Research platform ICSplat has launched the New Concordia Island Contest to stimulate, through abstraction, new ideas to imagine the future of the Costa Concordia shipwreck, of the Giglio Island and its inhabitants. A news report from Catania

University of Catania’s ICSplat — a research platform focusing on landscape and new forms of architecture — has launched the New Concordia Island Contest, a competition for ideas responding to the shipwreck of the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship of the Costa Crociere company, out from regular service after the shipwreck on the night of 13 January 2012 on the Giglio Island. The competition has the aim of stimulating new future visions for the Giglio Island and the shipwreck, which will become as part of the same landscape and with the same identity. How can we rethink the future of these places? What could the shipwreck become if it remains aground for a period longer than a year? How will we program the disassembling and dragging of the parts? How to work with the shipwreck to build a form of memory? Is there any way to reconsider the Giglio island with this new outcropping rock that has changed the coastline?

In recent decades the perception of disaster has fueled insecurity and collective fear by encouraging the development of technicist rhetoric that uses engineering as linear solution to the issues. A disaster takes such a social and cultural significance that technical knowledge and economies are forced to reorganize themselves exclusively within its logic. “Collapse” is a suspension of time that forces a rethink on the duration of the transformations and role of architecture: we need to think fast action in long-term visions. The “collapse” is the acceleration, determined by catastrophic events (landslides, floods, earthquakes), which triggers new immediate necessities; how can time be organized in different speed and forms? The collapse is the measure of erasing. Can architecture suspend erasure at the margins of disaster? Or, can it trigger mechanisms of metabolism and coexistence with the everyday life?

Registration for the competition runs from 10 August (early registration) to 24 September (last registration deadline). Submissions must be entered by 25 September. All information can be downloaded from theICSplat website.

The jury evaluating the competition entries is composed of Cristina Díaz Moreno (AMID, cero9, Madrid), Andrea Bartoli (FARM CULTURAL PARK, Favara), Luca Emanueli (SEALINElab, Ferrara), Eva Franch i Gilabert (director of Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York), Joseph Grima (director of Domus, Milan), Kamiel Klaasse (NLarchitects, Amsterdam), Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG, Los Angeles), Marco Navarra (NOWA, Caltagirone), Lori Nix (New York), François Roche (R&Sie(n), Paris), Italo Rota (Milan), Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow Wow, Tokyo).