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WalkscapesWalking As An Aesthetic PracticeFrancesco CareriCulicidae Architectural Pressan imprint of Culicidae Press, LLC922 5TH STAmes, IA 50010USAwww.culicidaepress.comeditor@culicidaepress.com+1 (352) 388-3848+1 (515) 462-0278 WALKSCAPES: WALKING AS AN AESTHETIC PRACTICEPublished originally by Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2002© Francesco Careri / Editorial Gustavo Gili, SL, Barcelona, 2002 
And for the current edition,© Culicidae Press, Ames, IA, 2017© Introduction: Gilles Tiberghien© English translation: Steven Piccolo© Foreword: Christopher Flynn© Interior and cover design: polytektonAll rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereonmay be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic,electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, orinformation storage and retrieval systems—without written permission ofthe publisher. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied,with regard of the accuracy of the information contained in this book andcannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissionsthat may be made.to Zonzo, with affectionContentsForeword (2017) by Christopher FlynnWalkscapes Ten Years Later (2013)Nomad City (2002) by Gilles A. TiberghienWalkscapesErrare Humanum Est...Anti WalkLand WalkTransurbanceToward A New Expansion of The FieldErrare Humanum Est... Cain, Abel, and ArchitectureNomadic Space and “Erratic” SpaceFrom the Path to the MenhirThe Benben and the KaAnti WalkThe Dada VisitThe Urban ReadymadeSurrealist DeambulationCity as Amniotic FluidFrom Banal City to Unconscious CityLettrist Drifting (Dérive)The Theory of the DériveL’Archipel Influentiel Playful City versus Bourgeois CityWorld as a Nomadic LabyrinthLand WalkThe Voyage of Tony SmithField ExpansionsFrom the Menhir to the PathTreading the WorldThe Wayfarer on the MapThe Suburban OdysseyThe Entropic LandscapeTransurbanceBarefoot in the ChaosThe Fractal ArchipelagoZonzoBibliographyPhoto CreditsAcknowledgments Christopher FlynnForeword(2017)The planners who designed the roads flowing south from Calaisnever imagined pedestrians. The pebbled pavement is gravel and sandstrewn, and sidewalks make only occasional appearances. The houses andbusinesses one passes are not designed for the eye of the passerby. WhenWilliam Wordsworth walked from the northern tip of France to the Alps in1790 on the eve of the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, he firstfound himself in “a mean city,” where he saw “How bright a face is wornwhen joy of one / Is joy for tens of millions.” From there he headed southfor the Alps: direct through hamlets, towns,Gaudy with reliques of that festival,Flowers left to wither on triumphal arcs,And window-garlands. On the public roads,And, once, three days successively, through pathsBy which our toilsome journey was abridged,Among sequestered villages we walkedAnd found benevolence and blessednessSpread like a fragrance everywhere, when springHath left no corner of the land untouched …A summer ago I went looking for roads through the countrysideWordsworth hurried across on his way to gaze at Mont Blanc. I had not readFrancesco Careri’s Walkscapes yet.But after coming across it right after that journey, which involved alot of imitation and repetition, it became clear to me that it spoke directly tothat act of walking across the sad streets south of that mean city just acrossthe channel from Dover. Careri traces a genealogy of walking across thetwentieth century here, but the aggregate does more than that. This is asmart book, and more importantly, a useful one for those interested in whatit means to walk through the banal cityscapes and suburbs of a world whoserelationship to urbanism is once more in the midst of radical change. Mywalk from Calais to the Alps was intended as a re-creation for adocumentary film project, but after reading Walkscapes I realized, or ratherdecided, it was its own errance, as much an architectural act as apilgrimage. In other works, this book changed my mind, giving me a richerway of seeing an experience already filled with interesting complications.Near the end of Walkscapes, Careri throws out the names of a fewcities the Stalker Group has walked in acts he and they call ‘transurbance.’“Losing itself amidst urban amnesias Stalker has encountered those spacesDada defined as banal and those places the Surrealists defined as theunconscious of the city.” Careri focuses on Robert Smithson’s walks acrossan area most would consider an anti-landscape aggressively projecting ananti-aesthetic, the crumbling outskirts of Passaic, N.J., in the 1960s. For me,the focus on Smithson, a Minimalist artist, and his work in the late 1960s,spins a thread in the web of connections that make up Walkscapes and itsexplorations into walking as art that brings Wordsworth and the group ofwalkers he inspired into the same conversation. My failed attempt to followin Wordsworth’s footsteps—the roads aren’t the same, and even if some ofthem are, they’re paved, and run along canals dug long after the poet madehis walk, across a landscape that has been radically changed and changedagain—brought me to a landscape that reminded me of the New Jerseywhere I grew up, and the Passaic that figures prominently in Careri’saccount of those whose footsteps he identifies as antecedents.So when I call this book ‘useful,’ I mean that it has helped me teaseout some of the things I have been trying to think about walks I have beenmaking that connect my suburban New Jersey boyhood to my intentionalfailures to repeat the walks British Romantic poets made in the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a time when cities all over theworld have been re-urbanizing after having emptied out in the last decadesin the twentieth century, this book and its focus on how we encounter thecityscape cover similar ground to that touched by Kierkegaard in Repetition(1843), a book about the impossibility of recreating any experience.Kierkegaard has a perfect night at the theater, watching the play, sitting in abox with a view of other spectators who form a tableau that strikes him asperfect. The next night he returns, but the play is not exactly the same, thepeople in the boxes around him do not arouse the same interest, and fromthis he develops the idea that experiences are unique, no matter how onetries to recreate them. I knew this with the walks I took throughout Europe,so failure was built into my expectations. Careri’s focus here on Smithsonand his experiments in Passaic, a town where I worked for a newspaper andlived, and his own recursive walks across European cities that have beenwalked by previous artists, brought about a set of connections in my mindthat made sense of it all. Not a communicable kind of sense, but one thatsomehow put Passaic, Calais, Wordsworth, Kierkegaard and the idea of theWalkscape into a functional harmony.Errare humanum est, Careri reminds us, going back to an earlyhistory of walkers as architects, to nomads in story and reality. To err meansto wander, and to wander is to leave the path, and before long, to go wrong.Like many writers who have tackled the concept of nomadism throughouttime, Careri recounts the tale of Cain and Abel, but in this book he bringsout the complications of Cain’s story. The first murderer may have been thefirst nomad, but before that, he was the first farmer, and his brother was thefirst shepherd. The move from pastoral life to nomadic travel initiates thekinds of moves this book examines throughout the twentieth century.Nomads in the strictest sense aren’t aimless. They bring cattle to market,goods to a place of trading, families to food and water. In this sense of theterm, to err is human because to wander is often necessary for humanity.Careri doesn’t let the reader forget thatduring the period oftranshumance—by a great multitude of different people. Along the way themenhirs attracted the attention of the wayfarer to communicate the presenceof singular facts and information regarding the surrounding territory,information useful for the continuation of the journey, such as changes ofdirection, points of passage, intersections, passes, dangers. But perhaps themenhirs also indicated places where ritual celebrations were held,connected to wandering: sacred paths, initiations, processions, games,contests, dances, theatrical and musical performances. The entire voyage,which had been the place of events, stories, and myths around or along themenhirs, encountered a space for representation of itself: tales of travels andlegends were celebrated and ritualized around the stones planted in theground. Therefore the journey-path created, through the menhirs, a newtype of space, a space around, which the Egyptians later were able totransform into a space inside. The menhirs were positioned in relation to theroad structure, but in contrast to what one might expect, they did notfunction as perspective poles—they were placed laterally with respect to thepath. In the case of multiple menhirs lined up in a row, besides defining adirection, they separated two spaces, or more precisely they architecturallyconstructed the border of a space to be crossed or perhaps danced in, arhythmical space, geometrically defined, that represents the firstarchitecture, in the sense of physical construction of a complex symbolicspace, a ‘space of going’ and therefore not a ‘space of staying:’ the sametype of space that was to be constructed in the first Egyptian works ofarchitecture.While in the world of the villages and the cultivated fields theerratic path had been transformed into a trail and then a road, giving rise tothe architecture of the city, in the empty spaces of the nomadic universe thepath conserves its symbolic elements of Paleolithic roaming and transfersthem into the sacred spaces of the Egyptian temples. From this moment onit would be increasingly difficult to separate architecture from the path. The Benben and the KaThe Egyptian civilization is a stationary one, but still closely linkedto its nomadic origins, conserving a substantial continuity with thePaleolithic cultures in its symbolic and religious expressions. The menhirand the path, the architectural archetypes of the earlier ages, aretransformed by the Egyptian civilization into the first true works ofarchitecture, the former as volume and the latter as interior space.According to Sigfried Giedion, the birth of the first volume in spacewas represented in Egyptian culture by the myth of the benben, “the firststone to emerge from the chaos,” a monolith said to represent the verticalpetrifaction of the first sunbeam, thus connected to the symbolism of themenhirs, the obelisks, and the pyramids. The birth of interior space, on theother hand, is connected to the concept of the ka, the symbol of eternalwandering, a sort of divine spirit that symbolized movement, life, energyand embodies the memory of the perilous migrations of the Paleolithicperiod. The symbol of the benben is a conical monolith with a luminous tip,while the hieroglyphic for ka is composed of two arms raised skyward,probably representing the act of transmission of divine energy and ofworship of the Sun. The two symbols would seem to be present in themenhirs placed along the routes of transhumance in Sardinia, at whose top asign is sculpted that could be interpreted as a sunbeam, with a large figureat the center that is very similar to the symbol of ka with its raised arms. Kais one of man’s most ancient symbols, and because it is frequently found inmany different civilizations at great distances from one another, we couldsuppose that it was comprehensible for the multitudes of people whocrossed the continents on foot: a symbol understood by all the errantpopulations of the Paleolithic period.Giedion states that the “organization of the large temples of the NewKingdom expressed the idea of eternal wandering,” and that the first worksof architecture in stone were the result of the wanderings of the ka. One ofthe most spectacular Egyptian constructions is the great hypostyle ofKarnak, a passage inside enormous rows of parallel columns that remindsus (not only for the uncanny name resemblance, containing the root ‘ka’) ofthe spatial rhythm of Carnac, the largest alignment of menhirs in the world,probably utilized for sacred dances and ritual processions.12 Thus therewould appear to be a continuity between the sacred paths flanked by rowsof megaliths and the first Egyptian hypostyle architecture flanked byfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXcolumns. In the Egyptian temples, with the cella obscura which containedthe image of the god, each part of the complex was conceived as a place oftransit. The large hypostyles with their forest of columns served as apassageway for the king and for the procession that took the god from onesanctuary to