One-minute story: The landscape of reconstruction from place to condition

After a traumatic event such as an earthquake, the link with history, time, culture, landscape and the relationship between people is totally dissolved. In the affected places, in an instant, all the stratification that created the place itself is completely destroyed. The endemic fragility of the landscape is superimposed on that between people and the places they inhabit. The architecture of reconstruction is called upon to operate in a scenario that no longer presents ties of any kind, and therefore questions itself on how to restore identity to the destroyed places. The aim is to investigate the vicissitudes of the many people and places involved in the three major earthquakes that have occurred in Italy since 2009, from L’Aquila to Emilia-Romagna to the Apennines in Central Italy. The occasion offered by the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, curated by Alessandro Melis, for a reflection on the Resilient Communities affected by earthquakes was interpreted by the “One Minute’s Story” section as an opportunity to examine the always complicated theme of reconstruction outside the scope of the discipline and investigate new possible contributions that would shift the theme no longer to the design of the object but to the relational inclusion of communities. The responses that have been given to the various reconstructions that have always taken place in Italy since 1968 have focused on a mostly physical reconstruction of places and only rarely on the reconstruction of communities so badly torn apart by trauma. The earthquakes that are the subject of this section have shown the different response capacities of the affected populations, reactions that are unequivocally intertwined with the theme of inland areas. Living with the earthquake means, in fact, building a collective project that anticipates the future, organizing the present also on the basis of a careful historical perspective. The paper explains how the History of a Minute section, dedicated to post-earthquake resilient communities, proposed a different look at reconstruction with a project based on the importance that Local Communities and Digital Data have within reconstruction paths in realizing community-type externalities.