The Pleasure of the Outdated | 2005-2008
The area situated into the Treviso and Venezia districts is workshop of languages, historical
stratifications and quick occupation processes of agricultural lands, subordinated to mobility
requirements of vehicles, goods and people. The patrimony of the urban, landscapist and
anthropological identity is seriously at risk. Part of the agrarian landscape, reclaimed,
shows the marks of devastation, of alterations in agroeconomy and of the new economical
and commercial arrangement which has on many occasions moved towards the coasting areas.
On the remains of changes of the territory, some marks and fragments of rural archeology
emerge: farmhouses and agricultural ruins where the vegetation, like a virus, has damaged
the architectural structure itself, changing its morphology. Immediate in the observer is mind
reference to the past, the experience of time, memory, the charm of the ruins, the idea of
sublime suggested by Piranesi and Goethe, the promised revelation by this invasion of
disorder and devastation. The fascination issued by these hybrid bodies, territory of
experimentation between architecture and nature, material and vegetable, past and
contemporary, concerns the one who looks at some pure enjoyment of the outdated.
The pleasure and the emotions that one feels looking at them are of an aesthetic nature,
afterwards one feels a distance:
«that one between a past sense, disappeared, and an actual perception, incomplete. The
perception of this margin between two uncertainties, between two unfinished states is the
essential reason of our pleasure… The perception of this margin is the same perception of
the time, erased in the twinkling of an eye wheter by the erudition and the restoration (the
illusory obviousness of the past) or by the sight and the renovation (the illusory obviousness
of the present).»
Marc Augé ‘Ruins and rubble’. The sense of time, Turin, 2004
It almost looks like nature can take care of secrets of the past better than man: decadent but
animated by their own inner life made of plants and animals, extraordinary evidence of memory,
history and culture.
Enjoyment of pure time, pure pleasure of the outdated.
Originally published in the March 2010 on Urbanautica
Originally published in the November 2010 on New Landscape Photography