Progetto Borca » Glimpses

A glimpse on Borca by Giorgio Orbi

admin — Sat, 19 Nov 2016 14:08:37 +0000

Mountains look so beautiful that once you start looking at them you can’t stop. A glance lasts only a moment but it takes part of the whole metamorphosis.

Giorgio Orbi, Sguardo, 2016, HD Video, 00:03:17

A glimpse on Borca by Giaime Meloni

admin — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 12:35:34 +0000

Das Unheimliche

The only thing I remember is getting lost, getting lost in Borca.
This is what I have left: that upsetting feeling of having wandered day and night with no fixed goal, no destination.
My body wandered like a transitient presence in the pure gesture of discovery…
Now in my mind, and in my notebook, a few traces of a tortuous path remain; a maze of ideas and corridors, of stories and stratifications, of signs and elements enclosed in an uncertain temporality.

Frightened, insecure, but at the same time reassured by a daily feeling of harmony, I harbour a strong interest in regards to knowing and recognizing the place I visited in my journey, to listen to its story, to make it domestic and familiar.
To do that, I need to create a relationship with it, I need to listen to what this place has to say through its silence.

Giaime Meloni

Photo: Giaime Meloni

A glimpse on Borca by Marcella Giulia Pace

admin — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 14:45:54 +0000

Marcella was born in Ragusa. Her father used to work for Eni. During the first half of the 80s, when she was seven, she discovered the Village of Borca. Her older sister had already passed through it. In the next four years, she was able to come back there, and subsequently spent several summers between the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building) and the permanent tents camping. Two weeks each summer: this was the duration of the stay granted to the children of each Eni employee whose application had been accepted. The Village, and the mountain, greatly struck the imagination of this Sicilian little girl, who reached a precocious resolution: “… I’ve desired to come and live in these places from the get go. I’ve been determined to do so since I was, maybe, eleven…” Today, Marcella lives a few kilometers from Borca, and teaches in Cortina. Yesterday (December the 31st 2014), after 30 years, she returned to the Colonia, with progettoborca. Recovering her own nostalgias, memories, images, emotions. Together with a projects that wants to go forward, feeding off all of this, as well.

MGP: One sees the same things, but those things are read with the eyes of knowledge and experience. Those frames represent, to me, the perspective games that I used to play as a child. I would never understand why those small, square windows had a “random” arrangement, and I could never pinpoint the location of the outer and inner parts of said small window. I remember, once, asking another kid to stand in front of one of them, as I ran outside to try and guess to which one of the many openings it corresponded… The picture of the sloping roof, with the huge ledge running along its lenght, on the other hand, reminds me of the times when I tried to make the corners fit together… and how, as if by magic, I became aware of the sight’s deceit: when it looked like they might coincide with one another (the ledge’s with the roof’s) I closed the left eyes, and the conquered connection was lost: the corner of the ledge moved to my left, and the other way round when my right eye was closed. Even in this picture I couldn’t make them come together… I appreciated that architecture in a spontaneous way, in and age when one doesn’t judge beauty, but instead everything is naturally absorbed. I wonder if Gellner might have had in mind to stimulate the children’s curiosity with those unusual constructions, seeing as they used to be their main beneficiaries… he gifted us with matching colours, too. And all those walls and pillars, all in concrete’s natural colour, gave me the feeling of something unfinished… every year when I came back, I hoped they might’ve gained colours of their own, and instead they remained always the same… I truly am surrounded by a thousand feelings when I find myself in that place… that is where lay the roots of my passion for the mountain in general, and the Dolomites in particular…

Marcella Giulia Pace

A glimpse on Borca by Giancarlo Dell’Antonia

admin — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 16:06:15 +0000

Notes, for a glimpse.

Month of February, soft chill, sky with no clouds over the Eni village of Borca di Cadore.
And off I go, to visit the Colonia.
A place of a thousand shapes: and yet I don’t suffer any dispersion because of it. Rather, I stockpile a great number of images, and they, in turn, lead me back to a human will to respect and accept.
An organic world made of multiple geometries where I see children rejoicing, each of them with their own ray of sunlight, a diaphragm between the artificial and the natural.

