It is called POST-COLONIA | Festival of Architecture and Imaginaries of Transition and is an example of how languages and disciplines must be hybridised in order to succeed in giving complex readings of reality and the challenges it poses to us, starting with the management of the legacies of the past.
POST COLONIA confronts the built and natural landscape of the Apuan coastal stretch of Marina di Massa, in the north of the Region of Tuscany, dotted with ‘Marine Colonies’ designed in the first half of the 20th century by large Italian industrial groups, including Fiat, Montedison and Olivetti, to house the daughters of the working class.
Just as most of the colonies have now fallen into disuse, a reminder of unfulfilled promises and failed utopias, the surrounding natural landscape has also radically changed: the climate crisis engulfs the heavily man-made seascape and in turn threatens the architecture itself, just as the economic model that designed them is shattered.
Since the 1980s, this area has witnessed a progressive collapse of the industrial sector, causing quite a few consequences whose evident signs have redefined the contours of the coastline – now populated by concrete complexes of mostly abandoned and eroded colonies – and produced various forms of reuse and redefinition often dictated by pragmatic needs such as the right to live, which has turned them into squatters’ living spaces, or the right to transgress, which has converted them into resilient, spontaneous and ephemeral social places.
The festival addresses the coast as a complex system of relationships, economies, culture, nature and the built environment, where these architectural legacies and their ‘failure’ become a lens through which to think, experimenting with the temporary, about possible and desirable futures, in the face of the urgencies of contemporaneity.
The festival therefore confronts the history and the present of this coastline where ‘the invention of mass tourism’ has given rise to a process of anthropisation of the landscape that today must be rethought in non-extractive and sustainable terms.
From 7 to 13 April 2025 in Marina di Massa (MS).
Project partners:
Italian partners:
LAMA Impresa Sociale – Lead partner
Associazione Orizzontale – Project partner
DOC.scs Cooperativa Sociale – Project partner
International partners:
CIVA – Center for Architecture in Brussels
Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design
Plateau Urbain, Paris
Technlcal sponsors:
ISTITUTO PROFESSIONALE STATALE PER L’ENOGASTRONOMIA E
L’OSPITALITA’ ALBERGHIERA “G. Minuto”
Autolinee Toscane
Supporters:
Rai Radio Rai Tre Soldi
INU – Istituto nazionale urbanistica
Associazione Lo Stato Dei Luoghi
DIDA – Università di Firenze
Project manager
Francesca Mazzocchi (LAMA)
Art direction
Martina Angelotti e Emanuele Guidi
Multidisciplinary Team
Riccardo Luciani, Margherita Manfra, Aldo Giannotti, Cèline Condorelli, Silvia Franceschini
Project funded by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture.
