Abstract
he paper illustrates how the experiments by some emerging architectural practices, adopting the tools of temporary setup, of-ten not far from installation or exhibition design, claim a deeper sense of architec-ture, and identify marginal areas –distant from the centres of our cities as widely ac-credited attractive areas for tourism or lei-sure– as valuable reservoirs of resources, redefining their established patterns. Their interventions create an intermediate space, which instead of obsessively opposing cen-tre and periphery, urban and rural, moder-nity and tradition, global and local, is able to instil a deviation, staging new images and opening up to a new imagery. In the ephem-eral character of the presented projects lays one of their more powerful strengths. They concentrate an enormous amount of energy in a certain place at a certain moment and this phenomenon has a big transformative potential. In this context, performances, installations and exhibitions can be under-stood as activist’s tools making the appro-priation of marginal areas as well as de-vices capable of strengthening community interactions. This paper is part of a broader analysis connected to a research project that starts from the assumption that archi-tectural exhibitions today should be recog-nised as a mean oriented not only towards the documentation and presentation of ar-chitecture, but as a proper instrument for the production of architectural experiments.