“Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction.” (Peter Zumthor)
Aedificante. is a cultural and social communication project, a manifesto for youth policies that, in this case through photographic storytelling, shows the construction site as a place of narration of a craft that is as noble as it is now almost abandoned, recounting the hidden world of “savoir faire” with the voice of images. The aim is to draw a line connecting the past to the future, giving value to the work, understood as the indispensable work of building craftsmen, who make every single project unique and above all feasible thanks to their skills. The photographs depicted in the Aedificante exhibition just opened in Milan and collected in full in the catalogue now being distributed, tell of an ancient craft that is unfortunately disappearing due to a lack of interest and motivation on the part of young people, who seem to be far removed from the desire to learn it, become passionate about it and make it their own. What the Aedificante project proposes to do is precisely to demolish, with the powerful and precise blows of a new culture, certain preconceptions linked to the construction site as a place of punishment for young people with little motivation to undertake any form of training. Today, the construction world is a very different reality compared to only a few decades ago, made up first of all of years of study and acquired skills, of minds that work even before arms, and of an economic tranquillity, which means being able to start a family, buy a house and improve oneself socially, that is achieved in a few years. Because now before the works, consciences must be built.
“The construction industry pays for an old mentality that sees building sites almost as places of punishment, of mud and toil, of waking up at dawn, of frost and forced sunbathing, but this is not all there is to our work and young people of both sexes must be able to know this because the situation is dramatic,” says Giuseppe Taramelli, creator of the project. The driving force behind Aedificante is precisely the need to highlight this critical situation, both real and contemporary, which if not resolved could lead to the extinction of a strategic sector for our country’s economy. That of the building craftsman in general is a craft made up of unique and unrepeatable gestures, the fruit of the experience and knowledge of a human capital of inestimable value and irreplaceable by machines. Thus through a series of auteur photographs, this first Milanese stage of Aedificante reveals an unprecedented aspect of “Knowing how to build”, the soul of the “rising city” according to the famous futurist motto. The images were taken by architect and photographer Giacomo Albo between 2016 and 2022. The author has chosen black and white to highlight the essence of the testimony, documenting the relationship between the compositional elements of the space under construction as a dynamic palimpsest of the human work, so as to restore intact the action and the voice. In colour, on the other hand, are the images contained in the last photographic section, an integration of the exhibition and the catalogue, photographs that recount the work, the days, the gestures of the man engaged on the building site, as in a journalistic reportage.
Aedificante is an emotional tale that highlights the process of dynamic transformation of the urban or rural landscape generated by the construction work, leading us to imagine the natural future interactions between the built environment and those who will live or work or study there. The titles chosen for the eight black and white photographic sections act as a continuum of the creative idea of author Giacomo Albo, who lingers in an almost melancholic way to scrutinise the skeleton of the buildings, their slow modification until completion, thus capturing the moments of their constructive metamorphosis. Moments that he condenses into details that represent the daily texture of those who work in and for construction sites. Completing the exhibition apparatus is a short video story with symbolic installations of typical building site artefacts, which create an entrance portal to the PlayArt didactic path with workshops and cards dedicated to primary and secondary school students, who are the main actors of a future specialised training work. The wish that was expressed during the presentation conference, which took place at the Fondazione Stelline in Milan, is that this cultural project, due to its communicative essence, may be taken as an example and reproduced in the future by other Italian companies. And that, under the name of Aedificante, scholarships, documentaries, workshops, educational experiences in companies and more will be born from its format in order to carry out the necessary cultural transformation process.
TEXT BY ANGELO DADDA
Aedificante is an initiative promoted and supported by Taramelli Srl, which thanks also to the support of a number of sponsors and the patronage of the Lombardy Region, the Municipality of Milan and Ance, has been translated into a photographic exhibition on display and open to the public until 26 February 2023 at the Fondazione Stelline in Milan. The exhibition will subsequently be shown in other important cultural spaces in northern Italy.
