The issues of abandoned industrial landscapes raise several questions that can no longer be addressed from the point of view of a single discipline or the perspective of mere conservation or remediation. The critical re-problematization of this heritage in the present must contemplate multiple contributions that can be sought in a broad field that ranges from techniques to natural sciences to the arts and humanistic studies: the landscape model seems to constitute, more credibly today, this field, in its innate “bifocality” - conceptual and concrete, ecological and symbolic - as a context in which a new relationship between living beings, but also the symbolic manifestations of such a relationship, can be expressed.
However, especially after the European Convention of Landscape, the landscape also results from degradation, abandonment, and waste: this landscape “advances” from the interruption of an unfinished process or the conversion between one production system and another. This concept involves many dimensions, perhaps all of them, and “advances” also in the common sense that a community expresses for places.
The research and the point of view offered by this text try to project the post-industrial landscape of south-west Sardinia – one of the most significant mining basins in Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – into this new dimension in which the project prefigures new relationships, new figures and new natures that can be suggested by industrial abandonment, mining waste, new dynamics of plant colonization, new spontaneous uses. An interpretative and pragmatic approach, at the same time, that starts from the recognition of these figures, “excavations”, “fractures”, “topographies”, “waste and findings” to imagine the industrial remains as new ecological machines, which participate as protagonists in the construction of a new landscape.