Cheating Time. Bruno Munari the Archaeologist is a publication originally produced for the homonymous exhibition at the Civic Archaeological Museum of Bologna on the occasion of the centenary of Bruno Munari’s birth in 2007.

Inside, the reader will find objects from the 3rd millennium B.C. side by side with "Fossils of the Year 2000," inscriptions in ancient languages and "Illegible Writings by Unknown Populations," quotations by Munari and the great archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe. The research is both historical and fantastical.

As Bruno Munari's son Alberto Munari explains in the book's introduction, the starting point of this adventure was the visit to an archaeological site in the island of Panarea (Sicily): father and son started to play with History using its own instruments of analysis.
From that initial experience emerged the "Imaginary Museum of the Aeolian Islands," "Fossils of the Year 2000," and "Theoretical Reconstuctions of Imaginary Objects."

"An archaeologist found a bone of an unknown antediluvian animal. From that bone he tried to reconstruct the animal. I found bits of unidentifiable odds and ends, and I tried to reconstruct 'the thing' following a random method based on aleatory rules."  —Bruno Munari

Designed by CorrainiStudio

Published by Edizioni Corraini in 2007
First reprint, 2024

Bilingual, text in Italian and English

Softcover, 64 pages, full color offset, 4.75 × 6.7 inches

ISBN: 978-8-87-570113-0