Urban legends: Città Ticino - Site I - Morel central periphery
Adrien Bossel
/Sébastien Denys Piero Gerbail
Up the labyrinth
Outside, the wind whistles between the trees and I hear it bouncing on stones and bricks. I enter by the old garage through the blue metallic door at the bottom end. A hanging sheet of plastic dances along to welcome me. I make few steps towards the tunnels, intrigued by the sound of music. I push the heavy curtain at the end of the corridor to see a band enchanting the place with warm melodies. I stay only for a few songs. I need to go.
I climb some narrow stairs. The room up there is flooded with light during the day and upholster with story-telling shadows at night. The painter doesn’t even see me, completely absorbed by his work. Behind, some talented streetartists share the wall to create a modern fresque to fill the space with life and spirit of the inhabitants. I unfortunately can’t witness these wonderful crafts any longer.
I move on and take a curved slope to the common space of the housing. The room is colored by the spared concrete structures: blue, yellow and red painted details remind me of what the place was; reminiscence of the spirit of the garage. Just outside, on the terrasse, a group of neighbors and their friends having drinks and banters under the palm trees waving under the wind.
I go on with my ascent, in the need to fetch a jacket in my flat after having overestimated the temperature. My friends told me, they always do. A window just went dark in the beautiful palace house on the opposite side of the road; someone is going to bed.
I grab my jacket and rise to the top of the building to join my friends on the roof-top terrasse. We catch the last rays of sun: the sky is orange and the mountains are black. The lights draw lines on the landscape revealing the density and the reach of the life around. We’ll sit until the place goes to sleep. We might never leave.
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Urban legends are short fictions that come close to myths, contemporary tales, which spread in popular culture by oral transmission and proliferate through social networks. These stories that circulate and that everyone knows. Your uncle told you about that alligator living in the sewers of New York, your father’s girlfriend confirmed it. These legends are mysterious, terrifying or funny. They are adapted to the local folklore by word of mouth, through hearsay. Each city produces these murmurs. Like an echo.
GayMenzel Studio addresses the complexity of the context as a source of development of a narrative linked to the site itself. This highlighting tool reveals the inherent qualities of the place and integrates projections or personal aspirations into it, with the broad ambition of reconnection to the environment.
The studio develops a coherent idea of a project starting from the territory and its landscape all the way up to the very detail. A prototype of a lamp will reflect these influences and enable evocation.
