Spazi chiusi. Prigioni, manicomi, confinamenti, eremitaggi, stanze| Università di Cagliari - Università Roma | 5 June 2020, 2020
La mia riflessione parte da un cronotopo che sta al confine tra spazi chiusi e aperti, tra l’inte... more La mia riflessione parte da un cronotopo che sta al confine tra spazi chiusi e aperti, tra l’interno e l’esterno, un limite che separa l’io dall’altro.
È il cronotopo della soglia, quello che Bachtin in Estetica e romanzo definisce come lo spazio della crisi, ma anche della svolta. Da qui nasce l’idea di parlare di sconfinamenti urbani, intesi come possibilità di un’articolazione dialettica, come costruzione di una relazione dinamica che consente il superamento delle dicotomie. Nasce così una nuova configurazione relazionale tra interno e esterno, soggetto e oggetto, corpo e ambiente, mobilità e immobilità. Il mio racconto è strutturato attorno a tre spazi liminari a cui corrispondono altrettanti capitoli: la finestra, la mappa, la vetrina. Sono a mio avviso soglie che invitano ad andare oltre, ma anche punti di partenza, da cui iniziare a tracciare una mappa incompleta delle nostre città durante la pandemia.
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È il cronotopo della soglia, quello che Bachtin in Estetica e romanzo definisce come lo spazio della crisi, ma anche della svolta. Da qui nasce l’idea di parlare di sconfinamenti urbani, intesi come possibilità di un’articolazione dialettica, come costruzione di una relazione dinamica che consente il superamento delle dicotomie. Nasce così una nuova configurazione relazionale tra interno e esterno, soggetto e oggetto, corpo e ambiente, mobilità e immobilità. Il mio racconto è strutturato attorno a tre spazi liminari a cui corrispondono altrettanti capitoli: la finestra, la mappa, la vetrina. Sono a mio avviso soglie che invitano ad andare oltre, ma anche punti di partenza, da cui iniziare a tracciare una mappa incompleta delle nostre città durante la pandemia.
In this paper I will focus on a creative practice in which I am involved in as both a cultural geographer and a comics author myself: with an urban sociologist, Adriano Cancellieri, I am currently curating the anthology Quartieri. Un viaggio al centro delle periferie italiane [Neighborhoods. A travel through Italian peripheries] (Cancellieri and Peterle, 2019) and composing one of the 5 short comics stories collected in it. These short stories will be set in 5 peripheral neighborhoods of 5 Italian cities (Padua, Bologna, Milan, Palermo and Rome), each of which faces issues concerning integration/migration; spatial/social marginality; the perception/narration of identity and of a sense of community. In particular, our short story on the ‘multi-ethnic neighborhood’ of Arcella, in the city of Padua, is a result of ethnographic accounts we collected during fieldwork, interviewing recent migrants and long-term residents, shopkeepers and private citizens, representatives of associations and resident committees. Through its creative composition practice, the comic book emerged as a ‘place of mediation’ between different cultural and geographical perspectives (Hawkins, 2015). Constantly unfolding in the confrontation between authors, stories, and the protagonists of the stories collected during fieldwork, comics build potential ‘spaces of encounter’ for disparate subjectivities and voices to emerge, meet and dialogue.
I will explore these suggestions by proposing three examples: first, a graphic novel by Will Eisner published in 1987 and titled "The building"; second, "Living with buildings and walking with ghosts" the latest work by the well-known psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, which appeared in 2018 and became also an exhibition; third, a personal flânerie in the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens Estate, that I’ve realised in February 2019 while I was living in Tower Hamlets, East London. Following Sinclair’s exploration, I will focus on brutalist estates as architectural bodies that have peculiar stories to tell thanks, to their controversial and critical position in contemporary London as in many other cities. But, How can we listen to voices of buildings, interpreting them as non-human narrators that keep stories hidden in them? Furthermore, “is there a link between the walking and storytelling practice of the flâneur and the encounter with the (im)mobilities
of buildings?”
develop the concept of the river Po as a “liquid chronotope” (Conte 2008, Bauman 2000, Bakhtin
1975) that works both on the metaphorical-narrative and the physical-geographical level. On the one
hand the river Po works as a narrative line and guides Celati's narration replacing the structuring
function of the plot; on the other hand it represents a geographical element that orients both the
narrator's and our perfomative tour through the “new Italian landscape”.
