Per una conservazione attiva e inventiva dei luoghi della memoria. Strategie e strumenti del progetto paesaggistico

The landscape often becomes a context that encourages the creation of sedimen¬tary layers of memory or memories, contributing to that peculiar and highly fragile interweaving that continually creates and reinterprets the identities of layered sites. This essay particularly examines one of the essential elements of landscape projects, perhaps their most characterising feature, in order to introduce the dynamic process-based factor that is linked to time: the structure of vegetation that appears, grows, dies and regenerates itself following cycles and phases that can either be guided by man’s intervention or entirely independent of it. Firstly, we can consider the particular use of flora and vegetation (including native plants) as an ecological, figurative and symbolic part of sites of memory: a practice that we can detect as far back as Classical times, when sacred groves and memorial woods became an essential element of sacralised landscapes, or that broke down into botanical species, pictured in the frescoes of funerary commemorations. Over the centuries, there have been many different interpretations of sacred, wild or wooded groves with memorial functions, such as, among others, Vicino Orsini’s Sacred Grove in the Gardens of Bomarzo dating from the sixteenth cen¬tury and, more recently, the Italian phenomenon of Remembrance Parks, set up in 1922 by a minister, Dario Lupi, to commemorate the fallen of the First World War. In order to understand the evolution of these traces of the past in the modern-day world, three projects are put forward as examples whose central symbolic feature lies in the definition of how vegetation is structured in a site of memory: the plant architecture featuring Taxodium distichum, created by Pietro Porcinai in the Bascapè plain south of Milan, commemorating the aeroplane that crashed and killed Enrico Mattei on 26th October 1962; the masterplan managing the vegetation at the former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, on Lüneburg heath, researched by Berlin’s Sinai studio from 2003 to 2012; and the swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor) woods created for the 9/11 Memorial, at Ground Zero, planted by Peter Walker and Michael Arad. In Fossoli, too, the continuity of plant life is proof of the resilience of these places – accompanying and narrating the enduring memory of the camp’s later phases – de¬spite the passage of time and the succession of both manmade and natural changes. The regeneration of a memorial landscape that can be interpreted and continuously cultivated by public authorities and by the collective community obviously involves the drafting of a new masterplan for the camp that can take responsibility for the definition and orientation of all the systems that make up this particular structure of open spaces: its paths, borders, various different historical/landscape environments, the translation and communication of signs and historical layers and, naturally, the structure of vegetation.