La pergola e la cattedrale: il paesaggio come artefatto

The pergola built by generations of winemakers on the terraced hills and mountains in Trentino is a symbol of an agricultural landscape that is contemporarily, natural product and storage of human work and techniques. This landscape is the material expression of pre-industrial age practices and knowledge, is a system of interventions and “a work of art” made by a rural culture that has changed natural resources (soil, water, vegetation) operating within the same places. The Cattedrale Vegetale produced in 2001 by Giuliano Mauri in Val di Sella is the icon of the works of “Art in Nature”, an artistic branch that spreads in Europe in the ‘80s. This art shatters the terms of usual landscape representation, because it eludes the production of images as a full expression of the work; its products have sense in the natural habitat in which they were designed, because characterized by sizes, technique and materials depending on the area of intervention. Economic artefacts the former and aesthetic the latter; in both cases the raison d'être of which does not lie in immediate usage but in starting a productive process in a broad sense, a mediation form between man and environment: “alive for nature”, they nourish seasons and natural changes. The pergola is provisional because like all vineyards it has an average life of twenty or thirty years but also because it is tied to ancient traditions, perhaps destined to extinction; a work of “Art in Nature” expresses itself in the measure it is perishable and returns its materials to the worlds from which they arise, organic and inorganic. It’s nice to think that the pergola and the Cattedrale maintain their ethical and aesthetic value even after abandonment like all artefacts connected with them: as expression of a relationship that can survive to the matter because it refers to patterns of human thought that within a given space/time context have physically and conceptually changed the places for habitation.