#3016

“Nature, in this sense, abolishes not only history but time” Marc Augé Ruins and rubble. The sense of time On 2 December, the meeting of the Municipal Council was held in Arquata del Tronto, which gave the definitive go-ahead for the start of the reconstruction works of the territories destroyed by the 2016 earthquake. More than six years have passed since that tragic night. In the last two years we have documented the situation of the areas of Central Italy destroyed by the earthquakes with epicenter in Accumoli (August 24, 2016, Magnitude 6) and Visso (October 26, 2016, Magnitude 5.9). A documentation that has become a journey within the order of time itself. In these places, we have been amazed: not so much for the destruction, but rather for the inability to give sense to the time. The clothes still hanging make us feel like the first responders who arrived a few minutes after the tragedy; on the other hand, the historical stones ordered and numbered on the pallets bring us forward a thousand years, like archaeologists of 3016 who discover a new Pompei. We are incapable of distinguishing rubble from ruin. The order of time is marked only by the vegetation, which in the last six years has recovered spaces that had been denied it, becoming a distinctive element of a rediscovered order of time.