The Winged Chimera and its Double. An Educational Opportunity to Rethink Technique

Abstract

The technological updating of the restoration didactics, as well as the upgrading of any other discipline, raises wide-ranging cultural issues. As Heidegger reminds us, in the case we consider the essence of the Technique as something not technical at all, it is advisable for us to be vigilant about the alleged neutrality of technological tools as well as about the claimed mastering of their usage, which is in fact indispensable nowadays. It is rather necessary to reflect about the radical shifts in the Technique, which switched from being mere “means" to an “end”. This has been widely marked by Philosophy, which nowadays profiles a scenery in which the undefined increasing of means deploys the goals that - through it - can be achieved. Thinking about the pitfalls underlying the “reversal of the subjectivity" that this same scenario involves, whereas it is the technique the one tool determining the way to gain experience, is even more necessary to fulfil our purposes. In the teaching experience, predisposition to wait for responses guaranteed from the optimization of technical procedures reverberates the sense of such "reversal". Such approach is an element that teachers often complain about considering the student approach. It is responsibility of the Didactics to acknowledge its scale and to identify useful strategies in order to assign centrality to the “who" and to promote the right order among the “why, what and how” to do things. In the recent Lab experience, the presence of a couple of winged chimeras has enabled a small but significant approach change: the expected responses have been switched into questions, to which the technique has been called in in order to provide appropriate answers.