NOTES FROM THE UNDERWORLD. RECYCLING STRATEGIES FOR THE - MINING COMPOUND.

CATERINA PADOA SCHIOPPA DIAP

Department of Architecture, Roma La Sapienza University, Adjunct Professor at Politecnico di Milano

SUMMARY: Brownfields, greyfields and greenfields – as wastelands are today commonly catalogued – have grown exponentially in the last half-century, almost as much as urban sprawl. Since the early 1990s most thoughtful landscape architects, urban planners and architects have acknowledged the transformative potential of those territories. The paper addresses this theme from a theoretical and experimental point of view, focusing in the legacy left by a long history of mining exploitation in the Sulcis-Iglesiente area in .

CONTEXT: LIFE & DEATH OF AN UNDERWORLD

The area called Sulcis-Iglesiente in the southwest of Sardinia is ’s largest mining compound, with an extension of over 3700 square kilometres. It was progressively dismantled starting in the late 1970s after an extensive history of raw material exploitation. Extraction of metals and minerals – obsidian, carboniferous granites, diorites, silver, lead and zinc – started long before the modern era, in Neolithic times. From the geological point of view, Sardinia is certainly one the oldest and most primitive territories on the European continent, with carbonate rocks that are over 500 million years old and are a remarkable reservoir of scientific and environmental knowledge. This abundance of mineral resources is the explanation for an early interest in this remote and gorgeous territory. Indeed, many different peoples of the Mediterranean region have conquered Sardinia, which saw changing governance and the development of a mining industry, starting with the in the VII century B.C.E. followed by the Carthaginians in the V century B.C.E., the Romans in the III century B.C.E., and the Spanish in the , and finally, in the mid- seventeenth century, Piedmont state. In these centuries the island became one of the most important European centres for the birth of western industrialized civilization, a place where novel production systems were tested, and avant-garde techniques and sophisticated technologies were adopted. The growth of industry peaked in the XIX century, when private mining companies were established giving new shape both to the physical landscape and the entire society. With the arrival of electricity at the end of the century, some of the main extraction sites – e.g. Monteponi – were transformed into little towns, with specialized plants, mechanical washeries, foundries,

Proceedings Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium/ 2 - 6 October 2017 S. Margherita di , , Italy / © 2017 by CISA Publisher, Italy

Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 large warehouses, and railways, as well as services and housing for workers. At that time in the Sulcis-Iglesiente area metallurgical activity – the processing and refining of raw materials as well as the treatment and disposal of sterile and waste material – was added to mining activity. Thus new settlements were founded, such as Nebida with the La Marmora monumental washery, and the large compound of Masua, extending over 7 hectares, which in the 1950’s was one of the most important European centres specializing in froth flotation, the mineral process in which gangue, or worthless material, is separated and removed. Close to Masua, in 1924, was founded as one of the most futuristic works of engineering in the Mediterranean sea, for the storage and transportation of mining material. Excavated in the cliffs, this unique harbour was designed to exploit the natural morphology, with nine gigantic silos 18 meters high and with loading and unloading galleries connecting the sea to the main extraction sites.

Figure 1. Monteponi little town in 1875.

While the local economy was entirely based on lucrative mining activity, in the second-half of the nineteenth century Sardinia went through a period of poverty, malaria epidemics, and a general economic crisis linked to the decline of rural activities, particularly breeding and harvesting, partly caused by soil and water pollution produced by the mining industry itself. During the fascist regime, before the final impoverishment of the soil and the gradual closure of all industrial sites, mining was a very flourishing activity, fuelling Mussolini’s political and military plan. After all, Mussolini decided to invest in Sardinia with several infrastructural works and with the foundation of Carbonia, a city in the heart of the Sulcis area, planned as the new centre of Italian coal production, symbolically representing the crazy yet pervasive mirage of the autarchic economy. Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017

Finally, starting in the 1950s the economy begins to shrink, leaving a heavy legacy both in terms of human health and environmental degradation. Gradually the mining sites were dismantled and the whole compound was shut in 1991, along with most large European mining and industrial districts, most famously the Ruhr region with its 477 mines, the first example of a large-scale operation of reclamation, recycling and transformation of an abandoned industrial site into a park. After a long process of cultural and political awareness, carried out by local forces, especially by former miners, in 2001 the Sulcis-Iglesiente area was declared a UNESCO protected site, as well as a so-called Site of National Interest (SIN), thus becoming officially part of a global network of post-industrial areas valued for their important architectural and environmental qualities. The “Historical and Environmental Geomineral Park of Sardinia” with its terribly polluted, hydrologically instable, hilly, wild environment, inhabited by vast abandoned infrastructures of tunnels, extraction wells, and industrial plants but also less noble mud hills, slag and sludge dumps, and landfills, is a desolate yet fascinating landscape of waste architecture.

