Stalker Unbounded

“STALKER UNBOUNDED”
Peter Lang
The Rise of Heterotopia: On Public Space and the Architecture of the Everyday in a Post-Civil Society

EAAE-conference 2005 Leuven, Belgium, 26-28 may 2005 KULeuven, Belgium September 16, 2006

Stalker’s explorations of “actual” territories in and around Rome in October of 1995 opened new ground in urban research, and came at a time when Rome was experiencing a surge in population growth and physical expansion. But rather then a fact finding excursion or a survey of the built landscape, Stalker descended into the deep folds of the urban countryside packing a deceptively critical set of observational tools. Stalker intentionally sought to construct an experiential passage that would refute architectural and urban precedents, that would establish new advances in conceptual artistic practices, and perhaps most significantly that would not intervene there where local conditions would be most transient and fragile. (it is of course difficult to discuss the group Stalker as a homogeneous entity, considering the significant contributions made by each of its members. Nonetheless, for the sake of this essay, and in homage to Richard Brautigan’s 1967 “Trout Fishing in America”,(Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1989) I will use the term Stalker in the singular person) In the Spring of 1990, sparked by the Italian government’s heavy handed attempts to privatize higher education, several of Stalker’s future members assumed lead roles in organizing a series of highly effective student agitations at the School of Architecture at Valle Giulia. These student demonstrations, teach-ins, street spectacles and art actions echoed the revolutionary events that took place barely a few months earlier in 1989, that opened the fatal breech in the monumental divide between political and ideological world systems. In Italy, geographically proximate to some of the hottest zones in political transition, the revolt against the government intervention in the universities spread from one end of the country to the other. In the meantime, new unexpected waves of immigrants began arriving in masses on the italian shores. In effect be most significant in the group’s investigations throughout the nineties was the way the territories around Rome were themselves dramatically changing, becoming in the process far more impenetrable and reclusive even as the city began its expansion into the surrounding periphery and became a target for new waves of immigration. Each of their successive actions in and around the capital, focusing on areas of abandonment within the city and along the Tiber river, succeeded in further galvanizing their ad hoc operational style. With each action the collective was able to draw the public’s attention, this despite the numerous roadblocks set in place by Rome’s official city administration. By the time a cohesive group was formed to organize the exploration around Rome The stakes were high, experience demonstrated that official channels and commercial interests were perilously close to wiping out these marginal areas located so deep inside the city fabric—despite the clear lack of information on these extraneous areas. that despite its informal demeanor and backwoods camping profile was nonetheless openly conscious of its delicate position poised on the verge of two vastly divergent worlds, so near yet so far apart. But the group was determined to forge a different kind of architectural discourse, clearly outside the stringent canons of the architectural academia that well into the late eighties in Italy continued to focus on tightly bound formalist post-modern definitions on architecture and the city. Instead the group drew closer to the pioneers of contemporary art, integrating lessons from the Surrealists, the Situationists International and the American Land Artists—specifically Richard Long and Robert Smithson; as well as a number of Italian directors, beginning with Pasolini and Antonioni. Before 1989 one already could witness the strains of overcrowded shantytowns, degraded housing estates and major ecological disasters. But in the massive human scramble following the collapse of the post-war U.S.-Soviet entente, the political wildfires, the collapsing frontiers, the massive population movements and effects of global warming irrevocably transformed the present landscape. The first discernable patterns within this paradigm shift pointed to a new form of global society, unrestricted by national boundaries or regional frontiers but divided by its access to communication networks and transport corridors. The outcome would, as Zygmunt Bauman observed already in 1998, engender: (t)wo worlds, two perceptions of the world, two strategies. (Bauman, 100)- Bauman posited the following “paradox”: this postmodern reality of the deregulated/ privatized/consumerist world, the globalizing/localizing world, finds only a pale, one-sided and grossly distorted reflection in the postmodernist narrative. The hybridization and defeat of essentialisms proclaimed by the postmodernist eulogy of the “globalizing’ world are far from conveying the complexity and sharp contradictions tearing that world apart. (Bauman, 101). There remains a vast arena that is, according to Bauman, not critically articulated. (Bauman 101 see 1.) It is this other arena of our global society, these neglected communities and their everyday struggles for survival that is in fact the critical force in the current global chain of events. Yet over the last fifteen years this segment of globalization’s outcasts has born the brunt of official policies enacted with little regard to human costs. Confronted with growing waves of refugees, the industrialized nations, dependent precisely on these groups to boost their limited labor pools, paradoxically began tightening their borders and expelling “undocumented” populations. Despite increased militarization, refugees continued to penetrate across national borders and settle into these zones of economic privilege. Such draconian policies of containment, seeking to restrict the growing foreign presence, ultimately forces these transient communities into an underground network of non sanctioned relations: prostitution, black-market economy, and other illegal activities. But what if this human face of globalization holds the best chance for society’s future advancement? What can we make of these new population mixes and their creative contributions to contemporary society? The increasing presence of what are considered in Europe “extracommunitari” the growing number of legal and “illegal” immigrants