top of page

Progetto Borca

Borca di Cadore (BL)

curated by Dolomiti Contemporanee

residenza artistica 2018 - 2020

Architettura e tempo

The research takes place in the complex of buildings of the former Eni colony, where once hundreds of children spent their holidays. Now the original function no longer exists, the buildings are empty and suspended at the time of the colony. In 10 years, without maintenance, the covering of the buildings has given way to the cold, the woods and the water, allowing the mountains to enter the architecture. Without electricity, in the corridors and with the woods in front of the windows, days flow one after the other like the frames of a film.

 

The image of fringed architecture that merges with the mountain and that of suspended time overlap creating a dialogue of transparencies, lights and shadows.

Ancora 1

Sguardo

About looks that chat while they look at each other

My look resembles an instant photograph, it is tied to time and moment.

When I arrived in early spring, there was still some snow on the mountains. I am at the entrance of the colony, at the base of Mount Antelao. Across the valley another mountain stands, Mount Pelmo. This is the landscape of Borca di Cadore.

Before arriving at the colony, I thought of focusing on a research on the relationship between architecture and the territory. Perhaps this search would have made sense when the colony and village were used as a vacation spot. After the site was divested, the buildings of the colony began a process of transformation. Now that they are no longer inhabited as they once were, their relationship with the territory is perceived as a dialogue based on transformations over time. It is a dialogue between stone and concrete, between Mount Antelao and the colony.

It is a snapshot, as a figure of speech, to say that two shots with different shutter speeds overlap in this image.

So it is a dialogue that speaks about themes, such as the transformation through time and the speed with which transformations occur, but also about hierarchies and the shape that hierarchy can adopt, vertical in the case of the mountain and horizontal in the case of architecture. Erosion and degradation that carve stone and concrete and give life to new forms, new spaces and ways of living.

When Mount Pelmo speaks, from far away, it does it with horizontal lines marked by snow on the folds of her surface. When Mount Antelao speaks, it does it through small constant scratches that climb upwards. The architecture speaks with long and horizontal slippery signs that adapt to the shapes of the mountain. Words intersect as the texture and warp of an irregular fabric where sometimes windows are created, from which the mountain enters architecture.

Now, I am inside the colony, in a labyrinth of dark ramps, which are covered for long stretches and which always seem to lead to the starting point. I follow a road marked by funny lights projected on the floor. I constantly look for a window that allows me to see the Pelmo to have a point of reference with the outside, because the colony seems a world apart, full of images like those of children on holiday, in the dormitories or that of the animals which at night cross the corridors of the buildings (the mountain insists on entering architecture and inhabiting the spaces that have remained empty). Sometimes, in the middle of the dark corridors, a door opens, and a space, a study or a laboratory lights up and other paths, other reconstructions and other worlds begin from here.

I arrived at the colony one day in early spring. The snow covered only some parts of the mountain and left the others bare, highlighting all the folds of its body. Another day, the landscape will be different, because the colony and the mountain are constantly changing, they breathe, and my look will be different too.

Paulina Herrera Letelier

bottom of page