Ipnospiaggia
Lucia Croci Candiani
Lucia Croci Candiani (1994) considers the landscape as the interpretation and narration of the territory through individual experience and collective imagination. She considers the intervention of human beings not as extraneous to an alleged state of pristine nature, but as a particular phenomenon which is intrinsic to it. She is fascinated by human attempts to camouflage their interventions by imitating the forms and outcomes of other natural events. In 2018 she graduated from Politecnico di Milano, currently she works as a freelance architect.
The beach is, in the collective imagination, the symbol of summer holidays.
However, seaside tourism is a rather recent phenomenon that spread to all social classes only after the war, but which has led to the transformation of large parts of the coastal territory. The sandy and flat beach is the most suitable to accommodate the greatest number of umbrellas and people, but it is only present on some parts of the coast.
n the portions of the coast where these characteristics are not naturally present, but where the position is favorable for tourism, man has altered the landscape by excavating and moving large quantities of sand, creating barriers in the sea and other engineering efforts in order to recreate a para-natural space to cram in as many paying tourists as possible.
Although created with all the attention to make them as mimetic as possible with the rest of the territory, these artificial beaches are nothing more than the product of a calculated human design. The artificiality of these places is made explicit and brought to paroxysm in the final image: the beach is no longer an element that imitates nature, but is deformed and manipulated until it becomes an imaginary and surreal landscape, absurd and unnatural but just as artificial as a sand beach. The image is the result of the deformation of a postcard, a device that over the years has been fundamental in the construction of the imaginary linked to holiday destinations.
