Urban legends: Città Ticino - Site III - Cornaredo city gate
Luca Rodella
/Hampus Carl Axel Thysell
Voices from the Void
I’m waiting for my mother to come pick me up
The large open space makes me feel exposed
Leaving me clenching to the fence
I spend the time seeing how far I can kick rocks onto the field
I’m late for practice again
As my cleats tear up the dust of my shortcut
I’m glad we’re not playing dirt field
We drove here from Chur
As we heard spring's already here in Ticino
We drove here to learn how to operate our trucks
We buy pizza and sungaze on their roofs
I unlock the gate and climb into the shovel truck
Thinking back to that time the circus came here
I scoop up the gravel and drive away
Leaving it open
I’ll be back in a while
I run as fast as I can
Stirring the dust up into the air
I have to return him the ball
As I know he’s now too old to run himself
The dome is the only thing visible over the wall
I’ve come to see her for the last time
When I reach the entrance my dress shoes have lost their shine
Dust to dust
In the city of autonomous objects
Walls built against walls
Windows turn themselves inwards
Inside their own skulls
Only to see their own reflections
Mirrored in themselves
Turning blind to their shifting reflections in the water
Flowing by
It separates them
The sediment forming islands where
If one ever learned how to swim
One shall forget
The terrain lies open to be appropriated
Those who need it
Know where to find it
Know how to use it
Know that they cannot own it
The value of possibility
For how should it be measured?
Becomes threatened
By an appetite for productivity
For profitability
Containing multitudes
Consisting of nothing
It lacks a form
Its edges defined by its surroundings
Leaving it vulnerable
The moment activity departures
The container receives a form
In order to preserve it
In order to protect it
In order to let it become something in itself
A container containing itself
From its tribunes it watches its own face
Learning to know itself for the first time
Not through sonar in an echo chamber
But in its reflection
In the everchanging flow of the river
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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.