THE FAILURE OF REASON

"When architecture meets the sea, things happen that cannot happen elsewhere" - Mario Ferrari. The Montecatini colony in Cervia was designed in 1937 by a Jewish architect, Eugenio Faludi, ironically a year before the promulgation of the Italian racial laws, which then led him to flee to England in 1939. The censorship that he suffered after the "DECLARATION ON RACE" approved by the Grand Council of Fascism on October 6, 1938, erased the memory of the authorship of this magnificent example of Italian rationalist architecture for a long time. The marine heliotherapy colonies were structures that allowed even the children of the lower classes who lived in the cities to enjoy the healthy sea climate. At the same time, they were places where the regime propaganda formed a new generation of victims of ideology, a common bond to all authoritarianisms even in our present. The colony underwent some changes over the years, such as that of the tower, which was bombed and then rebuilt in the 1950s, once towering well beyond the height of the horizontal body of the building, a clear reference to the littorial tower, a "gymnastic instrument," in having to climb it as a cult of the body, to reach the top and open the view of the uncontaminated marine landscape. It later became part of an Allied airport with the advance of liberation. It remained in operation until the 1990s as a State Monopoly colony. Rationalism sees reason as an essential tool for knowledge, opposed to the hegemony of the senses. The marine colonies of the Ventennio were imposing structures, designed by the greatest architects of the time, to whom an unexpected expressive freedom was often allowed, and the opportunity to experiment with the functionalist and rationalist architectural language, purified of the monumental and propagandistic influences of the period. Strictly functional blocks without decorative elements. It was precisely this lack of useless embellishments, of "vernacular" references that would make them understandable, attractive, and popular even to those who did not have the culture to understand their greatness, that was one of the reasons that led to their failure. This reason, along with the uncomfortable memory of the tragic fascist period, does not justify the guilty state of abandonment in which these buildings - many of which are great architectural expressions - are left. We should be able to distinguish between the work of the human intellect and the political and propaganda exploitation that was made of it. I chose a day of dense fog to photograph, I wanted to erase the surrounding landscape, now urbanized, and bring the structure back to its original isolation. I animated the images by superimposing "ghosts of memory" from photographs of the time, some of which were taken in the same places.