UPWARD – ARCHITECTURE EXIBITHION

UPWARD – ARCHITECTURE EXIBITHION

Location

Rome, Italy

Status

Realized

Year

2016

Design Team

Sergio Bianchi with Valeria Menculini, Simone Fracasso, Roberto Ruggeri, Valeria Chiozzi, Simone Russo, Michal Marcinia.

The exhibition summarizes the research study by Sergio Bianchi, with particular reference to the theme of how to inhabit the planet.

Western society, in the development of its habitat denies the concept of “natural”. The praxis is pouring concrete to eliminate the “wild” nature. Our cities grow overlapping layers on a reassuring, paved environment. A smooth, polished, polished surface where “gardens” are the only spaces left for other species, animal or plant.

The words of Black Elk, probably the most influential Native American leader of the twentieth century, come back to my mind: , “Only to the white man was nature a wilderness and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame, Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.” In their culture, the natural/artificial dichotomy didn’t exist, there was no “wild nature”. The earth, in the great mystery of life, offered wonderful opportunities.

I think we should strive to regain that optimism, to recover that sense of belonging to the lifecycle, giving up to our tired anthropocentric approach. How to do that? How to find a place for man leaving enough space for other species?

The answer, perhaps naive and partial, is UPWARD. Moving upward, as while enriching the human / natural relationship, offers immense opportunities to give back part of the soil to “others” who share the planet with our species. The entomologist Edward Wilson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, in his recent book “Half Earth”, proposed to restrict half of the planet’s surface to the “natural”. But we humans are part of the “natural”, so our research has to move toward the integration of our habitat with that 50% of the planet’s surface.

Once again the words of a Native American help us out.

Chief Seattle said:”Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

Lastly a thought of Luigi Pellegrin. He spent his life working on this matter. He wrote: “The earth is a huge root which can afford the explosion in the space of a social organization, that today on the land now is getting lazy, and it’s a different relationship, a variation with increased volume in space and an increased freedom in the earth’s surface”..