another. There were no spaces designed to contain acongregation attending a religious function, but there were spaces to walkthrough, built for the initiations that made the eternal wandering sacred andsymbolic.13Before the physical transformation of the face of the Earth thatbegan with the menhirs, the territory had undergone a culturaltransformation based on walking, an action that took place only on thesurface of the planet, without penetrating it. The space of the path,therefore, precedes architectonic space; it is an immaterial space withsymbolic-religious meanings. For thousands of years, when the physicalconstruction of a symbolic place was still unthinkable, the crossing of spacerepresented an aesthetic means through which it was possible to inhabit theworld. Religion, dance, music, and narrative in its epic forms ofgeographical description and initiation of entire peoples were associatedwith wandering. The path/story was transformed into a literary genreconnected to the voyage, the description and representation of space. Theattempts to go ‘beyond art,’ referred to in the next chapter, have utilized thepath to undermine the forms of traditional representation and to arrive ataction constructed in real space.Up to this point we have seen that the problem of the birth ofarchitecture, be it as a principle of structuring the landscape, or as thearchitecture of interior space, is connected to the erratic path and itsnomadic evolution.Once this important point has been clarified, and thus once we haverefuted the erroneous but common conviction that architecture is aninvention of the sedentary, settled world rather than the nomadic world, wewill not plunge into the subsequent history of architecture, but stop here atthe phase of wandering, of the path seen as symbolic action rather than as asign or object in space. What follows is a sort of history of the city-as-path,from the first forms of the Dada readymade to the experiences of the 1960s.The aesthetic practice of walking has freed itself, in the last century, fromall religious ritual connotations to assume the increasingly evidentappearance of an independent art form. In order for this secularization offile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe practice of walking and its return to the purely aesthetic sphere to takeplace, it was necessary to wait for the avant-gardes of the 20th century,when Dada made the first lay pilgrimage to a Christian church.Notes for Errare Humanum Est1 This interpretation of Genesis is the basis of many texts on nomadicspace, we find it in: Eugenio Turri, Gli uomini delle tende, EdizioniComunità, Milano 1983; Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, Viking, NewYork 1987; Eric J. Leed, La mente del viaggiatore. Dall’Odisseaalturismo globale, Il mulino, Bologna 1992. See also the interpretationof the birth of architecture in Frank Lloyd Wright, The living City,Horizon Press, New York 1958.2 Genesis 4.12 and 4.15.3 Genesis 4.20-21.4 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, op. cit, p. 259.5 Richard Sennet, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and SocialLife of Cities, Knopf, New York 1992, p. 17.6 On the role of Sahel as a margin between nomadism andsedentaryism and the perception of emptiness in nomadic space, seeEugenio Turri: For the nomad - writes Turri - the desert smells of voidand in this regard quotes a phrase from Lawrence: «This,» said theArabs, «is the best perfume, it smells of nothing.» His life knew theair, the winds, the sun and the light, the open spaces, and an immensevoid. There was no fruitfulness in nature; no human effort appeared:only the sky on the top, the whole earth on the bottom. Nothing else.»Eugenio Turri, Gli uomini delle tende…, op cit., p.40.7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: capitalisme etschizophrénie, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1980, p. 50. (Englishversion: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,Atholone Press, London, 1987).8 On the walkabout of Aboriginal Australians in addition to BruceChatwin, The Songlines…, op. cit., see also: Franco La Cecla,Perdersi, l’uomo senza ambiente, Laterza, Bari 1988; Franco LaCecla, Mente locale. Per un’antropologia dell’abitare, elèuthera,Milano 1993; Barbara Glowczewski, YAPA. Peintres aborigènes,Baudoin Lebon, Paris 1991; Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message DownUnder, MM Co. 1991; Kenneth White, L’art de la terre, in : “Ligeia”n°11-12, Paris 1992, p. 76; Theodor G.H. Strehlow, CentralAustralian Religion. Personal Monototemism in a PolytotemicCommunity, Flinders Press, South Australia 1993.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX9 On the nuragic and prenuragic history of Sardinia see: GiovanniLilliu, La civiltà dei sardi, dal paleolitico all’età dei nuraghi, NuovaERI, Torino 1963; Sergio Frau, Le colonne d’Ercole. Un inchiesta,neon, Roma 2002; Leonardo Melis, Shardana. I popoli del mare,PTM, Mogoro 2002; Enrico Atzeni, La scoperta delle Statue-Menhir.Trent’anni di ricerche archeologiche nel territorio di Laconi, Cuec,Cagliari 2004.10 See Michel Cazenave, Enciclopédie de Simboles, La PochothèqueL.G.F., Paris 1996; Jean Chevalier et Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionnairedes Symboles, Lafont/Jupiter, Paris 1969.11 On the spread of megalithicism see Paolo Malagrinò, Dolmen emenhir di Puglia, Schena, Fasano, 1982. On the location of menhirsalong the intercontinental routes see Arthur Breizh, Le ossa deldrago. Sentieri magici dai menhir ai celti, Keltia, Aosta 1996. Onreligious pilgrimages see Edith Turner e Victor Turner, Image andPilgrimage in Christian Culture, Columbia University Press, NewYork 1978. For the youthful wandering of Buddha, Jesus andMuhammad see Odon Vallet, Trois marcheurs: Bouddha, Jésus,Mahomet, in: Qu’est-ce qu’une route?, “Les Cahiers de médiologie”n° 2, Paris 1997.12 There are many similarities between the Spatiality of the Karnakhypostyle in Egypt and the alignments of Carnac in Brittany, and theirrelationships with the Ka. I wrote more about it on Francesco Careri,Pasear, detenerse, Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 2016.13 On concepts of ka and benben and their relationship with thepyramids and the first Egyptian temples see Sigfried Giedion, TheEternal Present. A Contribution on Constancy and Change, PantheonBooks, New York, 1964; Serge Sauneron e Jean Yoyotte, LaNaissance du Monde, in “Sources Orientales”, vol. I, Paris 1959, pp.82-83.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXAnti Walk The Dada VisitOn 14 April 1921 in Paris, at three in the afternoon, in pouring rain,the Dada movement had an appointment to meet in front of the church ofSaint-Julien-le-Pauvre. This action was to be the first in a series of urbanexcursions to the banal places of the city. It is a conscious aestheticoperation backed up by press releases, proclamations, flyers andphotographic documentation. The visit opens the Grande Saison Dada, aseason of public operations designed to give new energy to the group,which was in a moment of the doldrums and internal debate.1 André Bretonrecalled the project as a substantial failure: “Passing from the halls ofspectacle to the open air will not suffice to put an end to the Dadarecyclings.”2 In spite of Breton’s words, this first visit remains the mostimportant Dada intervention in the city. The passage from the halls ofspectacle to “the open air” was, in fact, the first step in a long series ofexcursions, deambulations and ‘driftings’ that crossed the entire century asa form of anti-art.The first Dada urban readymade marks the passage from therepresentation of motion to the construction of an aesthetic action to beeffected in the reality of everyday life. In the first years of the century thetheme of motion had become one of the main areas of research of the avant-gardes. Movement and speed had emerged as a new urban presence capableof imprinting itself on the canvases of the painters and the pages of thepoets. At first, attempts were made to capture movement with traditionalmeans of representation. Later, after the Dada experience, there was apassage from the representation of motion to the practice of movement inreal space. With the Dada visits and the subsequent deambulations of theSurrealists the action of passing through space was utilized as an aestheticform capable of taking the place of representation, and therefore of the artsystem in general.Dada effected the passage from the representation of the city of thefuture to the habitation of the city of the banal. The Futurist city wascrossed by flows of energy and eddies of the human masses, a city that hadlost any possibility of static vision, set in motion by the speeding vehicles,the lights and noises, the multiplication of perspective vantage points andthe continuous metamorphosis of space.3 But the research of the Futurists,though it was based on a sophisticated interpretation of the new urbanspaces and the events that took place there, stopped at the phase offile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXrepresentation, without going beyond to penetrate the field of action. Theact of exploration and acoustic, visual, and tactile perception of urbanspaces in transformation was not considered an aesthetic action in its ownright. The Futurists did not intervene in the urban environment; their soiréestook place in literary circles, art galleries and theaters,and almost never(with the exception of brawls and political assemblies) in the reality of thecity.Tristan Tzara, in the manifesto of 1916, had declared that Dada is“decidedly against the future,” indicating that every sort of possibleuniverse is already available in the present. The urban actions performed inthe early 1920s by the Parisian group that had formed around Breton werealready very distant from the proclamations of the Futurists. The Dada cityis a city of the banal that has abandoned all the hyper-technological utopiasof Futurism. The frequentation and visiting of insipid places represented,for the Dadaists, a concrete way of arriving at the total secularization of art,so as to achieve a union between art and life, the sublime and the quotidian.It is interesting to note that the setting for the first Dada action is preciselymodern Paris, the city already frequented, at the end of the previouscentury, by the flâneur, that ephemeral character who, in his rebellionagainst modernity, killed time by enjoying manifestations of the unusualand the absurd, when wandering about the city. Dada raised the tradition offlânerie to the level of an aesthetic operation. The Parisian walk describedby Walter Benjamin in the 1920s is utilized as an art form that inscribesitself directly in real space and time, rather than on a medium. Paris,therefore, was the first city to offer itself as an ideal territory for thoseartistic experiences that sought to give life to the revolutionary project ofgoing beyond art pursued by the Surrealists and the Situationists.4file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe Urban ReadymadeIn 1917 Duchamp had proposed the Woolworth Building in NewYork as his own ready-made work, but this was still an architectonic objectand not a public space. The urban readymade realized at Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, on the other hand, is the first symbolic operation that attributesaesthetic value to a space rather than an object. Dada progressed fromintroducing a banal object into the space of art to introducing art—thepersons and bodies of the Dada artists—into a banal place in the city. That“new interpretation of nature applied this time not to art, but to life,”announced in the press release explaining the Saint-Julien-le-Pauvreoperation, is a revolutionary appeal to life versus art and the quotidianversus the aesthetic, challenging the traditional modes of urbanintervention, a field of action usually reserved for architects and townplanners. Before the Dada action, artistic activity could be inserted in publicspace only through operations of decoration, such as the installation ofsculptural objects in squares and parks. The Dada intervention offers artistsa new possibility for working on the city. Before the Dada visit any artistwho wanted to present a place to his audience had to shift the real place intoa place designated by means of representation, with the inevitableconsequence of a subjective interpretation.Dada did not intervene in the place by inserting an object or byremoving others. It brought the artist, or the group of artists, directly to thesite in question, without effecting any material operation, without leavingphysical traces other than the documentation of the operation—flyers,photographs, articles, stories—and without any kind of subsequentelaboration.Among the photos documenting the event there is one showing thegroup in the garden of