Memories from Apparent Emptyness: Ambiance of the Buoncammino Prison in Cagliari

Abstract

The city tells of itself through its form, its spatial image and its ambiances, sensitive atmospheres and synthesis of the multiple perceptions produced by urban experience. And, on the other hand, the urban finds its significant identity through use and practices, stratified memories, individual and collective and in constant evolution. From this ancestral dialectical and representational relationship between human societies and urban spaces, emerge generative spatial configurations linked to the intense effects caused by the interaction between spaces, perceptions, places, memories, practices. The void (of meaning rather than in the plot) assumes, in this vision, a double interpretative key: on one side it is what allows us to embrace the sedimented matter with the senses, on the other it is interpreted as lack, absence of life and activities. But this is only apparent. Memory resists in the void, guards and resends, reveals itself to the watchful eye and it is capable of inducing renewed significations.
The large abandoned urban complexes, and among them the prisons, contain a rich heritage of stories; they possess a memory, linked to experiences, facts, tales, suggestions. Induced by the evocation of some sensitive experiences, what follows is a multifocal narration of the Buoncammino prison in Cagliari and its surroundings, today a large apparent void waiting for new (or old) meanings.