Crolla la diga – Le voci si contraddicono
Vajont territories, (2013-2024)
‘In one hour, it became a desert’ was said.
How the “Vajont area” looks like today depends on large scale on the readjustments that took place over the last 60 years after the tabula rasa generated by the flooding of the Vajont reservoir (1963). During this time inhabitants have re-appropriated of this desert. Traces of the tabula rasa are still recognisable in the stratification and topography of the area.
I always heard about this catastrophe from my family, in school as a child and trough many medias; this made me develop an interest for the differences and incoherences in telling such same story, ultimately the notion of historical truth.
Collective and personal memory, news and media, landscape and traces are crucial in my research.
The project is realised for CALAMITA/À and is partially published in The Walking Mountain (2016)
* About Vajont
On October 9th, 1963 at 10:39pm 260 million cubic meters of rock broke off from the top of Monte Toc.
It fell into the reservoir of the Vajont Dam producing an enormous wave of at least 50 million cubic meters of water.
The wall of water pushed an air pocket before it.
It was more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
So strong, in fact, that almost all the victims were found naked, their clothes blown off by the blast. The dam, completed in 1959 and the biggest in the world at the time, did not suffer any serious damage. However, the flooding destroyed several villages in the valley and killed almost 2000 people.
It was, according to the UNESCO, one of the worst man-made environmental catastrophes of all time. The disaster wasn’t due to the evil nature of man but more to human negligence.