L’eredità dell’antico nel divenire archeologico. Una proposizione teorico-operativa per il progetto contemporaneo

This contribution aims to reflect on the meaning of heritage by trying to build a theoretical-operational proposition capable of acting on the contradictions crossing the presence of archaeological heritage within the contemporary city. The first problem is the validity of the concept of historical document used by archaeological science, within a city that seems to have undermined every form of continuity with history, every idea of heritage, as Marc Augé states. Hence the need to define a cultural process for “extending” that concept, from a retroactive phenomenon to testimony of a Present capable of developing its own inheritance. This is an objective that aims to resolve the “temporal segmentation” used so far by the traditional historiographical approach, and which has as its referent the “extension of the archaeological method” born at the end of the seventies. Extension which opens the second question of the discussion: can the Present elaborate its own remoteness, its own archaeological promise? Recalling the thoughts of Henry Bergson, the dissertation tries to investigate the possible answer, taking as a parameter the different meaning that the “temporal distance” can take on, in the logical-critical reciprocity of diachronic phenomena. The latter is the theme on which our research focuses, expressed through an illustrative apparatus derived from the design activity conducted by the author within the Department of Architecture of the Polytechnic of Bari, that has as its objective experimenting with a project theoretical-methodological focused on the dialectical circularity between inherited forms and linguistic instances of our time.