Future for a sunken landscape

The Never Never Island

As part of the "Water. Architecture. Venice - W.A.Ve", organized by the University of Architecture of Venice (IUAV) in 2021, the University of Architecture and Urbanism "Ion Mincu" (UAUIM) responded to the call launched within the UNISCAPE - European Universities Network for the European Landscape Convention, promoting the values of the vanished island, and thus the story of the island with an area of 0^km2 has gone beyond the borders of Romania, involving students from IUAV and UAUIM, coordinated by the Analogique team, who managed, through their proposals, to valorize the potential of the vanished landscape of the island under water, an approach then continued with a case study - Peninsula Pescăruș in Orșova, by UAUIM students, in the period October-December 2021, within the project coordinated by lect. dr. arh. Tana Nicoleta Lascu, Strategies for Island Landscape Architecture - research through thearchitecture project and landscape - STARINS in Bucharest. Starting from the idea of valorizing the riverside landscape as heritage, we consider this approach as a step through which the island regains its important cultural place, by experimenting with new ways of visionary design, towards the recovery of the identity of a landscape reconstructed from the sphere of the imaginary, but also of narrative, photographs and archival documents.
The exhibition that we propose includes previously unpublished material, the result of research carried out by IUAV and UAUIM students at the W.A. workshops.Ve - 2021, IUAV and UNISCAPE, where UAUIM participated as the promoter of the Ada Kaleh - The Never Never Island Workshop, and in the Ada Kaleh - A Waterscape for Future - Landmarks and Connections in the River Landscape workshop, held during the research project Strategies for Island Landscape Architecture - Research through Architecture and Landscape Design , acronym STARINS, held at UAUIM, October 18 - December 10, 2021. The exhibition also includes the 16 documentary panels with text and archival images on the Ada Kaleh Island Landscape values in an integrated approach from the perspective of historical processuality, as well as 4 diploma projects realized by UAUIM students for the island of Shimian, which will be presented at IRCCU in Venice, July 3-16, 2021, as a related event of the W.A.Ve. - 2021 Workshops.
Today, Ada Kaleh is the island that does not exist. Our project was set up as an exploration and introspection of submerged landscapes in the space where the geology of water generates puzzling visions of underwater archaeology; it is an investigation and an acknowledgment of the imaginary, traced by strabic geographies, which generate and make possible the projection of novel narrative scaffolds, configuring the infrastructures of patterns of inhabitation in the landscape, from the perspective of new amphibious life forms, even as liquid matter mixes with aeriform matter. The scenarios that emerge as possible are the result of interrogation and a dense network of relationships that interweave the fields of analogical and traditional modeling with digital and virtual techniques. The two labs, held in Venice and Bucharest, covered different themes and specificities, intersecting different disciplines and reinforcing the distance between science and art, the distance between languages and contents, which is reflected in the practice of design for architecture and landscape.