23-9-94
Restoration, renovation, and mummification have become intrinsic values and, popularly, if not populistically, slogans. The past, in the face of our inability to create something new, is coerced into taking the place of the present. The old plays the role of the new, instead of reminding it of its fate.
We live in the hysteria of covering the signs of time, rushing anxiously to erase what we call wounds, making everything resemble the new. Nothing is allowed to die, as the terror of death becomes a denial of time.
We move within well-arranged settings, among poorly painted neo-classical spectres, in dead restored villages that come to life for a month a year when meticulous foreign owners briefly open the windows, guided by the expert who will show them the right knob and the correct chest. In archaeological sites perpetually covered with tarpaulins, shielded by prohibitive barriers, far from the caresses of those who adored them.
People, in their creative difficulty, keep their heritage frozen, unable to live it, not allowing it to reconcile them with time. The glass coffin does not give life to the dead, nor solace to the living. Strength and comfort come only from our conscious and organic integration into the flow and decay of time, accepting its (linear or cyclical) course.
Inhabited houses need to be supported to be lived in, preserved, not "renovated." It's our aesthetic and functional need that saves them, not the dubious repetition of the original design. Matter integrates into time; our interventions cannot ignore it but must cooperate with it.
And houses age. They too die. Old overgrown villas return to soil. Let's consider this their natural path, feeling the essence of materials that know how to die: wood, iron, stone.
The restored theater, the flawless temple do not move us because they illustrate the denial of time, which they should embody. Statues should have broken arms, columns should lie on the ground, and stairs worn by pilgrims, for time has willed it so.
The wonders that reached us did well to do so. And those lost should remain in our memory, as recounted by books and tales, with many more existing that we all ignore. And that's okay.
Ruins are not dead and ugly, just as aging humans are not. Time should not be met with surgical interventions.
Plato Rivellis