Signs of Man
6357 Le Città dell’Amore
viaggio attraverso le utopie amorose occidentali e le posizioni orientali
Texts by Giancarlo Marmori, Elena Guicciardi, Alain Daniélou
1976 / 164 PAGES.
Language: Italian, Spanish
The East and West face to face. The subject: erotism. The West provides the texts – anthologies of romantic utopias – while the East provides the images, taken from an Indian book that teaches us “how to do it”.
Utopias express the age-old dream of erotic freedom through the language of rules and regulations. Our era is mainly interested in two things: raptures and systems. Giancarlo Marmori’s text and Elena Guicciardini’s anthology launch us into the vast literature of amatory utopias, where authors stage a sparkling, lively, delirious parade of systematic raptures (and rapturous systems) in the way of sex. The iconography accompanying these totalitarian sexual fantasies is far more modest: an Indian book with the aim of teaching newly-wed couples and people in love “how to do it”.
The practical manual at hand is not an erotic book but, rather, a book of amatory devotions that draws us into the everyday metaphysics of India; into a world of subtle ethical and ritual meanings deciphered through the positions illustrated in the appendix by Professor Alain Daniélou, one of the greatest experts of Indian culture in Europe.