The project Barma – Le degré zéro de l’habiter arises from an encounter with an archaic, pre-Indo-European form of dwelling that still survives in the folds of the Cottian Alps. The term barma refers to a protruding rock, a natural shelter that, in remote times, offered the minimum conditions for human habitation. These structures, also found in France, Catalonia, southern Germany and Switzerland, belong to a time we cannot precisely date, yet they continue to speak to the present through what in them has remained suspended, unfinished, potential. Archaeology—understood in the deeper sense evoked by Agamben—does not look to the past out of nostalgia, but in order to grasp what in it renders the present visible. It is in the inoperative layer of ancient forms, in what has not been fully absorbed by history, that the possibility of thinking the present and the future otherwise emerges.

To observe the barme therefore means to question the genesis of our ways of dwelling, to understand how we have become what we are. It means interrupting the automatism of the contemporary world—an age in which the balance between the human species and the natural environment seems irreparably compromised—in order to rediscover traces of a possible equilibrium. The barme do not mold the land; they follow it. The dimensions of their rocky outcrops, shaped by geological forces, cannot be bent to proprietary or individualistic logics. For centuries, this compelled alpine communities to share resources, spaces, shelters: a collective, restrained model of integration with nature. Here a possible zero degreeof architecture and urban planning emerges—essential forms, flat roofs, orthogonal geometries that do not impose but welcome; a minimal way of inhabiting that leaves no invasive mark and restores to architecture its original openness.

The silence of these structures—made of stone, shadow, and grazing light—is not empty, but a threshold to a meditative space, not yet saturated by functions or meanings, where alternative forms of life can be imagined. Returning to black and white, for Perassi, was not only a way to describe the material; it was a necessary, liberating gesture. Because contemplating this zero degree of dwelling means rediscovering, even in the most difficult personal moment, the possibility of inhabiting the world anew.