Figure 2. Monteponi topographic plan, Municipal Historical Archive, Iglesias 2015.

LANDSCAPE OF EROSION: MATERIAL & INTANGIBLE HERITAGE

The territory connecting Iglesias to the seashore, where one finds Monteponi, Masua and Nebida, is indeed a “magnificent hell”, to quote Luciano Ottelli, enlightened geologist and former Director of the Geomineral Park, distinguished by a very impressive manmade morphology. Underneath the hills stand a subterranean city, excavated down to 500 meters below the sea level, containing 15 millions square meters of voids and 60 linear kilometres of underground paths, configuring a complex topographic system made of vertical veins, horizontal tunnels, bell pits, and spoil heaps, as well as natural caves and all the typical plastic forms generated by the Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 natural erosion of karst rocks, including the collapse and disintegration of the earth. It is a landscape in which – as in all “landscapes of erosion” – natural and artificial modification processes are temporally and spatially tangled, and the earth is permanently altered by the corrosive and destructive power of nature, personified by wind and water. Negative landscapes, literally fabricated through manmade excavation, in which large voids are molded “for denaturalization rather than scenic beauty” (Smithson, 1979), are mystical places, full of contradictions since the subtraction of materials has allowed the evolution of humanity and its physical edification, while displaying significantly the scars of exploitation and death. Hence, for their ambiguity and their enigmatic character, those “pulverized sites” have been the object of theoretical and artistic exploration by land artists since the 1960s, for example the American land artist Robert Smithson, who pioneered a radical change of perspective regarding wastelands in general. Their contribution can be measured not only by the stateliness of their artworks, but also by new notion of nature as well as of ecology that have been shaped by them – today embraced by earth and social sciences – notably the idea of integrating if not sublimating mankind’s irreversible modifications of the earth. For land artists, indeed, nostalgia for a primigeneous status quo is meaningless, and instead it is the entropy of these places which make them an object to be observed and framed by the artistic gesture.

Figure 3. Dump in Masua, 2015.

Landscapes of erosion resulting from human activity, such as quarries and mines, have also been favourite subject in the theoretical discourse among architects about wasteland recycling strategies. Perhaps this is because, compared to other terrains vague – abandoned, contaminated, unproductive or moribund lands – these areas have radically changed their geographical conformation, both in physical and human terms, so that the boundary between nature and artifice blurs, and the landscape eventually comes to resemble the natural structures Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 in which economical behaviour generates beauty. In this territory, the idea of “palimpsest” operates not metaphorically but corporeally; the landscape affords us with a real and embodied tactile experience across the vertical thickness of geological strata. Similar displacement occurs at the emotional level, since the sense of emptiness and stillness is not only related to what is perceived as a ruined landscape and an interrupted lifecycle, but also to the odd bodily exercise of descent in the mysterious and dark realm of the underworld.

Figure 4. Santa Barbara procession and descent of miners in Monteponi Galery in the early XX century, Municipal Historical Archive, Iglesias 2015.

Perhaps this experience evokes the concept of what Paul Connerton calls “performative memory”, generally associated with particular human actions – a repetitive play or performance – which amplifies the perception of a place where one may recognize traces, even latent, of collective identify. Here the simple experience of entering and circulating in the mining spaces may be strong enough to transmit the weight of history and its shared knowledge. If it is true, as Connerton claims, that contemporary society lives in a state of oblivion, of cultural amnesia as consequence of the fracture between individuals and places, due to the formless and scaleless condition of current urban development, Sulcis-Iglesiente has the privilege of being a significant European centre of modern industry, and an “anti-modern” place where the “myth of velocity”, much celebrated by Futurism and other artistic movements of the Avant-garde, has not landed. This paradox is embedded in the small mining villages and in local communities rooted in an untamed, empty territory, where the only linear infrastructures are paths that miners for centuries have walked. Fortunately these paths are not forgotten. On the contrary they are the precious evidence of a civilization filled with traumatic stories, traditions, superstitions, and rituals, whose traces are embodied in many scattered clearings, in churches dedicated to Santa Barbara, the Patron Saint of miners, in the remains of the countless processions that have transformed these Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 repetitive journeys into rites. Along these paths, today recollected along the so-called Cammino di Santa Barbara – the Route of Santa Barbara that in its entirety has a length of 395 km – the identity of a community and a collective memory has been created, precisely through the repetition of a bodily practice like a pilgrimage. From this perspective, if we embrace the principle that there is no future that does not interact with the past, not only on psychological but also on physical terms, this material and intangible heritage might become the foundation of any future scenario for the whole area.

