Effectiveness of art, network strategies and transformative approach to landscape and alpine heritage
Ever since 2011, Dolomiti Contemporanee (DC) has been operating on the contemporary identity of the mountain, and on the state of the Landscape, as well as the cultural, historic, and architectural Heritage inside the region of UNESCO’s Dolomites. Its research takes shape in the reactivation of large, issue-heavy industrial archaeology sites and compounds: former factories, former social villages, iconic architectural creations, with a great historical or aesthetic value, abandoned and underutilized, immersed in the powerful nature of the Dolomitic region. DC works on the redefinition of the mountain’s identity, building re-innovative and thematic critical images. In this sense, we refuse to recognize as an acceptable identity for the Alpine landscape the hotchpotch of stereotypical reductions which deliver a bland and reified vision of it, one that almost always involves plain and simple economic and touristic exploitation of the asset, to the detriment of its real potential’s nourishment. DC’s practice puts at the centre the need for re-enhancement and functional re-use of a few exceptional sites, which must be re-processed and re-activated. It is a responsible necessity of care and an opportunity for the regeneration of extraordinary underdeveloped sources of potential at the same time. Contemporary art, innovation culture, network strategies, those are some of the “techniques” through which such sites, so important in the past and now lifeless, are tackled, and morphed into cultural and artistic production centres, finally operative again, engines able to represent and provide new value to the territory.
