Project hypotheses
A refuge that raises many questions about the relationship with the river
A sculpture or a piece of architecture, perhaps a boat?
The river landscape of the Po has always been regarded as a border territory, over which the various institutions have passed responsibility back and forth.
Water pollution, land consumption and the excavation of the riverbed up to the 1970s have compromised some of its characteristics and increased both hydrogeological risk and the fragmentation of natural habitats.
Any kind of intervention in such a context must take the actual situation into account and bears the responsibility of entering into dialogue with the contingent reality.
The initial idea was to create an extension of the Museum, a true cultural outpost in a hostile territory: a site-specific installation in the river strip between the edge of the bank and the main embankment. The installation could be anchored to the ground so that, during the frequent flooding of the floodplain, it can rise and float, following the flow of the river. Like the houseboats built on old concrete barges moored to the embankment, this installation could have a function.
An amphibious space
Sweet Home thus becomes a true container of stories, able to gather the legacy of lives and memories and, at the same time, to act as a driver of change and of the future, within a broader practice of genuine remembrance that aims to directly involve those who will frequent these places.
Sweet Home is therefore not intended as a mere installation, but will become a detached annex of the Museo del Premio Suzzara: an amphibious space, like the floodplain in which it will be placed, that can in turn be an architectural recess people can enter, a small stage for performative actions, an exhibition room, an experimental educational workshop…
The model and its realisation will face each other in this liminal yet densely vital space formed by the riverbank. Sweet Home does not seek to be a mere reproduction of a boat or a house, but presents itself as an anti-monumental work that enters into a direct and very close relationship with the lives of local people. It appears as a residual object, a survivor of the recent transformations of contemporary society and its ways of life, taking shape as a refuge and raising many questions about the relationship of the river with life itself, with history, with memory.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
4 December 2020 inspection of the possible site of the planned work
First sketches of a simplified houseboat
Un posizionamento sul piano di campagna
Ipotesi struttura scafo
Placement assumptions
Ipotesi senza parte prodiera e poppiera