Arts Thread

Italy is facing a water crisis. Puglia’s current hydrological system is poorly managed, with 42 litres of every 100 that travels through Italian Aqueducts being lost through network inefficiencies. This is all in the context of a wider desertification issue, which is seeing less rainfall across the Puglia region and increasing droughts. This is damaging its vital agrarian economy, and slowly transforming the agricultural sites which formed the ‘Breadbasket of Italy’ into an arid expanse of empty fields. The Livestock Industry is particularly affected, with 266 farms being closed across the region in 3 years. ‘A Shepherd’s Odyssey’ seeks to address the hydraulic crisis and agricultural decline of the Puglia region by reviving the historic process of ‘transhumance’, a seasonal migration of livestock from the cool North to warm South. The project imagines a nationwide hydro-agricultural network of movement, be it sheep, cattle or water, in accordance with seasonal climatic cycles. This proposed aqueduct and viaduct infrastructure acts not only as a means of supplying water to the arid region, but also as a protective vessel; sheltering wayfarers as they travel from the mountainous L’Aquila pasture in the North, to the red rocks of the Spinazzola settlement in the South. Utilising the vibrant bauxite clay of an abandoned mine, the Southern pasture seeks to reinvent ancient Italian building techniques and revive a lost nomadic vernacular of slip cast 'caruselli'. Alongside this traditional construction technique, the project also examines the material future of waste bauxite clay. This led to the development of tiles created from bauxite clay slip and waste wool insulation spared from the annual transhumance cycle.