The Mediterranean is populated by a network of carceral islands. Colonised through the 19th and 20th century, these are now mostly abandoned or converted to natural parks, easy prey to the tourist industry. Yet, their subjugation to the global phenomenon of penal tourism is still resisted by an enduring shared shame and discomfort at the prospect of turning penal colonies and prisons into resorts or theme parks.
Casting Castaways will migrate from one island to the other at biennial intervals, interrogating these territories on how and whether the project of architecture can question the very ideas of incarceration and colonisation. If penal tourism and environmental preservation seem to be an inevitable destiny for the carceral islands, how can these phenomena encourage a reflection on present ideas of de-carceration instead of instrumentally exploit its memory? Should the architectural project act to reveal and make more legible the structures of colonisation/incarceration for the future preservation of their memory, or should it favour their ultimate decolonisation, perhaps accepting their status as ruins or promoting their physical de-structure? And how to avoid that the Visiting School itself and its pedagogy become a new act of colonisation?
In 2019, Casting Castaways will set camp in the island of Asinara (Italy), a penal colony from 1885 to 1997 and now a National Park. Building on the variety of experiences that have made up the history of the island - one marked by the control of a flourishing coastal trade, the appropriation of its territory through a variety of rights of use, coercive reclusion, the dream of reformation, production, subsistence, the environmental paradise, the reinstatement of the primeval garden in the form of national park… - the school argues that a new project for the island can only stem from a renewed, direct contact with its bare life.
The school asks its participants to directly engage with the territory of Asinara and to conceptually and physically dig what lies underneath it, as the prelude to architectural intervention. The techniques employed will be strictly related to a visceral approach to ‘what is there’ - introducing the minimum amount of foreign elements, materials, and technologies, and benefiting from the support of local craftsmen and artists.
As a tool for de-structuring and estranging the conundrum of stratified formal structures and perceptions of the penal colony, the participants will collate a photo essay and a collective diary. These will be the basis for the production of physical models with sand-casting techniques. On the traces of Sardinian sculptor Costantino Nivola, Casting Castaways will experiment with sand-casting to read, measure, represent and intervene across scales from the vast territory to fragments and objects dispersed in the landscape. The models will offer a physical platform for the elements of research to collide and confront each other, incorporating the architectural intentions, and will eventually stay on the island to become part of the very fabric of Asinara.
https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/VISITING/Asinara
Paolo Emilio Pisano
Sabrina Puddu
London, July 2019