the church, perhaps the most important image of theentire operation. We see the Dada group posing on an untended patch ofground. The image shows none of the actions that had accompanied theevent, such as the reading of texts selected at random from a Laroussedictionary, the giving of gifts to passers-by, or the attempts to get people toleave their homes and come into the street. The subject of the photo is thepresence of that particular group in the city, aware of the action they areperforming and conscious of what they are doing, namely nothing. Thework lies in having thought of the action to perform, rather than in theaction itself. Perhaps this is why the other actions in the program never tookplace. The project was not taken to its conclusion because it was alreadyfinished. Having performed the action in that particular place was theequivalent of having performed it on the entire city. We don’t know whichof the Dada artists had suggested that site—“an abandoned church, knownto few people, surrounded at the time by a sort of terrain vague enclosed byfences”—nor the reasons behind the choice.But its position, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, seems to indicatethat this particular garden around a church was selected precisely as if itwere an abandoned garden near one’s own home: a space to investigate,familiar but unknown, seldom visited but evident, a banal, useless spacewhich like so many others wouldn’t really have any reason to exist. Theexploration of the city and the continuing discovery of situations toinvestigate is possible anywhere, even in the heart of Parisian tourismzones, even along the Seine on the rive gauche facing the cathedral of NotreDame. With the exploration of the banal, Dada launched the application ofFreud’s research to the unconscious of the city. This idea was later to bedeveloped by the Surrealists and the Situationists.5 file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXSurrealist DeambulationThree years after the Dada visit, in May 1924, the Paris Dada grouporganized another intervention in real space. This time, instead of anencounter in a selected place in the city, the plan was for an erratic journeyin a vast natural territory. The voyage is the materialization of the lâcheztout of Breton, a veritable path of initiation that marks the definitivepassage from Dada to Surrealism. In this period the Dada events werebeginning to meet with less enthusiasm, relations with Tristan Tzara weredeteriorating, and a need was felt to gather energy and prepare for a newbreakthrough. It was in this delicate moment that Louis Aragon, AndréBreton, Max Morise and Roger Vitrac organized a deambulation in opencountry in the center of France. The group decided to set forth from Paris,going to Blois, a small town selected randomly on the map, by train andthen continuing on foot as far as Romorantin. Breton recalled this “quartetdeambulation,” conversing and walking for many consecutive days, as an“exploration between waking life and dream life.”6 After returning from thetrip he wrote the introduction to Poisson soluble, which was to become thefirst Surrealist Manifesto, in which we find the first definition of the termSurrealism: “pure psychic automatism with which one aims at expressing,whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning ofthought.”7 The trip, undertaken without aim or destination, had beentransformed into a form of automatic writing in real space, a literary/ruralroaming imprinted directly on the map of a mental territory.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX As opposed to the Dada excursion, this time the setting for theaction is not the city, but an ‘empty’ territory. The deambulation—a termthat already contains the essence of disorientation and self-abandon to theunconscious—took place amidst woods, countryside, paths, and small ruralsettlements. It would appear that the aim of going beyond the real into thedream world was accompanied by a desire for a return to vast, uninhabitedspaces, at the limits of real space. The Surrealist path was positioned out oftime, crossing the childhood of the world, taking on the archetypal forms ofwandering in the empathic territories of the primitive universe. Spaceappears as an active, pulsating subject, an autonomous producer ofaffections and relations. It is a living organism with its own character, acounterpart with shifting moods, with which it is possible to establish arelationship of mutual exchange. The path unwinds amidst snares anddangers, provoking a strong state of apprehension in the person walking, inboth senses of ‘feeling fear’ and ‘grasping’ or ‘learning.’ This empathicterritory penetrates down to the deepest strata of the mind, evoking imagesof other worlds in which reality and nightmare live side by side,transporting the being into a state of unconsciousness where the ego is nolonger definite. Deambulation is the achievement of a state of hypnosis bywalking, a disorienting loss of control. It is a medium through which toenter into contact with the unconscious part of the territory. City as Amniotic FluidJust as the other excursions announced by Dada were nevercompleted, so the rural wanderings of the Surrealists happened only once.But the continuing deambulation in groups through the outskirts of Paris—an interminable stroll, as Jacques Baron called it—did become one of themost assiduously practiced activities of the Surrealists for investigating thatunconscious part of the city that eluded bourgeois transformation.In 1924 Louis Aragon published Le Paysan de Paris, whose titleseems to be the inversion of the rural excursion. While previously fourParisians got lost in the countryside, now the city is described from theviewpoint of a paysan, a peasant who must grapple with the vertigo of themodern provoked by the nascent metropolis. The book is a sort of guide tothe quotidian marvels concealed inside the modern city. It is the descriptionof those unknown places and fragments of life that unfold far from touristitineraries, in a sort of submerged, undecipherable universe. During anocturnal deambulation, the Park of Buttes-Chaumont is described as theplace “where the unconscious of the city lurks,” a terrain of experienceswhere it is possible to meet up with extraordinary surprises and revelations.8In Le Paysan de Paris, Mirella Bandini finds a “recurring simile ofthe sea, of its mobile, labyrinthine space, its vastness; like the sea, Paris hasthe sense of the maternal womb and of nourishing liquid, of incessantagitation, of a totality.”9 It is in this amniotic fluid, where everything growsand is spontaneously transformed, out of sight, that the endless walks, theencounters, the trouvailles (discoveries of objets trouvés), the unexpectedevents, and collective games happen. These early deambulations led to theidea of giving form to the perception of the space of the city in cartesinfluentielles that take their place alongside the vision of the liquid city inSituationist cartography. The idea was to make maps based on thevariations of perception obtained when walking through the urbanenvironment, to include the impulses caused by the city in the affectivesentiments of the pedestrian. Breton believed in the possibility of drawingmaps in which the places we like are in white, the places we try to avoid inblack, while the rest, in gray, would represent the zones in which sensationsof attraction and repulsion alternate. These sensations regarding certainsettings could be perceived, for example, walking down a familiar streetwhere “if we pay the slightest bit of attention we can recognize zones offile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXwell-being and malaise that alternate, for which we could determine therespective lengths.”10 file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXFrom Banal City to Unconscious CityThe Futurist city of flux and speed had been transformed by Dadainto a place in which to notice the banal and the ridiculous, in which tounmask the farce of the bourgeois city, a public place in which to thumbnoses at institutional culture. The Surrealists abandoned the nihilism ofDada and moved toward a positive project. Using the groundwork laid bynascent psychoanalytical theory, they plunged beyond Dadaist negation inthe conviction that “something is hidden behind there.” Beyond theterritories of the banal exist the territories of the unconscious, beyondnegation the discovery of a new world that must be investigated beforebeing rejected or greeted with mere derision. The Surrealists believed thaturban space could be crossed like our mind, that a non-visible reality canreveal itself in the city. The Surrealist research is a sort of psychologicalinvestigation of one’s relationship with urban reality, an operation alreadyapplied with success through automatic writing and hypnotic dreams, andwhich can also be directly applied in walking through the city.The Surrealist city is an organism that produces and concealsterritories to be explored, landscapes in which to get lost and to endlesslyexperience the sensation of everyday wonder.Dada had glimpsed the fact that the city could be an aesthetic spacein which to operate through quotidian/symbolic actions, and had urgedartists to abandon the usual forms of representation, pointing the waytoward direct intervention in public space. Surrealism, perhaps without yetfully understanding its importance as an aesthetic form, utilized walking—the most natural and everyday act of man—as a means by which toinvestigate and unveil the unconscious zones of the city, those parts thatelude planned control and constitute the unexpressed, untranslatablecomponent in traditional representations. The Situationists were to accusethe Surrealists of failing to take the potential of the Dada project to itsextreme consequences. The ‘artless,’ art without artwork or artist, therejection of representation and personal talent, the pursuit of an anonymous,collective and revolutionary art, would be combined, along with thepractice of walking, in the wandering of the Lettrist/Situationists.Lettrist Drifting (Dérive)In the early 1950s the Lettrist International, which became theSituationist International in 1957, saw getting lost in the city as a concreteexpressive possibility of anti-art, adopting it as an aesthetic-political meansby which to undermine the postwar capitalist system.After the Dada ‘visit’ and the Surrealist ‘deambulation’ a new termwas coined: the dérive, literally ‘drift,’ a recreational collective act that notonly aims at defining the unconscious zones of the city, but which—withthe help of the concept of ‘psychogeography’—attempts to investigate thepsychic effects of the urban context on the individual. The dérive is theconstruction and implementation of new forms of behavior in real life, therealization of an alternative way of inhabiting the city, a lifestyle situatedoutside and against the rules of bourgeois society, with the aim of goingbeyond the deambulation of the Surrealists. Apart from having conductedtheir deambulation in the country rather than the city, the Surrealists aredefined as ‘imbeciles’ for not having understood—though it was right undertheir noses—the potential of deambulation as a collective art form, as anaesthetic operation that, if performed in a group, had the power to annul theindividual components of the artwork, a fundamental concept for Dada andSurrealism. The miserable failure of the Surrealist deambulation was due,according to the Situationists, to the exaggerated importance assigned to theunconscious and to chance, categories that were still included in theLettrists’ practice, but in a diluted form, closer to reality, within aconstructed method of investigation whose field of action must be life, andtherefore the real city. Lettrist drifting develops the subjective interpretationof the city already begun by the Surrealists, but with the aim oftransformingit into an objective method of exploration of the city: theurban space is an objective passional terrain rather than merely subjective-unconscious.In Surrealism, attempts to realize a new use of life effectivelycoexisted with a reactionary flight from the real. And in this sense theimportance attributed to dreams is interpreted by the Lettrists as the resultof a bourgeois incapacity to realize a new lifestyle in the real world. Theconstruction of the situation and the practice of the dérive are based,instead, on concrete control of the means and forms of behavior that can bedirectly experienced in the city. The Lettrists rejected the idea of aseparation between alienating, boring real life and a marvelous imaginarylife: reality itself had to become marvelous. It was no longer the time tocelebrate the unconscious of the city, it was time to experiment withsuperior ways of living through the construction of situations in everydayreality: it was time to act, not to dream.The practice of walking in a group, lending attention to unexpectedstimuli, passing entire nights bar-hopping, discussing, dreaming of arevolution that seemed imminent, became a form of rejection of the systemfor the Lettrists: a means of escaping from bourgeois life and rejecting therules of the art system. The dérive was, in fact, an action that would have ahard time fitting into the art system, as it consisted in constructing themodes of a situation whose consumption left no traces. It was a fleetingaction, an immediate instant to be experienced in the present momentwithout considering its representation and conservation in time. Anaesthetic activity that fit perfectly into the Dada logic of anti-art.The drifting of the Lettrists, which began as juvenile perdition in theParisian nights, over time took on the character of an antagonistic theory. In1952 a small group of young writers, including Guy Debord, Gil Wolman,Michèle Bernstein, Mohamed Dahou, Jacques Fillon and Gilles Ivain, brokeaway from the Lettrism of Isidore Isou to found the Lettrist International“to work on the conscious, collective construction of a new civilization.”The focus of their interest was no longer poetry, but a passionate way ofliving that took the form of adventure in the urban environment: Poetry has consumed its ultimate formalisms. Beyondaesthetics, poetry lies entirely in the power men will have intheir adventures. Poetry is read on faces. Therefore it is urgentto create new faces. Poetry is in the form of the cities. Weconstruct subversion. The new beauty will be that of thesituation, temporary and experienced. [...] Poetry simply meansthe development of absolutely new forms of behavior and themeans with which to be impassioned.11file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe Theory of the DériveIn the years preceding the formation of the Situationist International,the Lettrists begin to develop a theory based on the practice of urbandrifting. The time spent in marginal zones and the description of theunconscious city in Surrealist writings became a widespread literary genrein the mid-1950s, evolving into the Lettrist texts under the guise of travelguides and manuals for using the city. In 1955 Jacques Fillon wrote hisDescription raisonnée de Paris (Itinéraire pour une nouvelle agence devoyages), a short guide with exotic, multi-ethnic itineraries to be completedon foot, from the departure point of the Lettrist headquarters on the PlaceContrescarpe. But the first essay in which the term dérive appears is theFormulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau, written in 1953 by the 19-year-oldIvan Chtcheglov (alias Gilles Ivain) who, convinced of the fact that “arational extension of […] psychoanalysis into architectural expressionbecomes more and more urgent,” describes a mutant city continuouslyvaried by its inhabitants in which “the main activity of the inhabitants willbe CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hourto the next will result in total disorientation,” through quarters whose namescorrespond to continuously changing moods.12Guy Debord is the figure who collated these stimuli and completedthe research. In 1955 he wrote his Introduction a une critique de lagéographie urbaine, in which he set out to define experimental methods for“the observation of certain processes of the random and the predictable inthe streets,”13 while in 1956 with the Théorie de la dérive a definitive stepwas taken beyond the Surrealist deambulation. As opposed to theSurrealists’ expedition, in the dérive “chance is a less important factor […]than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities havepsychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points andvortices that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” Thedérive is a constructed operation that accepts chance, but is not based on it.In fact it has a few rules: preparatory decision, based on psychogeographicmaps of the directions of penetration of the environmental unit to beanalyzed; the extension of the space of investigation can vary from theblock to the quarter, to a maximum of “the complex of a large city and itsperipheral zones;” the dérive can be effected in groups composed of two orthree people who have reached the same level of awareness, since “cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive atfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXmore objective conclusions;” the average duration is defined as one day, butcan extend to weeks or months, taking the influence of climate variations,the possibility of pauses, the idea of taking a taxi to increase personaldisorientation into account. Debord then continues, listing other urbanoperations like the “static dérive of an entire day in the Gare Saint-Lazare,”or the possible appointment […] and certain amusements of dubioustaste that have always been enjoyed among our entourage—slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition,hitchhiking non-stop and without destination through Parisduring a transportation strike in the name of adding to theconfusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden tothe public.14 file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXL’Archipel InfluentielOn 11 June 1954 at the Galerie du Passage the Lettrist exhibition“66 métagraphies influentielles” was opened. The theory of the dériveaimed “to describe a previously lacking influential cartography,” whoseprecedents are found in the writings of Breton. The Métagraphiesinfluentielles of Gil J. Wolman are collages of images and phrases cut out ofnewspapers, while the work by Gilles Ivain is a map of Paris on whichfragments of islands, archipelagos, and peninsulas cut out of a globe areplaced: the elsewhere is everywhere, even in Paris, the exotic always withinarm’s reach; all you need to do is get lost and explore your own city. Threeyears later, in 1957, as preparatory documents for the founding of theSituationist International, Jorn and Debord continued the direction of the“metagraphs” in the books Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires. The informalmarks of Jorn simulate the Danish coasts inhabited by symbols ofconsumption, while in the urban mémoires and amnesias of Debord thespurts of paint seem like dérive trails across fragments of city.Once again, in the images it is Debord who sums things up: the firsttrue Situationist psychogeographical map is his Guide psychogéographiquede Paris. It is conceived as a folding map to be distributed to tourists, but amap that invites its user to get lost. As in the Dada visits and the guide ofJacques Fillon, Debord too uses the imagery of tourism to describe the city.Opening this strange guidewe find Paris exploded in pieces, a city whoseunity has been utterly lost and in which we can recognize only fragments ofthe historical center floating in empty space. The hypothetical tourist isinstructed to follow the arrows that connect homogeneous environmentalunits based on psychogeographical surveys. The city has been filtered bysubjective experience, “measuring” on oneself and in comparison withothers the affections and passions that take form by visiting places andlistening to one’s own inner impulses.That same year Debord published another map, The Naked City:Illustration de l’hypothèse des plaques tournantes en psychogéographique.The city is nude, stripped by the dérive, and its garments float out ofcontext. The disoriented quarters are continents set adrift in a liquid space,passional terrains that wander, attracting or repulsing one another due to thecontinuous production of disorienting affective tensions. The definition ofthe parts, the distances between the plates and the thicknesses of the vectorsare the result of experienced states of mind.In the two maps the routes inside the quarters are not indicated, theplates are islands that can be crossed completely, while the arrows arefragments of all the possible dérives, trajectories in the void, mentalwanderings between memories and absences. Amidst the floating quartersthere is the empty territory of urban amnesia. The unity of the city can beachieved only through the connection of fragmentary memories. The city isa psychic landscape constructed by means of holes, entire parts areforgotten or intentionally suppressed to construct an infinity of possiblecities in the void. It seems that the dérive has begun to form affectivevortices in the city, that the continuous generation of passions has allowedthe continents to take on their own magnetic autonomy and to undertaketheir own dérive through a liquid space. The Paris of Aragon had alreadybeen an immense sea in which spontaneous life forms appeared as in anamniotic fluid, and islands and continents had already appeared in themetagraph of Gilles Ivain. But in the maps of Debord the figure ofreference, at this point, is clearly the archipelago: a series of city-islandsimmersed in an empty sea furrowed by wandering. Many of the termsutilized make reference to this: the floating plates, the islands, the currents,the vortices and, above all, the term dérive in its meaning of ‘drifting,’without direction, at the mercy of the waters, and the nautical meaning as apart of a boat, the leeboard, an enlargement and extension of the keel thatmakes it possible to go against the current and to steer. The rational and theirrational, conscious and unconscious meet in the term dérive. Constructedwandering produces new territories to be explored, new spaces to beinhabited, new routes to be run. As the Lettrists had announced, roamingwill lead “to the conscious, collective construction of a new civilization.” Playful City versus Bourgeois CityThe Situationists replaced the unconscious dream city of theSurrealists with a playful, spontaneous city. While conserving the tendencyto look for the repressed memories of the city, the Situationists replaced therandomness of Surrealist roaming with the construction of rules of thegame. To play means deliberately breaking the rules and inventing yourown, to free creative activity from socio-cultural restrictions, to designaesthetic and revolutionary actions that undermine or elude social control.The theory of the Situationists was based on an aversion for work and thepremise of an imminent transformation of the use of time in society: withthe changes in production systems and the progress of automation, worktime would be reduced in favor of free time. Therefore it was important toprotect the use of this non-productive time from the powers that be.Otherwise it would be sucked into the system of capitalist consumptionthrough the creation of induced needs. This is the very description of theprocess of spectacularization of space in progress today, in which workersmust also produce more in their free time, consuming their income insidethe system. If recreational time was increasingly being transformed into atime of passive consumption, free time would have to become a timedevoted to play, not utilitarian but ludic.15 Therefore it was urgent to preparea revolution based on desire: to seek the latent desires of people in theeveryday world, stimulating them, re-awakening them, helping them to takethe place of the wants imposed by the dominant culture. By making use oftime and space it would be possible to escape the rules of the system and toachieve and self-construct new spaces of liberty. The Situationist sloganwould come true: “living is being at home wherever you go.” Theconstruction of situations was therefore the most direct way to realize newforms of behavior in the city, and to experience the moments of what lifecould be in a freer society within urban reality.