Contemporaneity has long revealed difficulties in what it means to inhabit a space, both in rural and urban contexts: from the economic unsustainability of having to pay rent or buy a house, to the ecological crisis in terms of materials, land use and homogenized construction, to the inability of the hyper-individualized mode of living to favor and sustain conviviality. The thematic line of “structures” reflects (through the act of building) on living as a process of care and relation, through practices of elementary self-construction and of “making place”, to open new perspectives and critical reframings on what it means to inhabit a space today. What we call a home is the result of an interpretation of space, loaded with symbolism, a spatialized interior state. Is setting roots in a place the same thing as inhabiting it? Or can we also find a definition of home that fits temporary states? What subjective and collective conditions make us think of a shelter, a small mobile house, or a temporary refuge, as a home? During the Social Camp we will construct temporary minimal architectures through the assemblage of modular elements, learning together how to regain our constructive skills as a tool of resistance and self-organization. Looking at the surrounding landscape, we will experiment with found materials and natural tinctures to imagine new and unexpected relations with the environment and the species that inhabit it.
Closing the Rudiments Trilogy of Valle Cascia, the Rudimento Terzo of this edition of the Festival of Furnace Fumes spatially determined the location of the After-Festival.
The same material of the previous rudiments has been reshaped and synthesized into a dense crystalline structure with radial implantation. The poplar rods derived from the First and Second Rudimento underwent further adaptations and transformations and, passing from year to year, from hand to hand, were reassembled into this final form by the hands of the 9 participants in the 6-day self-construction workshop that preceded the Fumi event.
This final Rudimento, the result of a process of material and structural condensation, does not have some tension structural components as in the previous ones but is entirely rigid in nature. The cooperative system of structurally equal elements coagulates all the muscular forces of those who helped build the three works of the trilogy into a matrix of joint efforts to form a toroidal shape.
The geometry is the result of 8 repetitions of an isometric structural molecule assembled from 24 basic structural components, for a total of 171 repetitions of the basic structural figure. For such a geometric configuration, the application of interactive light elements was designed and mapped onto an 8-base matrix.
Embedded in a cycle of symbolic constructions for the Poetry Festival ‘Fumi della Fornace’, Rudimento Secondo was once again a small miracle of self-construction in the remote and forgotten province of Macerata, where poetic boils created a situationist place out of an emotionally desertified space. Rudimento was nothing more than a backdrop, an architectural annotation dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the wonders of the poetry festival.
This time the Rudimenti were two, to be precise two tetrahedral pyramids of different density and size. The larger one assembled by the repetition of 64 modules, the smaller one of 16 modules.
The geometrical capacity of the tetrahedron to recreate itself from the sum of 4 other tetrahedra made it the optimal descriptive figure to assemble a fractal construction that can potentially expand infinitely by repeating itself cyclically.
A synecdoche of construction, the Rudimento Secondo tries to illustrate how the sum of the parts can generate a more holistic version of the part itself.
In contrast to the hierarchical symbolisms associated with pyramidal forms (social pyramid), the tetrahedral pyramid of Valle Cascia manifested a more egalitarian version of community building, where the grouping of individuals (basic tetrahedral modules) generates structures that exactly replicate the formalities of the starting individual, in a rhizomatic network of tension and compression forces that are distributed synergistically by the structural components.
The Rudimento Secondo is a tensile structure built by reusing 90 percent of the materials from the Rudimento primo, themselves salvaged from the failed cuts of a local carpenter’s shop. Built in 7 days with the commitment and enthusiasm of 6 people, the Rudimento Secondo was once again a practice of collectivism in the very process of its creation.
Of the Rudimento’s cycles of construction and destruction,the generating forces of the many hands that transferred their biological force into the tensions of the strings become visible at the moment of disassembly, when the cutting of the strings brings the creation back to collapse very quickly upon itself, succumbing again to gravitational forces.
Rudimento Primo inaugurates the series Rudimenti, an imaginary atlas of quasi-architectures conceived by Lorenzo Malloni. Essential, temporary, modular, Rudimento Primo is an attempt towards technological simplification, an invitation to think of a future not necessarily urban, but nomadic, in marginal lands where new avant-gardes emerge.
Every single living individual expresses its biological characteristics, the phenotype, from the codes recorded in its genetic makeup, the genotype. However, the phenotypic characteristics of an individual are not only manifestations of its genotype, but rather the resulting adaptation of that genotype to the environment in which it manifests itself.
The Rudimenti may take many forms, but all expressed in a crystalline geometric language (genotype) that determines the composition of elementary parts (lines) into more complex organs (plane geometric figures), until they become solid organisms with archetypal geometries (phenotype). Contextually to where it is built and by whom, a Rudimento can take on different aspects, sometimes the variations are geometric, sometimes material.
In Valle Cascia, a hamlet in the Macerata suburb of Montecassiano, during the third edition of the poetry festival I Fumi della Fornace, the Rudimento Primo and other small Rudimenti were built in 12 days with wood planks salvaged from small local carpentry workshops. The poplar rods were then cut locally to size to be then assembled as the first constituent digit of the Rudimento, letters of an alphabet for a language spoken with the hands. Given their easy technical, technological and material accessibility, the Rudiments can in fact be constructed chorally by unskilled hands. Structural connections made with low-cost and readily available materials are often the outcome of decisions made in the making respecting local material availability. This opens up a different way of seeing and relating to one’s surroundings, making it easier for builders to imagine and create rudiments of their own.
Rudimento Primo declares an urgency for lightness, for minimizing materials to the indispensable, in a complex but delicate balance of tension and compression forces. Building becomes pedagogy of the hands, exercise of synergy between individual and material, assembling, composition in symphonic terms; a symphony of equal building elements performed by an orchestra of amateurs.