The return

On October 9, 1963, Mount Toc falls into the artificial lake created by the Vajont dam, 270 million cubic meters of rock descend at 110 kilometers per hour and push the water out of the basin. A wave that exceeds the dam by 250 meters hits the village of Longarone, annihilating it and causing the death of 1917 people. The task of the reconstruction plan of the country was entrusted to Giuseppe Samonà who carried it out and presented it and it was approved on May 14, 1964, the architects involved were Costantino Dardi, Emilio Mattioni and Valeriano Pastor, Gianni Avon, Francesco Tentori and Edoardo Gellner, the church was entrusted to Giovanni Michelucci. The result was a total distortion of the viability and the reconstruction of a Longarone that the inhabitants, already hard tested by the tragedy, did not recognize and did not approve. Perhaps too ambitious from a formal point of view, excessively modern projects with great use of reinforced concrete marked a huge distance between the new Longarone and the one before the disaster. You can imagine with what state of mind the surviving inhabitants began their new life in the new Longarone. The dam remained intact, perhaps ideally, it would have been right to break it down and definitively take it out of the eyes of the citizens of these countries tortured by this disaster.

Longarone, or rather new Longarone, was born on the rubble of one of the worst environmental disasters in history. A piece of mountain landslides into a dam basin, which resists the impact and produces an anomalous wave that hurls itself downstream with unprecedented violence, sweeping away everything in the existing inhabited area and human lives. All while people were sleeping. Fabio d'Arsie uses photography to relate to built space and, therefore, to represent it. The images in this selection help us to "reconstruct" Longarone and read about its renewed building and urban face, which projects us explicitly into the second half of the twentieth-century topography. It's evidence of the irreducible "sapiens" will that manifests itself in the mathematics of addition and in building even on tragic foundations. The dam with its concrete cantilever is still up there, squeezed between the Vajont Valley's rocky slopes, weighing on its inhabitants' memory. A new town which, despite the modern impetus of the reconstruction plan entrusted to Giuseppe Samonà, is, in fact, a memorial. A place of remembrance. So we ask ourselves whether memory can survive when collectivised or "monumentalised." Yes, it is possible, as long as it is not eroded by time like a cliff exposed to the indifferent furies of the ocean. Today, over 50 years after the destructive epilogue, there is still a lot of talk about that event, the causes, and little about the consequences. So, the memory is alive but more like an act of speculation of a history limited to aesthetic paralysis or temporal sclerosis.