finding work and refuge within and around some of the European regions’ major urban centers in the course of the last dozen years have undeniably led to major changes in the urban fabric. These communities have introduced much needed diversity and economic stimuli, while extending and consolidating communications networks that connect across the globe. Athens, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin and London have become increasingly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, reflecting the massive influx of populations that have made their way to Europe from the Mediterranean, Central Europe and the Near East. Just as importantly, these cities have become inextricably linked with the far-flung peripheral areas, through new air corridors, trade and transportation links. In short, these growing communities are bringing a new generation of life to the city, maybe coming closest to reflecting a genuinely heterogeneous transformation in contemporary society’s basic makeup. These new communities represent an uncertain future, and one that cannot be easily charted according to earlier working methods. Quite the contrary, many of the lessons on urbanism, planning and city architecture accrued over the last century were developed based an entirely different political paradigm, Occidental in principle, privileging national identity, defending national interests, promoting Imperial gains, but also imbibed in democratic ideals and human self determination. What is new after 1989, in the aftermath of “globalization” is the gradual realization that the local is now part of the global, that national interests are related to transnational systems, and the environment is an inherently global condition outside any single country’s partial interests. David Harvey grasped this quandary when he recognized that new means and methods would be required to tease out the true nature of these worlds that exist tucked away within the city’s extensive urban fabric. Harvey suggests that, (w)e may also seek to represent the way this space is emotively and affectively as well as materially lived by means of poetic images, photographic compositions, artistic reconstructions. The strange spatio-temporality of a dream, a fantasy, a hidden longing, a lsot memory or even a peculiar thrill or tingle of fear as we walk down a street can be given representation through the works of art that ultimately always have a mundane presence in absolute space and time. (Harvey 2006, 131)
Flaminia Genari, an independent art critic, recorded an interview with the group Stalker on the terrace of a private house in Testaccio, Rome in June of 1996. She succeeded in drawing out several key issues in their work that would prophetically define Stalker’s future trajectory. Present at the interview that day were Lorenzo Romito, Francesco Careri, Romolo Ottaviani, Aldo Innocenzi, Giovanna Ripepi, along with several others who participated in the “Walk-About-Rome” in October of the previous year.(ftnt 1) Over the course of the interview it would become increasingly apparent that the group took up the idea of the walk in an extreme gesture of defiance: foremost against the complacent attitude prevalent in schools of architecture at the time that considered the urban voids of the city as nothing more than blank zones on the map frozen in space and time. Genari’s interview navigated through the genesis of the Roman walk, touching upon issues that spanned from the group’s instigative university education to their growing resistance to any kind of on-site intervention, from architectural project to art event; and that eventually led them to withdraw entirely from any kind of “action” that would leave traces on the city’s marginalized territories. Stalker’s principle ideological stance, against any form of indiscriminate intervention in or on these neglected urban spaces, evolved over time, gelling through a series of earlier experiments—not all necessarily successful, but nonetheless through a process that was enriched by the dynamically different individual attitudes brought together in this one loosely defined collective. In such an essay as this, where Stalker’s history and working practices are tangled together in a tight amalgam of theory and methodology, it is important to distinguish the group’s interactive dynamic and the deeply complex territorial context to which they have been inextricably drawn. The oddly imperceptible transformations to the peripheral urban landscapes linked to the massive social and political reconfigurations in the aftermath of 1989. . Besides coming to recognize these emergent territories, by what means can one define them? Or, more succinctly, how have these spaces contribute to the definition of the contemporary condition that stretches between the hemispheric and the hyper local? If we are willing to accept that something new and radically creative is taking place in these furrows and pockets of the city, does this suggest a heterotopic condition in the making? The discovery of the involuntary community and marginal territories. the abandonment of the “project” the refusal to erase one reality in the conceited pursuit of another. the recognition that the ground context is far richer than any imposition might ever achieve. The gradual realization that any form of engagement or intervention in the local would be artificially deterministic if not outright threatening to the actual environment as it exists in the present, and its state of isolation. the incalculable encounter with the non quantifiable: In fact the lost empty void condition of a specific territory, a blank on the map, was recognized as an unmediated space of vitality. the emergent consensus that to even project the notion of an outside imposition on a specific locality (in a form of colonialism or in the name of progress) would be an assertion of arrogance. Projecting, building, constructing, even the introduction of unofficial gardens, like graffiti art or performance art (mostly composed of an art public in the know or art critics, were considered as alternatives to the more aggressive architectural gestures, leading Stalker to a conscious gesture of inaction. The letting go of these spaces, purposefully withdrawing from the temptation to interfere in their destiny, through their re-arranging or erasure, the negation of that something which existed inside the spaces not demarcated or assigned with official value… that something outside determinate or designated space is in itself a heterotopia by default, an enclave that acquires autonomy despite its open nature.

