(...)
Casa Jasmina was fun. We held parties there, and invited people to create, laugh and take risks with us, from artists to astronauts, from makers to cooks. I was especially happy to host babies and toddlers to test our family-home inventions. It was eye-opening to see innocent children outsmart the plywood chairs, hop on the body temperature mattresses, spit out the organic food in disgust, and ignore the avant-garde techno-artworks. Toddlers care nothing for technical smartness, and they will inherit our smart rubbish.
Eventually we hit the wall. We promised we would engage with Casa Jasmina for two years, and we enjoyed it, but after five years, we had new personal priorities and the technical landscape had shifted. We were volunteers in a utopian experiment, but we weren’t landlords or real-estate developers. We had surfed to some rather undeserved fame and glory, in press events, conferences, classroom lectures… even design prizes. Not too bad for people who had deliberately avoided any business model at all. It lasted longer than John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 conceptual bed-in in Amsterdam. And no one has yet to build another Casa Jasmina.
Also, the factory that hosted our project is still developing in other directions. Turin, this ancient city, is valiantly re-developing itself. No other city would have asked us to build a “Casa Jasmina.” Our house project was the product of a creative local tech scene. It was a local-global confluence of happy events.
In Italian there is an expression, “concomittanza degli eventi,” or coexistence of events. When this “concomittanza” goes bad, wars break out, as it did in ex-Yugoslavia, a socialist utopia that lacked an exit strategy. When the concomittanza is happy, though, pleasant new things blossom in the world, like pumpkins on the compost heap.
So let Casa Jasmina — a sense of which is conveyed by these miscellaneous photographs — become another of the many urban myths of Turin, a small legend of a special time and place where people sat on the floor pondering a digitized future and re-inventing Vermouth with their own herbal ingredients....
