(Great War)-Scapes: a future for military heritage. The "testimonial gradient" as a new paradigm.
Creators: name: Aldrighettoni, Joel
Publisher: name: Universit� degli studi di Trento
Year: 2022

description: Just over a hundred years ago, the First World War profoundly disrupted the landscape of Europe: from the fields of Galicia to the French plains, from the Alpine arc to the coasts of the Baltic Sea, position and trench warfare brought about transformations by etching the ground, carving out mountains, reorganizing territorial arrangements and original environmental ecosystems, leaving room for the stratification of new traces and meanings that, over time, have contributed to the construction of what is now universally recognized as a fragile cultural heritage of high complexity. If Law n.78 of 2001, as a synthesis of a very intense and fruitful debate, protects the remains of the First World War mainly intending to protect this particular historical heritage without altering ?the material and historical characteristics? (in the Italian context), in the aftermath of the celebrations for the Centenary, and in light of numerous projects that have been applied to the restoration/recovery/evaluation of these assets, to return to investigate the ?landscapes of war? means to set up a new research to understand how these remains can continue to narrate their ?being in time? to future generations, stimulating ?possibilities of memory? and representing at the same time substantial resources, cultural but also economic, for the future. A problem of scale clearly emerged following the analysis of the status quo of a representative sample of places and artifacts and concluded/ongoing projects at the international level. The pregnant force of the remains as a ?system? deeply connected not only by a physical infrastructure of field fortifications, entrenchments, barracks, and obstacle courses but also by a dense network of intangible and visual relationships that substantiated their functioning, today is increasingly weakening. As a confirmation of this, it is evident, for example, how the fragmentation of the interventions and their management policies is also reflected in the greater attention paid by the majority of the carried out projects to the permanent fortifications compared to the entrenched articulated systems that surrounded them and were an integral part of them. To solve this interpretative-operative gap, the need to recover a systemic vision capable of moving at different scales and grasping the intangible wholeness of the system-vestiges, today apparently shattered, has emerged. This vision should focus attention not on the fragments as ?remains of a whole that no longer exists?, but on the potential that they can still generate if put in tension with each other: a magnetic field capable of binding the different parts and recomposing their meanings. This has led to moving away from the specificity of individual disciplinary knowledge to embrace a transversal approach able to place the warscape at the core and analyze it in its entire nature and biography of landscape-palimpsest multi-layered in different times. In this perspective, the indissoluble symbiosis between physical ?signs? and immaterial values (deposited over time) has turned out to be the specific peculiarity of the ?character? of these ?war landscapes?, thus recognizing the condition of fragility not as a point of weakness, but rather as their most ?authentic? peculiarity. It was possible to identify different ?ways of seeing? these warscapes through this simultaneously inductive and deductive knowledge-based process, studying not only the theoretical and methodological aspects of spatial analysis but also the relationships between the socio-cultural, historical, and anthropological factors that have defined its development and transformation. This approach focuses increasingly on the need to adopt a holistic vision to overcome the current fragmentation of this heritage and think about its future without betraying its authenticity. Operationally, this approach has been declined through two current levels of research. As an essential moment to consciously set up the future operative proposals, an order matrix was defined to reread the complexity recovering a systemic vision also in the analytical phase. By arranging the building typologies with the different morphologies of the territories, it was possible to identify some ?war-scape classes?, useful to interpret the fragmentary nature of the different ?war landscapes? through the identification both of the driving forces that had determined their construction, in different times, and of the same ones that can determine the trajectories of future change. By identifying the different ?war-scape classes?, it was possible to critically reinterpret the status quo of places and artifacts through a ?systemic look?. Based on what emerged, an articulate SWOT analysis was devolped to highlight the main potential and criticality of the remains at the system level. The second declination of this holistic approach focused on the meaning of the recognition of ?war landscapes? as ?places of memory?. Through the evolutionary study of the different phases of the ?construction of the Great War memory?, which throughout a century have alternated multiple and polysense ?practices of narration?, it was possible to better understand the processes that led to the recognition of the testimonial value of the remains. In this way, it was also possible to understand that specific ?sense of place? that, metaphorically, identifies the different warscapes as ?high capacity condensers of values?, in which the intensity of the potential (the meaningfulness of meanings/new re-significations) is directly proportional to the charge that is generated at the moment in which the relationships between the different poles (archipelago of vestiges as fragments) are strengthened. In this specific regard, it was possible to identify the physical space of the threshold between ?the visible and the submerged? as a particularly dense and pregnant accumulation basin to be ?poetically investigated? to unveil the permanence of the imprint of the war (manifested there as much on a physical level in the ?matter marked? by the conflict as in the meanings assumed by such ?signs?), still present today but ?hidden? under the multiple layers of deposition that have stratified over time. The considerations obtained through the two levels of research have been combined with a theoretical reflection on the recognition of the ?landscapes of war? as ?heritage? understood in its various etymological meanings (legacy, inheritance, and patrimony). In this way, it was possible to better understand the meaning of the concept of enhancement applied to this heritage, bringing to the surface some semantic nuclei that are currently critical