dupli-city
The beautifully frescoed Monastero di SS Severino e Sossio was overtaken by King Charles of Bourbon in 1808, filled to the brim with timber shelving and used to store the 1742 census of the Kingdom of Naples, a document which occupies 75km of shelving and manifests itself today as 500,000 massive, disintegrating hand-written volumes.
Both the census and monastery artwork teeter on the brink of decay as the shelving conceals the existence of the murals, and chemicals in the treated wood eat away at the census. The oldest social document in Southern Italy and the first example of a comprehensive census, it is almost untouchable.
As Napoli is close to losing two of its most historically precious artefacts, a rescue mission is launched to liberate and re-interpret them in order that each can be re-read in a novel, functional and exquisite way.
The census is carefully moved to be digitally copied, imprints of huge vacated monastery rooms are cast as archive buildings to be situated around the old city wall, the monastery is voided to expose its murals in a gigantic emptiness, and the fragile census documents are re-housed under technically appropriate conditions in the new archives.
a day trip by ferry around the bay of Naples, from the port to the islands and back
on taking over the monastery, the archivists for the Kingdom of Naples simply erected shelving to cover all surfaces, regardless of what precious art might have been adorning them
1. 1808-2010 archivio di stato; 2. 2010-2035 digitisation; 3. 2012-2050 transcription; 4. 2035-2036 deconstruction; 5. 2036-2061 conservation; 6. 2061- ... monastero
the monastery facade conceals a rich variety of interior spaces ...
... which will each be cast in reconstituted tufa, and redistributed around Naples as the new homes for the 1742 census, previously housed in the 'void' left behind
the stacks of census material are stored in a glass hyperbaric chamber which can be circumnavigated by visitors, enforcing its status as an artefact rather than a set of books to be consulted
(RE)ADJUSTED TERRITORIES 