Freespace is freedom. It is that void necessary to the man to find the space that he doesn’t have in the urban life. Today the freespace has become something precious because for a lot of years its importance had been underrated. Gradually, the necessity of the urban growing has begun to prevail over the needs of the single man. This condition forced us to move often out from the cities in order to find the “air” that we miss in the urban environment. In the contemporary cities the horizon disappears, the view without obstacles has become something rare and precious to find, to lose the sight in the vastness of the infinite.
“People like to keep certain distances between themselves and other people or things. And this invisible bubble of space that constitutes each person’s territory is one of the key dimension of modern society.”
The hidden dimension, Edward T. Hall, 1966
This space, that separates us from the rest, is the freespace that each of us needs and, with the urbanization’s fetishism, is getting always smaller : we are increasingly falling into compromises with the concrete. We are looking for the freespace indispensable to find a calmness that we lose in the urban flow. The contemporary urban growth makes our distance’s bubble every day smaller. The facility of the movements and the travels has made everything easier, every place easier to reach and ready to host the travelers. For many countries the tourism represent one of the biggest source of income, and for this reason, we always try to improve the services and the quality of the accommodations.
The tourists are discovering Albania since different years and they get always fascinated. How can a country, remained in the shadows so far, own such a beauty? The end of the communist regime marked the recovery of the country’s economic and urban growth, and with that also its tourism. Today many millions of people are visiting Albania, and every year this number grows. But what attracts the tourists? Certainly the low price of life allows the people to make luxury low-cost holidays. But, more important, are the 470 km of coast that the country offers, the countless national parks and the cultural monuments diffused all over its territory. Many attractions are represented by the huge natural vastness that Albania can offer, still in 2017. Here we can find infinite landscapes, where we can feel alone, where our freespace gets bigger and gives us the idea of being free.
But always more buildings are growing in order to give to the people and the tourists the opportunity to live close to the natural luxury. This has many positive aspects, but at the same time suffocates the freespace that belongs to each of us. The freespace that every person has is becoming smaller and this leads us to go in the search of empty areas, to magnify personal space, to feel free. These spaces, virgins, that man are looking for, are becoming more and more rare, harder to find, due to the growing’s hunger that is increasingly widening.
LANDESCAPE
The idea of the project is to represent this reality, trying to show the nature’s slow disappearance, the incessant expansion of the concrete that pours all over the territory. The freespace is an element that live just in the places where the function doesn’t exist. In the cities everything is built, not always, for a reason. In every urban place where we go, we are immediately “imprisoned” within a function. Everything today has a function, even the squares, the public empty spaces, have the function of being public. Maybe are the dimension, often reduced, or the fact of being surrounded by buildings that makes hard for the squares to represent the freespace. The infinite dimension of the nature represents today a place without a scale, without a dimension. The nature is so extended that offers to every man the opportunity to find a piece of freespace. Here it is possible a distance between people and building that makes clean the idea of void and space.
How to represent this concept?
First step is to bring the nature’s freedom. Inside the pavilion, we will expose 4 paintings of the albanian artist Agim Sulaj. The paintings will represent natural albanian scenes, virgins places where the visitor can lose his sight in the thousand details of the illustrations.
The second step will be the representation of the nature’s disappearance. To make that we’re going to build a “construction site” around the paintings: five pillars in concrete, connected by four walls in brick. During the duration of the Biennale, the walls will grow, until they will cover almost completely the canvas. The paintings will be made with a hyper-realistic style, they will be precious objects, icons of a style that is also disappearing. The walls will cover this preciousness, and for the visitors of the Biennale it will be a small luxury to see the canvas without barriers. The pavilion will be dynamic, it will grow with time and will be always different. Every phase of the project will be unique. In the pavilion are going to be exposed also different books with pictures and written works, that express the same concept.
Who will see the pavilion, could have the luck to find beautiful artworks, or to see a wall with a small window, that shows the memory of what was there.