Leeuw 2013) by suggesting that we consider graphic creative writing as a way to redraw research in
cultural geography, just as “graphic ethnography” was proposed for the feld of anthropology (Dennison
2015; Ingold 2011). In addiction, through the enacting of “carto-centred” narratives (Rossetto 2014),
this contribution endeavours to involve the audience in a creative writing and post-representational
mapping experience (fctionally) based in Berlin.
Starting from a cross-border geoliterary perspective, my analysis refers both to the concept of the ‘novel-geographer’ by geographer Marc Brosseau (1995), and to Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical approach (2009) to interpret the ‘territorial prose’ by many Italian writers as a way to understand and (re)inhabit contemporary (peri)urban spaces...
lineare della mappa” (Westphal) è divenuta il
paradigma dominante, mentre lo statuto ontologico
stesso della carta si è fatto oggetto di riflessione
transdisciplinare. Spostando l'attenzione dalla sua
natura statica, ci si è infatti concentrati sugli
elementi mobili, narrativi ed esperienziali della
carta, che torna ad essere racconto di mondi
possibili, anziché ‘rappresentazione’ della realtà. Se
la città contemporanea è insieme rizomatico di
frammenti in costante movimento, spazio
dell'attraversamento la cui geografia mobile è in
perpetua trasformazione, anche la mappa urbana si
è fatta “nomade” (Careri), costantemente
ridisegnata lungo e durante il percorso...
Although many spatial science scholars have investigated at length the Italian ʻdiffused cityʼ (Cosgrove 2007), literary critics have failed to concentrate on the textual representation of this primarily Venetian spatial phenomenon. Geographers, sociologists, architects and urban planners have variously analysed the urbanisation of Northern Italy from different perspectives as a paradigmatic example for analyzing also other urban formations around the world. However, the ʻdiffused urbanisationʼ of Italian northeast has never been interpreted as something that could also provide new and unforeseen literary insights. It is still almost unexplored from the perspective of literary theory and criticism, having been constantly put on the back burner and overshadowed by the historically authoritative, culturally dominant and literarily prevailing, worldwide known key case study of literary Venice. Taking this 'secondariness' into account and starting from these multifocal geographical and urban analyses, the aim of this paper is to embrace a new literary perspective that goes beyond Venice's dominant ʻliterary archetypeʼ, focusing on the large-mesh, polycentric, or even ʻnon-centric networkʼ (Cosgrove 2007) of the second cities that make up the Venetian ʻcittà diffusaʼ.
Où sont les frontières de la ville? Il s’agit d’une question trop complexe, qui exigerait que nous soyons capables de définir avec certitude, sans ambiguïté, ce qu’on entend par ville et, par là, ce qu’est la ville et où se trouve ce qui n’est pas ville. Il est sans doute plus facile de se poser la question suivante: quelles sont les marges, dentelées, mobiles, poreuses de la ville contemporaine? Et à partir de quel point de vue est-il possible d’en embrasser, d’un seul regard, la fragmentation complexe, l’expansion incontrôlable, l’identité vivante et multiple?
una narrazione scritta, può orientare il lettore nella pagina e nel mondo come una mappa? Il rapporto fra narrativa e carte geografiche oggi è al centro di diversi dibattiti volti ad esplorare le potenzialità e le problematicità del legame fra il linguaggio apparentemente oggettivo della cartografia e il linguaggio soggettivo e pregnante del raccontare.
With ‘narrative forms and practices’ as a shared starting point, contributions will be related (but not limited) to:
• State of the art of literary mobilities
• Narrative creative methods (writing, storytelling etc.)
• Narration of non-human mobilities
• Fictional and non-fictional mobilities
• Mobile maps and mappings
• Mobile practices as generative of motion, routes, encounters and place
• Im-mobilities/blockages, failures and disruptions
• Collective and individual mobilities
• Embodied mobility, privileged and excluded bodies
• Virtual mobilities
• The temporalities and rhythms of mobility
• Mobilization of affect and atmospheres
• Infrastructures, systems, assemblages
• Unsettling concepts of migration, diaspora, postcolonialism, non-Western experiences of mobility
• Interrogating distance and scale (global, planetary, home, bodies)
• Moving through elements (water, air, earth, etc.)
• Circuits of authorship and readership
• Mobilities in comics and verbo-visual modes of expression
June 18-19 2020 @ Lancaster House Hotel, Lancaster University, UK
Guest speaker: Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, UK
In order to participate, please email your paper proposal (300 words max) and a short biography (including details of up to 4 relevant publications) to unrulylandscapes@gmail.com by 3 March 2020.
Panels are open to the public. To attend, follow the zoom links provided in the programme.
More info at: https://www.mobilityandhumanities.it/unruly-landscapes/