notes on vivisezioneurbana9_a suivre…

these are a few notes on the performance you took part in today, which connect and reflect on the work you received instructions for a week ago, and the actual frame and formulation of this event, caused by a national general strike of the public transport.

:: a general overview of vivisezioneurbana

vivisezioneurbana is a group of actions performed in and on the urban fabric, and the development of tools of reception and filtration that, through an act of deconstruction, aim at giving a new perception of urban space. formazero develops a priori tools of analysis that induce prescribed actions on the object of its analysis.

the results of such research are processed afterwards and transformed into a relational object.

certain prescriptions provoke a situation in which the subject becomes distracted from superimposing a personal take on the object of analysis. the photographic or video documentation – meant as a debris of the programmed experience – results in what we could call “self representation of the urban fabric”, and by not aiming for authoriality, it aims at becoming a collective work. the installation which re-produces the debris of the experience is not a mere formal act, but a moment when the material is tested and the participants can evaluate and rethink.

 

:: project a:

staring from such premises, the first project we submitted focused on:

–the juxtaposition of a dense city centre and the anonymity of the suburbs as a metaphor of hospitality in between tourism and migration.

–the development of the city in relation to its urban inertia and the distinct polarisation that has taken place in the last few years between the gentrified centre and the suburbs

the urban train track seemed to be an ideal vector to explore the complex of these issues.

to dissect and perceive the urban fabric by utilising a system of transportation that allows for linearity and velocity seemed to us the best choice to describe such complexity.

we chose three itineraries (nord, flaminia; sud-est, casilina; sud-ovest, ostiense) for specific reasons:

–these are the first three metropolitan train lines of rome, activated after the development of the city beyond the aurelian walls (1920) and it is not by chance that they follow the three directions indicated in the urban plan of  1931 for the development of a city that influenced further developments in rome.

–these three train lines connect the centre with those neighbourhoods that are more densely inhabited by migrants and the working class.

it seemed to us that these train routes could be functional in a specific analysis of the city.

 

:: project b (vivisezioneurbana9_a suivre…):

due to the strike we could not make use of this logic; therefore we decided to work in an opposite direction, as well as in continuity to the premises of the first project.

the plan a intended to underline the sudden separation between the center and the periphery – while affirming the fact that rome can only be comprehended by knowing both aspects. this new project starts on one hand from an analysis of the stereotyped image of rome which we wanted to deconstructed, and on the other hand from the idea that as a citizen one perceives the urban space as a series of individual itineraries as a daily practice, thus building alternative urban forms.

the starting point, largo argentina, has been chosen because to us it represents a strong metaphore of the city and one that can reveal rome’s contradictions and distonia.

largo argentina is a place that visualises all the different uses and interpretation of the city as a whole.

it is a system of layers, in a very literal way. it is a square and at the same is used as a passage, a place of (fast) transition.

its center, that loosely reminds of urban walls, is a hole, a space that cannot be used, and that can only be looked at: thus assimilating the modern tourist to a voyeur.

the rest of the square is characterised by two of the most important streets for the urban traffic, bus stops, a taxi stand, a tram stop and large and busy sidewalks, that while attempting to accomplish their social role, lead to two places that act as meeting points/squares: the bookshop feltrinelli (during the day), the theatre teatro argentina (during the evening).

from the square you can reach the touristic city center (piazza venezia, colosseo, pantheon, piazza navona, campo de’ fiori, cancelleria, castel sant’angelo, vaticano…) as well as places for a domestic use (ministeries, institutions, workshops, shops..)

in brief, the thousand itineraries that compose the city meet in this very place, and are reflected by the diversity of both the social groups and the different reasons of who uses this space.

_why, then, this performance? in part we want to leave the answer to you, in part to build a structure that acts as a parody on the negation of the fruition of the city and of its perception.

the performance is a synthesis of the neurotic use of who daily performs the city and of the identically neurotic touristic fruition.

by forcing you to explore the significant center from which we wanted you to depart, we decided to distract you from it, or at least to alter your perception of it by giving you a specific serier of tasks.

we attempted therefore to impede you from choosing your itinerary among rome’s beautiful alleys (thus making you act as a citizen in its daily routine) and at the same time by pushing to its extreme the ritual of taking photographs and orienting yourself (thus making of you an epitome of the idea of tourism).

 

:: vivisezioneurbana15

the individuality that observes the world passes through the act of seeing. culture, automatic stratification of superficial interpretations of the others passes through individuality. the framing eye puts the existence into a manichean frame: what is inside and outside this slice of reality represents being and not being, choosing and not choosing, without any possibility of misunderstanding. the framing eye chooses and kills. and reality becomes a representation, a fragment of space and time saved from the other reality that continues to live. the autograph and autobiographical act of a conscience that saves from this other reality just enough time and space to justify an idea. the photographic act freezes the instant in which representation and reality coexist inside the frame. this instant is twice geometrical, being a concept that becomes a sign and a segment, necessarily parallelepiped, of a reality selected by a rational conscience. there is no possibility for silence in all this. silence intended as the need to reset, to revise the equilibrium of things, to deny all superstructures to see otherness beyond an eye creating its own identity. to recreate silence into this kind of geometry is to deny geometry itself, to deny purpose. it means to silence the need to represent the world, reducing the gaze into a dull filter that thinks it can swallow everything creatively when all it does is to regurgitate fragments of negation. to restart from a necessity that is no more to superimpose our identity on existence is a way to extract from it potential empty spaces, endless listening pauses. listening to our surroundings, never passively recording what is in motion but understanding the thing’s frail inner laws… to return to the irrational and pure mathematics of relationships, to create the discipline of silence. through the same clearness we generally reconstruct something incomprehensible in the end. to use rules in order to free ourselves from them, from these gags that deny individuality and allow all the rest to exist and to represent itself. to reverse the rules realizing that we too are part of the same game. to recognize impediment, a possibility of emancipation from a state of enforced and artificial necessity, because beyond ideas what will not be thought and what is not thinkable exists. to release photography from the illusion of representing through a gaze that presumes to choose. stop  believing that we can choose. photography must be freed from photography, from the pervasive need of photography, from an aggression of existence that makes us obsessed creators of visions. everything exists in spite of our conscience, which names and recognizes. to find the meaning of things, we have to have lost them first or never have possessed them at all. [traslation by luana rifuggio]

::the work

is the outcome of a complex research of privation of the gaze and of choice using a john cage inspired methodology that matches casual procedures with arranged devices. the images have been composed by superimposing four times the negative (north, south, east, west) achieved using a large format camera provided with a 90 mm lens (at 1.70 m from the soil) on a 6x9 mm plate (c41). the places photographed have been reached through mathematical and casual principles applied to the road map of rome. these materials will be put together with 15 sounds of the city (obtained with the same method) using a data processing software (max msp) that will work them out in real time following illimited number of patterns.

 

:: vivisezioneurbana60

vivisezioneurbana_60 is a study about time and space circularity, and it is part of our work of scanning and sectioning the urban texture. we made a continuous video sequence of 60 minutes, filming the city from the grande raccordo anulare (a ring highway around the city) on a car for 60 kilometers of the  whole ring in 60 minutes at 60 kilometers per hour speed. the video was digitalized and overlapped on the same video going backwards in time. there is a double annihilation of (circular) space and time. there is a single frame, in the middle of the video (the frame number 45.000), where the two sequences are identical, and time and space seem to implode, and then re-explode ad infinitum.