The new paving of the outdoor area of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli in Spilimbergo.
A critical analysis by Massimiliano Pavon.
Beyond the Walls. Poetry of a New Journey.
Viale Barbacane now separates the 'Citadel of Mosaics' from the historic centre of Spilimbergo.
The ancient city walls once stretched along this avenue, which was later demolished and transformed first into a cattle market and then into a tree-lined avenue.
Currently, a pedestrian path is being developed to connect the entrance to the Friuli School of Mosaic Art to the historic centre, continuing beyond Viale Barbacane towards Via Richelda da Spilimbergo. Richelda was a noblewoman from Spilimbergo who lived between the 13th and 14th centuries.
Running from north to south, the new route offers extraordinary views and almost suggests the continuation of the ancient route that led from the Tagliamento ford to the historic centre and beyond. The logistical needs of the time have now been transformed into cultural value and new attractions.
The work on the section between Viale Barbacane and the school is part of a larger project to resurface the area connecting the school to the buildings on Viale Barbacane.
In the words of the project curator, Stefano Jus:
'Traditionally, mosaics are associated with geometric and decorative figures, as well as symbolic and narrative ones.
In our case, a geometric treatment of the surface would clash with the site's irregularity, while the modular and repetitive subdivision could make the mosaic rigid and lose its characteristic status as a 'unique handmade piece', which is this technique's added value.
The decision was therefore made to give the mosaic a narrative function through figures. Historically, these themes were related to religion or mythology, but today we felt it was appropriate to depict the environment using figures made of symbols to document the Friulian ecosystem, including flowers, plants, trees, birds, fish, mammals and insects. This story takes advantage of the site's orientation (the north-south axis of the SMF route — Viale Barbacane is parallel to the Tagliamento river) to depict the territory from the mountains to the sea.
This can become an educational tool, with captions and signage highlighting the different species in the different areas".
We encounter the Tagliamento River again, which we had crossed earlier.
It now serves as a guideline, running parallel to the original crossing point, but with a different meaning.
The physical, experiential violence of the crossing has now been transformed into historical and cultural value.
Metaphorically speaking, for those who reach the school, the river is a distant sound.
The stones of the Tagliamento resonate with the marble of the new paving in their rocky consistency.
In the writer's opinion, this is a bold counter-naturalistic and counter-architectural interpretation of the design theme.
To a certain extent, a mosaic representation of a naturalistic subject is counter-naturalistic: the natural element, which is intrinsically organic and continuous, is reorganised using a technical device that is clearly artificial, composed of tiles — real 'fragments' of reality that are rigidly structured and discontinuous by their very nature.
For this reason, its mimetic value is limited, particularly when compared with classical painting, sculpture and photography.
The artificiality of the mimetic process is an intrinsic feature of mosaics, as it makes the process of image construction visible.
An architect interprets and translates the signs of the historic city, typically reinforcing its anthropogenic generative matrices in terms of alignments and geometries that differ from natural data.
The project operates on two levels.
It creates an 'artificial river' of natural elements with high entropic content that 'flows' in counterpoint to the 'natural river', acting in a counter-architectural manner.
At the same time, it contradicts the natural element using the very technique that represents it, thereby acting in a counter-natural manner.
Thus, the mosaic technique emerges as a historical and cultural kaleidoscope, where antiquity and contemporaneity seem to dissolve any temporal separation. This is similar to the wayfarer who, enveloped by the signs of the historic city, has an attenuated awareness of their own present.
From another perspective, we can see how this representation contrasts with both the natural flow of the river and the unstoppable flow of images in the media.
In this work, some elements are retained while many others are allowed to 'flow'.
The selected elements, removed from the flow of time, are not 'ossified' but rather crystallised according to the unique mosaic technique perpetuated through the centuries.
In this way, they become 'exemplary', much like the floor images in cathedrals.
