Space is the theme Festival of the Senses in Valle d’Itria from August 21 to 25. What space? Pictorial space and sound, city and country, astronautics, myths and constellations, neurophysiology, quantum universe, animal orientation and migration, inner space and coexistence, geopolitics, proprioception and sense of space, anthropology of the ancient world and models of housing, astrophysics and space economy… We publish the speech of one of the guests on the concept of “home”.
For hundreds of thousands of years our species has been living “outside”, building more or less complex shelters that serve to protect and socialize. Then, with the Neolithic and the surplus of food, came the granaries, and the real house was born from the barnsa relatively recent invention. So, while we began to inhabit it, the house began to inhabit us, to rise in our imagination, to fill our stories, sometimes to destroy our lives.
For every people on Earth, home has always had a double articulation: inside/outside, family/community, individual/collective, microcosm/macrocosm, shelter/exhibition, home/home, history/history, etc. An anthropology of living that still exists today in the gesture of “making home”. In Italy, however, it seems that the house, for historical, cultural, economic and narrative reasons, is invested with a surplus, a supplement of meaning that puts it at the center of an entire system of values, of a vision of the world .
“Making a house” in Italy means communicating consciously or unconsciously with a long memory, with an idea of ​​living that takes the monument, the stone, the architecture “forever” as its material and ideal model. For the Italian, the house is tradition, solidity and investment because for centuries our cities have grown working on duration, resistance, immutability. While, for example, in America, the underlying model of the house is the tent, the hut, the wagon of the settlers who travel in large areas, for Italy the house is the imitation in a reduced and private form of the cathedral, the castle, of the municipality.
Globalization, modernity, systemic collapse, however, are also transforming this cultural trend and this trust in the future: the rapid place of pioneer and nomadic cultures has arrived, or is returning. Selling, renting, moving, moving are less complex and disturbing than in the past. Building a house is no longer about bricks and deeds, thirty-year mortgages and family heirlooms. Today, the home is increasingly reliant on immaterial rituals, symbolic investments and movable goods. Not the walls, but the objects: today they are the things that make a house.
For a long time, for many cultures, the house was a reflection of the cosmos. Order, meaning, destiny. This narrative and symbolic construction of the house is not only from the organization of its spaces, but also from the presence of objects, which were at the center of a symbolic horizon and a domestic ritual. A simple knife hunted in great landscapes, a wooden cup was the lake with its deep waters. We are no different from our ancestors: things make up our homes, the objects we want around us are not just movable property, furnishings, inert matter. That’s how it was in the past, it’s still like that today, but what will the future of life, the future of things be like?
The Anthropocene is a geological, climatic, social and cultural eventand it is a theme that has also entered strongly into the reflection of architects and designers. The so-called “post house”, a house that will be able to take care of the needs and critical problems of an era of great changes, is an exercise in progress and a ground for creative solutions that are now inevitable. The point is no longer just that of an ecological choice, but to rethink the whole house as an ark of salvation: protection, identity, history, imagination, hope.
But how? In a house that risks closing on itself for spatial, economic, psychological and emotional, and climatic and health reasons, it is necessary to invest in the liberating power of the imagination, it is necessary to open virtual “windows” that must to be. not to be searched only on the web or in an escape from reality. Anthropology has always studied the function of what we can call “threshold objects”, i.e. utensils, decorations, everyday furnishings that not only speak of identity, memory and the past, but that stimulate projects, future projects and openings to the possible. . Objects always tell stories.
The potential narrativity of the domestic space, through the things that compose it, will have to be more and more in tune with the era of collapse that we are beginning to experience. We need antidotes and shelters, of course, but also positive impulses to get back from here sometimes, we entrust this function to objects that at first glance seem useless: a shell, a postcard, a crushed leaf between the pages of a book.
Neanderthal man also collected bibles, pebbles, animal teeth, bones, crystals. They were a kind of window into Elsewherea change to travel with the mind. We are not different. Thinking new stories for old things is a kind of immaterial design. It will help us, it will make us feel better, it will help us move forward.
The appointment
“Casa” – Saturday, August 24, 6 pm – Trullo senza nome (Cisternino)
For two million years we have lived in contact with the outside, in intermediate places between closed and open: with our backs to the rock, our eyes on the valley. A few millennia of agricultural civilization and a few centuries of accelerated urbanism have accustomed us to living in a box: the house today is often imagined as an armored shelter, as impervious as possible to the outside world. But the solution is outside, it is the territory,
that helps us find our place on this planet. Everything living must be rethought from there, combining the outside and the inside and trying to reverse the combination..