INTERVALS GAIA

DESIGN STUDIO

[galina]

One of my favourite textures I spotted was waiting for a sandwich near le marché des enfants rouges: bejewelled manhole cover, so abundantly joyful

[tokyostreetphoto]

Soba Noodles, Shinjuku 新宿

[miamlsunshine]

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IL BATTITO

Amarcord, F. Fellini

C’è un punto della città dove non passa quasi nessuno. Lì il rumore è puro ritmo meccanico: ventilazione, neon, passi lontani. Quel posto mi ipnotizza. Mi piazzo al centro e chiudo gli occhi per sentire il battito. Non il mio. Il suo.

In After Dark di Haruki Murakami, la voce narrante è una telecamera mobile senza corpo, che sorvola Tokyo come un occhio artificiale: è la città stessa a guardare, a prendere appunti, a respirare nel buio. Mi chiedo cosa significhi davvero questo “battito”: è struttura? È traffico? È un ritmo sociale? Sento che se imparassi a decodificarlo potrei progettare meglio, potrei progettare con la città, non sulla città. E forse è questo che sto cercando.

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LA SOGLIA

Ogni mattina mi fermo un secondo sulla soglia, prima di entrare nella città. È un gesto minuscolo, quasi ridicolo, ma è lì che avviene lo spostamento: da Gaia a parte di un organismo più grande. Mi chiedo sempre cosa sto attraversando: un confine? Un diaframma? Un’apertura della città stessa, come se mi aspirasse dentro il suo torace.

Quando leggo N.K. Jemisin, nel suo romanzo The City We Became, scopro che non sono l’unica a pensare alle città come a corpi che respirano, lottano, vivono attraverso noi e nonostante noi. E allora la mia soglia diventa un battito: la città mi prende dentro, mi metabolizza. E io mi lascio mangiare, ogni giorno da capo.

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a day in Florence

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a day in the Dolomites

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strolling through

Lago di Garda: Sirmione, Salò, Garda, Gardone

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strolling through

Napoli and Costiera Amalfitana

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strolling through

Roma

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strolling through

Bolzano

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strolling through

Innsbruck

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Peter Greenaway

The Stairs

As cinema approached its one hundredth year, filmmaker Peter Greenaway (British, b. 1942) embarked on perhaps his most ambitious project to date: The Stairs. This massive installation project would take place in ten cities around the world over the course of a decade, with each installment focusing on one of ten themes related to the language of cinema (location, audience, projection, and so on). At the same time, each exhibition would be an attempt to push the medium’s language forward, displacing film from the darkened theater to the space of everyday life. 

In 1994, Geneva, Switzerland, was the first city to host The Stairs. Greenaway and his team placed the custom-built white, wooden staircases at various locations around the city, from highly populated tourist sites to quiet residential streets. Though they varied in shape and size, the staircases were united by a common attribute: a circular “peephole” at the top, which offered a view that the artist conceived as a live, ongoing “movie” of the landscape. According to Greenaway, the staircases were “special viewing-platforms, modest positions of privilege from which to view the sites at all times of the day and night.” While the Geneva installation was followed in 1995 by one in Munich, Germany, the remaining eight were never realized.

Peter Greenaway—The Stairs: Geneva, the Location | George Eastman Museum

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Travelling and standing still in themselves are concepts that clash with each other, almost a paradox, but somehow perhaps it is still possible. Photographs have an incredible power, for example those hanging beside the bed or those in the living room imprinted in beautiful photo albums that we rarely take a good look at; but sometimes you just have to look at them carefully and you are back on the road in no time at all.

That is why I think it is important to print and keep those pictures, not just the 'aesthetically pleasing' ones, but the ones that mean something to us, the ones that make us travel in our heads.

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Elegantly attired, his gray hair swept back and curling at his neck, a handkerchief fountaining out of his jacket pocket, Jep is the very picture of the flâneur, the 19th-century urban stroller and spectator immortalized by Charles Baudelaire and in whom, Walter Benjamin wrote, “the joy of watching is triumphant.” What the flâneur watches is modern life, and other people.

Benjamin wondered why the flâneur, born in Paris, did not spring from the glorious archaeological sprawl that is Rome. “But perhaps in Rome even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved.” He suggested that for a flâneur, Rome’s “great reminiscences, the historical frissons” are so much junk better left to the tourists. The tourist, that familiar figure of contempt, plays a crucial role in “The Great Beauty,” which opens with a prologue set in the Janiculum, a hill west of the Tiber. There, scattered amid busts of heroes of the Risorgimento, the 19th-century movement for Italian unification, a smattering of Italians mill about while a group of Japanese tourists take in the sights — a view, a city, a people, a history — that, Mr. Sorrentino suggests, the natives no longer necessarily see.

‘The Great Beauty,’ Starring Toni Servillo - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

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The Great Beauty - La Grande Bellezza

Paolo Sorrentino

2013

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Sorrentino’s film is suffused with nostalgia for origins: the Saint tells Jep that she eats only roots because ‘roots are important’; Dadina teaches Jep that real friendship means occasionally helping the other feel like a child again; Romano ultimately leaves Rome to return to his hometown, but not before writing a play that seeks to redeem nostalgia as the only thing left to those who have lost faith in the future; Jep’s ultimate redemption becomes possible only through a return to the home-bound memory of his first love.

This nostalgia for origins sits uncomfortably with Sorrentino’s repeated references, in various interviews, to the figure of the flâneur. He wanted, he says, to propose a re-valuation of the semantic potential of the usually maligned figure of the tourist, attributing to it some of the subversive potential formerly associated with the flâneur. But while the figure of the tourist is central to the film’s opening sequence, setting up the rest of the film as a reflection on the different gazes directed at the Eternal City – the flâneur’s versus the tourist’s – and while Jep, himself disillusioned with Rome, declares that ‘The best people in Rome are the tourists’, in various interviews Sorrentino seems to make no meaningful distinction between the flâneur and the tourist. When asked why he chose to make a film about Rome, he replies that as someone originally from the provinces, he ‘still look[s] at it with the eyes of a lover, a tourist…a Neapolitan in Rome’.

Narrating the ‘Eternal City’ in ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960) and ‘La Grande Bellezza’ (2013) - NECSUS (necsus-ejms.org)