Il muro di Varsavia : anatomia di un’infrastruttura della coercizione : progettare con le spoglie del Ghetto nella città della distruzione totale = The Warsaw Wall : an anatomy of an infrastructure of the coercion : design with the Ghetto’s spoils in the city of total destruction

The image of the Warsaw Ghetto settled in the collective unconscious of post-war Europe coincides first of all with its symbolic element: the system of brick walls. The complex geography of the 'forbidden city' defined by this ‘infrastructure of coercion’, ratifies from 1940 to 1943 the metamorphosis of the Warsaw's urban landscape, first in concentration camp, then in a spread of 20-25 million cubic meters of irremovable ruins, which have forever changed the geography of the territorial palimpsest of Warsaw. At the end of 1945 it will still be the trace of the wall to define the distinction between the landscape and an outline still partially recognizable as a city. The wall: a furrow in the multicultural capital reduced to its primigenial imprint, an irreparable rift in the evolution of the European city. Interpreting the historical Warsaw, buried but still present in the urban substratum, represents a form of anatomy of the urban text, necessary to isolate the DNA of the city, its original structure, in order to give meaning to a present of urban modification that is extinguishing the memory of the city with new forms of forgetfulness. In Europe characterized by urban divisions, relocating the wall and fragments of the Warsaw Ghetto into the today city can then mean to build an extended museum of memorialistic places, micro-stories to reconnect with each other to transform the wall in an architecture of the connection between the city's memory and the urban present.