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX The Situationists saw the psychogeographical dérive as the meanswith which to strip the city naked, but also with which to construct a playfulway of reclaiming its territory: the city is a toy to be utilized at one’spleasure, a space for collective living, for the experience of alternativebehaviors, a place in which to waste useful time so as to transform it intoplayful-constructive time. It was necessary to challenge that affluence-peddled-as-happiness by bourgeois propaganda, which took the form inurban terms of the construction of houses with “all mod[ern]con[venience]s” and the organization of mobility. It was necessary to “gofrom the concept of circulation as a supplement of work and distribution inthe various functional zones of the city to one of circulation as pleasure andadventure,”16 to experience the city as a playful territory to be utilized forthe circulation of men toward an authentic life. What was needed was theconstruction of adventures. file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXWorld as a Nomadic LabyrinthThrough Constant’s New Babylon the theory of the dérivesimultaneously acquired a historical basis and a three-dimensionalarchitectural form. In 1956, in Alba, where Asger Jorn and Pinot Galliziohad set up the Experimental Laboratory of the Imaginist Bauhaus,nomadism inserted itself in the history of architecture as a critique of thefoundations of occidental society, ushering in a new territory ofdevelopment for the architectural avant-gardes of the decades to follow.17Visiting a camp of nomads on land owned by Pinot Gallizio,Constant found an entire conceptual apparatus with which he felt it possibleto refute the sedentary bases of functionalist architecture. He began workingon a project for the gypsies of Alba and soon was able to imagine a citydesigned for a new nomadic society, “a planetary-scale nomadic camp.”18The series of models he built until the mid-1970s represent the vision of aworld which, after the revolution, would be inhabited by the descendants ofAbel, by Homo Ludens who, free of the slavery of labor, could explore andat the same time transform the landscape around him. New Babylon is aplayful city, a collective work built by the architectural creativity of a newerrant society, a population that infinitely builds and rebuilds its ownlabyrinth in a new artificial landscape. The project of New Babylon wasdeveloped together with the Situationist theory of unitary urbanism, a newcreative activity of transformation of urban space that takes the Dada mythof “going beyond art” and shifts it into an initial attempt to “go beyondarchitecture.” In unitary urbanism all the arts combine in the construction ofthe space of man. The inhabitants would rediscover the primordial aptitudefor self-determinationof one’s environment, rediscovering the instinct forthe construction of one’s own home and one’s own life. The architect, likethe artist, would have to change jobs: no longer the builder of isolatedforms, but the builder of complete environments, of the scenarios of awaking dream. Architecture would thus become part of a wider-rangingactivity, and like the other arts it would disappear in favor of a unifiedactivity that sees the urban environment as the relational ground for a gameof participation.19Constant said: “For over half a century the world has been filled bythe spirit of Dada. Seen in this perspective perhaps New Babylon could becalled a response to anti-art.”20 Constant came to terms with nomadism andDada in the attempt to go beyond both. He had a dual objective: to gofile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXbeyond anti-art and to construct a nomadic city. Giulio Carlo Argan, toexplain the essence of Dada, had written: “An artistic movement thatnegates art is a contradiction: Dada is this contradiction.”21 On the subjectof New Babylon we might say the same thing: “To design a city for anomadic people that negates the city is a contradiction: New Babylon is thiscontradiction.” A double negative leads to a positive solution: a mega-structural, labyrinthine architecture, based on the sinuous line of thenomad’s journey. One step back into the Neolithic, one step forward intothe future. For the first time in history, in New Babylon walking againmaterializes an architecture conceived as the space of going. The unitaryurbanism of Constant gives rise to a new Situationist city. While in themaps of Debord the compact city was exploded into pieces, in those ofConstant the pieces are put back together to form a new city. There is nolonger a separation between the clumps of urban sod and the empty seacrisscrossed by the trails of the dérive. In New Babylon the dérive, localareas, and empty space have become an inseparable whole. The ‘plates’ ofDebord have become ‘sectors’ connected in a continuous sequence ofdifferent cities and heterogeneous cultures. The inhabitants of the entireworld can get lost in these labyrinths. The entire city is imagined as a singlespace for continuous drifting. It is no longer a sedentary city rooted to theground, but a nomadic city suspended in the air, a horizontal Tower ofBabel looming over immense territories to envelop the entire surface of theearth. Nomadism and city have become a single huge labyrinthine corridorthat travels around the world. A hyper-technological and multi-ethnic citythat is constantly transforming itself in space and time:New Babylon doesn’t end anywhere (because the Earth is round); itknows no boundaries (as there are no national economies) or collective life(as humanity is always moving). Each place is accessible to one and all.The entire Earth becomes a home for its inhabitants. Life is an infinitevoyage through a world that is changing so rapidly that it always seems likeanother.22file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXNotes for Anti Walk1 The operation Grande Saison Dada had been announced in themagazine Littérature, 19, and was described the day following thevisit in Comœdia of 15 April, in an article entitled Les Disciples deDADA à l’Église Saint-Julien-le Pauvre. The episode has beennarrated by two of the participants: Andre Parinaud (ed.), AndreBreton - Entretiens, Gallimard, Paris 1952, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Déjà jadis, René Juillard, Paris 1958. For furtherdiscussion: Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris, Jean-Jacques Pauvert,1965; Georges Hugnet, L’Aventure Dada, Galerie de l’Institut, Paris,1957. With the first visit, other excursions in the center of Paris wereannounced to the “Places that do not truly have any reason to exist”:the Louvre, the park of Buttes-Chaumont, the Gare Saint-Lazare, theCanal de l’Ourcq and Mont du Petit Cadenas (off the map). Theseexcursions never took place, but they are described in the walks in thesurrealistic novels of Louis Aragon and Andre Breton.2 André Parinaud, André Breton…, op. cit. p. 48.3 Here the reference is at the book Le mouvement by Etienne-JulesMarey edited in 1894 with the crono-photographic studies of humanlocomotion made in 1886. These are the photos that would inspire theNu descendant an escalier of Duchamp and futuristic attempts torepresent the dynamism of Balla’s paintings and Boccioni’ssculptures.4 On the theme of flânerie see: Walter Benjamin, Die Wiederkher desFlâneurs, in Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin, 1929; WalterBenjamin, Le Flâneur. Le Paris du Second Empire chez Baudelaire,in Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus,Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969 (English version: CharlesBaudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, NLB, London1973); Jean-Hubert Martin, Dérives. Itineraires surréalistes, dériveset autres parcours, in Cartes et cartographie de la Terre, CentreGeorge Pompidou, Paris 1980. Christel Hollevoet, Quand l’objet del’art est la démarche, flânerie, dérive et autres deambulations, inExposé, 2, Orléans 1995; Christel Hollevoet, Deambulation dans laville, de la flânerie et la dérive a l’apprehension de l’espace urbaindans Fluxus et l’art conceptuel, in Parachute, 68, 1992 ; AA.VV., «Le visiteur » n°5, Printemps 2000; Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. Afile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXhistory of walking, Viking Penguin, 2000; Rebecca Solnit, Walkingand Thinking and Walking, in “Kunstforum, Aestettik des Reisens”,n° 136, 1997, pp.117-131; Thierry Davila, Marcher Creer, Editionsdu regard, Paris, 2002.5 The operation had been announced in the magazine Littérature, 19,and was described the day following the visit in Comœdia of 15 April,in an article entitled “Les Disciples de DADA à l’Église Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre”. The episode has been narrated by two of the participants:André Parinaud (ed.), André Breton - Entretiens, Gallimard, Paris,1952, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Déjà jadis, René Juillard,Paris, 1958. For further discussion: Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris,Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965; Georges Hugnet, L’Aventure Dada,Galerie de l’Institut, Paris, 1957.6 André Parinaud, André Breton…, op cit, pp. 53-547 André Breton, Manifeste du Surrealisme (1924), in Manifestes duSurréalisme, Pauvert, Paris 1962.8 Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris, Gallimard, Paris 1926, p. 155.Deambulation continues throughout much of the Surrealist output.The exploration of the city had already begun in the Dada years, andthe results of those first journeys had gradually found their way intothe writings of the group. The books and stories written in those yearsare dense with urban walks, and they are also the only evidenceremaining. Some of these experiences were gathered in the magazineLittérature, which contains the first pieces of automatic writing, thenarrations of dreams, shared games like questionnaires, word games,verbal associations, the collective game-poems and the firstexperiences of wandering in real space. Among the most famoussurrealistic erratic novels see: André Breton, Les Pas Perdus,Gallimard, Paris 1924; André Breton, Nadja, N.R.F., Paris 1928;Marcel Morise, Itineraire du temps de la préhistoire à nos jours, in«La révolution surréaliste» n°11, Paris 1928.9 Mirella Bandini, La vertigine del moderno - percorsi surrealisti,Officina Edizioni, Roma, 1986, p. 120. See also Mirella Bandini,L’estetico il politico. Da Cobra all’Internazionale Situazionista 1948-1957, Ed. Officina, Rome 1977.10 Andre Breton, Pont Neuf, in La Clé des champs, Paris 1953, citedin Mirella Bandini, Surrealist References in the Notions of Dérive andfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXPsycogeography of the Situationist Urban Environment, in LiberoAndreotti & Xavier Costa (eds.), Situacionists: Art, Politics,Urbanism, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona / Actar,Barcelona, 1996.11 The phrases are from issues 1 and 5 of “Potlatch”, the InternationalLettrist Review completely reprinted in Gerard Berreby, Documentsrelatifs à la fondation de l’ lnternationale Situationniste 1948-1957,Ed. Alia, Paris, 1985.12 Ivan Chtcheglov alias Gilles Ivain, Formulaire pour un UrbanismeNouveau, written in 1953 and edited in “I.S.” n°1, p.15.13 Guy E. Debord, Introduction a une critique de la géographieurbaine, «Les Lèvres Nues» n° 6, pp. 11-15, Bruxelles, september1955.14 All the quotes came from Guy E. Debord, Théorie de la dérive, in«Les Lèvres Nues», 8/9, Brussels, 1956. Republished in“Internationale Situatiónniste”, 2, December 1958; (English version:Theory of the Dérive, in Libero Andreotti and Xavier Costa (eds.),Theory of the Dérive and Other Situatinist Writings on the City,Museu D’Art Contemporany de Barcelona/ Actar, 1996. See alsoSimon Sadler, The Situationist City, Mit Press, Cambridge Mass.1998.15 See Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, Amsterdam-Leipzig 1939.16 Constant, Another City for Another Life, “I.S.” n°3, p. 37.17 On Alba and the Experimental Laboratory see: Mirella Bandini,Pinot Gallizio e il Laboratorio Sperimentale d’Alba, Galleria Civicadi Arte Moderna, Torino 1974; Sandro Ricaldone, Jorn in Italia. Glianni del Bauhaus Immaginista, Fratelli Pozzo, Moncalieri 1997;Giorgina Bertolino, Francesca Comisso and Maria Teresa Roberto,Pinot Gallizio. Il laboratorio della scrittura, Charta, Milano 2005;Francesco Careri, Armin Linke and Luca Vitone, Constant e le radicidi New Babylon, “Domus” n° 885, october 2005. On the relationshipswith avangarde see: Reyner Banham, Megastructure, London 1976;Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, This is Tomorrow, avanguardie earchitettura contemporanea, Testo & Immagine, Torino 1999.18 Constant, New Babylon, Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague,1974, reprinted in Jean Clarence Lambert, New Babylon - Constant.Art et Utopie, Cercle d’art, Paris 1997, p. 49. On New Babylon seefile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXalso: Jean Clarence Lambert, Constant. Les trois espaces, cercle d’art,Paris 1992 ; Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon. The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art /010, Rotterdam 1998; Francesco Careri, Constant / New Babylon, unacittà nomade, Testo & Immagine, Torino 2001.19 See Guy E. Debord, Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s,“I.S.” n° 3, p. 11; Constant, Guy E. Debord, The Amsterdamdeclaration, “I.S.” n° 2, p. 31; Constant et all., Rapporto inauguraledella Conferenza di Monaco, “I.S.” n° 3, p. 26; Leonardo Lippolis,Urbanismo Unitario, Testo & Immagine, Torino 2002.20 Constant, “New Babylon - Ten Years On”, lecture at the Universityof Delft, 23 May 1980, in Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon. TheHyper-Architecture of Desire, Witte de With Center for ContemporaryArt of Rotterdam / 010, Rotterdam, 1998. p. 236.21 Giulio Carlo Argan, L’arte moderna 1770-1970, Sansoni, Firenze1970, p. 431.22 Constant, New Babylon…, op cit., p. 30.