The utopia of beauty: the conservation of the land art park of Fiumara d'arte in Sicily

The methodological moment of the reception of twentieth-century artifacts urgently commits our era. It is characterized by an understanding of the dynamics of deterioration and by the delicate question of use and fruition in view of transmission to the future. New reflections are imposed on the criteria that substantiate the conservative act. The culture of modernity, from the beginning, has produced fragile and often ephemeral artifacts, and has been characterized by the systematic use of poor materials and industrialized and serial production processes. Once the excitement of the novelty is over, there remains only a sense of embarrassing “out of place”, of “old” and obsolete, of outdated and useless, in a society where everything is quickly consumed and just as quickly replaced by a “newer” new. This is what often leads authors to circulate photos of the work just inaugurated, and not the current image. This sense of loss in the face of contemporaneity inevitably leads to interventions of restoration, reuse and refunctionalization with which we try to cancel the passage of time and return to the value of the original idea. The investigation of a specific case, such as the restoration and the refunctionalization of the works of the Fiumara d’Arte land art park and the project of new artistic lighting, presents itself as an opportunity for reflection and comparison between conservation and reuse, performance requirements and compatibility.