Vita nei boschi

Tempio di San Sebastiano, Mantova Playground, 1th October 2016, Mantova.

Vita nei boschi (Life in the woods) is a one-day playground inside the Leon Battista Alberti’s San Sebastiano Temple, and it is part of the Mantova Playground project curated by Ilaria Rodella and Pietro Corraini. The project develops on the comparison of the perfect architecture designed by the Renaissance Master, and the wild space of the primitive wood. As Aldo van Eyck and his playgrounds in Amsterdam wanted to criticize the functionalism, the architecture of the Modern Movement and its society, this little experience, and its temporary playground, become an occasion to let children confront the necessity to reconfigure the modalities of the anthropization of the world in the age of the Anthropocene, the age of the ultimate human impact on the world. Taking the playgrounds that were born in the European bombed areas during WWII and the Junk Playgrounds as references, the children were taken into a “little desert island” inside the church and they could use the typical materials (woods and stones) that the primitive man used to shape the world for the first time. In the same way the children could give birth to their playground in continuous mutation using those primordial elements.

 

Ph. Davide Galli