For a new society—superindustrial, fast-paced, fragmented, filled with bizarre styles, customs and choices, –is erupting in our midst. An alien culture is swiftly displacing the one in which most of us have our roots. Change is avalanching upon our heads, and most people are unprepared to cope with it. …In the past, when the pace of change was leisurely, the substitution of one culture for another tended to stretch over centuries. Today we experience a millennium of change in a few brief decades. Time is compressed. This means that the emergent superindustrial society will, itself, be swept away in the tidal wave of change—even before we have learned to cope adequately with it.
Alvin Toffler, “Futureshock” Playboy (December, 1970)

If Toffler recognized, back in 1970, the impossibility of overtaking what he perceived to be a swiftly catalyzing technological surge propelling unprecedented cultural change, he could barely have foreseen just how much more indeterminate the world would become following the final exhaustion at the end of the eighties of the-US/Soviet conflict. The collapse in 1989 of a political entente premised on mutually assured destruction and the subsequent desegregation of a tenuous set of confrontational global alliances ultimately provoked severe and unpredictable reactions that led to the disintegration of an already fragile network of geo-political relations. Released from decades of US-Soviet political and economic subjugation numerous countries seized the chance to engage in a massive geopolitical correction. Political scores were settled, often through violent means; new political alliances forged or old ones abandoned; governments reversed if not otherwise deposed. And in the midst thousands of refugees moved perilously across borders, waterways, mountain passes and war zones (ftn. See for example the mass exodus of East Germans to the West through Hungary that began on September 11 of 1989). Confronted with growing waves of refugees, the industrialized nations, dependent precisely on these groups to boost their limited labor pools, paradoxically began tightening their borders and expelling “undocumented” populations. Despite increased militarization, refugees continued to penetrate across national borders and settle into these zones of economic privilege. Such draconian policies of containment, seeking to restrict the growing foreign presence, ultimately forces these transient communities into an underground network of non sanctioned relations: prostitution, black-market economy, and other illegal activities. But what if this human face of globalization holds the best chance for society’s future advancement? What can we make of these new population mixes and their creative contributions to contemporary society?
The increasing presence of what are considered in Europe “extracommunitari” the growing number of legal and “illegal” immigrants finding work and refuge within and around some of the European regions’ major urban centers in the course of the last dozen years have undeniably led to major changes in the urban fabric. These communities have introduced much needed diversity and economic stimuli, while extending and consolidating communications networks that connect across the globe. _______________________________________________________________ Footnotes 1. Postmodernism, one of the many possible accounts of postmodern reality, merely articulates a caste-bound experience of the globals—the vociferous, highly audible and influential, yet relatively narrow category of exterritorial and globetrotters. It leaves unaccounted for and unarticulated other experience, which are also an integral part of the postmodern scene. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York, Columbia University Press 1998)100-101 2. David Harvey The Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, (New York, Verso, 2006)