Decomposizioni metafisiche. Indagini sulla cultura feticista per il recupero dei luoghi della memoria

The death insist on the body, precisely on the abandonment of the life whom lived in it, identifying itself on the corpse that became topos where to build around the design action. The dichotomy that stands at this oxymoron of absent-presence represent a fundamental theme in architecture; it creates a thought about the shape on the storing place of the corpses reached from the death. Which position does the body have to assume, as object of the memory of the life that abandoned? In which way his presence influences the shape of the cemeterial space? The analysis of a sequence of cases, that crosses transversely the occidental history (Caio Cestio’s pyramid, a memorial project by Etienne-Louis Boulle and the Urbino’s competition Cemetery of Superstudio in 1973), highlights a progressive transfiguration of the corpse in architecture: the body, in a society less and less characterized by a common religion, is becoming form. The fetishistic veneration, the result of the preservation of a connection with what has been, generates the worship for the image, the object transfiguration of the body into fragment; which formal figuration is affirmed through the anastylosis of the body in an artwork that conceptually evoke to its consummation. This operation recalls the irreducible tendency to unity that the concept of body has inherent, introducing a non-exhaustible metonymic substitution of the body in its figurative substitute, but able to recall the vivid memorial image of what was in the time that will be. The physical position of the body, its presence in the space, has acquired ever more importance in the formative process of these places, its formal "representation" has responded with architectural language to the question of memory: tomb, monument, memorial, cemetery are flowing into a new contemporary figure.