“GHOST TOWN LABORATORY”: METHODS & GUIDELINES

Along the 20 km of infrastructure that connect Iglesias to Monteponi, Nebida and Masua, in 2015 fourth-year students of the Politecnico of Milano were asked to confront the sort of complex topic which designers are commonly exposed today, that is to define formal responses and strategies of environmental remediation within a large landscape of ruins.

Figure 5. Waste Architecture in Masua, 2015.

As mentioned above, brownfields, greyfields and greenfields – as wastelands are today commonly catalogued – have grown exponentially in the last half-century, almost as much as urban sprawl. Hence, since the early 1990s most thoughtful landscape architects, urban planners and architects have acknowledged the transformative potential of those territories. As the phenomena of shrinking cities and shrinking economies have increased, it has become Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 increasingly urgent to deal with these complex new ecologies and to respond with a vast inventory of possible interventions, from land reclamation to reuse to recycling. From an educational point of view, it is important to frame the right questions, to problematize the many and diverse issues regarding the possible future of wastelands – in particular what we have called landscapes of erosion – in order to open up to a deep critical reading, not limited by ideological prejudices, and yet driven by empathic and affective reasoning. The first tool we encourage students to use is photography, which can grasp subjective details and render the sense of vertigo and odd vitality. Depending on this critical but partial reading, from which in any case the multiple and contradictory dynamics layering the territory should emerge, the programmatic guidelines as well as the formal devices are outlined. Thus the very initial question might be the one suggested by the French anthropogist Marc Augé in his book “Le temps en ruines”. Are these ruins or rubble? In other words, are we dealing with fragments from which a possible life can emerge or with simple inert materials? Is this a “moral world, full of admonishments” inhabited by allusive objects recalling mankind’s affirmation of spirit over nature, as in the case of “historical ruins”, or “architectural dead bodies” not deserving any further decent burial. This latter issue is crucial since it concerns the contemporary obsession to perpetuate the productive cycle infinitely, as a harmful response to the past culture of over-production and over-consumption. This sort of “defeat of the principle of entropy” (Marini, 2015) is senseless when it is applied to abandoned sites transformed into public parkland or recreational open space simply to satisfy the redemptive urge while feeding a service economy and a touristic society. Following this approach “park and greenery have become worn-out clichés”, argues Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze, serving as an empty symbol of healing. Furthermore, beyond the geographical and climatic specificity of the land renaturalization process, the programmatic agenda in such cases is generally standardized, generic if not banal, the effect is that leisure parks look the same all over the planet. The only exception is the variety of architectural solutions for the buildings’ recycling according to a “parasite strategy” – that is, assigning new identity through physical and semantic interference. The challenge today should go far beyond the objective of remedy and absolution. We might undertake another approach, perhaps even more sustainable and ecological, which implies a loss of control, a loss tout-court. Here Paul Virilio’s term “the aesthetic of disappearance” may be useful, it describes the state of an unfinished fragment which has the right to oblivion, and to the progressive, but inexorable, process of extinction. Coming back to the Sulcis-Iglesiente mining compound, therefore, it is worthwhile to envision many and diverse future scenarios, for example, a positive and propulsive one in which the area is sucked into the Sardinian touristic intensive economy. Or, the opposite, a passive one in which the area is engulfed by the nature which surrounds it, almost following the Taoist principle of wu-wei, of non-action and non-intervention. Undoubtedly, part of the answer is political, it implies an alternative idea of society. It is equally important to define a new identity that will allow those small communities to survive, as well as the right to remain at the “edge”, that is to preserve their intrinsic liminality. After all, the very potentiality of this sublime area, that which might preserve its authenticity and its legacy, is related to its limited visibility, its wilderness and remoteness, the absence of the typical “spectacularization” to which mass tourism destinations are generally exposed. In any case, whatever response and decision we may undertake about what to save and what to erase, it is essential to think in evolutionary terms, that is to engage with transformations that are both ecologically and economically sustainable in the short, medium and long term. Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017