The Tagliamento is a dynamic river system consisting of intertwined channels. Rather than flowing within a single stable riverbed, the water is distributed across a multitude of branches which can suddenly occupy large portions of the riverbed during floods. These branches expand laterally and continuously redraw their margins.
This characteristic of controlled instability and continuous landscape reconfiguration could serve as an interpretative metaphor for the paving project.
Similarly, the new path does not develop as a rigidly defined route, but rather expands to occupy portions of the pavement from which the buildings of the 'former Workers' Society' and the 'former Carabinieri Barracks' emerge as veritable urban islands.
These buildings are not isolated objects in space, but elements that emerge from a continuous ground with which they establish a relationship of mutual definition.
The 'enlarged' paving, reproducing the same thematic trace and distribution pattern as the new path, acts as a real connective tissue.
On the one hand, the new paving connects the school building, the two historic buildings and the installations that have occupied the open space over time, both functionally and symbolically, as well as perceptually. On the other hand, it helps to distinguish this architectural area as an autonomous and recognisable system that is clearly different from the surrounding historic city.
In this sense, the project helps to create a kind of mosaic 'citadel', where the newly paved ground, greenery and architecture come together to form a unified landscape.
In line with the river metaphor, the green area represents the dry ground that defines the riverbed, but it can also recall the undeveloped area that once existed beyond the city walls.
Similar urban contexts of strong symbolic and spatial value can be found, such as the Campo dei Miracoli in Pisa, where greenery and continuous paving create a perceptual and conceptual distance from the ordinary urban fabric while maintaining a deep connection with it.
The distinction between the 'citadel' and the historic city thus expresses close and reciprocal relationships on functional and historical-identity levels.
The new area is not presented as something foreign or self-referential, but rather as a space that can interact with the existing city. It reinterprets its layers and offers a contemporary view of the relationship between architecture, soil and the urban landscape.
The Tagliamento and the new route run parallel to each other at a distance of about two kilometres, which reinforces the idea that there is an evocative trace of meaning capable of guiding the adequately informed visitor's imagination.
Although the distance is relatively short as the crow flies, visual obstructions, both morphological and anthropogenic, together with the absence of a significant height difference, prevent direct perception of the river when walking along the new pavement.
Therefore, the relationship between the two elements cannot be based on immediate visual simultaneity.
However, this simultaneity, which can be experienced from an aerial viewpoint, can be suggested and constructed imaginatively.
This is the approach adopted by the final design element covered in this report: the infill of the side parapets of the crossing at the school entrance. This also responds to the need to evoke this invisible yet fundamental relationship.
Ideally and poetically, the river and the route are two complex systems in mutual relation: the animate and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, the organic and the inorganic.
This relationship is articulated on several levels: the material, the functional (in the evocative sense of 'crossing'), and the metaphorical.
The metaphorical level is formed through the meanings attributed to the project itself, which takes the river and its environment as one of its generative matrices. However, this level is consolidated a posteriori, partly thanks to interpretative readings of the project that collect and develop its cultural echoes in a diachronic manner.
Beyond its poetic intent and current interpretative suggestions, the mosaic work is destined to outlive its creators and contemporary interpreters, offering the possibility of traversing the new path over time. This could provide an opportunity for synesthetic experientiality and historical-cultural stimulation, embodying the profound responsibility of the designers and builders.
The project's lack of mimetic or descriptive intent with regard to the river suggests that the two entities are distinct, with a subtle analogy being the only connection.
The river embodies a transient, ever-changing materiality that adapts to the nature of liquid matter over time and space.
In contrast, the paving expresses the definitive nature of solid, stable matter.
The river also represents depth, a physical and perceptual dimension not present or suggested in the paving.
Furthermore, plant and animal elements in the river float or drift within the water, whereas on the paving they are exposed on the surface, immediately visible and deprived of any immersive dimension.
This analogue counterpoint, precisely because of its comparison with changeable, three-dimensional physical reality, which can be perceived through multiple senses, allows us to develop a deeper awareness of static, two-dimensional flooring.
