Abruzzo / Lanciano. Quando tutto e nulla cambia

The invisibility that surrounds Southern Italy and its cities is a condition that has consolidated over time for economic, social and cultural reasons. The total delegation of citizens to the policy for the administration of “public affairs” and the increasingly frequent absence of visions to imagine the future of urban and extra-urban spaces have been added to the structural lack of primary goods and services, infrastructures, investments and employment. In a time when we are no longer able to grasp the richness and beauty of the places we live in, the gaze, which is relationship and otherness, must rediscover its ability to “create” to allow the passage from bad seeing to quality seeing. It is not easy to make visible what is not visible. You need “attention” to see, to suspend one's thought, to leave it available, empty and permeable to the object, as the French philosopher and writer Simone Weil argued. It also takes respect, knowledge, awareness, responsibility. Time, beauty, the encounter between the imaginary and the real, the hybridization between architecture and nature, are just some of the powerful devices that, through imagination and narration, allow us to explore the invisible, because they help to see things differently, they create reality and generate change.