Aporias of Transition
by Francesco Sammarco
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
Along the Naples–Bari High-Speed Rail line, “transition” (here understood as a condition that requires rethinking spaces and flows in fragile territories) is not a guarantee of progress, but a field of contradictions. Aporias of Transition reads the construction corridor as a territorial device that, in the same gesture, connects and fractures: it accelerates mobility yet produces cuts, discontinuities, and new vulnerabilities between rural margins and peri-urban fabrics. Through a double distance – ground-level proximity and aerial reconnaissance via drone flight – the project builds a visual argument in which infrastructure becomes evidence: trenches, fences, detours, wounded soils, provisional landscapes. The aporia emerges in the gap between sustainability narratives and material footprints: the space where progress is negotiated, contested, and unevenly distributed.