The latter is governed by abstract projection principles, which evoke little or no three-dimensionality and are therefore confined almost exclusively to visual perception.
From this perspective, while retaining the relationship of iconic analogue representation mediated by cultural and perceptual conventions, the individual representation of a floral or faunal element acquires full autonomy with respect to its referent, from which it is neither intrinsically necessary nor dependent.
It thus occupies the space between the iconic basic scribble, based on recognisability, and the diagrammatic basic scribble, which is oriented towards structure and function instead.
Dear traveller, the author of the work or the mosaicist seems to be telling us: 'Do not look for anything more...'
This is the only reality.
The dialogue between living, physical reality and inert matter is one of the highest expressions of human creativity, as manifested in mosaic art.
Animated by continuous vital processes, growth, movement and metamorphosis, flora and fauna are observed, understood and finally translated by the artist into a non-living formal system composed of stone, mark and colour.
This process is not merely an imitation of reality, but a conscious transfiguration of it.
Natural reality, which is unstable and transitory by its very nature, is removed from biological time and inscribed in a dimension of duration.
In mosaic art, the vital pulse of living beings is entrusted not to organic matter, but to the compositional structure: the rhythm of the tiles and the tension between light and surface.
Life is not reproduced as a biological phenomenon, but as form, sign and symbol.
It is in this process that the 'miracle' of mosaic art lies: the artist's thoughts mediate between living and non-living matter, while the hand fixes what in nature is destined to dissolve.
Thus, the representation of plants and animals becomes an act of cultural preservation, where the ephemeral becomes stable and the fragility of living things survives in the permanence of the artefact.
The mosaic work takes the form of a space where two orders of reality intersect: the natural world, subject to the cycle of birth, transformation and death, and non-living matter, which is resistant to time and capable of outlasting the individual who created it.
It is this temporal gap that gives mosaic art its profound value, as it represents life and saves it from oblivion by entrusting it to collective memory and the continuity of history.
Perhaps we can propose an integrated reading of two pairs of complex othernesses, within which each of the four terms engages in a silent but structural dialogue with the other elements, in their dual material and immaterial dimensions.
The first pair is the historic city and the mosaic citadel, and the second is the connective system of the natural and river environment and the connective system of the new paving.
Each pair brings into tension elements that differ in origin, function, and temporality but are united by their mutual capacity for relationship and exchange, both morphologically and symbolically.
Exposed to the same celestial system — sometimes covered, sometimes studded with stars — these 'universes' exchange information and energy with it.
The former are measurable and verifiable and find precise evidence in the hemispherical sundial — a device capable of making the relationship between time, space, and the apparent motion of the stars visible. The latter manifest themselves strictly physically through radiation processes, but also on a less quantifiable level pertaining to the human experience of space, which is more perceptive and symbolic.
By stretching the limits of interpretation, it is possible to see these systems as sharing a common, almost 'multiversal' destiny inscribed in the same cosmic condition that transcends their individual components and unifies them.
We gain full experiential awareness of this unified horizon when we realise that the paving cannot be considered an autonomous or self-sufficient element. It can only be conceived or perceived in resonance with the psychic, affective, and symbolic content continually stimulated by the school, the historic city, and the surrounding natural environment.
The paving thus becomes a relational device capable of activating a system of perceptual and mnemonic references that transcend its technical function. Physical contact with the built surface becomes intertwined with the emotional and cultural experience of places, rendering the material and immaterial dimensions inseparable.
This interpenetration of space, memory and affection concretely manifests the unity of the design horizon: a lived unity, in which each built element only acquires meaning as part of a broader web of relationships between architecture, history and nature.
These subtle dimensions, which cannot be immediately measured or translated into technical parameters, also feed the project's profound quality.
They contribute to the necessary homage that human creativity should pay to natural reality whenever it intervenes in it, transforming and altering it through the conscious exercise of its anthropic action.