RE-WRITING THE PALIMPSEST
Proposal for the reuse of Fornelli former prison on Asinara island as a place of memory.
[by Federica Varenna, Marta Zilioli, 2019]

On Asinara, an island in the north of Sardegna, it’s located the former prison of Fornelli. This building, known mainly for being a high security prison during the terrorism year in Italy and for having locked up several representative of Mafia’s family, is far more than this, indeed the building went through the various evolution occurred on the island: lazaret of the penal colony at the beginning, it became later judicial sanatorium, jail and high-security prison at the end with the consequence that now walls illustrate a sequence of variation, readable in the building itself. Fornelli is destined to a monitored decay and this fact is evident looking at the abandonment condition, although the value of this heritage remain unaltered making its future one of the major argument of debate for the park’s community. With the intent of reopening the discussion about the purpose of the building a new collaboration between “Ente Parco” and “Politecnico di Milano” started, the workshop “Oltre il Carcere” (“Behond the jail”) during June 2018 signed the first step in this direction, but also the beginning of this paper. This paper is composed by three phase: an evaluation of the current status, an historical research to rebuild the whole history of the building and a proposal for intervention that can’t remain simply a preservation of the construction, which would lead to freeze the status in a fixed historical moment, but the creation of a new layer of information that will cooperate and integrate with the existing one. For this reason it is necessary to not consider this patrimony static, but in a continuous evolution able to transfer historical, political, ethical and critical awareness, giving back to the community a difficult historical heritage through the reading of the sign readable nowadays.

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