concerning the strengthening and/or enhancement of which to consciously direct future orientations of priorities. The priority issue, which strongly emerged, was the pressing need to develop new operational strategies to facilitate the recognition, within the contemporary multi-layered landscape, of the different levels of permanence of the remains, including in particular the most fragile ?signs? in terms of permanence, currently at greater ?risk of loss?. In addition to this, the need to propose new strategies regarding the policies of coordination and management of processes with particular attention to the importance of participatory aspects (issues identified but not explored in detail in this research), and the need to better understand some aspects of construction technology (related to technological experiments of reinforced concrete of whose structural behavior little is known), also emerged. In an inter-scalar vision, these aspects have assumed even greater importance in the awareness that the ability to recognize different areas concerning which the vestiges remain in the contemporary world at different levels of semantic significance is a necessary prerequisite for future projects to operate recovering that systemic vision lost today, ensuring the system-vestiges, as such, different margins of design, preserving our ?possibility of memory? through its evocative potential. In this perspective, the research has therefore elaborated and proposed a ?method in complexity? proper to facilitate the recognition of what can have testimonial value at the landscape scale by identifying areas in which the vestiges of war persist at different temperatures. This is a new paradigm that, moving from the need to recover a systemic view capable of recognizing the permanence of even the most fragile remains, expands the meaning of ?testimonial value? at the scale of the ?warscape? by introducing the concept of ?testimonial gradient?. This is a useful parameter to identify the different areas in which the degree of semantic significance of the vestiges and the related ?possibilities of memory? are graduated according to the level of knowledge of specific indicators, such as the historical-identity aspects, the typological-constructive knowledge of the artifacts, the degree of community involvement and, above all, the legibility of the vestige-system. In addition to having defined at a conceptual level the meaning of these indicators, the research has also developed an analytical method based on a multi-criteria analysis to make operational the qualitative considerations expressed by the knowledge-based parameters previously identified and to obtain accurate fragility maps of the different warscapes. These documents are fascinating not only because they give an overall view of the semantic density of a given context, but because they are a fundamental proactive tool for future practices of ?care?: the essential knowledge base on which to base future choices in terms of conservation, protection, and enhancement. In the light of the previous considerations, it has emerged the awareness of how necessary is the interdisciplinary collaboration for the definition of the indicators constituting the ?testimonial gradient?: the last part of the present research has therefore been mainly focused on the elaboration of an operative method to facilitate the deepening of two of these indicators, in relation also to the criticalities previously emerged, linked to the issues of recognizability of the most fragile permanences, both from an overall point of view and of construction technology. Therefore, intending to contribute to the unveiling of the broad and deep information basin in which the complex system of visible but also ?submerged? vestiges has been recognized, the research proposed the elaboration of a knowledge-based method called ?stratigraphic telescope?, a methodological tool able to explore the processes of construction/transformation of war landscapes at different scales. This method proved to be a fertile contribution to place, side by side with the study of archival documents and manuals of fortifications, an indispensable store of knowledge to better understand the construction techniques, the technical and technological details, the materials used, and the tactical or planting solutions proposed. This method is clearly based on applying the interpretive code of architectural stratigraphy to the scale of the landscape, thus interpreting the history of artifacts as the result of processes of addition, subtraction, and transformation that have left physical traces linked together in a stratigraphic sequence. Operationally, this has been interpreted in understanding the archaeological transformation?s dynamics of the landscapes over time, comparing the impact of the war event with the current recognition of land uses and the permanence of the remains. This method founds itself mainly on analyzing, comparing, and interpreting historical documentation, period aerial photographs, current orthophotos, and data processing obtained by techniques of high-resolution (remote sensing). In this perspective, the use of software for the creation of Geographic Information Systems such as ArcGis and QuantumGis has been fundamental, as these work environments have allowed overall coordination of the entire cognitive process: from the integrated management of the different input datasets (georeferencing of historical maps of militarization and military aerial photographs) to the processing of the expected outputs. In this regard, the most innovative result of the research has been the important contribution that some specific visualization modalities of LIDAR data obtained through specific tools such as the Relief Tool Visualization (e.g., Hillshading from multiple directions and Sky-View-Factor visualization) have provided in the identification of different degrees of legibility of the footprint of the Great War within the topography of today?s landscape. The validation phase on specific case studies, for example, on the system of Austro-Hungarian forts in Trentino (Italy) and on the entrenched system around Fort Busa Verle (Altopiano di Vezzena, TN, Italy), has allowed us to verify the effectiveness of this method not only on a qualitative but also on a quantitative level. In conclusion, therefore, the elaboration of the tool ?stratigraphic telescope?, in addition to the new possibilities of narration introduced by it, is a significant methodological contribution to the definition of the ?testimonial gradient? previously described as a crucial moment to consciously set up future projects. The implementation of the proposed method on other case histories and the theoretical-operational deepening of the other identified indicators are the main directions towards which future research perspectives can be developed.