Giancarlo Dell’Antonia

A glimpse on Borca by Antonietta and Federica

admin — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 14:24:38 +0000

A double glimpse, this one, which flows through time, during two generations.
Anotietta was 22 in 1958, when she worked in the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp).
Federica, her daughter, was born in 1975.
Today, her glimpse recalls her mother’s, who passed away, and whose tale is very similar to that of many former “Enians”, who today remember the Village, in which they’ve lived, inside a new community, in this exciting and unique social experiment, wanted by Mattei, who was able to grant so much cohesion to the “Eni people”. A great many of them remember that unique experience, consumed in the fantastic station of Borca, an experience far off in time by now, kept safe in the past. Like so many of them, today Federica too wants to come back here, to come back home, she tells us, to see what’s moving today, in the village, and how, and why. In this far but not buried place, not anymore, for which hope is born again…

There is a photo, black and white: two girls, one smiles brightly, the other has an air of tiredness about her, of disenchant: perhaps she knows already, that life is going to be hard, that nothing is a given. One of them is my mum, the other I don’t know. Behind them, a scribbled note: Borca, August the 19th 1958. I find a postcard, too, black and white, Borca 942 meters above sea level, from the same week. My mum was 22, and she worked in the kitchen of the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building), Eni Village. I recognize the dining room in a video from those years. It’s incredible when a photo is unfolded and it tells a story. This is mine. Today, my mother isn’t here anymore, at some point, that bright smile became the one of the girl beside her, faraway, tired, bitter. It’s a story that wants to come home. I’d like to go there, where my mum, an August night almost sixty years ago, wrote to my aunt: ‘…To let you know that I’m pretty fine, and that there’s a lot to do in this Colonia, but when the evening comes and we’re all together, keeping each other company, everything is okay again’. I know, now, that there’s something new: I’d like to visit the Colonia, today. What’s left of it, what changed, what value it has, and it gains back, that place, today. For me, too.

Federica

A glimpse on Borca by Roberto Paci Dalò

admin — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 07:29:33 +0000

Geologie degli affetti/cartografie dell’invisibile

Roberto Paci Dalò arrived in Borca, and the Dolomites, for the first time, in December 2014. His glimpse on the former Eni Villgae and on progettoborca is here, made out of these sketches, in which images, projections, fragments of sporadic text, embryos of ideas and sparks mix up together. Some of them will see light during the next few months.

(Eng.: geology of the loved ones/cartography of the invisible)

A glimpse on Borca by Gabriele Grones

admin — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 10:21:12 +0000

A place

A place can be defined as the complexity of the relations and possibility that the human undertakes with it.
The history of a place is the history of this confrontation, of the unrolled paths and those still yet to take, of the suggestions and the thoughts stimulated and suggested by the space itself, the overall ever-continuos interaction of the human with the space itself.
A place is also an occasion of measure of the human, whom relates to it through its own thought and its own perception of self in relation to what surrounds it. The human thus understand its own “being in the space”, getting close to the poetic nature of the elements in which it’s put into relation. The human needs to measure and confront itself with what is around it; to know, to welcome in itself its own spacial perception, developing it; to take a hold of the maturation and the development of its own thought.
Through this intelligent and critical thought, creating and operating are necessary for the human to measure itself with what is “other”, outside the self. The result of this relation is the realisation of accomplished elements, which correspont to a need of profound research. There’s something at the basis of creation that isn’t linked to practical activity, an that of the realising itself, but to the comprehension and elaboration of an accomplished shape.
The presence of the human in the space can thus be articulated through two different but connected directions: on one hand the direct interaction of the human with the place that leads him to grasp its complexity and perceive its being inside the environment itself; on the other, this being inside the environment, develops the awareness of the necessity for a way of thinking both able to elaborate a critical reasoning on its acting and to create accomplished shapes to the end of relating with the space in a more complete and conscious way. Both these components are essential for the human to reach its awareness of self.

Gabriele Grones

Renato Barilli/Gellner, Borca, the six-legged dog (abstract)

