Visiting the Eni Village, I’ve had the feeling of entering an archaeological site, much like in the operating of those who, as they dig, rediscover an ideal and lost society. Unlike the digs, in which the existence of the mere perimeters of the architectures distances from the original messages, the Borca site allows instead an almost complete recovery. I believe that, to devise a project suitable for the Eni Village, tackling it through a personal filter wouldn’t be enough; the risk would be to lose the cultural and social origin of a place that was generated through political compromises and collaborations with great businesses as Pirelli or Ginori. As an intellectual and thinker, the artist should get rid of his personal vision, to reach a comprehension of some primary necessities of a whole. The contemporary artist, even before dealing with the Creation of Worlds, should reflect on the State of Art. The constitution of a group, taking on various themes from several points of view, serves this kind of approach very well. As I kept thinking, I reflected on what the essential factors to bring people close to a determinate subject once again might be. Which kind of approaches one should take upon themselves to be able to change the human sentiment towards something. I imagined that the raising of consciousness could proceed through Awareness and Contact. It may seem banal, but it is through contact that one can establish a connection, and it’s through contact that the restorers mesure the object, without a “first contact” it’s difficult to make the next step. Retracing the first steps starting from scratch, re-establishing a contact, recreating familiarity, feeling compassion. Through the sostitution or reallocation of missing or vandalized parts with new artistic artefacts it would be possible to declare a sympathetic but disenchanted stance on a place which becomes not mere archaeology, but a still current  ideologic emblem that has to be strenghtened, thus remarking the real impossibility – or extreme difficulty – of healing this place both from a practical and philosophical standpoint. I am not facing a reasoning like this for the first time, I have already had the occasion of reflecting on some “high” creations of the human spirit (for example, in case of the Vittoriano Viganò’s Marchiondi Institute in Milan) through my thoughts on nature; that is to say, how nature itself is always seen as the weak element to be defended, and that, overpowered by the rampant cementification, it needs tutelage. It is rare that the opposite line of thinking is taken into consideration, that is to say how nature, instead, contributes in time to the decay of meaningful works produced by people. When people interrupt their control, everything goes back to dust and vegetation. A rule of destiny comes into action. One could then assert that the human has a divine power, that it s able to interrupt the natural cycle. There, that’s the power of its Will.

Conact —-> Awareness —-> (Raising Consciousness) —-> Will. These are the elements to re-establish the possibility of inhabiting an ecosystem.

Mirko Canesi

 

Reflection and generel idea for Borca
action group (artists): Mirko Canesi, Fiorella Fontana, Stefano Serusi and Marcello Tedesco.

How can a place re-live?
To be a museum of itself would imply a total, almost photographic, in a sense, reorganisation of the conditions of a particular moment of its history, the un-derailed gathering  of images and objects that pertain to it, reaching an unnatural and steady freeze in which time wouldn’t be permitted to create new stories. Instead, one can think of it as a material and immaterial archive to be interpreted, and that needs to gain substance once again, with new acts and new narrations. Thinking of it as an ideal theatre of presented gestures and artworks, that cannot be but for that location, both because they are produced in that specific context, and because they are shown in a unique harmony with the existing architecture and nature.
Visiting the Eni Village, one obtains a direct contact with the paternalistic idea that has animated, in the past, people like Enrico Mattei, that is to say to unite will to a kind of ethics that we sum up today as  socialist and christian at the same time. Beside a State that wants to one up itself through technological progress, the necessity to conceive an ample humanistic project in which the well-being of the worker and the education of their children – future Italians- is the main concern and symbol, isn’t secondary.
In the Eni Village, even from its architectural design, the idea of giving children a Summer Camp both close to nature and protected from its perils, in which to combine, through regular daily practise, study and religious reflection, is clear.
During our survery, the typically modernistic will to match to the development process brilliance and architectural quality, both in the spaces and the furnishing which have immediately earned our interest, was still clear for all to see.
Among these elements are the four confessionals, found without a function in the main hall, for which an immediate and strong empathy was born.
In them we have wanted to find that projectual approach that wants to return to the individual seen in communion; individual not as much subjugated to the fear of sin, but rather accepted in its individuality, and whom approaches not confession, per se, but confidence, which can become, also and most of all, the confidence towards this place of those who came in contact with it.
Mattei’s State – defined the most powerful Italian state after Augustus by foreigners – is a State where the individual, their thoughts, their necessities don’t fall on deaf ears, and where ideas find a space to express themselves.
Spending a few days in informal residence at the Eni Village will be for us an ocasion to link ourselves with the place, and to somehow follow the trail of those who have wanted it in the first place, and those who have inhabited it, seeking out stories and traces in the surroundings themselves, which will have to be given back with minimal interventions on the location, and studying ways to re-use it in a temporary way, or in a more extensive and utopic projectual plan that springs from its very legend.