Tra Palermo e Agrigento. Note per una poetica della deriva

The route which breaks into the sunburnt countryside stretching between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the African Sea is a form of extended architecture characterized by a stratification of signs. It represents not only a physical but also a human crossing path which has defied time and distance by eroding and designing the complex surface of a transversal territory. In the past times, this route disclosed a new geographic dimension to the locus conclusus (Latin for “enclosed space”) of the very small urban enclosures. For entire generations it has represented a pledge for development as well as a suspended project. New invisible cities did arise from it, systems made of overlapping relations which involved countryside and infrastructures, nature and artifice. Nowadays, the violent forces of an increasingly indifferent and insensitive transformation process still find their expression in such route system which takes its nourishment from a globalizing atopy. The adrift landscape subject to continuous transformation, where the ephemeral and precarious forms have been definitely admitted within a space that neglects time, is the hermeneutical key that unlocks the project. As a result, architecture, like Fantaisie impromptu, should give Beauty back to the ever changing places which progressively shift towards new possibilities.