admin — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 14:40:18 +0000

Gellner, a great example of glocalism

[...] Let’s begin, at this point, to consider the maximum endeavour by Gellner, the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building) of Borca, and in particular the central building, used for meetings, dominated by the cabin motif, which is also repeated in the Church, on the top of the hill. Hence, a triangular glass wall, which can be invested with the usual lively sequence of scans, is defined; the trestle that supports each glass designs an admirably diverse and irregular frame, with junctions, intersections, partitions entrusted to an unpredictable casuality, linked to a fitting inspiration. The massive structures conceived and realised in the Colonia offer us other inspired example of this happy, spontaneous, unrestrained commitment to aleatory criteria, as a rolling of dices. If we still remain in the central, cabin-like space, we catch sight of many illuminated bodies hanging from the ceiling, and well, they too adjust themselves to that very same rhythm trusted to an unpredictable casuality, because of the strings that hold them up and that conduct electricity, which are placed on different heights, making the bulbs dangle in a similarly irregular pattern, that comes to play in the animation of the container, in making it bright, reactive in its various points. If we then go out and walk through the long corridors, or flank the low surrounding walls, we’ll be able to see another one of Gellner’s extraordinary inventions. Those surfaces are interrupted by little windows for the obvious necessity of inner light, or to give the chance for those inside to have brilliant viewpoints of the external environment, invaded by the thriving vegetation. But even in designing these complementary and elements – details – the architect carries out his skillful work of fusion of opposites; that is clearly detectable in the windows, which follow the usual criteria of lucid and unyielding rationalism, are framed inside rectangular schemes, reiterated, moreover, by the frames themselves, which are quadrangolar as well, but whose sizes, again, are pleasantly variable, as if, letting go of the coding of inorganic and artificial matter, they embraced a new one, typical of organic substances, two of whose kind are never found. The architect freely playes on the alternation of formats, now smaller, now bigger, and of their dislocation, placing them closer or farther away, thus refuting any instance of boring symmetry, which is also the fall of vital tension, a concession to repetitive laziness, to routine, while that way the architect assaults the walls, punches a moltitude of holes in them, as if allowing them to breathe. In a way, it is the effect of pleasant variability that one usually employs for decorative motifs. Gellner broadly behaves like a good heir of the Modern Movement, seeing as he more or less accepts Adolf Loos’ motto of considering the ornament as a crime, but takes some payback distributing those rectangular schemes of his that, even in their impeccable nature, have aleatory and jumpy criteria, and thus he makes so that, while respecting a strictness code, they are still able to carry out the task of introducing transgression factors.

Regarding this chapter, one must remember another fortunate instrument of which Gellner makes ample use of: colour. In this field, too, he’s in conformity with the Modern Movement’s parameters. Indeed, as it refused the ornament, it also made a clear statement of refusal in regards of any kind of chromatism, demanding that only raw materials may be able to “speak out”, concrete on view, with its grey and dull achromaticity, or all too terse and transparent glass walls. Gellner, on the other hand, highlights even more the asymmetric scanning of the surfaces, as he proceeds to their coloration. Once again, one may appeal to a lieage from Mondrian’s example, whom did not shy away from chromatic layering himself, but, having reached the optimal state of his style, had decided to only make use of the three primary colours, yellow-red-blue, using them in contrast to immaculate whites and black supporting framework. Gellner, instead, understands that such classical nature and predictability in colour shading would have been the cause of boredom, would provoke the downfall of vital interests, and thus carefully varies the palette of his coatings, avoiding for them to be too ostentatious and vivid, predictably entrusted to the basics, the spatial scannings, too, responding to asymmetric and irregular criteria. The yellows must be shifted towards ocher, or towards the colours of soil and tobacco, the reds must become tan, purple-like. But, upon closer inspection, they are the very same colours that we use today for all our decor, for office moquettes, or for plastic forniture, as the Formica, or for the walls of rooms where the correct execution of professional activities doesn’t want to give up the titillation of the senses. This way, Gellner conducts a reformation of his own, or subtle criticism on the too obvious chromatic scale upon which Mondrian relayed so much, as have done the painters belonging to the so-called New Geo, from the 80s onwards, with the US artist Peter Halley at the lead, and with European correspondences offered by the German Günther Förg and the Swiss
John Armleder. Normacy, yes, that is to say the adoption of a rather uniform codex, good for everyone, but with the condition of allowing an ample range of variations, recoveries from past reserves, from folklore, from suggestive and stimulating precedents. All of this is in line with a regime of compromises and fusions like the current one, thus labels like “postmodern” and “glocal” appear completely effective. [...]

Renato Barilli

A glimpse on Borca by Filippo Manzini

admin — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 16:35:31 +0000

The feeling is that diving into the context of the eni villahe, where the relationship between architecture and environment exists and resists, is the perfect situation to call into question the creative person, the “artist”. The village isn’t only a completed endeavor in the most conceptual and planning sense of relationship between nature, physical space and design, but it’s a real, physical place, charged with an active past.

