Rare Minerals. Mineral #1
I am a "long-distance" researcher with a professional path that has been very meandered, with several turning points that followed my deepest curiosities and recurring dilemmas. Fascinated by the concept of "nature" since early age, I found my freedom running out in the wilderness and setting up for intrepid adventures and, by this, I developed a bottomless joy to bring people close to wildlife and journey as a form of learning.
Along my professional path I passed several milestones on the way, first as scout leader and learning programme developer, becoming after a licensed outdoor experiential and learning facilitator, continuing as an economist in international tourism, socially engaged design, landscape architecture and, today, as an independent researcher. On the latest role, as researcher, I have been focusing on the topic of “the nature, materiality and phenomenology of architecture in fast-forward movement".
Currently I am in the process of finishing a three year research journey in the programme "Post-Planetary Design" at The New Centre for Research and Practice. Having architecture as a core discipline, the purpose has been to reimagine the role and agency of its discipline concerning environmental, technological paradigms and long-term existential risk. During my time here I have developed the project "Rare Minerals", a research design project in the form of an album of urban experiences, so far as prototypes, that has been exhibited in The Romanian Architecture Biennale, under the section "Visionary Projects".
My final project in this research journey, called “The Universal Shop”, is planned to become a book in the near future and it surveils the extends, variables and components of “Cosmopolicy” (through a kaleidoscopic interplay of economy, ecology, technology, politics and poetics) with the purpose to understand and learn how can we arrive to a collective resonance and navigate as such unknown territories.
“Architecture does not exist as an object of knowledge outside of what physicists call intermediate dimensions. At the scale of the very big or the very small, one may speak of the architecture of cosmos or the intimate architecture of matter.”
('Fire and Memory', L. F. Galiano).
Rare Minerals is an album of urban experiences that explores what surrounds, envelops, inhabits and pulses life far from the “infinite depths, the depths where man is man no longer, where sounds and ether waves, rhythmic vibrations pulse, shaping mountains, winds, marine currents, the animal and vegetable worlds” ('The Life and Work of Giacinto Scelsi', Robin Freeman) over the subtle touch of millions of light years and music. The album is a research design project trying to catch glimpses of common wondering and reflection. Far from a fairytale setup, nature in its distant entropy, in its constant becoming while transiting layers of porosity and abstraction is harsh and often violent, a journey form, in the end a life form.
‘What sets human consciousness apart from other biologically evolved phenomena is that it makes a reality appear within itself. It creates inwardness. The life process has become aware of itself’ ('The Ego Tunnel', Thomas Metzinger).
Mineral #1 is an urban experience designed for The Woodland Cemetery, in Stockholm, a unique architectural UNESCO heritage, designed by Sigurd Lewerentz. The project is an architectural gesture with a shape of non-shape, but a continuous becoming, same as the “intermediate dimensions” bring awareness of itself and the other. A confusion that we may just witness together.
Mineral #1 is an experience in a place reserved for collective memory, where life and its extensions become uncertain. The project is a sound design written exclusively for the 110ha of urban landscape, meeting the audience as a simple manifest of acoustics and vibrations setting in motion an “acoustic fog” following, in tune, the landscape and its topography.