Resources available. Time, space, work and proximity to home

MATTIA BALSAMINI

The survey carried out by Balsamini on the landscape around Castelfranco Veneto raises wider questions about the design of the territory of the North East where the rules of an economy, based on small and medium enterprises, have affected the planning tools but also the character of the company.

“I spent most of my childhood afternoons after school at my father’s office. Marco, that is his name, owned (and still does) a business designing and installing heating and cooling systems. At the time I wasn’t passionate about his job, I wasn’t even exactly sure what he did for a living. But I knew well that, before him, my grandfather owned the firm and that now Marco was carrying it on. The offices were located off a town road near the Sacile railroad station, and behind the entrance gate you could see this three-storey house built in the seventies. On the ground floor were the offices, while on the first and second floor was my grandparents’ residence. I moved and played between these two worlds almost seamlessly, being accustomed to think they were one. Eating an afternoon snack, talking with my grandma, then walking downstairs to play with the tools in the workshop, among busy working people. Labour, very close to home, at the point they intersect. The fast shift of the post-war period that took place in my hometown (like in most of north-eastern Italy) projected the area from rural poverty to richness in a few decades – richness that wasn’t created thanks to oil, gas or gold, but through the only available resources: time, space and labour. Labour is an action, but it is also a place – a space in which we move and exist. Just like home is. What I started questioning, during the residence in Castelfranco, was how the contact of the domestic and work settings, typical of this area, affected each other. I believe I became interested in re-discovering what I first saw in my childhood.” (M.B.)

“Man defends himself. It is a sort of animal need. Man truly defends himself against the only thing that imposes itself: death, nothingness, the enigma of his existence. Everything is man’s enemy. Man is enemy to himself, his thoughts, his acts, other men, their thoughts, their acts, things: everything is man’s enemy. And man defends himself. He defends himself as he can, using the same weapons that are his enemies, thoughts, acts, life, which is his enemy to escape nothingness”. (Ettore Sottsass, Per qualcuno può essere lo spazio)

Project realized as part of the artist residency “OMNE/WORK”, Castelfranco Veneto 31st May – 11th June 2016, exhibited during OMNEFEST (Museo Casa Giorgione, 13th October – 9th December 2018) and published in the book “OMNE/WORK 2016- 2018”, Lettera Ventidue, Siracusa 2018