Elisabetta Terragni trento tunnel the abc of trentino

The paradox is complete: military zones, especially those along the Albanian coastline, punctuated by disturbing structures, have saved some of the most undisturbed landscapes from savage speculative overbuilding. ”Elisabetta Terragni"
Albania. In a maybe unexpected and far (even though quite near to us) landscape, Elisabetta Terragni and Jeffrey Schnapp, this time in team with Daniele Ledda, managed to turn back working on a particular typological variant of the museal places, analogous with the one they successfully realized in Trento some years ago: the tunnel as exhibition space. Because of its recent history, the issue of the reuse of the discarded infrastructures is in Albania a matter of the greatest importance, powerful and fertile ground for projects, considering the impressive physical impact of the military defence system created with obsessive systematicity in the 1960′s and 1970′s. A uniform fabric of pillboxes and tunnels covering as a “thick and vague cobweb” all the national territory (Abitare dealt with this subject last year publishing a research on the Concrete Mushrooms). The underwater base for submarines (a 650 metres long, 12 metres high tunnel, for 4 Whiskeys, 90 meters each) cutting a strip of land in Porto Palermo, or more exactly in the Panorma Bay, is undoubtedly an exceptional site, between water and sky, to consider, document and transmit the events of the Cold War.
Anna Foppiano (Abitare)