Methodologically, in the academic context the project acquires its most ideal significance beyond its operative drift. It is a representational machine unfolding political and ideal projection beyond the contingency of administrative constraints and the current system of social and economic interests. Radical invention, if justified by a consistent and meticulous narrative, is strongly recommended, especially when it drives intriguing proposals, capable of awakening the common need to desire and dream, while shaping the collective imaginary. Among the student proposals some recurring themes seem to resonate as refrains, building up a substantial common ground easily transmittable as shared guidelines and as masterplan, thus anticipating in strategic terms what the design proposal consolidates in formal terms.

VISIONS: PATHS OF REMEDIATION & PATHS OF REMEMBRANCE

Projects reflect different approaches. Some, close to land art, thus delaying the interpretation of signs, operate through minimal gestures sometimes, at first glance, fully camouflaged in the existing scenery, others, more radical, propose strong landmarks in order to emphasize the shift between nature and artifice. Some projects choose the vocabulary of monumentality, others that of ephemeral scattered architectural events. Some work within the large surface of extractive sites, of dumps and landfills, others prefer the linear infrastructure of the Cammino di Santa Barbara which crosses the area. Consequentially, some propose very ambitious programs of soil remediation and recycling of mining spaces for new uses such as a speleotherapic hub within the subterranean city of Monteponi, or the transformation of a concrete silo into an open- air theatre in Masua. Others have developed an acupuncture strategy, based on the dispersion of symbolic objects along the aforementioned walkway, hosting basic facilities for visitors such as bike rental, toilets, first aid, water tanks and potable water. Rooted in the knowledge of both their material and immaterial heritage, these paths of remediation and paths of remembrance are always dealing with the notion of “waste”. In some cases, waste is the architectural component of abandoned buildings and disused infrastructures, which can be recomposed into new artefacts. Fragments of rusted iron, old machinery and tools, remnants of the technology of mineralogical and metallurgical activity are reassembled in novel forms. The collection of these little architectures – resembling constructivist sculptures for their structural lightness, but also the objet-trouvés assemblages of the Sardinian artist Maria Lai – are truly examples of recycling. In fact, in a recycling strategy, the new identity is more effective if it maintains a distance from the original, and here pieces which were once expressions of a technological leap have become models of low-tech architectures as well as expressions of what Andrea Branzi calls “weak urbanism”. After all, what makes this recycling operation interesting is its impact at the larger territorial scale. Placed 2,5 km apart, those kiosks are single entities yet interconnected, defining a flexible and adaptive system, a “fuzzy reality” similar to the nebulous consistency of the universe, enabling both locally and globally, along the whole corridor, diffuse and unpredictable transformations, according to social, economical and technological evolutionary conditions. Hence, for example, one of these panoramic points where multiple functions overlap could start a “genetic mutation” in which changes of dimension and materiality could occur due to the spontaneous development of new activities such as catering and accommodation. This kind of mutation where there are industrial citadels – where the availability of built space and the need to recover contaminated land work together – operates as a design scalar device. Within this temporal and geographical multiscalarity, the transition from the idea of waste as Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 raw material of ruined architectures to be reused, to the idea of waste as coarse material and sterile products discarded by the extractive industry to be transformed is complete. For gigantic wastelands – either dumps of waste material mixed with sludge and filled with dangerous pollutants, or heaps of fine-grain polluted material dispersed in the atmosphere and carried by rivers and aquifers – the ground zero of any intervention is indeed the process of soil and water remediation, using different techniques, such as phytoremediation, electrokinetic remediation, or even the more experimental nanoremediation. Beyond the technical aspects, which architecture students can guide only very approximately, in the academic context the aim of research into these areas – areas which are sometimes very beautiful like the so-called “Red Mud” of Monteponi – is to learn how to enhance self-sufficient processes. This means not only to promote long-term strategies based on natural processes, agricultural practices, plant lifecycles, but, as well, on artistic performances, seasonal events, temporary colonization, and the like, in order to turn what is today an ecological threat into a potential resource while promoting cultural recovery.