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXLand Walk The Voyage of Tony SmithIn December 1966 the magazine Artforum published the story of ajourney by Tony Smith along a highway under construction on the outskirtsof New York. Gilles Tiberghien considers this experience of the New JerseyTurnpike lived by Tony Smith—seen by many as the “father” of AmericanMinimal Art—to be the origin of Land Art, and the predecessor of an entireseries of walks in deserts and the urban peripheries that took place in thelate 1960s.1One evening, with some students at Cooper Union, Smith decided tosneak into the Turnpike construction site and to drive down the black ribbonof asphalt that crosses the marginal spaces of the American periphery likean empty gash. During the trip Smith feels a sort of ineffable ecstasy hedefines as “the end of art” and wonders, “The road and much of thelandscape was artificial, and yet it couldn’t be called a work of art.”2 Thiswent straight to the heart of a basic problem regarding the aesthetic natureof the path: can the road be considered an artwork? If it can, in what way?As a large readymade? As an abstract sign crossing the landscape? As anobject or as an experience? As a space in its own right or as an act ofcrossing? What is the role of the surrounding landscape?The story leads to many questions and many possible paths ofinvestigation. The road is seen by Tony Smith in the two different possibleways that were to be analyzed by Minimal Art and Land Art: one is the roadas sign and object, on which the crossing takes place; the other is thecrossing itself as experience, as attitude that becomes form.3file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThis was not, in fact, the end of art, but a sudden intuition that wasshortly thereafter to take art out of the galleries and museums to reclaim theexperience of lived space and the larger scale of the landscape. Althoughthe experience of Tony Smith still seems quite similar to the Dadareadymade, from this moment on the practice of walking begins to betransformed into a true autonomous artform. What seemed like an aestheticrealization, an immediate flash of intuition, an almost indescribable ecstasy,is then utilized in countless ways by a great number of artists—most ofthem sculptors—who emerged at the end of the 1960s in a passage fromMinimalism to that series of very heterogeneous experiences categorizedunder the generic term of ‘Land Art.’ This passage is easily understood ifwe compare the works of Carl Andre with those of Richard Long, twoartists who seem to have taken the experience of Tony Smith in twodifferent directions.In his process of the canceling or reduction of sculpture, Carl Andretried to make objects that could occupy space without filling it, to createpresences that were increasingly absent within real space. His goal wasvery similar to the long black road of Tony Smith: a sort of infinite carpet, atwo-dimensional space to inhabit, an abstract ground, artificial, dilated,prolonged and flattened like a foundation without thickness, on which nosculpture rests, but simultaneously defining a space that is experienced bythe observer.To clarify the subsequent passage from the minimal object to theobjectless experience, we can turn to two interviews with Carl Andre andRichard Long. Andre states, “Actually, for me the ideal sculpture is a road.[...] Most of my works, in any case the best ones, are somehow roads—theyrequire you to follow them, to walk around them or go onto them.”4 RichardLong responds, What distinguishes his work from mine is that he has made flatsculptures on which we can walk. It’s a space on which to walkthat can be moved and put somewhere else, while my artconsists in the act of walking itself. Carl Andre makes objectson which to walk, my art is made by walking. This is afundamental difference.5 file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXTherefore Smith’s perplexities seem, just a few years later, to havealready found resolutions in two directions: for Andre the road experiencedby Smith is not only art, it is the ideal sculpture; Long goes further, sayingthat art consists in the very act of walking, of living the experience. At thispoint it seems clear that the fundamental step has been taken. With Long thepassage has been made from the object to its absence. The erratic pathreturns to its status as an aesthetic form in the field of the visual arts.The first attempts to use walking as an art form—or, more precisely,as a form of anti-art—were made as an expansion of the field of action ofliterature into the visual arts. The collective forms of the visit, thedeambulation and the dérive, in fact, were experiences born in a literarysphere, and the connection linking Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and GuyDebord is a literary one. In the 1960s the consequences of their researchwere explored by artists interested in the theatrical space of performance artand urban happenings with Dada roots, but also by sculptors with a focuson the space of architecture and the landscape. The return to walking in thefield of sculpture is an integral part of a more general expansion ofsculpture itself. The artists take steps that seem to trace back through all thestages that led from the erratic journey to the menhir, and the menhir toarchitecture. In their works we can once again see a logical thread that goesfrom minimal objects (the menhir), to the territorial works of Land Art (thelandscape) and the wanderings of the Land artists (walking). A thread thatconnects walking to that field of activity that operates as transformation ofthe earth’s surface, a field of action shared by architecture and landscapedesign. To effect this passage it is again necessary to find an empty field ofaction, in which the signs of history and civilization are absent: the desertsand the terrain vague of the abandoned urban periphery.Field ExpansionsIn June 1967 the critic Michael Fried, prompted by Tony Smith’stale, responded in the pages of Artforum with an article entitled “Art andObjecthood,” in which Smith’s experience is seen as a clear example of thewar being waged by theater and literature against art.6 Fried was concernedabout the growing invasion of other arts in the field of sculpture andpainting, and called for a return of all the arts within their own disciplinaryboundaries. The enemy was that experimentalism which, as we have seen,had been christened urbanisme unitaire by the Situationists, and whichtended, under different names, to move in the direction of a sort of unifyinginterdisciplinary approach. Actually, unitary urbanism had never beenrealized, and sculpture had not trespassed beyond its own disciplinaryconfines; it was simply trying to come to grips with its own limits, to workon its margins to enlarge its field of action. Rather than being invaded bytheatrical space, sculpture was invading, with increasingly awareness, theliving space life, and therefore the theater, dance, architecture, andlandscape.In homage to Arena Quad I+II of Samuel Beckett and the characterMolloy, Bruce Nauman walked for about an hour on a space defined bystarting with a line drawn on the ground. With his hands clasped behind hisback, placing one leg at a time on the ground, walking—instead of anordinary gesture—becomes a dance of the weights and continuous re-balancing of the body while giving rise, through the sound of the cadencedsteps, to a rhythmical, sonorous space.According to Rosalind Krauss, sculpture after the 1950s wasexperienced as the negative of architecture and landscape: “That which, ontop of or in front of a building, was not a building; or that which, inserted ina landscape, was not a landscape. […] At this point it was the categoryresulting from non-landscape and non-architecture. […] But non-architecture is simply another form of definition of the landscape, and non-landscape is, to put it more simply, architecture.”7 Utilizing a system ofmathematical expansion, Rosalind Krauss thus graphically expresses theexpanded field in which sculpture operates after the 1960s: below we findmodernist sculpture derived from the pairing non-architecture and non-landscape, while above, the two positive elements of landscape andarchitecture identify the space of action of the construction of places, aspace containing “labyrinths, mazes, Japanese gardens, places for gamesfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand for ritual processions.”8 Therefore it is necessary to reconsider sculpturein a wider historical framework, one “undertaking the construction of itsgenealogies, starting with data that no longer date back mere decades, butmillennia.”9file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXGilles Tiberghien heads in the direction indicated by Krauss, in anattempt to return to the most elementary categories: If the history of the relations between architecture and sculptureis complex, and involves, as Hegel says, a sort of division offunctions, it would appear that for a certain number ofsculptures of Land Art what is at stake is a return to the veryorigins of this history.10 The division of functions is that in which architecture has thefunction of a place of shelter, or worship or gathering, while sculpture hasthe function of presenting the image of man or of god. Hegel, in hisLectures on Aesthetics, says that the origins of sculpture and architecture“should have an immediate, simple character, and not the relativity thatcomes from the division of the functions. Our force therefore is to seek apoint situated beyond this division.” Considering architecture in itsexclusively symbolic function, Hegel looks not for works of architecturethat immediately translate an internal meaning in the external form, butworks whose meaning must be sought elsewhere, like symbols. Thistype ofwork that is independent of function, simultaneously sculpture andarchitecture, is defined by Hegel as “inorganic sculpture (unorganischeSkulptur), because [these works] realize a symbolic form destined only tosuggest or reawaken a representation.” According to Hegel the first worksof such non-functional and non-mimetic architecture are the Egyptianobelisks, colossal statues and the pyramids: It is only in inorganic creation that man is fully nature’s equal,and creates driven by a profound desire and without an externalmodel; when man crosses this borderline and begins to createorganic works, he becomes dependent on them, his creationloses any autonomy and becomes mere imitation of nature. Tiberghien clarifies this concept by adding his own definition ofinorganic sculpture to Hegel’s definition: “A pure presentation of itself, thegift of naked presence,” a characteristic found in certain works of Minimaland Land Art that are simultaneously sculpture and architecture, and thatfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXapproach the territory as large abstract forms, free of any imitativetendency.According to Tiberghien: Everything happened as if the Minimal artists, having wanted torestore a maximum of autonomy to sculpture, had rediscoveredand given value to a certain number of elements sculptureshares with architecture, thanks to which it becomes possible toreturn to a sort of original form. Many of the works of Land Art are situated, according toTiberghien, “in advance of symbolism itself, in that sphere of non-separation of architecture and sculpture that corresponds to what Hegelcalls the primitive need of art.”At this point it seems useful to take another step backward withrespect to Hegel, and to look at the menhir as an archetype of inorganicsculpture. Following this backtracking logic, the path can be seen asbelonging to that sphere situated beyond the inorganic sculpture Hegel calls“the primitive need of art,” and Rosalind Krauss calls “the construction ofplaces.” Considering architecture, too, as a discipline that operates in itsown expanded field, we should expect to find sculpture, landscape, and pathwithin it. Their common field of action is the activity of symbolictransformation of the territory. Walking, therefore, is situated in a spherewhere it is still simultaneously sculpture, architecture, and landscape,between the primitive need of art and inorganic sculpture.The obelisk and the pyramid cited by Hegel as the first inorganicsculptures descend from the benben and the menhir, which in turn descendfrom wandering. Thus we can view the menhir as the first inorganicsculpture, a symbolic, non-mimetic form that carries inside it the home andthe image of God, the column that was to give rise to architecture, and thestatue that was to give rise to sculpture. But the menhir is also the firstsymbolic construction of the Earth’s surface that transforms the landscapefrom a natural to an artificial state. Therefore the menhir containsarchitecture, sculpture, and landscape. Thus we can understand whyMinimal sculpture, in