the pleasure of the outdated


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and nature, material and vegetable, past and contemporary, concerns the one who looks at some pure enjoyment of the outdated.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Enjoyment of pure time, pure pleasure of the outdated.