CAMBIANDO IL PUNTO DI VISTA: prospettive anamorfiche contro il degrado urbano

The project focuses on the abandoned construction site of the Piscinola metro station in Naples, Line 1, which in the original plans should have been an important railway intersection. The Piscinola station serves directly the quarters of Piscinola and Scampia, but actually it also represents the main access to Naples for people coming from the northeast regional area. On the Line 1, whose end station is precisely Piscinola, an art installation work is in progress with the tasks to put the subway users in contact with contemporary art and to upgrade the areas in which the stations are. The station, on which our project focuses on, is now an abandoned place, where some temporary fences can barely mask the widespread degradation, channeling passenger flows through the abandoned escalators to the train platforms. The access to the station is granted by three gates, respectively to a direct access for service cars, to a park and to the bus station. This paper presents the project of an art installation for the Piscinola subway station, based on a specific projection method, called anamorphosis, and the whole aim is a participative one, to involve the people of Piscinola and Scampia in the making of the installation. Anamorphosis is not a way to mislead the viewer’s eyes, but an evident overlaying of different realities. The observer is not induced to believe that the new shapes can exist as they’re perceived and there is no extreme realism to hide or transform the existing environment in favor of a false perspective. Project features • Participative process The making of the project will involve directly the local community to strengthen and increase the identity feeling, transforming the Piscinola station from an anonymous transit place to a site that the community can recognize as its own and in which identify positive values. Non-aggressive and non-oppressive social interaction are favored by this kind of project by inducing integration between the people who participate to the project, making the efforts from individuals converge to the target of the community. • Degradation as material for the art installation Phisical and social degradation in Piscinola and Scampia are strictly connected: the proposal moves from the diffused vandalizing effect of graffiti to transform that vandalistic act in a statement of hope and redemption, through an attribution of a positive meaning by art. Also the architectures, abandoned and debased, lose their value as space to get a new value which, out of the artistic operation, is also the combination of the history, features and meaning of already existing elements with the new overlaying signs, partly covering and partly enhancing them. • The recreational dimension of the installation Anamorphic installations require the interaction of the observer, who becomes necessary to the formation of meaningful images: anamorphosis generates a recreational dimension and an active involvement including the observer in the installation itself. • Temporarity of the installation All the installation proposed in this paper are easily maintenable but also reversible and removable, so to facilitate the completion of the station functionality according to the original project that now is interrupted.