The project was born in September 2020 to learn about the territorial changes of the capital of Sardinia, Cagliari.
Being a city by the sea I was interested in investigating what happens going up from the sea to the mouth to the inhabited city and the events that happen with the time that goes on.

Man has always shaped space as he pleases, appropriates it and makes it the place where he lives. These processes of appropriation of space are born for necessity and survival needs.
Man creates places for work, he constantly follows the idea of development, of progress, without, however, questioning the real responses of the territory to these actions.

Every gesture of man on the territory, every interaction, creates a change of the territory itself, starting that difficult path of maintaining the balance between human and natural dynamics. It is precisely the concept of balance, of its constant research and of its most frequent rupture, the key to the interpretation of the project.

I want to talk about a changed environmental system, occupied since Phoenician times, in the center of the Mediterranean. It is a large wetland, a biodiversity reserve and the cradle of the current city of Cagliari. Now relegated to a backward city, colonized by large port infrastructure, power plants and industrial buildings, is a landscape that despite everything still retains the deepest meaning of balance. It is defined as a small ecosystem that enjoys and lives, at the same time, thanks to a network of micro-activities, such as fishing, which indissolubly binds man to the lagoon. It is the breeding ground of the few fishermen who resist the environmental revolution dictated by the construction of the canal port,those who heal those bonds so frail but rooted between man and water. The design of the big infrastructural system leads to the birth of real new artificial islands that stand between the sea and the lagoon, modifying the outlets, the accesses, the original landing places.

New morphologies are born, new landscapes that, with their connotation, clearly break the balances that lasted centuries. So a new phase begins, a new process of achieving environmental balances.
The lagoon landscape is thus a hybrid, where large infrastructure, industrial buildings, the railway, the airport, alternate with a small fishing village, hinge between sea and lagoon, which is called Giorgino and small settlements of the banks, made of shelters, small ports and temporary landings, made of materials of result for fishermen who still take care of the micro-production of the wet-lagoon system. This project aims to describe the so rapid and sudden transformations to which an indispensable place for the natural and urban ecosystem is subjected, not only of the city of Cagliari but of the whole island. It tells, beyond the inevitable transformations, the permanences, everything that resists and that continues its struggle for the maintenance of balance.

The actor in this struggle is always the man, the one who breaks and ties up with nature. Man is still the one who can save the lagoon from its constant transformation, stopping the tension to its extreme artificialization. Its task is to bring it back to its original role as a theatre, a space of life and a place to live.