Inimmaginabile e progetto. Architettura e memoria nei luoghi della Deportazione

The public memory of the Holocaust has been inscribed in a proliferating number of images and memorial spaces. This is partcularly true for the main concentration sites, which have become symbols in times, while many other "lieux de mà©moire" of the Deportation still suffer for a condition of intrinsic weakness. This circumstance should be connected to the frailty of material remains, whose debris are often hard to be preserved and interpreted, and to the overlapping of competing memories originated by the frequent reuse of these places by different communities, after the war. The case study of the former Fossoli concentration camp clearly represents this condition, as it question the capability of architecture in giving form to the palimpsest of memories allowing its layers to be recongnizable, in making visible the invisible without imposing new rhetorical meanings. The specific features of space and landscape can be instrumental to mediate between the need for eloquence and the articulation of memories. Indeed, space could be effectively considered as a language capable of expressing things not necessarly connected with restricted spatial meanings: Michel De Certeau wrote about space as «the product of crossing actions which give to it orientation, meaning and time references, and make it work as a multiple unity of conflictual programs». Thus space †" being it a urban place, a border, a larger territorial area or else †" plays a crucial role in framing our present experience while, at the same time, making it present the past experiences compressed in collective memory. The aim of this work is to investigate how distinct spatial entities, considering their cultural and collective significance, can be used to implement such an interaction of topological features and meaning, making it possible to consider them as consistent spatial narrations of memories.