The creative response might be diverse, that depends on the subject of the research and the manner of operating, because this place, that I see how an open container, can create different variables (expectations?).

I feel seminars and workshops being born because of that need: a truly free dialogue between artists, insiders and more, maybe open to a restricted and interested audience, with the intent of pulling out sense and sensations of everyone in regards of this site from the dialogue.

Make the artist emerge, and render them aware of their indipendence or loyalty in regards of their actions, this is one of the objectives: can one put them into question, change them, or perhaps the matrix must remain always the same, indifferent to the specific situation?
And to create an action of awareness is it necessary to bring planning, psico-social roots with oneself, perhaps activating the community, or is it sufficient to operate in a conceptual or merely formal and either way apparently devoid of function phase?

Moreover, it’d be interesting to jump from the dialogue to an active moment, a laboratory in which one puts into play one’s own essence, I’m thinking of artists with experience mixed with young artists and young academy people whom will be able to and will have to get an exchange from us.

Filippo Manzini

Marco Andrighetto/La conquista dell’inutile

admin — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 06:09:06 +0000

(Eng.: The conquest of the useless)

The Eni Village, abadoned and silent, is enveloped by the surrounding woods which has grown in time.
Nature is taking over the buildings without much ado.
The inner spaces, lifeless and silent, maintain a cleanliness without history:
few signs of a past life,
clean tapestries, intact timbers, perfectly preserved forniture, floors with little dust on them,
only rare children’s drawings and technical files of long gone stays
remain as witness of a past era carried out in the village.
In this metaphisical calm,
despite the numerous openings to the outside,
the animals don’t get inside and very few insects have taken nest,
the woodworms have not filled the tiles with holes, not much rust on the iron and few cobwebs.
The structure, instead,
so anthropomorphic and rational,
is enduring attacks from the landscape:
the rain gets inside and the earth/soil moves,
aftershock cracks upset the structural shapes,
the mortars give way and the walls peel away,
the inert matter decays generating signs of new life forms.
The aesthetic rigour of the structure is lacerated as a fragile epidermis
which protects and hides the truth of time in the hypoderm.
In these logorated details, uneven and unstable
intervene with precision to rise up a different and wild nature from the signs.
My task is that of taking away few fragments of matter from this surface and
allowing a glimpse of a mirage of invasion of the Jungle.
The vicissitudes of the pieces of plaster barely attached to the walls,
create pereidolia in my gaze/thoughts.
The negative and positive spaces,
the relationship between the bidimensionality of the drawing and the tridimensionality of the matter
dialogue in the middle, at the centre where things grow,
creating new horizons.

Marco Andrighetto

A glimpse on Borca by Marc Augé

admin — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 09:53:34 +0000

… It’s about exiting exiting the past to imagine the future. Art has value if it begins something, if it inaugurates something. And it is this idea of inauguration that seems to me to be as precious in the contest’s project, as it is in Dolomiti Contemporanee’s project in general.
Inauguration isn’t refusal of the past, but the idea of beggining once again, which is essential.
I think that these are spectacular places, marvellous places which mandate respect. And I have the impression of better understanding the will of the DC project after having seen these places.
In general, I believe that there is, in the other sites, the will to place a bet on time against history.
The site of Borca di Cadore is a place that tries to re-live, after rich but concluded experiences.
This idea of recommencing something is a fundamentally aesthetic concept, creator and pragmatist at the same time, because this is about making art in a places that changes its function and that, in a way, resembles a ruin. We don’t know what its use was anymore, or rather, we know, but it’s a dead thing at this point. And this way of trying to make a place alive again in its current velleities independently from its past, is something that influences time and history. It’s saving time, by overcoming history. It’s not denying history but trying to consider the fact that it is gone by, that is has a start, an end and a sequel . And this sequel is a renewal, a fresh start. I believe that the sites not only allow this kind of approach, but impose it, in a way. I believe the endeavour of DC to be open and ambitious. It has its risks and it has its promises. And it’s exactly the balance between risks and promises that’s beautiful. It’s the glorious uncertainty of art…

Marc Augé

A glimpse on Borca by Kai-Uwe Schulte-Bunert

admin — Sun, 03 Aug 2014 13:04:53 +0000

The place is full of stimuli, full of void, full of history, an all-Italian history, big ideas, destroyed by profits, by a different reality, the transformation of a social idea in a private reality, the whole that has become a retirement in the singular. [...]. Right now there in Borca two opposing relities are meeting, on one side the old, original, “mountain-dwelling” one, on the other the new one, the one of the “occupants”. Yesterday, Stefania, after having seen the film about the Village, has said that perhaps the only mistake of the project has been that of not having involved the inhabitants of Borca enough. Maybe that could be a possible approach for the future?

