November 20th, casso – Visions, projects, projections from Vajont

 Visions, projects, projections from Vajont

Nuovo Spazio di Casso
Sturday, November 20th 2021, 9.30 AM/1.00 PM

A meeting open to designers, and to those interested in the themes and practices of land regeneration.

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Dolomiti Contemporanee (DC) will host a new meeting inside the Spazio di Casso al Vajont. A workshop open to anybody who wishes to reflect on and suggest an articulated discussion on a functional enhancement approach – meaning a culturally organic one – to the Dolomitic landscape and to some of its problematic peculiarities (critical sites) which constitute a potential that can be turned on its head (trasformation of the passivity-inducing limit into activation opportunity), and DC‘s work primary purpose.
Among the themes which will be covered: projects in the Vajont area, concrete and utopic architecture; the re-innovative impetus, the restoration of heritage and the dynamic forms of landscape conservation; nature, memory, workshopping, redemption; value and function of artistic projects; skills (architecture, curatorship, geology) and integrated multidisciplinary models.

Ever since 2012, when the former elementary school of Casso (Erto e Casso, PN) was reopened by DC together with the Erto e Casso Municipality and the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, we have been working inside this area, understanding it as an open space for confrontation and operative reasoning on the identity of the Landscape and its transformations, which must be favoured in a constructive and open manner, avoiding for the Vajont to be only read and treated and experienced as an inevitable Landscape of tragedy and commemoration, foreign to creative immagination, which is a premise for research, not entertainment.

The tools adopted by this industrious experimental regeneration policy are many; at times they are finally integrated inside a polymorphous and multidisciplinary perspective, the only one which proves to be able to produce truly interconnected images of a theme or a territory.
Single skills, in fact,  be they linked to research, know-hows and professions, appear to be ethereal and vain when they are not crosses and reshuffled by a comprehensive outlook, one which may stimulate, constructing it, the activation context, this human body, social and reactively environmental, single (endogenous?) topsoil  of any possible redemption whatasoever.

The Nuovo Spazio di Casso is a Centre for Mountain Landscape, which operates through intellectual grip, critical culture, visual arts, visions and projects.

This year, the platform launched in the Vajont area by DC can be found inside the Italian Pavilion Resilient Communities, at the Venice Architecture Biennale, with the Two Calls for Vajont Contest and the Cantiere Formazione section as well, in which are presented a few outcomes of the educational work and development project created in this area by the University of Portsmouth.

As well as Alessandro Melis, curator of the Italian pavilion, this meeting will be also attended by the architect Antonino di Raimo (Reader in Architecture, Architecture School, Portsmouth University) and the curator Gianluca D’Incà Levis, both part of the curatorial team of Resilient Communities.

The Vajont area is also present inside the IDEAS of Italy project by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, another meaningful passage which places this area at the centre of an organic conversation about the necessity to give impulse to inner and mountainous areas, and to locations burdened by meaningful issues.

This workshop allows architects, curators, researchers, architects, visionary designers, Universities, geologists, artists. Some fields of research and education and training will be shown, and numerous projects developed in the past few months and years will be outlined.
Vajont: a location of the project, of the projection towards the future, of well-constructed ideas: a regeneration hub.

Being alien, Being Alienated, (cultural) Sciencefiction.
What is the mountain? How do we see/act upon it? And what is a project? Is it linked or not, this project, to the territory? How so? What is its purpose? What can cultural designers, architects, artists, geologists, do in the Vajont area? What is the Spazio di Casso’s purpose? Self-analysis.

Order of operations:

We will start in the morning, at 9.30 AM, and end at 1.00 PM, the workshop consists of a meeting-debate, including a moment of final confrontation with all participants to the workshop itself.

During the morning, all present will be guided through a visit of the collective exhibit VACCANZA, The Mountain Tropical Experience, currently hosted inside the Spazio di Casso.
Free time for lunch.

To confirm your attendance, please send an e-mail to info@dolomiticontemporanee.net.

The event will be streamed live on Dolomiti Contemporanee‘s Facebook page.

In compliace with Covid-19 regularions, to access to the Nuovo Spazio di Casso and take part in the workshop, participants will have to exhibit a valid green pass.


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Will open the meeting:

Antonio Carrara – Mayor of Erto e Casso
Graziano Pizzimenti – City council member for Infrastructures and territory for the Friuli Venezia Giulia region 
Roberto Padrin – President of the Belluno Province
Mara Nemela – Director of the Dolomiti Unesco Foundation
Pierpaolo Zanchetta – Biodiversity service for the Friuli Venezia Giulia region


Will speak at the panel:

Gianluca D’Incà Levis – curator of Dolomiti Contemporanee, who will moderate the meeting
Alessandro Melis – architect, curator of the Italian Pavilion Resilient Communities
Antonino Di Raimo – Reader in Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Portsmouth
Francesco Zanatta – Artist from Fondazione Malutta 
Francesco Musco – Professor of urban planning at the IUAV University of Venice
Emiliano Oddone – Geologist, Dolomiti Project

These images are taken from the Master’s Thesis developed by the students of the School of Architecture of Portsmouth (UK), 2020/21, professors Antonino di Raimo and Alessandro Melis (Studios of Portsmouth: Thesis Preparation, Thesis Design, Integration of Transdisciplinary Experiences).

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the event is part of the dolomity days program, promoted by the friuli venezia giulia region and in collaboration with the dolomiti unesco foundation.