TRANSHUMANCE

Transhumance is metaphor of many town destiny. Like flocks, collected and led away, many people move from their original places making this lifeless places, frozen and anxious to come back to life or death. Transhumance is a return trip after abandonment, towards the research of a sense of ruin.

Returning in an abandoned and destroyed place make us wonder about ways to recompose and manage the fragments. Often damage and incompleteness are linked to the past, consequently we seem to lose awareness about the time flowing by. What it is now new, sooner or later, will be ruined, maybe broken. Returning means to recompose pieces and to reinvent them. Appreciate the beauty of rearranging things in a new beginning and inspiring new scenarios. Assuming to relive a place, almost reduced to geography, through a new settlement, we reflected on the dialogue between matter and time. We wonder why ancient ruins are so suggestive and so full of meaning. Above all, a big doubt triggers on our time: is architecture still capable to get old? Can we still produce ruins and not only rubble? The Matter becomes the debate protagonist. Next to the stone of Cirella’s old houses, concrete is chosen as symbol material of our time. From this combination, comes out the image of a stripped architecture, which wants to dress only the signature of the time flowing by. Given the incomplete and melancholic nature of Cirella, in hit’s own highly introspective and evocative essence, this project means to reinvent Cirella as a place to create art: a colony for artist. A chance to age wants to be given to the bare concrete of new houses, next to the stone, surely in a different way, still little appreciated, but in continuous dialogue with the past. Creativity is responsible to hold together memories and the future of this destroyed place. Like the creative soul of the human being, the incompleteness of these ruins recalls the sense of deep incompleteness which is part of the artistic soul, and consequently pushing for the reassembly of the missing pieces. Although wrapped in the melancholy veil, ruins are a prelude to new creations. We perceive rubbles not as an end point, but as opportunities for a new beginning. Ruins are victims of the time but they seem to be timeless, just like artists. Slaves to the time they live, melancholy, immortals. They collapse and revive again.