Water-Mine

Within the theme “Design the existing,” the site chosen for investigation is located in Sardinia (Italy), at the Nebida mining complex, where the remains of monumental hydro-gravimetric washing plants lie, once used for the enrichment of raw minerals extracted from the Sardinian subsoil. The regeneration project of the mining complex thus becomes a warning to conduct a historical-architectural investigation capable of encompassing the fields of knowledge necessary to generate as concrete a project as possible for the recovery of these structures, both theoretically and practically.

In defining a red thread to guide the extension of regeneration efforts and interventions, the project begins by determining a resonance within it, a permanent meaning, the continuous reminder of the presence of water in every industrial process linked to the washing plants of Nebida. Through the dual pair of ‘specter of the past’ and ‘place for the future,’ the museum system seeks to achieve its meaning in every domain, the latter evoked by the pre-existing structures and narrated by the project. The museum is divided into three distinct sectors: The Museum Hub, Chessa Park, and Lamarmora Park, connected by a system of multiple and differently itinerant paths, characterized by the possibility of traversing the descending routes via a diagonal elevator that mirrors and utilizes the ancient railway system on which the material was transported. The architecture of memory thus becomes a way to formulate spaces of sensitive matter that can stage ancient presences, give shape to abstract meanings, and stir the depths of the unconscious. This concept is embodied in spaces and places of silence, capable of generating noise deep within those who listen, much like when one is silent and rediscovering their own heartbeat, that cyclical mechanism which allows us to survive, for a moment, the shipwreck of life. The material restitution of an immaterial presence like water is disguised in the project as a vortex of meanings and signifiers, scattered across the traces of the mining remains, evoked by widespread interventions through insertions, overlays, reflections, demolitions, restorations, and climatic processes, in order to reestablish a relationship between matter and memory, between nature and artifice, between time, place, and human.