Architecture of dust

A wooden carpet seems to float in the air and, gently resting on an ethereal talcum-coloured surface as if it were a spaceship landed on a distant planet, transports us to a dimension apparently out of time, which seems to have stopped or never passed, suspended, motionless. A sense of initial estrangement pervades the observer’s mind. The eye is confused, the mind disturbed, projected into an infinite space, without horizon, where everything seems upside down. Sky and earth, above and below, high and low, light and heavy, are inverted despite all laws of gravity and any conscious perception of space.

Like a kaleidoscope that, in a whirl of ever-new shapes and colours, gradually leads to vision and discovery, this architecture reveals itself little by little, whispering motifs, stimuli, reflections, memories. Through space one enters an indefinite time where memory takes shape in a cyclical process of transformation from matter to dust and vice versa. Invisible to the naked eye, so that only light reveals its presence, dust crystallises and in its settling expresses the sedimentation of knowledge and wisdom. Impalpable, insubstantial, volatile dust, as Calvino recalls regarding an original collection of sand exhibited in a whimsical exhibition in Paris, which he describes as “the least conspicuous, but the most mysterious, the one that seemed to have more to say, even through the opaque silence imprisoned in the glass of the ampoules.” The same glass through which, writes the critic Janus about Duchamp, “the artist enters a completely new dimension, in the transparency of space, which allows him to cross the entire surface, to go to the other side of his work, like Alice entering the domain of the enchanted mirror.”

In this fascinating domestic space, dust, raised by the wind, guides the spectator’s gaze towards infinity and the bowels of mother earth in the transition from the soft and silky surface of the side walls that indefinitely delimit the space to the rough and corrugated surface of the ceiling vault, concave and enveloping, an explicit reference to the cave and grotto, an archetypal form that revives that ancestral desire for protection and natural shelter that presides over the birth of the house, but which is at the same time a Jungian reference to the uterine cavity, matrix and mother.

A biblical theme par excellence, always linked to matter and time, dust evokes the origin of life and man, in the representation of the earth from which we were born and to which we will return, giving shape to this stimulating architecture, evocative of memory.

In the configuration of the cave, a synthesis of the representation of the world that encompasses both sky and earth, such dichotomy is expressed in the accentuated chromatic and material differentiation of the surfaces, particularly in the use of colour and the choice of materials. Antonino Cardillo, already the author of projects inspired by the relationship between man and nature, in search of its possible representation, effectively expresses the blend of nature and artifice, found, for example, in the reference to the mysterious and impenetrable atmosphere of sixteenth-century nymphaea, where the material, initially imprisoned by strict construction rules, becomes rebellious and, crumpling and corrugating, no longer domesticated by man’s hand, follows the profile of natural conformations. This explicit reference is emphasised by the use of pozzolana, a primitive material used in the first handmade dwellings, which shapes and characterises the ceiling vault. Depositing on the surface with a process similar to the techniques found in Pollock’s paintings, where sand and earth elements coexist in colour, creating furrows, reliefs, protrusions, or the material consistency of Burri’s paintings, dust materialises in this project, as in Duchamp’s Raising Dust, crystallising its fleeting and aleatory nature, immersed in a continuous process of aggregation and dissolution.

Art and architecture seem to converge here, in the configuration of a metaphysical space, where living becomes a form of art, which would preclude any form of personalisation that does not alter its context, form, and substance. However, as one traverses the sequence of spaces that follow one another, sometimes unexpectedly hidden by invisible revolving walls in the alternation of doors and arches that blur in a curious play of chance, of which life is perhaps the most masterful expression, metaphor of the indeterminacy and fatality of human existence, the initial sense of estrangement gives way to a state of progressive awareness, rebalanced by the reassuring presence of everyday objects, which presuppose the presence of man in his becoming. Skilfully designed objects inhabit this light, ethereal, intangible space. The lighting, consisting of slots in the floor that project beams of light onto the vault, once again reversing every rule, introduces an additional destabilising element. The light projected onto the vault, in a sort of echo to that projected in Plato’s cave, focuses attention upwards, revealing the thin boundary that separates what is familiar from what is unknown, what remains from what passes and transforms, the infinite from the finite, the soul from the body. Cardillo’s project gives voice to that desire for immortality that dwells in the human soul, unconsciously reaching towards endless days, as a temple of eternal living where origin and end, birth and death, alpha and omega coincide, transforming this House of Dust, in its inescapable cyclicity, into a timeless and dreamlike experience, an opportunity to savour, in everyday life, a corner of eternity.