Literary and Multimedia Park of Salvatore Cambosu, Orotelli, Italy – Open Ideas Competition – 2nd prize (with Paratelier, Lisbon)

The second prize of the competition of ideas launched by The City of Orotelli (Italy) was awarded to Paratelier and its design proposal for the Park of Salvatore Cambosu, an Italian writer from Sardinia. The competition was looking for ideas which would enhance the urban context and landscapes, involving the places which were sung in the poet’s works “Cambosiane”, in the construction of a Literary and Multimedia park dedicated to one of the most eminent citizens of Orotelli – Salvatore Cambosu.

“If the people and the arts of the island find the common origin in the mystery of the stones, the stones are asking to be launched into the emptiness of the distances and to become the voices of echo. The choir of past voices can’t move beyond the island. To know where to send them: where we expect the echoes. We expect echos of the world.”

The words of Mary Lai, a great sculptor and a student of Salvator Cambosu, have given the design guidelines of the idea for the literary and multimedia park od Orotelli: the memory as life, the strong identity as a cultural stimulus, reinforced isolation to overcome the isolationism.

The landscape itself has already a magical flavor that characterizes the early work of Cambosu, but also the harshness of the reality that wants to be communicated. So in this context, paths, already designed in its pages, are underpinned by “multi-media stations”, “WPA points” (wood and iron materials are used to highlight the powerful, almost underground connection with the land) which became a multi-sensory metaphor of historical reality, moral and social impact of the place and the poetry of the writer. The visitor can, in observing the landscape that is a poetic material itself, listen to the words of the writer, but also – imagine – the stories of the myths, traditions, history, traditional music of the place.