OTHER SPACE

A great middle ground, like a pier stretching into the Mediterranean, where the traditional contrast between North and South is dematerialized, revealing an Arcipelago, in which the islands are the interior regions of Italy, projecting like a pier into the Mediterranean. Spaces, places, areas, neither metropolitan cities nor suburbs, representing 60% of the country.
“OTHER SPACE” is the film that narrates the journey of Mario Cucinella through the interior territories of Italy, to rediscover the roots of a tangible and intangible material knowledge along the millenarian history of the country, its true DNA. In these places the arts, crafts, and knowledge were born, which gave life to cities, with their architecture, their piazzas, their cultural heritage, then eventually their manufacturing and industry. Today, cut off from the transport networks that connect large urban centers, these areas have become depopulated and often seem abandoned. This journey is one of continuity, a dialogue between the past and the future: a synthesis that can be represented through contemporary architecture, without being imprisoned in the golden cage of History.
Cucinella departs from Venice and crosses Alps, Apennines, islands. Along the way he meets the people who live there. A shepherd who still practices seasonal livestock migration in Alta Murgia, a painter who tells stories by painting murals on the walls of the houses of Orgosolo, the citizens of Gibellina nuova, the city born out of the rubble of the Belice earthquake, rich in immensely valuable works of art, but incomplete and abandoned. And then a Camaldolese friar, the order that for a thousand years looked after the Casentinesi Forests. Lone eagles, escaping the metropolis, who come from all over the world to work thanks to the broadband of the visionary project of the Telematic Village of Colletta in CastelBianco. And still others.
The following questions arise from these encounters: What is right way forward after an earthquake? How to rebuild? How much can we exploit our woodlands? How will we get from one place to another in the future? Where do we live better and longer? And why?
“Abandonment” versus “Healing.” “Sustainability.” These are the themes.
Sustainability understood as support, help, as a civic duty, borrowing its meaning from music, where sustain is the duration of a note. If the environment in which we live is a musical note, can architecture help it to last? Can the architect reclaim his role as a “physician of places” and help people to take care of the environment they live in? To revive them and to instill new life?