In Naples it's easy to come across buildings like this. Some of them show one or more walled windows, as well as the entrances. But this building seems to be a single block of tuff worked so as to appear as a place that was then, intentionally, made inaccessible. For about sixty meters, in this small portion of the city, there is an extraordinary visual stratification composed of three elements; a long strip of asphalt dense with cracks, a box made of many tuff bricks and a sky that curves together with the road and that mysterious and melancholic urban object. That path is a sort of portal towards the northern outskirts of the city. Less than a kilometer later, and always on the same strip of asphalt, it is possible to witness a certain kind of degradation that I don't think has any comparison among the other suburbs of any Western European city.

#Naples #urbanvoid

An urban void in Naples is ever really (and only) an unused city space. It would be more accurate to say that, in Naples, a disused space is an open wound surrounded by pulsating life that, by difference, produces a kind of vibration. The void in Naples can be felt, and it can be observed. Ruined buildings next to concrete skeletons that have never been completed coexist without any real boundary with newly inaugurated blocks of flats and public places. But also barbed wire and gates worn by rust to delimit places without any function other than that of filling the landscape with their presence.

#Naples #urbanvoid

No one, in the apparel industry, really wants what's best for us. And nobody, in the above industry, cares about the condition of workers and environmental sustainability. But there's no doubt that They All want something from us. And the thing They really want is more than our money; They aim to control our desires. They make us swallow pills whose names engraved on them we have to learn by heart. All of a sudden, we small retailers, we had to learn words like lifestyle, brand awareness, ad strategies. The best that can happen to us is to finance the absurd circle that fuels our artificial desire to buy Their products. Because yes, there are worse things. There is an Italian company that distributes jackets made in China whose quality is rather mediocre, if not low, but whose brand has an inexplicable charm in the region where I live.