Every human intervention on an island – even those that interpret it as an ideal space for confinement - starts as an act of colonisation aimed at reducing the unescapable condition of insularity. Enacting the power of nomads as decolonising agents, Casting Castaways will migrate every two years from island to island across a former carceral archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea. We will seek for a pedagogy that, while suggesting future scenarios vis a vis current trends in tourism, environmental preservation and heritage, interrogates those territories to understand how and whether architecture can challenge and escape from the very ideas of incarceration and colonisation.
In 2019, we will set camp in the island of Asinara (Italy), a penal colony from 1885 to 1997 and now a national park. Arguing that a new project for the island can only stem from direct engagement with its bare life and by de-structuring the conundrum of stratified formal structures and perceptions of the penal colony, we will engage with its territory through conceptually and physically digging into its substance. On the traces of Sardinian sculptor Costantino Nivola, we will experiment with sandcasting to read, measure, represent and intervene across scales from the vast territory to fragments and objects dispersed in the landscape.
Prominent Features of the workshop/ skills developed
