Rebuilding for dwelling in the post-quake environment
My research, as part of the sub-project “An Architecture of Entanglement”, aims to explore how a small eco-community rebuilds places in which to live after an earthquake. By means of a ‘dwelling perspective’ (Ingold 2000), I will compare official civic restoration and unofficial ecological reconstruction of the medieval village Pescomaggiore, L’Aquila Province, central Italy. In 2009 Pescomaggiore was hit by the earthquake, and this research seeks to show the different paths subsequently followed by a town’s inhabitants as they build in a specific post-quake environment.
Bearing in mind that dwelling is the precondition for building (Heidegger 1951), I will observe how dwellers of Pescomaggiore ecovillage are now reshaping places, by moving through, interweaving materials, lives and energies in an entanglement. Far from dwelling upon romantic aesthetics, that would restore an essentialist model of tradition through conservation politics, we would analyse which kind of building activities the Pescomaggiore’s ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger 1991) is selecting in order to reinvent, within the landscape, its own rescue challenge.
In a post-disaster scenario, supposing a change in the interaction of inhabitants between them and with their environment, we aim to pay attention on the local resilience’s ‘taskscape’ (Ingold 2000) throughout a participative involvement of the anthropologist in the daily skilled ‘making’ (Ingold 2013). For this purpose, we need to consider the growing giving-form building of the ecovillage as practical and ‘shared performance’ (Marchand 2007a) of dwelling. In this way, we might be able to rethink about the re-construction of places in Pescomaggiore as an alive ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2007a) of materials, persons, animals, plants, technics, skills, energies, ambitions, narratives and resistances. Furthermore, all these elements might be understood to be combined in a wider range of multi-directional and interconnected social, economical, political, technological and ecological movements.
Enrico Marcore (Doctoral researcher)