The Disegno Lectures

What / Why / How

Coincidental Aesthetics, Formative Design and Drawing into Dasein are the three main themes of the Disegno Lectures. These lectures form the intellectual basis for all practical studies, seminars, master classes and courses.

In general, the Disegno Lectures are about what Michel Foucault called "the care of the self", literally "the work on oneself - epimeleia heautou" - the idea of an "aesthetics of existence", of the self and of life understood as a work of art. 

What does this mean?

Why do we have to strive for it (especially as those who work with the tools of art)?

How to do it?

In relation to this question, Coincidental Aesthetics deals with the adoption of methodological tools for use within the socio-political dimension.

Formative Design provides the theoretical knowledge and practical tools to realize the aesthetic dimension.

Drawing into Dasein reflects in a very practical sense on working within the ethical dimension.

All courses combine practical and theoretical knowledge. The theoretical knowledge by deriving it from the practical assignments.

The Disegno Lectures are held by Tomaso Carnetto.

A short introduction

Since I was a very young child - about 18 months old - I used to draw like every other young child on planet Earth had ever done, and will do. 

You do not even need a pencil to draw. Drawing is to be taken literally: drawing into the world by simply tracing the lines of your perception. 

This is how we unconsciously explore the world around us. By drawing, we capture what we see in basic forms. This is where the Platonic philosophy begins, that everything has form in the form of an idea.

Drawing is the opening of the form to appropriate the world through subjectivization. The Disegno Lectures deal with the question of what this means, how to realize it in the double sense of the word: to understand it and to actively implement it.

We use the activity of drawing as a tool for our investigations; to deconstruct or decode the forms and reconstruct or encode them anew. In this way we use drawing in the sense of Disegno.

Disegno was founded by Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The central concern of Disegno was to understand how all the measurements of space and time that govern our existence are taken from the human body, and to use the knowledge thus gained to design objects, that is, the world, according to the needs of human beings.

It is obvious that drawing has very little to do with copying what we see. Rather, it is about what we bodily perceive, not primarily in terms of our attempt to avoid what might harm us and to reach what promises pleasure, but much more as a lust for life that includes both in terms of passion.

This has many serious implications for the way in which we design our togetherness, in other words for politics, religion and science. 

Or, to put it more concretely, for the way we design every element of our environment: according to the idea of functional optimization or according to the bodily perceptible, that is, the aesthetic narrative of our passions.

Disegno as a contemporary understanding of how drawing is evidence of "Dasein" as such, Disegno is a tool of passion. 

We use this tool to understand the given conditions of our being - space, time, objects - as material for our subjectivized narrative. 

Don't forget, even if it is not so easy to understand, a narrative encodes a direct physical impact on the forms, that is, on space and time, and on all objects and bodies within the spatio-temporal dimension. 

We can formulate our individual narrative only by surrendering to passion. This surrender is an active act that includes the act of creation as well as the acquisition of knowledge.

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