LAZMAG
HELD WITHIN MONDITALIA AT THE 14TH BIENNALE DI VENEZIA ARCHITETTURA 2014, THE SEARCH FOR THIS COLLECTIVE HAS REVEALED THE PERSONALITY OF AN AREA WE THOUGHT WE KNEW WELL. TOGETHER WITH OTHER SEARCHES, WHERE THE SPACES HAVE A DECIDEDLY “ITALIAN” THEME, THE WORK WE WERE CONFRONTED WITH WAS A SORT OF UN-REVEAL OF A TERRITORIALLY ICONIC, POLITICALLY IMPORTANT LOCATION YEARNED FOR BY THOSE WHO ARE LOOKING FOR AN IDEALLY GRATIFYING VACATION. WHY CHOOSE MIMA? THE ITALIAN RIVIERA HAS HAD MANY EXAMPLES OF EGO-TOURISTIC TRANSFORMATIONS, AND THIS SLICE OF THE COASTLINE HAS ALWAYS HAD A SORT OF ELITIST FAME (just look at the nearby Riminization*) We wanted to go for something simple, somehow elementary: a concentrated case-study. Even in a scenario of analogies, genericness and blurred boundaries such as seaside Rivieras, we figured MIMA had something special. MIMA is touristic DNA in a pure state: an industrial machine for the production of leisure. It was founded in 1912 (not by an urbanist, but by an advertiser) upon this single purpose, it was not a pre-existing city that eventually discovered the seaside as a possibility for development and growth. It was instead fully conceived and built from scratch for tourism, out of a natural tabula-rasa. It is an early XXth century version of a modern holiday village, a 100 years old ancestor of a Club-Med resort. Therefore MIMA doesn’t have the complexity of an actual Italian-style city: almost no permanent population (only 5% of its capacities), no history, no monuments, no idea of a past, that could at some point be monumentalized and mobilize usual public consensus, (or produce attraction in that common Italian way of “we go there because it’s ancient and cultural and beautiful). MIMA is only a neighborhood, but despite its small size, it still has a brand which is renown (at least on a national scale), it’s attraction is still based on the fabrication and transmission of a specific identity. So as a case study it has the quality of concentration, it’s a condensed stage for the touristic magnet to operate. YOUR ANALYSIS IS MERCILESS, YET SURPRISINGLY THOROUGH. THE OLD-MARKETING THAT ACCOMPANIES THE BIRTH OF AN IDEAL SPACE IN A TERRITORY WITH NO EXCELLENT “NATURAL RESOURCES” (A CLOSED SEA, SOME PINE TREES, AND LITTLE ELSE EXCEPT AGRICULTURE), WAS THIS ALREADY PLANNED IN THE PROJECT’S DNA AS A COMMENT ON THE GROWTH OF “EMPTINESS” AND ILLUSION? Yes it very much was. I think that this hint of emptiness has something to do with the economic character of touristic machines. Touristic attraction ultimately happens as a form of consumption. Urban strategies for touristic survival completely coincide with those of shopping, advertising, and consumer culture. Then of course, already in the choice of the subject there’s a similar approach to “values”, then the one you could find in a market driven zeitgeist. Nevertheless I would like to distance ourselves from sheer moralism. The study for sure has something to do with illusory realms that suddenly become far too real, it surely addresses the blind exploitation of natural resources, but this is not the only nor the main point.
Even if ghosts are piling up on each-other, and the economic bubble of the hollow built-mass is reaching its burst, still attraction is performed, and -one could argue- mostly through spontaneous and unplanned strategies, the city has been resisting and surviving and remains nowadays popular, in someway “desirable”. So beyond the sarcasm, MIMA is also a declaration of potential and hope. IS IT STILL POSSIBLE TO PLAN SUCH ILLUSORY SPACES/TERRITORIES? THE COMMON PERCEPTION IS THAT THEY’RE STILL VALUABLE PLACES DESPITE THE CRISIS AND THE OBVIOUS LACK OF CARE DURING MOST OF THE YEAR. THIS IS THE REAL QUESTION WE SHOULD ASK THE PLANNERS, THINKING ABOUT THE UTOPISTIC EXAMPLES OF PHARAONIC HOTELS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ARABIAN DESERT OR ENTIRE CITIES BUILT FROM SCRATCH IN IMPASSABLE AREAS OF CHINA. Of course as you just said it has been possible for a long time. New towns are everywhere ideally connected to desires: as new developments need inhabitants to properly function, they need a tool to act on people’s wishes, in order to induce them to consumption. The actual battlefield of this crusade of artificial colonization is IMAGERY. So a study of touristic attraction becomes also a documentation of present-day desires, and ultimately a reading of current collective Imagery. For example MIMA is a great stage of another current social paradox, which is the coexistence between the imaginary dream of luxury (crowned by lusts of absolute exclusivity), coupling with the most bulimic quest for cheapness (perfectly represented by the heroic one-dimensional-architecture of aperitivo streetbars or beach clubs). Then I think we should investigate more on the nature of the illusion. For sure we can easily associate for example with real estate development, a sort of romanticization of reality for marketing needs. Some kind of falsity that starts taking place as soon as reality is turned into fiction and images, by the means of language and advertising discourse. So is the illusion actually “claiming something false”? like “we have Caribbean beaches on the Adriatic Sea” or so? A kind of scam? I think this approach is very short-ended and mostly leads to failure, as people try to avoid scams rather then craving for them every new summer. So what interested us in MIMA’s example of illusion was not that of packaging lies but that of producing distraction: shifting the focus of the advertising campaign, in order to direct the attention elsewhere. MIMA distracts but at the same time produces new spaces for development and growth; in many ways throughout its history (think of skyscrapers, then swimming-pools and then theme parks, then clubs etc), this almost schizophrenic strategy of invention of new attractors has allowed the engine to endure. Distraction then supports a sort of ON and OFF approach towards the body of reality. As everything cannot be in focus at the same time, there will be protagonists conquering all the attention, and there will be a totally forgotten background. While the ON-parts perform, anything could occur to the OFF-parts, in this way the latter become reservoirs of change and creative potential.
MIMA is interesting as an almost didactic stage of an oxymoron, a paradoxical juxtaposition between total death, paralysis and decay on one side, and extreme vitality on the other. 118
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