The city on stage
Editorial for Stormi. Trajectories on Associate Artists, issue 3, 2022
Issued by Piccolo Teatro di Milano
‘Houses remain silent’ — in Russian Molčat Doma — is the image chosen by the Minsk-based band of the same name to describe its relationship with the city and with the past. One thinks of the concrete ghosts of brutalist architecture, central to the unfinished metropolitan projects of the former USSR: anachronistic, imposing places, true black holes that still dominate the urban landscape, like variants of a possible contemporary world. The case of Molčat Doma is not an isolated one. The American band Pere Ubu, with the album Dub Housing, also ironised the failures of social housing. Independent music, in short, listens to metropolises, absorbing the soundscapes that emerge during explorations through their streets.
A similar trajectory now seems to interest, and to unite, many art forms, theatre foremost among them, also with the aim of reshaping public space through artistic projects. The wide range of approaches within this line of research extends from collective itinerant outings, such as Rimini Protokoll’s Cargo Texas Toolhouse, where the landscape becomes a sequence of fleeting glimpses seen from the window of a lorry, to solitary walkabouts, with all that the loss of a material guide entails during a performative walk. It is precisely through this latter format that lacasadargilla developed its adaptation of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, placing the Milanese territory at the centre of its inquiry in all its heterogeneity.
Acting as witness to a melancholic sense of communal consciousness, the text, written by Fabrizio Sinisi, traces seven possible itineraries. These are overlaid with, and related to, Laing’s own autobiography, reimagining different neighbourhoods as narrative miniatures of the city according to the various forms of solitude that inhabit them. In initiatives of this kind, anomalous buildings and peripheral areas encountered along the way become protagonists of the artistic action precisely because of their aesthetic qualities. They are fundamental organisms within the intimate psychogeographies of those who live there.
But how can an artist’s intention modify our conception of landscape? What does their responsibility consist of when rereading urban space through new symbols? These are not new questions. Over the past century, various intellectuals have articulated responses to them, albeit from perspectives opposed to the current one. Such was the role of the nineteenth-century flâneur, for whom, as Benjamin notes in The Arcades Project, the urban grid represented ‘the realisation of the ancient human dream of the labyrinth’, a place in which to lose oneself freely and almost unconsciously.
A similar approach characterised the Dada group, which in April 1921 arranged to meet, via a bizarre collage manifesto, outside a little-known church, from which they planned to set off on a collective excursion through the streets of Paris. A complete failure. Because of the rain, no one showed up. And yet this example of programmatic nomadism reveals the strong inclination, already present in the artistic culture of the early twentieth century, towards forging a new relationship with the urban environment.
Today, however, the intention no longer seems to be that of consciously getting lost in the city’s meanders, but rather of redesigning the city through wandering, exercising a form of control. The proliferation of walkabouts and site-specific works has taken on the shape of clear narratives, defined by a beginning and an end. What emerges is a transformative space which, to quote Benjamin again, ‘opens itself’ to those who traverse it ‘like a landscape and encloses them like a room’. Here the artist appears to take on the role of a dowser, someone who once located hidden springs, orienting themselves through the cardinal points of an itinerary of encounters that, beyond surprising and engaging, is perceived by its followers as the trace of a narrative intention.
It is no coincidence that the experience of Milan, The Lonely City always goes beyond the structural outline devised by lacasadargilla. Each participant, independently weaving correspondences between the surrounding world and the dramaturgy they are listening to, is given the chance to re-recognise a familiar reality through their own hidden semantics. One may even radically change one’s idea of the city’s potential, discovering within it a multiplication of coexisting metropolises. The result is the activation of a mental process akin to parallel montage. From the juxtaposition of sound and image, mediated by the artist’s intention, an implicit tension is created between events, a shared meaning that allows the participant to move freely out of the podcast narrative to focus on the surrounding world, and back again.
But is it still appropriate to speak of spectators? The question of what differentiates these ‘wanderers’ from an audience as such would require further specification. Rimini Protokoll offer an effective image, describing the group as a ‘horde’, a collectivity governed by entropy, almost an assembly of deserters, called upon to realise what it means no longer to be constrained, and protected, by the containment measures of theatre. This is what happens in Remote Milano (2014), the Milanese version of the Berlin collective’s Remote X, a guided walk led by a robotic, impersonal voice through emblematic locations of the Lombard capital.
In such a context, internalising the reality one is immersed in, thanks to the suggestions generated by the narrative, collides with the need to share, or even negotiate, the experiential space with a group of strangers. Isolated within the walk and yet part of the horde, each person must take account of the presence of others and therefore sacrifice a degree of autonomy. These are the compromises the contemporary flâneur must accept, recognising themselves instead as a component of a flock-like audience. By actively participating in the artistic initiative through wandering, they come to feel closer to the role of performer in the act of producing meaning.
What emerges is a framework of horizontal relationships, within which one feels called upon to delineate a new ‘architecture of the landscape’, understood as an ‘action of symbolic, as well as physical, transformation of anthropic space’, to borrow Francesco Careri’s words from Walkscapes. Following a performance through historic monuments and abandoned spaces often provokes a gradual evaporation of the layers of meaning these environments hold within the collective imagination.
In this sense, we are not far from the idea that everything would be periphery, present in the architectural utopia of New Babylon, Constant Nieuwenhuys’s unrealised project. It imagined a post-capitalist macrostructure where, as the Dutch sculptor sought to visualise through drawings, sketches, and texts, creativity could free individuals from the chains of productive labour, renewing society.
This flattening of hierarchies within territories can also involve human physicality, which becomes fused with such a process. This is the case with Veduta (2016) by the collective MK, winners of the Silver Lion in 2014, where spectators, positioned among balconies and glass façades overlooking Piazza Maggiore, watch a dance unfolding in Bologna’s ‘agora’ while wearing headphones. What is achieved is a blending of private and public. The spectator, within the intimate space of a home, participates in something that unfolds among the arcades and towers of the city, inhabited by dancing bodies that stir the stillness of the place.
The attainment of a new perspective on places is also the aim of urbex practices, explorations of buildings reclaimed by nature. Particularly compelling are the results of the collective DOM, whose study of urban voids feeds into a wide production of radio programmes and performances, one need only think of The Man Who Walks, recently presented in Milan, constructing geographies of alternative realities. In a contemporary moment marked by anxious questions about possible apocalypses, this kind of theatre redirects such tendencies by installing itself precisely within the city’s penumbras.
As in Tabula rasa. You came into this house to destroy, the dilapidated houses of Terni become an unviolated refuge where, amid cracks, plants, and flowers, a new life is celebrated, one that persists undisturbed in perpetual regeneration. Through this operation, there is also an attempt to return to a form of stage, one that nonetheless incorporates the aesthetics of ruin. The mystery and enchantment of Tabula rasa are concentrated within a single house that speaks for all others. The passage from anthropomorphic to wild space is mirrored in the animal-like movements of a performer imbued with post-human vitality. The architectures of catastrophe are thus overturned, becoming witnesses of an aftermath capable of signalling unexpected rebirths.
On reflection, the opening statement could itself be framed as a question. Do houses remain silent? Or, more generally, do buildings, neighbourhoods, and cities sleep, or are they teeming with other meanings? The answer is anything but obvious. After all, the very trajectories devised by lacasadargilla can only provoke specific reactions depending on what Milan represents for each of us. Any place, even one that appears devoid of identity, becomes a resonant chamber for how it communicates with individual existence. Performative traversals thus draw new collective maps for new communities.
Leonardo Ravioli, Alessandro Stracuzzi
