LW

SARDINIA 2013​

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In its 3rd edition, LandWorks realized a number of on-site projects to underline the significance of the landscape and the natural and cultural heritage of Caprera Island, in collaboration with the Parco Nazionale dell’Arcipelago di La Maddalena, Agenzia del Demanio della Sardegna, the Assessorato all’Ambiente della Regione Sardegna, the municipality La Maddalena and other partners.

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From May 23rd to June 2nd, 2013, an international group of about 80 participants, led by landscape architecture experts, were deployed to parts of the island where these tangible signs of recent history appear and blend with a landscape full of questions and expectations. Complex and carefully designed projects took shape in the span of a week.  Despite their ephemerality, these landscape installations embedded themselves in the context and matter at hand, populating and pressing interrogatives of the location, so as to convey a common need with the local players to acquire new means of expressing and communicating strategies with which to discuss the future of these landscapes. During the 10th day of intense work together with local actors, under the guidance of the internationally renown guests, the workshop participants from different parts of the globe and a myriad of different academic institutions created temporary and permanent installations together using materials strictly collected on the site, both natural, as well as the artificial “garbage” coming from places. The new installations were realized with the same passion that contributed to the creation of land architectures the year before.

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The LandWorks are still visible today and continue to serve as artifacts that represent a significant memory for the locals who contributed to building and installing them, as well as for the tourists that every year explore the “unpolluted” and crystallized territories of the Park. The international students were divided in different working groups and worked under the direction of their Team Leader (chosen inside the international artists and landscape architects invited for the LandWorks Operative Program’s third edition) to realize their land-architectures during an intensive 10-day program.

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The operative workshop setting was the north coast of Sardinia, inside the administrative limits of the Parco Nazionale dell’Arcipelago di La Maddalena, a unique natural and cultural heritage of Mediterranean landscape. Installations were embedded into the ex-fortress of the XIX century defensive landscapes in Punta Rossa, on the extreme southern part of the little Caprera Island.

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There, one finds the ruins of military architecture and the main settlement of the Sailing Centre– a unique social, economic and recreational setting where most military and civil sailing activities from the Mediterranean depart for destinations around the world, and the home of generations of important sailing champions. LandWorks installations inside those sites operated much like an open-air museum to offer visitors a critical reinterpretation of the history of a fundamental period for industry military development (or “civilization”) of the Sardinian island.