Your doctoral thesis focused on photography as a tool to transforming landscapes. You are an architect, what motivated you to work on this theme?

Giaime Meloni (GM): During my studies in architecture I developed an initial and ingenuous sensitivity to the image, while remaining in the formal rigor of spatial representation. However, when I looked through architecture books I felt a sort of frustration because I had the feeling of sticking to the surface of the images. I contemplated them but I was not yet able to observe them. At the same time as an architectural student, I wondered why I was producing photographs. And what role did this accumulation of visual notes play? These curiosity towards the images were the first fundamental step to feed the questions on the relationship between photography and architecture that I was able to deepen in a PhD.

© Giaime Meloni from the series 'Sardegna’

What are the most significant conclusions of this work?

GM: I'm not sure I can talk about conclusions, rather than carrying out research I think I have built the basis for a more complex reflection on the relationship between two disciplines. The interest of my research, not only the academic one, is in fact trying to understand the possible intersections between photographic image and architecture without building a relationship of subjection. In fact, too often we talk about this relationship in terms of hierarchies, in one case photography is considered only as an illustrative practice and therefore a necessary tool for describing spaces, on the other hand we consider architecture and landscape as the object of the gaze. In short, I believe that true wealth lies in making the methods and tools that generate visual culture evolve in the context of its link to space.

Your relationship within the academy and research continues now in Paris. How?

GM: I believe that the teaching of visual culture, understood as education for reading and producing images, is a necessary and unavoidable step in architecture's training. «No one who ignores the alphabet, but he who ignores the photograph will be the illiterate of the future», thus prophetically warned Lazlo Moholy Nagy in 1931. I regret to note that almost ninety years later there is still a lack of sensitivity on the crucial importance of images as a universal language. Furthermore, the proliferation of image consumption, especially on social networks, exacerbates the need for an education that allows students (but not only) to decode and not passively suffer what is part of their daily flow of visual stimuli. Based on this premise, the pedagogy that I try to develop in recent years in the schools of architecture offers above all to stimulate students' curiosity towards the photographic message. Concretely it is a matter of accompanying the students in a process of appropriation and manipulation of images to construct and return a personal discourse overcoming the illustrative character.

For some time you have been exploring, through iconographic research, the dialogue between the palm and the coloumn as a symbolic image, a secular visual fascination, and an founding archetypal figure among Mediterranean cultures…

GM: ‘Columns of cultures’ is a project born from a desire to question the plural identity of the Mediterranean through the visual analysis of two symbolic figures: the column and the palm. In fact, the first phase of iconographic research allowed me to see that the palm tree was present in all cultures (whether ancient or contemporary) that occupy the geographical context of the Mediterranean. While analyzing, through photography, the shape of this plant, I realized that the interest I had for this object was implicitly linked to the column, the founding element of architecture. In fact, the palm tree is an atypical tree (from the botanical point of view it is a grass) that has an original and recognizable appearance for its unique stem without branches that makes it look like a column.

The first traces of this analogy can be found in Egyptian architecture where palm trees adorned the capitals of the temples. This similarity has allowed me to broaden my field of study and visual exploration through the fusion of architecture and nature (in the widest sense possible). The column embodies the archetypal element of the building, the vertical sign that supports the roof, but at the same time represents one of the expressions of monumentality. The two elements, palm and column, allow me to read the Mediterranean space in a unified way. My gaze is romantic in contemplating the signs of the past, but at the same time tries to be objective and scientific when it is necessary to understand their evolution. The research I have been carrying out for over two years is articulated in several chapters marked by themes (botanical, landscape, architectural and sociological).

© Giaime Meloni from the series 'Coloumns of cultures’ 

© Giaime Meloni from the series 'Coloumns of cultures’ 

You collaborate with the French photographer Cyrille Weiner. Tell us about more…

GM: I met Cyrille Weiner while I was doing my doctoral thesis. From the first meeting there was immediately a certain harmony, but above all we shared the same interest in a vision of photography as a poetic document able to build a narration on the border between the real and the imaginary. From that moment we stayed in touch and when Marina Caneve and Gianpaolo Arena, the two curators of the Calamita/à project invited Cyrille to make a period of residence on the Vajont, we decided to go there together.

