The desert, the net and the bones
@Che cosa sono gli oggetti?, Centro Tian Qi, 8th-10th April 2016, Milan
The geographers and the archeologists who had worked on the reconstruction of the dawn of human history, before the invention of any kind of scripts, used the first artifacts and objects as the only trace they could study. First of all, the shelter.
Then, creating an object has a primary and originary value, ad it gives identity and shape to new civilizations, to new visions of the society and of the world. This concept is strictly linked to the man and the objects that he creates. Through them, the man claims his power on the world, defeats the nature and he shapes it. The origin of the process of anthropization and civilization of the world is placed into the objects.
Today the acknowledgment of the Anthropocene and its unique opportunity to reconsider the modalities and the processes of anthropization, forces us to rethink ourselves. In 20.000 BC the world was climatically uninhabitable. The very low temperatures, the numerous blizzards and the absence of natural materials such as wood, pushed the man to realise his artifacts and his shelters through new modalities. In recent years, in Ukraine and in the Netherlands, researchers found what is defined as the “Mammoth Bones House”. It is a particular house, in the form of a dome, built in those years, through the use of Mammoth bones. The man of the glaciation adapted his habits, and thus his objects, in order to survive. Furthermore the dome recurs as archetype in those historical moments in which the human practices are undermined, like the counterculture of the 60s and 70s.
For instance, by examining the historical landscape of the second half of the 20th century, we can understand that the counterculture movements of the 60s and 70s played a crucial role in redefining society. Accordingly, it is important to consider the ways in which these movements broke with the socio-cultural conditions of the time: a de-intellectualisation and an emancipation of all aspects of life, in complete opposition to the capitalist idea of progress.
Self-made manuals became key elements for enacting these social and cultural processes, as they were the repositories of theoretical and practical principles employed, for instance, in the utopian communes of the time. They were tools with which man stopped being passive and regained the ability to shape his world.
Both Fuller’s dome and the reinforced concrete structure in the Dom-ino show how design can turn into a simple hardware requiring little technical knowledge. In a similar way, in 1962,
N. John Habraken theorised a hybrid system to resolve the problem of mass construction by differentiating between the fixed structure (support) and the components that could be freely managed by the dweller (infill). This differentiation was then applied to constructions such as Drop City’s simple geodesic domes that were covered with readily available materials or to the raw cement structures skinned with scraps in the favelas (South-American shantytowns). The transformation of the architect into a producer of open structures and free tools at the dweller’s service also leads to a process of emancipation from concentrations of power.
In a moment in which the failure of the modalities of anthropization of the world weighs on our consciences, we reclaim the necessity of rethinking the world and our lives. Like the man of the glaciation, we decided to give a new shape to the primary object: the house, the shelter. Shaping a new vision of this primary artifact means envisioning a new way of anthropization, a new civilization. Distinctive feauture that bonds these elements is the use of animal bones as a building material. The new vision of the domesticity and of its furnishing elements brings us back to the dawn of the man himself, representing a sort of founding and sacred ritual of celebration of the union between man and nature, today taken to the extreme.
Enrico Boccioletti, Costanza Candeloro, Giovanni Copelli, Andrea Magnani, Nicola Melinelli, Parasite 2.0, Margherita Potenza, Mark Scartani.
Curated by Giovanni Copelli
Photo by Elena Radice and Parasite2.0
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