Museo della Grande Guerra Werk Gschwent - Lavarone, Trento (articolo il ferro dei vinti, autore Nicola Braghieri)

Presentation of the Francesco Collotti’s project for the refurbishment of Forte Belvedere in Lavarone (Italy). The restoration of Forte Belvedere, deprived during the Fascism of its Skoda rotating turrets and of its steel beams, seems like a tribute to this history. The theme of retribution returns in every part of the project. With the restrained touch of rhetoric permitted by such a weighty history, without scorning the defeated or exalting the victor, Francesco Collotti works inside the folds of collective awareness, where the protagonists of the tale are not the acts of heroes, but the tragedies of a quick war that then dragged on for years. The tragedy is a collective one, where the colors of uniforms, flags and air vanish, overwhelmed by the red rust of dried blood on every conserved relic. It is not a philological restoration, but a critical work that shows the layered signs of a passage from a ferocious past to a suprisingly more lucid present.. A tragic place that forces you to work in a rugged way, without ornament, entering that world of forms composed of great thicknesses, based on tactical reasoning that dictates the form of objects that are fortunately very different from those of our everyday lives: the great armored door, like the shell of some barbaric beast, the flooring restored in beaten concrete and rough larch planks, the signage made by deep cuts of the welding torch in iron... Outside the raw concrete, white like the stone of the fort, reflects the levels and openings of the existing foundations and protects a cubical volume suspended over a precipice. The larch barracks contains a cafe and a small bookstore. The ticket desk is beside it: a cube of bolted iron, dripping with rust. To the side a ramp reaches the site of the armored cupola turrets, skirting the wall still wounded by Italian bombs. From above, the gaze roams freely on all sides. Beautiful lands, tromented for half a century by unthinkable violence. Text’s languages: italian, english