What remains is architecture, as monument, almost a burden, but a possibility as well, we hope. Not to completely destroy Mattei’s initial idea, I believe it’s necessary to find a usage for the compound that may have a social value for the old Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building). For example: an international school of Italian cookery, a regional centre for the training of young people in that branch, involving the surrounding communities. Longarone’s ice cream makers could open a school of their trade, perhaps an institute for food research might find space there, and many other possibilities certainly come to mind in time. There could be a conference centre, an educational cookery hub, maybe even a restaurant, the dorm rooms could be partly transformed into hotel rooms, and partly in didactic spaces.

But these are just ideas, thrown out there…

My work, instead, concentrates in two directions:

1) Architectural details, perhaps with an influence from nature, that I see as a commentary, a personal interpretation of Mttei’s and Gellner’s intentions, finding a link to the current situation, with all the emptiness and abandon.

2) Portraits of teenagers, whom find themselves inside an age in which they’re about to explode, nobody knows in which direction. Until now I’ve photographed only boys and girls from the camping, which is handled by a parish association, but I can imagine the involvement of other youngsters of the village of Borca, perhaps even some from the cottages. Through such portraits I’m trying to link the content of the old ideas with the current situation and the hope for the future.

Kai-Uwe Schulte-Bunert

A glimpse on Borca by Stefano Moras

admin — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 16:45:21 +0000

texture
vibrates
stops
becomes wall
again
strenght
moves
a resisting shape

The ENI Village shows itself now in its stillness, cold and
tangled. Not immediately fordable without feeling a constant
sensation of déjàvu or bewilderment, the residential compound
is yes, still and swallowed – now – by the woods, but dynamic in
the perception of those people who visit it once more. Infiltrations, small
settlements of animals, stale smells, heaps of objects,
doors.
No maps.
What may we call the Village, now?

Stefano Moras

A glimpse on Borca by Elisa Bertaglia

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 16:36:29 +0000

About a month ago I’ve visited the former Eni Village of Borca di Cadore together with Dolomiti Contemporanee. I’ve collaborated with DC a few times before, in the various sites in which they’d taken interest, with artworks planned with a dialogue with the space in mind: in Sass Muss in 2011, in Taibon in 2012, and in Casso in 2013.
I didn’t know anything about Borca and the Eni Village, I’d only seen a few beautiful pictures taken in the previous surveys to which I did not take part. It was immediately clear that this location is exceptional. But I couldn’t “understand”, if one could speak of comprehension, that is, its extraordinary nature. We’ve arrived at about 10 in the morning, and while in the rest of the world the temperature was around 33 degrees Celsius, and the Sun shined swelteringly down, over the first series of turns leading to the entrance you could already feel the cool air, the chilliness, that makes you realise you’re not in the “city”, but in an almost parallel reality. Separated. I don’t really feel like reporting on what has been said and told about the Eni Village at the beggining and during the exhibit: an educational chat which to those whom, like me, did not know anything about the Village has opened towards many interesting inputs. The impact, the important thing, has been, is, devastating. You dive directly into a place non-place which emanates the sweat of a whole life that it has housed once upon a time. It is not a disused factory, or simply a place that has changed purpose, abandoned. It’s a residue. An enormous footprint of a complex combination of thoughts and utopias. The entrance to the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building) doesn’t allow commenting on the first few large halls: you end up enmeshed by that place, whose structures are so extraordinary. In his planning, Gellner did not leave any element to chance, may it be architectural, functional or decorative: the shape of the rooms, the square windows, the lighting system, the radiators, the chairs, the paving,… Delving deeper inside, this feeling of structural coherence and harmony becomes absolute. The bathrooms, maybe, are one of the most extraordinary things. The cleverness, the effeciveness and the practicality of some of the design choices, make all the settings innovative not just for the years in which they were made, but by nowadays standardss as well.
Established: the quality of the architectural planning is astonishing. But it’s not just because of that, actually is not really because of that, that I’ve decided to propose a project for Borca. (indeed, the perfection and beauty of some of the settings, from a certain point of view, dishearten someone like me, who works with visual arts from intervening on a such a place. The risk is almost a given: being totally sucked into, or completely ridiculed by, such a powerful place. How can one think about inserting a small, insignificant framed drawing to a wall? It’s not thinkable; not doable. It doesn’t make sense. Perhaps Polke, Beuys, or few others, could insert themselves in such settings with a drawing on paper without being defeated by them…) The Eni Village has a very powerful strenght of impace which, from my point of view, has to be conveyed and utilized as a lever. A work like mine, which travels on thin semantic lines, on a “stealthy” impact, on tiny clues, vibrations, the idea of an intervention in Borca has to penetrare in the epidermic structure of the place and come to an almost mimetic relationship with it, to then slowly re-emerge, in a “subcutaneous” action. To clarify: working in a small moving, earthquake-like slope, a breaking of coherence inside the architectural thread itself, a virus that goes to integrate and permeate the structure. The opportunity that I can glimpse for my work in Borca, is precisely that of taking energies, suggestions, inputs, images, ideas, and to realise something which constitutes as a rupture with my own “usual” research (research carried out more often than not in the studio, in front of a panel and a sheet of paper, alone) to inspect new possibilities and new directions. This is the key to interpretation that interests me and the direction that I want to give to my project of intervention in Borca. Something that would undoubtly undermine my own research itself, trying to overcome some of my limits; something that would allow me to establish for myself new issues for which to seek a solution.

