Carsismo
by Paul Montagnon
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Nature, Environment and Perspectives
The Karst plateau between Italy and Slovenia is a territory whose contours are hardly delineated. The borders that divide it seem to have vanished, on both sides people speak mainly the same language and the landscape remains similar. This land that karstification made permeable and unfathomable imposes a certain impression of chaos, the anthropization is limited but often rendered violent by its conflictual relationship with a nature difficult to tame and by the history of a border region marked by conflicts. The landscape draws from these characteristics an aspect at the same time bucolic or inhospitable. If we walk around, we can glimpse a fairly preserved context where the compromises seem to allow a rather healthy balance between nature and human presence. If we cross it more carefully, we gradually discover indelible scars: marble quarries, trenches or buildings carved into the rock. More discreetly the ecosystem appears altered and shaped by man, then, our route crosses the erratic paths that mark the passages of the “Balkan route” and gradually the reading becomes more complex.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023