Saudi Arabia was closed to visitors for about ten years, until the fall of 2019, after which it was possible to enter the country with a tourist visa. In the suspended time that preceded this event, the architectural studio Schiattarella Associates invited the photographer Joanna Silva and the curator Emilia Giorgi to undertake a journey to bring to light the traces, often minute and hidden, of buildings, testimonies and traditions in the cities of Riyadh and Jeddahtoday at the centre of vast architectural, urban and social transformation operations.
The fruit of the journey undertaken by Giovanna Silva, Emilia Giorgi, Amedeo and Andrea Schiattarella is Saudiscapesa book of photographs and texts published by Nero Editions. This ambitious and experimental project manages to intertwine visual and written stories, offering a multifaceted narrative of the places where the Roman studio has operated for more than a decade.
Emilia Giorgi says: «The book becomes the tool to follow and tell the research of an architectural firm, without ever talking about projects, but evoking atmospheres, languages and places where they are inscribed. Giovanna Silvia’s gaze helps us to tell the cities in which the firm operates, extremely different from each other and yet both paradigmatic of an ongoing transformation that runs quickly before our eyes. With the photographic sequence we try to reformulate the way of reading the urban and landscape contexts in which architects move. Going to look for the cultural roots of Saudi architecture that has always inspired their work. (…) Architecture should stop being a spaceship that glides over territoriesa strong, imposing sign but incapable of dialoguing with the sense of place”.
Some urban fragments captured in Giovanna Silva’s photographs no longer exist. Riyadhcity that will host Expo 2030some buildings collapsed due to the lack of consolidation interventions. Jeddahthe historic center recognized UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014is experiencing an intense period of renewal, while the adjacent construction sites have been demolished, as happened in Milan with the Bottonuto. «The two cities portrayed no longer exist, everything has changed profoundly – explains Emilia Giorgi – that’s why the images are a testimony, they can tell a passage, perhaps a pause, a wait, the moment in which the diver takes a deep breath, stretches out, and then launches himself. We are there on that springboard and the shots stop all the swarming that expands around». The photographs therefore fix a moment before a radical transformation, they read the context and capture “the small and large events that mark the landscape”.
The project is emblematic of How fast things change in Saudi Arabia. A country in eternal evolution, a perpetual construction site surrounded by desert. The path undertaken by Schiattarella Associati in Saudi Arabia also clearly illustrates this: «It is a country that has experienced, in the last fifty years, an astonishing transformation driven by an irresistible need to find one’s own dimension within an economic landscape that has become increasingly globalized. As often happens, these sudden accelerations end up moving along unpredictable lines (and so quickly) that they overshadow values that have settled over the centuries and that appear, precisely because of their nature, as elements that slow down, if not actually hinder, evolutionary processes (considered inevitable). The consequence is, often, the minimizing the role of cultural roots and the loss of sense of the specific characteristics of indigenous identities”.
And so the publication Saudiscapesrather than outlining a systematic survey of Saudi cities, captures those landscapes and urban fragments that best represent the effects of losing a sense of one’s rootsin which the contradictions between past and present seem to coexist in a state of constant indeterminacy. For the designers, what was commissioned to Silva and Giorgi is therefore a work of awareness to preserve and tell the authentic roots of the place. A work destined to continue with new journeys and shared, curious and conscious explorations.
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