Elisa Bertaglia

A glimpse on Borca by Fabio Roncato

admin — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 08:11:57 +0000

It is with Borca di Cadore behind myself that I immediately re-thought those empty spaces of the Colonia (Eng.: summer camp building) as the inevitable result of a completed process of transformation, an hatched exuvia on the ground as witness of the completed transition into adulthood. Regarding Gellner’s architectures I’ve remembered how, inside the building, I felt comforted by the studying of such peculiar and hostile volumes, the aggregating function of the shapes is still active and the architectures remain authoritative and decisive. Despite all this, the building seems suspended in history. I believe that the reactivation of this critical body embedded in the mountain must go through a reflection on the first percepted impressions, through the recovery of those sensations with no mediation which provokes the granting of way into a new and different territory. It is in this phase of perceptive intensification that the space gains meaning. Perceiving what’s to come and getting ready to listen, with the intention of file a testimony and not to give information.

Fabio Roncato

A glimpse on Borca by Barbara Taboni

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 08:08:54 +0000

Here, where the outside and the inside breathe and meet in a masterful architecture, Luka Sirok, in residence for a week, carries out an interesting operation, interacts with the space, opens up to his possibilities, and concentrates a landscape: he takes the inner ramp of the pyramid-cabin and a mountain out of it, fixes the mountain to the frame and then breaks it down and makes it roll down below. The objects descend, the space ascends. Now the Sun peeks from the small square windows, the light bounces off the broken mirrors on the ground, geometries echos among each other, and thus the space is completely changed because of it. The shapes reveal themselves and emerge from their own shadow…

Barbara Taboni

A glimpse on Borca by Miriam Secco

admin — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 09:28:27 +0000

We interrupt silence with our presence, we cross the rooms one after the other, lingering to take a few pictures and make considerations on the space, the shapes, the structures.
I feel like a tourist, a voyeur. And for that I develop a sudden reserve which prevents me from taking the real measures of the space, which are not counted in centimeters, but in gestures. I’d like to run, because there have been children here, thus if I think of children I think of running in corridors. I’d like to lay down to see the ceiling, in the rooms where these very ceiling were most liked used to many looks. (Editor’s note: Miriam is crossing through the summer camp building, the refectory, the daycare room, the main hall, the dormitories, the locker rooms, the cinema).
This place doesn’t live now, it isn’t a place because nothing happens in it, but is was built to be something specific. If one doesn’t enter carefully and treats it as a corpse, it will probably remain a gutted corpse, on which to experiment.
Taking measures can also mean taking it up with gestures that once have been commonplace, reactivating it through affection and then modify its shape from the inside, eventually, when we are not strangers anymore.

