Case study C: Remote Rural Areas PAEesSAGGIO - Azione Matese: The Village of Art & Urban Node RU.DE.RI Association ( RUral DEsign per la RIgenerazione dei territori (https://www.facebook.com/ruraldesignrigenerazione) Edited by Valentina Anzoise (founder member of RU.DE.RI association) RU.DE.RI - Rural Design for Territorial Regeneration - is a cultural association composed of architects, designers, researchers and professionals based all over Italy (and also abroad), whose activities are mainly focused on remote, rural areas of Southern Italy. The association promotes practices and approaches aimed at valorizing rural contexts, placing the activities related to agriculture at the heart of territorial regeneration to broaden the scope of design - mainly based on the urban paradigm synthetized in the famous statement by Gropius "from the spoon to the city" - to embrace instead the concept of landscape, not only in an aesthetic and ecological sense but also in a scientific and productive one, as a result of the co-evolution of environmental systems and human activities. The cornerstones of the paradigm shift proposed by RU.DE.RI move from a new interpretation of the historical role of agriculture that is based, on the one hand, on the awareness of new emerging perceptions of the territory and, on the other hand, on the need for a systemic integration of agricultural productive chains with culture and landscape design. For productive activities here are not meant exclusively agricultural ones but also the network of ecosystem services provided to urban areas by rural areas, as well as the production of narratives which will bring outside of the rural areas the values of what - in a previous project we will explain below - we1 have named the "Rural City", i.e. that systemic continuum embracing natural enclave, cultural landscapes and farming villages as part of a habitat composed of systems with different and complementary qualities. At the center of RU.DE.RI activity there is a re-assessment and re- definition of key concepts such as "territory" and "identity", to re-configure the sense of history and culture as productive open processes, which are actively taking place, and are not fix or prepackaged objects. To learn more from the experience of this association, Mario Festa - architect and member of the Azione Matese workgroup and actual president of RU.DE.RI - has been interviewed by Valentina Anzoise, a founder member of RU.DE.RI, in a sort of peer-interview or appreciative inquiry. 1 Some of the actual members of RU.DE.RI have been also in the founder working group of "Azione Matese", the intervention of territorial regeneration that we will explain in the following pages through the voice of Mario Festa. VA: Mario, if you had to identify where the vision promoted by RU.DE.RI association comes from or what has first inspired it, what would you say? MF: I would say that a fundamental step is represented by "PAEseSAGGIO - Azione Matese" (Wise Village Landscape - Matese Action), a cultural and territorial regeneration intervention born because of a series of coincidences: i.e other architects and I, returning in Italy after having worked together for years in Berlin, met again and got fascinated with Italian inland and mountain areas. A key question at the origin of our bet was: how is it possible to "do something good" in those extremely marginal places? We then decided to work on the Apennine massif of Matese, in Campania Region, in a remote area very close to the village where I was born and raised. For a long time we tried to get in contact with local authorities and institutions to expose our project and vision. Most of them refused, because our ideas were "too faraway and visionary" compared to "traditional" development projects they were used to and they expected from us to bring there! Notice also that, at that time, almost none was talking of urban regeneration in Italy. Therefore, given the difficulty of bringing forward the proposals with the municipalities of Matese, at a certain point we had almost decided to give up. But some years before, in 1993, the Matese Regional Park had been established, and in 2002 a symbolic episode happened to us: we were chatting in a restaurant of Gallo Matese - one of the village we wanted to work on - when the Commissioner of the Park came in and asked us: "What are you doing here?". We told him what we had in mind to do in these marginal areas, and he said: "This thing is interesting, and it could fall into the PIT (Integrated Territorial Plan) of the Park". After this meeting, it was he who supported us throughout all the process and created the conditions to establish a memorandum of understanding between 5 municipalities in the North-West area of the Park: Capriati a Volturno, Fontegreca, Gallo Matese, Letino and Prata Sannita. From that moment we began the program "PAESesAGGIO - Azione Matese"2 funded by the European Union through the Operational Programme 2000-2006 (POR) of Campania Region and it was divided into two main interventions: the Village of Art project and the Urban Node project, for which they were allocated € 500.000 and € 700.000 respectively. 2 The title is given by a wordplay among the words Paesaggio (i.e. Landscape), Paese (i.e. Village) and Saggio (i.e. Wise) Fig. 1 Map of the five villages involved in Azione Matese VA: What were these two projects about and how did you undertake the first activities envisaged? MF: Concerning the Village of Art project, before funds finally arrived, the founder working group - comprised of 5 architects coming from different parts of Italy - had already begun to work concretely on the development of its broader vision. It was 2003-2004, and the main reference for us were previous experiments of Italian artistic installations realized in inland, desolate, areas. Nonetheless, compared to those experiences, we were interested especially in involving the population. Art was a pretext for promoting "short circuits". In this in-between period we realized some events, with some funds allocated by the Matese municipalities, to start addressing some issues that were close to our long-run aims and vision: the relationship with nature, emigration, etc. Officially, the Village of Art started in 2005-2006. When we got the funds we could developed various participatory art workshops - two in each villages, involving hundreds of people - that led to the creation of some collective works: the Migrant Rafts, the Nests, the Million Dollar Donkey Hotel, etc. The idea was artists to realize works with the locals, just like in a laboratory, with the aim of creating the conditions for an exchange but also for these communities to perceive their own places differently. Fig. 2, 3 & 4: Construction of the Migrant Rafts on the Matese Lake, by Giuliano Mauri and the people of the 5 villages involved in the project Fig. 5 & 6 Construction of the Million Dollar Donkey Hotel by the artists of Feld72 and the community of Prata Sannita Urban Node was the second project to be funded, and we realized it only in the municipality of Gallo Matese. In this case we had a physical space on which to intervene: Gallo Matese's new town hall that had never been finished. We decided, instead of building something new, to work on something already existing. At that time it was only a skeleton of reinforced concrete, so we thought how we could complete this building - which was really an abomination in the village landscape! - but at the same time we worked - together with the whole community of Gallo Matese - on what content to put there, how to use it once finished. Fig. 7, 8 and 9: The unfinished town hall of Gallo Matese and its regeneration plan developed and realized within the Urban Node project And then the idea came: developing an archive of the material and immaterial culture of the territory, which could make it possible to think about a new kind of urbanity by bringing together local people still living in the village with their emigrants abroad. The irony is that - to realized this project - we worked together with the University of Naples and that of Zurich! In 2006-2007 we had the inauguration of the "new" building, as well as of the municipal offices, a library, an internet lab, a multipurpose room for exhibitions, seminars, etc. and a guesthouse. Fig. 10 Gallesi in the World, demonstration in the streets of Gallo Matese, by Stalker and the community of Gallo. VA: Who was involved in the two projects and how they related and got in contact with the places and the communities? MF: In the Village of Art project - besides the 5 of us constituting the founder working group - we managed to involve around 20 artists, coming from all over Italy, Europe and beyond... we had also group from the United States! While in the Urban Node project - since we had to work only in one village - we were a little less: the founder group made of 5 people and other 15 people (among them artists, architects, etc.). All the people invited to contribute to the project were paid for everything they needed to stay and work on site, and the communities also contributed a lot opening their houses, offering meals and support of different kind. Each artist, on average, has been on the Matese from 15 days to one month. Some, coming from afar, settled there for the whole summer for 2 years in a row. Others, in charge of the coordination and usually living in other places, spent all their holidays (summer or not) to work there.