Figure di paesaggio

In 1996, the Italy by night image made by the ITATEN research group shows new shapes of the Italian landscape. A continous urban cloud that fills the nitescape. A myriad of sources of light gathering up on the big infrastructural lines, that clears only when meets the mountains and the sea. Hystoric centers, industrial areas, arterial roads, suburbs: everything becomes homologous in the negative zenith figure. In the last 20 years new lifestyles designed new landscapes. Italy proposed by traditional geographic maps with cities like balls, separated and gathered around their nucleus, is a conventional image, that does’nt match the real. The 100 towns Italy does’nt exist any more. The great order of natural landscape becomes the theatre of urban sprawl, and hystoric and cultural contexts estabilish the local declentions of change. The new geography of the Country does not consider administrative borders, does not have boundaries: as one city made of thousand different others, that intersect and are placed one upon the other. Towns tend to connect each other. Central places move along infrastrucures and residential areas towards the countryside. Public space is sucked back inside malls. Hystoric centres and nature areas are made up for tourism. Ratification and identity mark the characteristic of the different local territories. The new image of Italy keeps togeteher history, innovation and mediocrity: shows an antropologic dimension that describes enviromental conditions specific and glocal (global and local) at the same time. Following similar researches in Europe, Atlas 003 wants to detect the new aesthetics of BelPaese through the gaze of 30 photographer (from the most famous as Gabriele Basilico to the younger ones, as Francesco Jodice) to show up its contraddictions and opportunities. Atlas 003 is a report on physical conditions of Italy. A picture that could be taken again after years to monitorize changing and the ability to manage it. It’s an open research on tranforming identity of Bel Paese, where architetcture, landscape and society interact in a model that describes conflicts of spaces in Italy in new millennium, made of images, representations, emerging figures. The distance from the stereotype pictures of Italy it’s intriguing, but the aim of this research is not denunciation nor satisfation. Atlas 003 describes emerging figures of Italy in change, offering at the same time other landscapes and new points of view. Italian Atlas 003 is promoted by the Italian Ministery of Culture and published by Casabella,