Miriam Secco

A glimpse on Borca by Mirko Canesi

admin — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 14:21:04 +0000

Visiting the Eni Village, I’ve had the feeling of entering an archaeological site, much like in the operating of those who, as they dig, rediscover an ideal and lost society. Unlike the digs, in which the existence of the mere perimeters of the architectures distances from the original messages, the Borca site allows instead an almost complete recovery. I believe that, to devise a project suitable for the Eni Village, tackling it through a personal filter wouldn’t be enough; the risk would be to lose the cultural and social origin of a place that was generated through political compromises and collaborations with great businesses as Pirelli or Ginori. As an intellectual and thinker, the artist should get rid of his personal vision, to reach a comprehension of some primary necessities of a whole. The contemporary artist, even before dealing with the Creation of Worlds, should reflect on the State of Art. The constitution of a group, taking on various themes from several points of view, serves this kind of approach very well. As I kept thinking, I reflected on what the essential factors to bring people close to a determinate subject once again might be. Which kind of approaches one should take upon themselves to be able to change the human sentiment towards something. I imagined that the raising of consciousness could proceed through Awareness and Contact. It may seem banal, but it is through contact that one can establish a connection, and it’s through contact that the restorers mesure the object, without a “first contact” it’s difficult to make the next step. Retracing the first steps starting from scratch, re-establishing a contact, recreating familiarity, feeling compassion. Through the sostitution or reallocation of missing or vandalized parts with new artistic artefacts it would be possible to declare a sympathetic but disenchanted stance on a place which becomes not mere archaeology, but a still current ideologic emblem that has to be strenghtened, thus remarking the real impossibility – or extreme difficulty – of healing this place both from a practical and philosophical standpoint. I am not facing a reasoning like this for the first time, I have already had the occasion of reflecting on some “high” creations of the human spirit (for example, in case of the Vittoriano Viganò’s Marchiondi Institute in Milan) through my thoughts on nature; that is to say, how nature itself is always seen as the weak element to be defended, and that, overpowered by the rampant cementification, it needs tutelage. It is rare that the opposite line of thinking is taken into consideration, that is to say how nature, instead, contributes in time to the decay of meaningful works produced by people. When people interrupt their control, everything goes back to dust and vegetation. A rule of destiny comes into action. One could then assert that the human has a divine power, that it s able to interrupt the natural cycle. There, that’s the power of its Will.

Conact —-> Awareness —-> (Raising Consciousness) —-> Will. These are the elements to re-establish the possibility of inhabiting an ecosystem.

Mirko Canesi

Reflection and generel idea for Borca
action group (artists): Mirko Canesi, Fiorella Fontana, Stefano Serusi and Marcello Tedesco.

How can a place re-live?
To be a museum of itself would imply a total, almost photographic, in a sense, reorganisation of the conditions of a particular moment of its history, the un-derailed gathering of images and objects that pertain to it, reaching an unnatural and steady freeze in which time wouldn’t be permitted to create new stories. Instead, one can think of it as a material and immaterial archive to be interpreted, and that needs to gain substance once again, with new acts and new narrations. Thinking of it as an ideal theatre of presented gestures and artworks, that cannot be but for that location, both because they are produced in that specific context, and because they are shown in a unique harmony with the existing architecture and nature.
Visiting the Eni Village, one obtains a direct contact with the paternalistic idea that has animated, in the past, people like Enrico Mattei, that is to say to unite will to a kind of ethics that we sum up today as socialist and christian at the same time. Beside a State that wants to one up itself through technological progress, the necessity to conceive an ample humanistic project in which the well-being of the worker and the education of their children – future Italians- is the main concern and symbol, isn’t secondary.
In the Eni Village, even from its architectural design, the idea of giving children a Summer Camp both close to nature and protected from its perils, in which to combine, through regular daily practise, study and religious reflection, is clear.
During our survery, the typically modernistic will to match to the development process brilliance and architectural quality, both in the spaces and the furnishing which have immediately earned our interest, was still clear for all to see.
Among these elements are the four confessionals, found without a function in the main hall, for which an immediate and strong empathy was born.
In them we have wanted to find that projectual approach that wants to return to the individual seen in communion; individual not as much subjugated to the fear of sin, but rather accepted in its individuality, and whom approaches not confession, per se, but confidence, which can become, also and most of all, the confidence towards this place of those who came in contact with it.
Mattei’s State – defined the most powerful Italian state after Augustus by foreigners – is a State where the individual, their thoughts, their necessities don’t fall on deaf ears, and where ideas find a space to express themselves.
Spending a few days in informal residence at the Eni Village will be for us an ocasion to link ourselves with the place, and to somehow follow the trail of those who have wanted it in the first place, and those who have inhabited it, seeking out stories and traces in the surroundings themselves, which will have to be given back with minimal interventions on the location, and studying ways to re-use it in a temporary way, or in a more extensive and utopic projectual plan that springs from its very legend.

