Scenes in america deserta
what: installation realized as the result of the scholarship award "Quaderni di Viaggio," 7th edition (promoted by Fondazione Giannino Furlan & Ordine degli Architetti, Pianificatori, Paesaggisti e Conservatori della Provincia di Pordenone)
where: Fondazione Ado Furlan, Pordenone, Italy
when: september - october 2019
key words: desert, questioning the void, experimentation, transitional places, mean time, utopia-dystopia, natural-artificial
link: see more on instagram
Built on the trace of the eponymous text by Reyner Banham (1982), the trip represented a means of exploration of the ways humans have measured and confronted themselves with the Mojave Desert, encountering a spatial context characterized by the compresence of multiple temporal dimensions. An environment where isolation, exceptionality, aridity, and distance give life to an extreme landscape that has paradoxically represented an incredibly fertile field of architectural experimentation, recording the proliferation of projects characterized by a constant oscillation between utopia-dystopia, reality-fiction, and nature-artifice.
A testing ground that unfolded, and still triggers, the formation of different temporal dimensions, generating and in some cases even degenerating, into projects with catastrophic consequences from a social and environmental point of view. The archetypical and deepen rooted transitory condition evoked by the nomadic settlements and cultures thus translates into a much more threatening and hostile transient condition: nuclear experimentation and environmental pollution alter vast areas of the American wilderness, preventing their use more or less temporarily. Landscapes in transition emerge, immersed in a latent and suspended temporal dimension, an in-between temporal fragment defined as mean time. It requires the architectural discipline to construct processes capable of redeeming them.
It is properly to detect this articulated system of in-between fragments that the journey has been organized, aiming to investigate the different filigree of projects that, settling within the American desert landscape, have stratified their meanings, symbols, and artifacts, activating processes and strategies to measure up to this particular transitory condition.
failure becomes chance
“The Desert is considered a place suitable for extravagances. I am not referring only to those of Bessie Johnson or Curtis Howe Springer, but also to the dune-biggy fanatics, solitary self-hitch hikers, seekers of legendary gold mines; and to those who detonated the first atomic bombs, proposed advanced missile systems and modeled gigantic earth sculptures. We must not forget that the first UFO sightings, or considered as such, and the pioneering conversation with the green men of the planet Venus took place in the Mojave.
In a landscape where officially, nothing exists (otherwise it would not be a “desert”), everything is possible and therefore everything can happen.”
R. Banham, 1984.
temporal becomes permanent