The work we have produced ‘Banale & Brutale’ is an aesthetic research on concrete brut as material that built the dam, the main cause of the human disaster, but at the same time that marked the time of the reconstruction of Longarone. This work was a first verification test to understand if we could work together. Starting from this experience, thanks to Calamita/à, we began to share Cyrille's studio and for the last year we moved to a larger and more comfortable studio. This move has allowed us to share spatially and intellectually a larger project, although we both maintain our identity as authors. Since two years we have founded atmosphériques narratives, a research and creation studio that promotes the experimentation of new forms of visual communication in the architectural field. We work above all in close collaboration with architectural firms that are interested in the production of content and who intend to break the codes of classical and canonical representation of architecture, especially with regard to the constructed one. The privileged return format for this type of work is the book.

You are also working again in Italy, in the Cadore regione around the former Eni Village…

GM: About two years ago I started a residency within ‘Progetto Borca’, a project activated by Minoter and Dolomiti Contemporanee, whose goal is to promote the regeneration of spaces through artistic processes. The early phase of the residence was characterized by an exploration of the places and I must admit that I suffered the aesthetic / contemplative appeal for the landscape of the Belluno Dolomites and the architecture of Edoardo Gellner, demiurge architect of the Eni village. For this reason I immediately had the need to carry out a long-term process, made of continuous going and return between Borca and Montreuil, which have marked these last two years, and which have allowed me to take the distance from what I was going creating within the colony of the former Eni village.

Each return was an opportunity to produce a new contact with the place articulated between visual memory and formal obsessions. The result of this work is a reflection on the concept of “unheimlich”, translated into Italian with the term of “perturbante” (“uncanny” in English), with which I had the pleasure of winning the special mention of the Graziadei Prize 2017. 'Unheumlich' represents a metaphor on the condition of contemporary living. This experience emphasizes the human need to construct a domestic dimension within the generic space, working on the intangible but palpable register of the unconscious. The search for the family territory also includes in an antithetic way its negation, of which the perturbing is ambiguously the definition. The incessant repetition of some forms, subjects and colors within the sequence evokes this search for a reference point capable of generating that sense of familiarity with the place.

© Giaime Meloni from the series 'Unheumlich’

© Giaime Meloni from the series 'Unheumlich’

© Giaime Meloni from the series 'Unheumlich’

You are of Sardinian origin, a singular land. Tell us briefly where you grew up ...

GM: I was born in Sardinia and I spent my childhood in Siliqua, a small rural town that lives of the fame of the Castle that belonged in the thirteenth century to Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, also known as a character of the Divine Comedy. During my architecture studies I lived in Cagliari, within a district that more than represent the historic center perfectly matches the dynamics of life of the village. Its position closed by fortified walls and set on the hill makes any contact with the outside demanding a certain centrifugal force.

Lately it has undergone a phase of transformation under the tourist pressure of holiday homes and some of the historic neighbors give way to weekly flows of visitors. By necessity of study during my doctorate I had the possibility to realize a thesis in co-tutelage between France and Italy. From that moment I defined myself as a person who lives between two islands: Ile-de-France and Sardinia. In one case it is just a toponym, in the other is about a geographical entity. Both represent for me the physical and mental boundaries of my daily life. In fact, more than Sardinia specifically, it is the condition of living the island, metaphorically or really, which is an indispensable condition for me. Wherever I am, I try to find or reconstruct some elements that allow me to generate an ordinary dimension of life, made of small gestures and routine. Although I live in a nostalgic and conflictual way the relationship with Sardinia, I always feel I am between two realities: one metropolitan and the other more rural. The fact of being able to generate comparisons enriches the exchange.

© Giaime Meloni from the series 'Sardegna’

---

LINKS

Giaime Meloni
Urbanautica Italy