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Portfolio

Olivo Barbieri

Dolomites Project 2010

Olivo Barbieri tells a story of mountains as designed architectures, where the risk and limit of sustainability is the same as what prompted Jean Baudrillard to write, as far back as 1986: “I sought the future and past catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the metropolises.” Seascapes, great waterfalls, mountains and old city centres are fragile theme parks. Entertainment has virtually replaced the sublime. The veduta genre of megalopolises may, by dimension and consideration, compete with nature for importance in the collective imagination. The Dolomites are symbolic forms in movement whose history began two hundred and fifty million years ago. Their component material came from oceanic abysses and recalls the latter’s design, almost an upside-down history of the earth.