Figure 6. Acupuncture strategy along the Cammino di Santa Barbara, students’ project, 2015.

These kind of strategies, along the line of some exemplary projects such as Fresh Kills Landfill by James Corner/Field Operations, might possibly permit a gradual and complete land Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 rehabilitation, as if an apparent new virginity could be attained. However, as we have established, new forms of intense exploitation such as mass tourism are undesirable. On the contrary, in order to avoid any further entropic colonization, the condition of separation, that is a physical and functional discontinuity embodied in a thick boundary, might be emphasized. In this way these areas become “reservoirs” of a nature that escapes any human control, a “patch” of territorial wilderness and resilience, ecologically valuable, according to Richard Forman’s thesis.

Figure 7. Speleotherapic hub in Monteponi, students’ project, 2015.

Similar indeterminacy could be envisioned for the abandoned and unsafe voids excavated in the mountainside, as well as decrepit chimneys, plants and infrastructures. However, this exceptional heritage manifests a great civilization, just like the massive Sardinian Nuragic architecture. Avoiding its museification – an approach that often mortifies rather than enhances any kind of heritage – the challenge here is to fine-tune very specific programs of reuse and to define a consistent formal lexicon, in order to recover what may become the trigger for an economical revival. This means undertaking a rigorous investigation, constructing a comprehensive taxonomy of waste architectures – for instance, a taxonomy of voids according to depth, size and degree of natural light – to which transformative tactics can be applied. Interestingly, visionary projects and significant spatial and architectural interventions do not Sardinia 2017 / Sixteenth International Waste Management and Landfill Symposium / 2 - 6 October 2017 always merge. The case of the speleotherapic hub within the Monteponi mines, mentioned above, is indeed a very smart solution for the specific features of the site – rooms with air free of pollen and dust, chimneys for natural ventilation, availability of salt coming from nearby saline fields. However, it consists of smooth spatial adaptations, supported by a hard technological and infrastructural system. In fact, the reuse of the subterranean city has little impact at the ground level, even though it involves an extensive territory. The project proposes a series of vertical and horizontal cylinders – mimicking the form of a lighthouse, but also the so-called perdas fittas, the Sardinian ancestral system of Menhir – as physical thresholds that emphasize the rite of passage between light and darkness, between above and below the terrestrial skin. The repetition and topological adaption of this unique architectural element works as a field, a diffuse landmark, a visual reference pattern that gives visibility to a remarkable work of waste architecture, otherwise hidden. When waste acquires this other meaning, beyond its material condition – that is spaces without function, lifeless structures belonging to an unproductive body – another conceptual shift has occurred. Despite their waste circumstances, the Sulcis-Iglesiente landscapes of erosion become what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari calls “a virtual dimension of reality” referring to the concept of the “body without organs”, a reservoir of potentialities, a place where “gestation and formation yet to come”. Around these spaces the imaginative mind overcomes any rational boundary. Ideal trajectories are accomplished. A strong narrative is invented. And eventually a new identity, anchored to the collective memories belonging to the vital Sardinian culture, unfolds.

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As teacher I am fortunate to engage with a large academic community that stimulates my theoretical research. In particular I am grateful to the Department of Architecture of Roma La Sapienza University and to the Politecnico di Milano, to my collegues Isabella Inti and Maria Chiara Pastore with whom I shared the teaching experience in the “Ghost Town Laboratory. Iglesias, Nebida, Masua” in 2015/2016, as well as to the photograper Filippo Romano who guided student through their photographic studies, and to tutors Corinna Del Bianco and Cecilia Tramontano. This work would never have happened without the support and work of students. Among them are Jacopo Rosa, Marina Corbella, Fabio Trivieri, Emma Backlund, Elena Maksimovic, Ricardo Russo, Ana Marques, Katarina Skrbic, Milos Petrovic, Zhao Zhongjie, Federica Ferrari, Faruk Baran Heybeli, Pooja Gulur Vasudev, Mohana Krishna, Ingrid Noe Colonia, Ozge Ozcelik, Giovanni Romei, Simone Pio Scarano, Daya Vismara, Chaoran Wang, whose work is included here. I thank Karen Bermann for her generous support in the English revision.

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