Domus 1052 is on newsstands: “Recovering Italy”

  Recovering Italy is the relationship of this horizon, the conceptual, narrative and visual chronicle of a reconnaissance. It is a ‘place’ where private initiative linked to the project, art and beauty is still the key to understanding one’s own intimate nature and looking to the future.

We collect in these pages a series of photographic shots collected in In The Light Of (You), a collective project conceived and coordinated by photographer and artist Giorgio Barrera. The photos depict two people who meet with the mask in small and large public spaces, stop a few meters away, and then separate.

Matteo Agnoletto reflects on how the anti-contamination measures, which appear antithetical to the usual frequentation of the space, have actually made their authentic value re-emerge. Like Luigi Ghirri's photos, admiring the emptiness derived from depopulation makes it possible to grasp urban perspectives where the beauty of the architectures that generate it can be seen.

Starting from the assumption that architecture serves to bring people together, it is not possible to really talk about post-Covid-19 architecture. Projects can therefore move in two directions: working on the long distance, or working on the short distance, with an uncertain attempt attitude.

Edoardo Tresoldi, the wire mesh artist, inaugurated last September 12 his last work in Reggio Calabria, Opera. It consists of 46 classic columns, each about 8 m high, distributed from a regular grid on the surface of a park of 2,500 square meters at the Falcomatà waterfront.

Edoardo Tresoldi, the wire mesh artist, inaugurated last September 12 his last work in Reggio Calabria, Opera. It consists of 46 classic columns, each about 8 m high, distributed from a regular grid on the surface of a park of 2,500 square meters at the Falcomatà waterfront.

The historian Sara Marini, through examples of some outdoor installations, faces the urgency of architecture to reopen, to build new alliances with the outside intended not only as a horizon to be investigated, but also as a living and changing material to live with.

With a layout designed by the Spanish architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg, and after a complex restoration that lasted two years, by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure of Florence, the Roman bronze statue of the Winged Victory returns to Brescia, in the ancient Capitoline temple near which it was found in 1826.

To discuss how and when Italian industry will recover the negative effects of this pandemic crisis, Riccardo Gallo analyses the impact on the production structure of two world crises: the oil crisis of 1973-1974, triggered by the Kippur war in the Middle East and degenerated into energy and raw materials crises; the financial crisis of 2008-2009, culminating in the bankruptcy of the investment bank Lehman Brothers and degenerated into sovereign debt and industry crises.

There are places that become memories of the future and, never as now, we feel the need to rethink them: they are the factories, the places of production, archaeology of the twentieth century in a changing world. So far away and so close, because they still live in Italy, a connective tissue, economic and social, that keeps together territories and bell towers, in the name of work and community.

Never before has the world needed designers to reconsider. Emergency design, previously destined for marginal and remote experiences, has set in motion to invent new strategies for living and social cohesion, new products with global diffusion and low costs, regenerating themes such as circular economy, reuse, flexibility of production, some reconverted in a few weeks, like many in the fashion industry to produce gowns and masks.

"A country where something moves must be connected with a country where nothing moves" says Franco Arminio, writing about the need to invest in countries. The urgency is to immediately open a large construction site to move "from the puddle-community to the stream-community".

Through maps, which highlight the small municipalities in the process of depopulation on Italian territory, Matteo Agnoletto and Leo Piraccini trace itineraries, which become an opportunity for promotion especially for the territories of small municipalities, repositories of an artistic and cultural heritage still too little known today.

Never before have mountains and inland areas been the focus of public debate. So that the interior areas do not become yet another re-proposal of development centered on building, a radical cultural change is needed, and here there is little to build.

The architect Lina Malfona, together with Petrini Architetti, has investigated the theme of the suburban individual house in the last decade. These dozen buildings have almost all been built in the small hilly paradise just a stone's throw from Lake Bracciano, near Rome.

The ruins of an early Christian church, in the historic village of Mammola, becomes for Nik Spatari and Hiske Maas an open-air museum, an exhibition project that is divided into seven hectares of park. The place became the couple's laboratory of experimentation, including giant exhibitions such as Enrico Baj, Alberto Giacometti, Mario Schifano and Mimmo Rotella.

During the first quarantine Ugo La Pietra imagined through his drawings a society capable of rediscovering a balance between architecture and nature, between globalization and genius loci, speaking to an urbanized society that is undergoing a profound transformation: since the 1980s we have seen a growing population of individuals living "crowded loneliness".