Mirko Canesi. Fall and Rising, 2013

A glimpse on Borca by Fiorella Fontana

admin — Sat, 07 Jun 2014 14:34:04 +0000

In my artistic proceeding, I consider what surrounds me as part of a Whole. A moltitude of elements which come together to form the One. A panic vidion in which the microcosm and macrocosm merge together. The human in this vision comes in contact with its most instinctual and arcaic part, recovers the language of the symbol and the archetype once more. The space in which I am going to intervene is part of this whole organic, often leading me to various site-specific reflections. Visiting Borca di Cadore’s Summer Camp Building the temporal suspension is strongly perceivable, and the presence of original objects seems to emphasize the dichotomy of a physically existing but function-less place. It’s striking how the surrounding woods and nature are interacting with the structure, as if they’d want to devour it. I’d like to insert these reflections inside a specific proposition for this location, in which to temporally unite the space of Borca with another hypotetical psace, thinking of the essential intervention, like for example moulds of the objects or respectful interventions on the objects themselves, or even completely structural ones (broken glass windows or doors), thus emphasizing even more the relation presence/absence that such a place has evoked in me.

Fiorella Fontana

Reflection and generel idea for Borca
action group (artists): Mirko Canesi, Fiorella Fontana, Stefano Serusi and Marcello Tedesco.

Fiorella Fontana, Untitled, 2013.

A glimpse on Borca by Stefano Serusi

admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2014 14:49:49 +0000

The analysis of places is a fundamental part of my work, in particular in regards of their ability of producing, in those who transit through them, a particular mood and, subsequently, when the drawing of the places itself is generated with a certain awareness, of inspiring a better lifestyle. The reproduction of this idea, typically modernistic, often appears in my expositive projects, in which the path among the artworks itself is essential for their reading and for an ideal functionalization of them. In the images of Borca I see a time not interrupted, but suspended, an intact mechanism that maintains the memory of its function, which an external intervention has abruptly snatched away. What I’d like to do is to temporarily reactivate some of these functions (the meals, the studying, the whispering in the darkened dormitories, the praying, etc.) involving several people in this operation, so that they may become witnesses of the lost communion between the parts.

Stefano Serusi

Reflection and generel idea for Borca
action group (artists): Mirko Canesi, Fiorella Fontana, Stefano Serusi and Marcello Tedesco.

Stefano Serusi. Ritmo, 2013.

A glimpse on Borca by Luca Chiesura

admin — Wed, 04 Jun 2014 10:18:53 +0000

A thought on Borca di Cadore

The meeting with Marc Augé in Forni di Sopra (UD), has spurred me into reflection on several issues related to the contemporary vision of the artist. In particular, the subjects of my following considerations have been the so-called artistic poetics and its relation with the initial, childish experiences.
I believe the creative and expressive forms opted for by an artist, whom we’re going to describe as very young, to be fundamental, because they establish that unique and inescapable relation between the human, which becomes their expounder, and its emotions. As a willowy shrub which rises tall because it follows the trunk onto which it’s hanging on, so the thoughts and sentiments rise up to a higher level when they find an expressive form that makes them shared and vibrant. The creative technical questions aren’t to be understood as lost in a sterile void, but when one is young they are the elements which support the drive for research, for shaping the outer and inner forms, indipendently from the consensus on the public, and from the profit.
The places which are identified as ruins, as abandoned and/or disused buildings, detached from their original role, can attract attention as fulcra of artistic activity precisely because the artist mainly senses the vacuity of many human actions designed for the acheivement of social success. What remains unaltered is the vital drive of nature that can be interpreted in many ways, but that makes one feel a link which something that may be defined as trascendent. The artwork doesn’t seek an explaination for the human set of problems; it does, however, insert itself, almost by chancee, in spite of society and image, in another dimension, so to speak. The village-place of Borca depicts itself precisenty in this transient reality.

Luca Chiesura

Gustave Caillebotte. Les raboteurs de parquet ( the planers of parquet), oil on canvas, cm 102 x 146,5, 1875.

The planers of parquet (Les raboteurs des parquet) by Gustave Caillebotte represent symbolically the artist’s work in Borca. As Caillebotte’s raboteurs, the artists in Borca carry out a work of planing through their artworks, bringing new light and new live in the former Eni Village.