Architectures from Future Past. Glimpses of Utopia in Dystopian Italian Comics

While science fiction traditionally serves as an imaginative laboratory for alternative futures, contemporary dystopian narratives paradoxically reveal cultural stagnation and inability to envision possibilities beyond existing paradigms. In comics, space assumes an inherent structural significance as it spatializes time, with settings evolving to central narrative elements throughout the medium’s history. This study examines architectural representations in three graphic narratives — Fior’s Celestia, Bertolini’s Da sola, and Pinto’s Lo schermo bianco — where space assumes structural significance beyond setting. Through cognitive estrangement, these works deploy unrealized architectural projects as what Fisher terms architectures of anachronism that create temporal short-circuits. Our analysis employs interdisciplinary methodologies combining philosophy and ecocriticism to examine how these architectures function as heterotopic sites. These works articulate a paradoxical nostalgia for denied futures, creating fragile utopian spaces within dystopian frameworks where characters access modes of posthuman subjectivity that resist the endoapocalyptic condition of our reality.