VIGNE MUSEUM
Jean-Baptiste Decavèle
Yona Friedman became dedicated to architecture at an early age. It was immediately after the war that he started to become an architect, and set out for Israel as a refugee in 1948 in order to do so. The Vigne Museum can be appreciated with regard to all the projects Yona Friedman put in place from 1948 onwards; it is one of the consequences of his tenacity and of the very precise choices he had made throughout his life.
The Vigne Museum is an Architecture Without Building, a Museum without a door, a Museum for Improvisation, a Museum without walls, for the Landscape, a Museum that one can view from the outside.
It was built in a totally improvised way by Yona Friedman, with the Livio Felluga Family and myself. In that regard, it is important to consider it in relation to an important corpus of Yona Friedman's Museum works and completed projects such as, for example, the project for Centre Pompidou in Paris; The Museum of Simple Technology that Yona Friedman built in Madras in the early 1980s...It represents also one of the architectural, social, holistic and artistic unities set out since he build La Petite Ville Spatiale in Basel in 2010.
The Vigne Musem is also a consequence of the specific project which Yona Friedman began with Livio Felluga, Dora Stiefelmeier, Mario Pieroni, Giovanna Felluga (artistic director of the Vigne Museum), her family, their crew and me. And I did my best to translate Yona Friedman's intentions when building it with him. It was one of the most important moments of my life. The time we spent together talking about it in Paris; the time we spent together being there in Friuli Venezia Giulia, being with him in Paris. The exchanges we had during the building process together with him and his daughter Marianne.
The Vigne Musem is an extension of the earlier projects we achieved in Italy, Holland and other venues together with RAM, Zerynthia and DAC Rome.
Sometimes when I pause at the Vigne Museum I have the impression of being in an
immense kaleidoscope in which each segment represents a different idea by Yona
Friedman.
It is a museum without doors, a museum that you visit both outside and inside. In any case, from there, one can have an infinite number of points of view on
everything one wants to look at.
I am a very visual person, I make (among other things) videos with my hands and drawings with my steps. There is something on the formal level that has changed for me with the Vigne Musem.
What has changed in the Vigne Museum since I left is that the VIGNE MUSEUM Cultural Association gives it life. For me, this recruitment is part of my current thinking.
There are many things that have affected these past two years and which pose social and structural questions. I would also say, to sum up, that much has changed for me. The terrorist attacks, refugees, to name only two phenomena that have occurred.
The attacks have consequences on our daily life, on the ways we organise and control our lives, on what we can expect and the margins of freedom for new developments that are created. Refugees ask important questions that allow us to make progress in redefining society, the city and how they can renew themselves, organise themselves, reinvent themselves, in order to survive. Obviously not everyone (on the western side) comes out satisfied. It is obvious that we are in a particular historical moment and that we live it together.
When a few months ago we finished No Man's Land in Loreto Aprutino, with the ARIA Foundation, Zerynthia, RAM and DAC and with Cecilia Casorati, Yona Friedman said that this type of initiative could perhaps have been carried out in many villages. The same goes for the Vigne Museum. These two projects are linked, they represent a particular cartography. A museum is above all a space, an architecture, just as life is a space that we build together, a space between us. What has changed with the creation of the Vigne Museum and No Man’s Land is that the two structures, implemented in Italy, represent anchor points in space. These structures are not asking for anything except to multiply. What has been put in place is an initiative. This fact is very important because without initiative ideas die and it is these the initiatives that we must continue. We must create actions in different places, enrich them, enlarge them, strengthen this cartography without borders that Vigne Musem and No Man's Land have generated.
