ISSN 2533-2899 129 7 / 2020 From Suffering to Hope. The Survey of Rubble as a Measure of Resilience Paolo Belardi, Giovanna Ramaccini Rubble is the conscience of history “The sight of the ruins makes us feetingly sense the ex- istence of a time that is not what the history manuals talk about or that the restorations try to bring back to life. It is a pure, undated time, absent from our world of images, simulacra and reconstructions, from our violent world whose rubble no longer has time to become ruins. A lost time that art sometimes succeeds in fnding again.” [Augé 2004, p. 8] The seismic events that shook Central Italy in 2016 brought highlighted the concept of resilience, not just in terms of the ability of a building to withstand the shock wave caused by a telluric shock, but also in terms of the ability of a community to react to the psychological anni- hilation caused by a seismic event. As Paolo Crepet point- ed out, after a seismic event “we worry, rightly or wrongly, about material aspects. Which is right, but there is a loss of identity that is not taken into account in the same way. […] That is the most diffcult part to repair” [Scianca 2016]. What follows is the need to start again from “what remains” [Teti 2017], with a proactive attitude that some- how fnds a symbolic incarnation in the Japanese art of kintsugi in which the fragments of broken ceramics are recomposed through the gold dust insert [Santini 2018]. Although kintsugi is an artistic practice rooted in a distant culture, both from a historical and geographical point of view, Italian architects (but also artists) have always been sensitive to the evocative power of ruins (and rubble), Abstract As in the Japanese art of kintsugi, where fragments of broken ceramics are recomposed using the gold dust insert, in the installation Canapa Nera, presented by the Regione Umbria at Milan Design Week 2018, the preciousness of the material was substantiated by an alchemical mix of the hopes that vibrate in the fbres of the black hemp of the Valnerina with the memories that permeate the rubble of the diruti walls of Norcia following the seismic events that in 2016 upset Central Italy. Canapa Nera was a long two- faced wall, characterised on one side by a polyptych of eleven large canvases of hemp inspired by the plots and colours of the annual fowering of the Pian Grande and on the other side by a chaotic explosion of variegated rubble, the recovery of which entailed both operational and interpretative diffculties, because they were linked both to the extraction and to the identifcation of the most suitable survey techniques. As part of the study undertaken, the measurement and graphic restitution of the individual rubble was aimed at enhancing its identity value, celebrated through the recomposition of a fragmented whole, scattered among voids. Making measurable the poetic space that marks the gap between suffering and hope. Keywords: earthquake, resilience, identity, rubble, measure. https://doi.org/10.26375/disegno.7.2020.14