‟The Cathedral of Solomon is the opposite of the idea we normally have of a church. It is not a grand architectural mass, but a grandhollow. The island of Lampedusa itself becomes architecture. Its Interior is emptied and its rocky body opens up to receive the boat-loads of refugees arriving from Africa. A gigantic ark of salvation, lonely awaiting, in the Mediterranean. By means of a system of interior links, the project leads to the island’s highest point, on land. To anew life: to Europe. In fact, in the vertical ascent, it corresponds symbolically to a relocation in terms of continent. If according to submarine geography, Lampedusa belongs the plateau of the coasts of Africa, in political geography, the surface of the terrain is European territory. A strange conflict between visible and unseen reality. Diderot, in his play ‘Fils naturel’, sets on Lampedusa the birth of a new theatrical genre: the bourgeois drama. Starting out from the adventures of specific individuals, he observes the great polyphonic edifice of modern Europe„
‟Migration is a slap in the face to this system because, inter alia, it constitutes an obvious proof that resources are not unlimited, that habitable territories and the concentration of available wealth are confined to a small part of the Earth. Just 15%. The rest is silence: deserts and oceans„
Susanna Pisciella
‘Lampedusa – The cathedral of Solomon: Renato Rizzi’
La Triennale di Milano, Milan – IT