Recycling the archaeological heritage: from drosscapes to dialogical landscapes

Between the various typologies of drosscapes codified by Alan Berger, we can ascribe the archaeological sites to those areas waiting for development processes that are places “in-between” city and landscape and past and future, very often excluded from the normal environment life cycles and in which the idea of “ruin” or “antiquity” is easily confused with that of “residue” and “waste” (Berger, 2007). The debates on the relationship between archaeological sites, design and landscape connote nowadays new complex issues upon the triad Reuse/Reduce/Recycle and become affected by the new interpretative matrices of what is known as “green economy” (Bocchi, 2003). The concepts expressed during the Exposition at MAXXI about recycle (re-build upon/around/inside/into, residue vs waste, living the ruins vs constructing, re-naturalizing vs re-urbanizing) (Ciorra and Marini, 2011), as well as the following epistemological study presented in the German Pavilion at the 13th Venice Biennale (Petzet and Heilmeyer, 2013) that codifies an economic development model in which “doing better” is overtaken by “doing less”, can be undoubtedly referred to the archaeological sites that are actually “trace-waste” with a configuration of “lost places” due to the actions of History cycles (Tarpino, 2012). This new interpretative approach presupposes a critical look entirely on the archaeological sites’ “life cycle” and on the modalities through which they “dialogue” with the social dimension of the environment: think, for example, of the archaeological areas put on the turistic cycles of the “mass enjoyment”, hardly compatible with the purposes of protection and conservation (Choay, 1995) or with a more desiderable condition of “multiple dialogy” through the architectural project (different functions, different users typologies, ethic relationship with urban and rural landscape). Is objectively difficult to find out a compatibility between archaeological sites and concects of “re-use” and “re-duce”, but is moreover true that “re-cycle” can be a new actitude through which is possible to re-focus the interpretative actions on the archaeological heritage making them passing from a configuration of drosscape to a condition of “dialogic landscape”. This paper fits within this framekork, investigating the relationship between the concept of recycle and the need of a new ethic-dialogic re-interpretation of the archaeological landscapes, studying the different ways in which the project of architecture can bring about new life cycles for ruins and for the entire archaeological heritage