That long gaze over the roofs of Taranto
The activity of the Italian Pavilion of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – The Venice Architecture Biennale, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture, starts from Taranto with the Post Disaster group of architects and designers. It’s titled Post DisasterRooftops EP04 and it’s the first of nine activations site specific of «Spaziale presents», the preparatory phase for the realization of «Spaziale: Everyone belongs to everyone else», the project for the Italian pavilion curated by Fosbury Architecture.
The Post Disaster collective (founded by Gabriele Leo, Gabriella Mastrangelo, Grazia Mappa, Peppe Frisino) will develop the project together with the performers, activists and researchers Silvia Calderoni known to the general public as the main interpreter of the Motus theater company, and Ilenia Caleo, actress and playwright. They are working on the creation of a performative action resulting from a research on the critical and material suggestions of Taranto which will take place in the spring on the roofs of the Old City.
Everything will then flow into the Italian Pavilion, from 20 May to 26 November 2023, as a formal and theoretical synthesis of the processes triggered in the various territories in the previous months, restoring a different and original image of Italian architecture in the international context. For Fosbury Architecture: «Architecture is a research practice that goes beyond the construction of artifacts and Design is always the result of a collective and collaborative work, which goes beyond the idea of the architect-author. The “space” is understood, in this vision, as a physical and symbolic place, a geographical area and an abstract dimension, a system of known references and a territory of possibilities».
Post DisasterRooftops EP 04 is the important stage of a process that began in 2018 born right on the roofs of Taranto, a manifesto city of the contemporary urban and ecological crisis, whose condition is a starting point for exploring a series of urgent issues of global interest. Over the years, on the roofs of Taranto, the collective has invited artists, scholars, researchers and designers to investigate new interpretations of the spaces of the city through their own practice and background, transforming from time to time these temporary and unconventional spaces into arenas, stages for performances or open-air laboratories.
«From the roofs of the Old City of Taranto it is possible to have an immediate recognition of the effects of the environmental, economic, political disaster and, at the same time, collectively imagine alternative futures through continuous shifts of gaze between the real and the possible. Climbing the roofs allows you to have an overview of a traumatized city but also offers an opportunity for healing, a privileged point of view to imagine an alternative narrative, starting from those buildings that we reinterpret as public space. We thought that such a physical and bodily condition, yet distant from the logic of public space, was ideal for hosting a critical platform on the urgent issues of contemporary urbanity», the Post Disasters tell us that with their practice they have achieved a solid complexity of complexity of relationships and recognitions that now flow into the Biennale project.
In full harmony with Fosbury Architecture for which «Italy is a constellation of fragile territories. For some the catastrophe is a sadly cyclical event, for others an inevitable future, for still others it seems to have already occurred. Living with disaster is a theme that architects and designers can no longer ignore, to imagine projects that tend to deal concretely». Here too the positions converge, for the Taranto collective «Disasters are temporary factors, transitional events which, however dramatic, reveal the possibility of imagining alternative and ideal scenarios. A call to action, to become aware of a condition of crisis and, consequently, of the need to imagine a post, through continuous shifts of gaze between the real and the possible».
The works in progress of «Spaziale presents» and the activation of the nine interventions will be told step by step on the web and all the details will be revealed in a forthcoming press conference. In the meantime Taranto continues to be an open building site also for the search for new visions and for the sharing of knowledge.