order to re-appropriate architectonic space, had to goback to come to terms with the menhir, in order to then evolve in thedirection of Land Art. And in this journey back to and from the menhir, thepath suddenly reappears, seen this time as sculpture in an expanded field,and no longer as a literary form.In the attempt to annul everything that until that point had beenconsidered sculpture, the Minimal artists found themselves at a sort ofground zero of their discipline. In this process of subtraction they had foundobjects extraneous to nature, contrasting the natural landscape by means ofthe artificial signs of culture, erasing that sort of animated presence that hadalways lurked inside sculpture. The artists had undertaken a series ofpassages that led them back to the menhir: the elimination of the base orpedestal to return to a direct relationship with the sky and the ground (themenhir is directly planted in the ground); the return to the monolith and themass (the three parts of the column in architecture corresponded, insculpture, to the subdivisions of the totem); the elimination of color andnatural materials in favor of artificial, industrial materials, artifacts (thestone of the menhir was, in the Stone Age, the most ‘artificial’ materialfound in nature, and its vertical position was the least natural imaginable);compositions based on simple, rhythmical, and serial repetition (points,lines, surfaces); elimination of any adjectival impulses in favor of pure,crystalline forms; removal of the figurative mimesis that still existed inzoomorphic, anthropomorphic, and totemic modern sculptures; recovery ofa sort of human dimension and therefore of a more abstract, theatricalanthropomorphism due to that residual “animated presence” that continuesto persist in sculpture.The result of these operations is a monomateric, situated, fixed,immobile, inert, inexpressive, almost dead object. But it is an object thatimposes a certain distance and has a new relationship with its space; it is acharacter without internal life but, at the same time, it takes possession ofthe space, forcing the observer to participate, to share an experience thatgoes beyond the visible and that addresses, like architecture, the entirebody, its presence in time and space. From the Menhir to the PathWhile the Minimal object moves toward the menhir, still seen as anobject with an internal presence, Land Art moves, instead, more directlytoward architecture and landscape, i.e. toward the menhir as an inanimateobject to be utilized to transform the territory. Starting in 1966, the year ofthe publication of Tony Smith’s journey, sculpture rapidly regained theground taken from it by architecture; ground not only in the sense ofdisciplinary territory, but also of physical terrain, large portions of theEarth’s surface. Sculptors laid claim to new spaces, in the belief thatsculpture had a right to take part in that action of transformation andmodeling of the signs and materials of the territory from which it had beenexcluded since the Neolithic period, since sculpture had been subjugated toarchitectural space as the totem at the center of the village, the image on thefronton of a temple, a work in a museum or a statue in the park. Theobjective of Land Art is no longer the modeling of large or small objects inopen space, but the physical transformation of the territory, the use of themeans and techniques of architecture to construct a new nature and to createlarge artificial landscapes. Any sculptural anthropomorphism still survivingin Minimalist sculptures is abandoned in favor of that even more abstractmimesis that characterizes architecture and landscape.The surface of the Earth, over the course of the millennia, has beenengraved, designed, and constructed by architecture, incessantlysuperimposing a system of cultural signs on a system of original, naturalsigns; the Earth of the Land artists is sculpted, drawn on, cut, excavated,disrupted, packaged, lived, and crossed anew through the archetypal signsof human thought. In Land Art we can see a conscious return to theNeolithic.11 Long rows of stones planted in the ground, fences of leaves orbranches, spirals of earth, lines and circles designed on the ground, orenormous excavations of the terrain, large monuments in earth, cement, ironand formless pourings of industrial materials are utilized as means ofappropriation of space, as primal actions toward an archaic nature, asanthropic intervention in a primitive landscape. The spaces in which theseoperations take place are spaces without architecture or signs of humanpresence, empty spaces in which to realize works that take on the meaningof a primordial sign, a unique trace in an archaic, atemporal landscape. Allthis seemsnot only are the wanderings of Cainhuman, but Cain’s work at building the first city, Enoch, was also a naturalimpulse, and the acts of modern wanderers who carve constantlydisappearing paths through cities are both natural and an art form. Francesco Careri (2017) Compared with the first edition of this book there have not been anysubstantive changes. My text and the introduction by Gilles Tiberghienremain in the original translation made by Steven Piccolo. However, thislatest version has been expanded and upgraded in the notes and thebibliography sections. It begins with the new foreword by ChristopherFlynn, my epilogue for the second Spanish edition, and it ends with theStalker Manifesto written by Lorenzo Romito as a tribute to Stalker fromWalkscapes. I want to thank Mikesch Muecke for republishing it withCulicidade Press.With respect to the layout of the book, the gray pages will allow thereader to access an important amount of heterogeneous materials. These arequotes, photographs, flyers, press releases, poems, maps, glossaries,thematic inserts, and stories. The book can be read only through thosedocuments, which are basically the few testimonials of those who worriedmore about walking than leaving traces.Walkscapes: Ten Years Later(2013)I have often thought about writing a second book on walking, andabout updating Walkscapes with new chapters on artists who make walkingpart of their work today. If I have refrained, it is because I think the bookworks just as it is, and because I don’t believe I can do much better on thistheme. So the text of this new edition is exactly the same as the original; Ihaven’t changed a single letter. There are a few more footnotes, given thefact that I had already added some for the Italian edition, and I haveremoved a few of the illustrations, because they seemed superfluous. Thebibliography has been updated, because in recent years much has beenwritten on this theme. And I have decided to write this short preface which,perhaps in an overly autobiographical, introspective way, attempts toexplain how I have myself interpreted the words written at the end of thebook: Venturing into New Babylon can be a useful method for theinterpretation and transformation of those zones of Zonzo that,in recent years, have thrown the disciplines of architecture andurban planning into crisis. And thanks to the artists who haveroamed its interior, this city is visible today and appears as oneof the most important unresolved problems of architecturalculture. To design a nomadic city would seem to be acontradiction in terms. Perhaps it must be done in keeping withthe manner of the Neo-Babylonians: transforming it playfullyfrom the inside out, modifying it during the journey, restoringlife to the primitive aptitude for the play of relations thatpermitted Abel to dwell in the world. Many things have happened over the last ten years: three children,from whom I learn every day to play with the world; a position at theuniversity, where I teach a course entirely based on walking; the house-manifesto built together with the descendants of Abel and then burneddown by Cain and his anti-tzigane cohorts; and the Laboratory of CivicArts, with which I move forward with the collective projects I previouslydid with Stalker, and which ideally continues to follow the path of Stalker.Ten years ago, when Daniela Colafranceschi and Monica Gili askedme to write the book, I would never have imagined it would be reprinted sixtimes, and reissued in this new form. I actually had no idea what it meant towrite a book, to put statements on paper that I would then have to confirm,discuss, elaborate, defend. Above all, I had no idea a book could make metravel so extensively. Walkscapes, especially in South America, has metwith unexpected success, and I have been invited to conferences andseminars, and above all to walk with artists, architects, students, citizens.Crossing Bogota, Santiago, Montevideo, São Paulo, Salvador da Bahia,Talca, I have understood that I don’t know how to walk in the colonial gridand that to cross the city, in a ‘transurbance,’ I have to look for the points inwhich the grid breaks up, lose my way along rivers, skirting around the newresidential zones, plunging into the mazes of the favelas. Walking in SouthAmerica means coming to terms with many fears: fear of the city, fear ofpublic space, fear of breaking rules, fear of usurping space, fear of crossingoften non-existent barriers, fear of other inhabitants, nearly alwaysperceived as potential enemies. To put it simply, walking is scary, so peopledon’t walk any more; those who walk are homeless, drug addicts, outcasts.The anti-peripatetic and anti-urban phenomenon is clearer here than inEurope, where it still seems to only be on the verge of taking form: neverleave the house on foot, never expose your body without an enclosure,protect it in the home or in the car. Above all, never go out after sundown!Shut yourself up, if possible, in gated communities to watch terrifying filmsor to travel with the Internet. Commit advertising to memory so you willknow what to look for when you’re strolling in shopping malls. Atarchitecture schools I realized that the students, the future ruling class,know everything about urban theory and French philosophers; they say theyare experts on cities and public space, but actually they have never had theexperience of playing soccer in the street, of meeting friends at the square,of making out in a park, or sneaking into an industrial ruin, crossing afavela, stopping to ask a stranger for directions. What kind of city couldever produce these people who are scared of walking?The only category with which cities are designed today is that ofsecurity. It might sound banal, but the only way to have a safe city is tohave people walking in the street. This factor alone allows people to watchand watch out for each other, without any need for fences and surveillancecameras. And the only way to have a living, democratic city is to be able towalk, without erasing conflicts and differences, to be able to walk toprotest, to reassert our right to the city. As a teacher I feel I have moreresponsibilities, and I have begun to understand that walking is anindispensable tool to train not only students but also citizens, that walking isan action capable of lowering the level of fear and of unmasking the mediaconstruct of insecurity: a ‘civic’ project that is able to produce public spaceand common action. In my Civic Arts courses what I try to transmit to thestudents is the pleasure of getting lost for the sake of knowledge. Theoutcome cannot be taken for granted, but it brings remarkable rewards. Itake them where they’ve never been as yet, I pull the rug out from undertheir feet and highjack them into uncharted territories. Usually at thebeginning there’s a mood of reluctance and distrust, doubts about what weare doing, the fear of wasting time. But in the end, for those who stick withit, there is the growing pleasure of finding new paths and new certainties, ofbuilding thought with your own body, acting with your own mind. Castingdoubt on the few certainties you have just managed to put together thus faris actually a way to open the mind to previously unexplored worlds andpossibilities, encouraging you to reinvent everything, from scratch: youridea of the city, your own definition of art and architecture, your own placein this world. You can break free of false convictions and start to rememberthat space is a fantastic invention with which you can play, like a kid. Onemotto that guides our walks is “lose time to gain space.” If we want to gain‘other’ spaces we have to know how to play, to deliberately get out of afunctional-productive system in order to enter a non-functional,unproductive system. You have to learn how to lose time, not alwaysseeking the shortest route, letting yourself get detouredalmost like a desire to start all over again from the beginning ofthe history of the world, to go back to point zero in order to find a unitaryfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXdiscipline, in which the art of the Earth—and in this sense the term‘earthwork’ used by Smithson seems much more convincing than the termLand Art—was the only means available with which to come to grips withnatural space and infinite time.We will not linger here over an analysis of the major works built bythe Land artists, just as we did not delve into the works of architecture afterthose of the Egyptians. These works are incredible spaces to walk through,but they would open up another field of investigation, too vast and tooclosely connected to architecture itself.Instead, we will attempt to understand how some of the Land artistsrediscovered walking as a primary act of symbolic transformation of theterritory. An action that is not a physical transformation of the territory, buta crossing of it that doesn’t need to leave permanent traces, that acts onlysuperficially on the world, but can achieve proportions even greater thanthose of the earthworks. Treading the WorldIn 1967, the year after the publication of the journey of Tony Smith,on the other side of the Atlantic, Richard Long produced A Line Made byWalking, a straight line ‘sculpted’ on the ground simply by treading ongrass. The result of this action is a sign that remains only on photographicfilm, disappearing from the ground when the grass returns to its originalposition. A Line Made by Walking, thanks to its radical clarity and formalsimplicity, is considered a fundamental point of passage in contemporaryart. Rudi Fuchs has compared it to the black square of Kasimir Malevich, “afundamental interruption of the history of art.”12file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Guy Tosatto considers it “one of the most singular and revolutionarygestures of 20th-century sculpture,”13 and Hamish Fulton, the English artistwho has often accompanied Richard Long in his continental wanderings,interpreting the art of walking in keeping with his own expressive forms,sees this first work by Long as one of the most original works of occidental art in the 20thcentury. (The long journey begins with a single step.) When hewas only 23 years old Long combined two apparently separateactivities: sculpture (the line) and walking (the action). A line(made by) walking. In time the sculpture would disappear.14 The infinite line of black asphalt on which the ecstasy of Smithbegins to take form, avoiding its transformation into an object.A Line Made by Walking produces a sensation of infinity, it is a longsegment that stops at the trees that enclose the visual field, but couldcontinue around the entire planet. The image of the treaded grass containsthe presence of absence: absence of action, absence of the body, absence ofthe object. But it is also unmistakably the result of the action of a body, andit is an object, a something that is situated between sculpture, aperformance, and an architecture of the landscape. The later works of Longand Fulton are the continuation and embellishment of this initial gesture, ofwhich no trace has remained on the ground itself. The basis for the works ofLong and Fulton is walking, the setting in which the works take place is anatural, timeless space, an eternally primordial landscape where thepresence of the artist is already a symbolic act in itself.15Fulton develops the theme of walking as an act of celebration of theuncontaminated landscape, a sort of ritual pilgrimage through what remainsof nature. His work involves environmental and ecological concerns, andhis journeys can also be interpreted as a form of protest: “My work canevidently be inserted in the history of art, but never in the past has therebeen an era in which my concerns had such significance as today. [...] Theopen spaces are disappearing. [...] For me being in nature is a form ofimmediate religion.”16 Long acknowledges that “nature produces muchmore effect on me than I do on her.”17 For the two artists nature correspondsfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXto an inviolable Mother Earth on which one can walk, design figures, movestones, but without effecting any radical transformation. This is the factorthat has led to their repeated dissent regarding the Land artists. The roots oftheir research go back to the culture of the Celtic megalith, far from themassive transformation of American landscapes. For Long, “Land Art is anAmerican expression. It means bulldozers and big projects. To me it seemslike a typically American movement; it is the construction of works on landpurchased by the artists with the aim of making a large, permanentmonument. All this absolutely does not interest me.”18 Long’s interventionis free of any technological aid, it doesn’t cut into the Earth’s crust, butmerely transforms the surface in a reversible way. The only means utilizedis his own body, his possibility of movement, the strength of his arms andlegs: the largest stone utilized is one that can be moved by a single person,and the longest path is the one the body can follow in a certain period oftime. The body is a tool for measuring space and time. Through the bodyLong measures his own perceptions and the variations in atmosphericagents, he uses walking to capture the changes in the direction of the winds,in temperature and sounds. To measure means identifying points, indicatingthem, aligning them, circumscribing spaces, alternating them in keepingwith a rhythm and a direction, and here again Long’s work has primordialroots: geometry as the measure of the world.19 file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe Wayfarer on the MapOne of the main problems of the art of walking is thecommunication of the experience in aesthetic form. The Dadaists andSurrealists did not transfer their actions onto a cartographic base, andavoided representation by resorting to literary description; the Situationistsproduced their psychogeographic maps, but did not want to represent thereal routes of the effected dérives. In coming to grips with the world of artand therefore with the problem of representation, on the other hand, Fultonand Long both make use of the map as an expressive tool. The two Englishartists in this field follow two paths that reflect their different ways of usingthe body. For Fulton the body is exclusively an instrument of perception,while for Long it is also a tool for drawing.In Fulton, the representation of the places crossed is a map in theabstract sense. The representation of the path is resolved by means ofimages and graphic texts that bear witness to the experience of walkingwith the awareness of never being able to achieve it through representation.In the galleries Fulton presents his journeys through a sort of geographicalpoetry: phrases and signs that can be interpreted as cartography, evoking thesensation of the places, altitudes, place names, distances in miles. Like Zenpoetry his brief phrases capture the immediacy of the experience and theperception of space, as in Japanese haiku, aiming at a reawakening of a hicet nunc experienced during the journey. Fulton’swalking is like the motionof the clouds, it leaves no traces on the ground or on the paper: “Walks arelike clouds. They come and go.”20In Long, on the other hand, walking is an action that leaves its markon the place. It is an act that draws a figure on the terrain and therefore canbe reported in cartographic representation. But the procedure can be utilizedin an inverse sense, the paper can function as a surface on which to drawfigures to be subsequently walked: once a circle has been drawn on a map,you can cross its diameter, walk its edge, walk outside it… Long utilizescartography as a base on which to plan his itineraries, and the choice of theterritory in which to walk is related to the selected figure. Here walking isnot only an action, it is also a sign, a form that can be superimposed onexisting forms, both in reality and on paper.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Thus the world becomes an immense aesthetic territory, anenormous canvas on which to draw by walking. A surface that is not awhite page, but an intricate design of historical and geographicalsedimentation on which to simply add one more layer. Walking the figuressuperimposed on the map-territory, the body of the wayfarer registers theevents of the journey, the sensations, obstacles, dangers, the variations ofthe terrain. The physical structure of the territory is reflected on the body inmotion.21 file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe Suburban OdysseyIn the October1967 issue of Artforum a letter to the editor respondsironically to the article by Michael Fried. It is signed by Robert Smithson, ayoung artist on the New York Minimalist scene, and the text is cutting andparadoxical. It is the prologue of a spectacular film not yet written, whose title is TheTribulations of Michael Fried. […] Fried, the orthodoxmodernist, guardian of the gospels of Clement Greenberg, hasbeen abducted in ecstasy by Tony Smith, the agent of theinfinite. […] He is gripped by terror of the infinite. Thecorruption of appearances of the infinite is worse than anyknown form of the Devil. A radical skepticism, known only tothe terrible ‘literalists’, threatens the innermost essence of form.The labyrinths of an endless time—the virus of eternity—contaminate his brain. Fried, the holy Marxist, won’t let himselfbe tempted by this perilous sensibility.22 One year after its publication, the voyage of Tony Smith remains atthe center of the controversy between modernists and Minimalists.Robert Smithson had already dealt with the issues raised by TonySmith in the article “Toward the Development of an Air Terminal Site” inthe June issue of Artforum, the same issue containing the article by MichaelFried. Smithson writes of “remote places like the Pine Barrens in NewJersey or the frozen plains of the North Pole and the South Pole, that can bereconsidered by forms of art that could use the actual territory as amedium.”23 He compares Tony Smith’s road to the structure of a sentencethat unwinds along the New Jersey Turnpike: the actual territory is a surrealmedium through which we can read and write on space like a text.Naturalism “is replaced by a non-objective sense of space. The landscapethen begins to look more like a map in three dimensions than a rusticgarden.”24file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe action of revealing new landscapes is another consequence ofthe story of Tony Smith.Smith’s “dark pavement” had been extended as an object (CarlAndre) and as the absence of the object (Richard Long). Smithson, instead,puts the accent on where the dark road passes, on the quality of thelandscape crossed.The sensation of the infinite and of the end of art felt by Smithdidn’t only come from the dark silhouette crossing the landscape, but alsofrom the type of landscape around it, an actual territory that had still notbeen investigated by art. Smithson understood that with ‘earth art’ newspaces were opened up for physical and conceptual experimentation, andthat artists could modify the way the observer saw these territories,representing them in a new light, revealing aesthetic values: the newaesthetic discipline of Site Selection Study had just begun.25 In December1967 another article by Robert Smithson appeared in Artforum with the title“The Monuments of Passaic,” and at the same time an exhibition of hiswork was inaugurated in New York at the gallery of Virginia Dwan.26 Theshow included a Negative Map Showing Region of Monuments along thePassaic River, and twenty-four black-and-white photographs showing themonuments of Passaic. But the show was not a photo show, and themonuments are actually strange objects in the industrial landscape of theperiphery. The invitation, on the other hand, was clear: the audience shouldrent a car and go with the artist/revealer/guide along the Passaic River toexplore a “land that time forgot.”27The article in Artforum provides some clues, and the account of theexperience of the discovery of this land, a sort of parody of the diaries oftravelers in the 19th century in which Smithson sets off to explore theuncharted, virgin territories of the outskirts of Passaic, his native city.Smithson defines the journey as a suburban odyssey, a pseudo-touristic epicthat celebrates as monuments the live presences of a space in dissolution, aplace that thirty years later we would have called a non-place. In an entirelydifferent sense, Smithson applied the term non-site to the materials heextracted from the sites, which took on a negative sign once they had beendecontextualized in galleries.28On the morning of 30 September 1967 he left his house to set off onthe Tour. Before taking a bus to Passaic he bought a paperback novel byfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXBrian W. Aldiss entitled Earthworks. As he browsed through the book henoticed, through the window, that the bus had already passed a monument,so he decided to get off the bus and continue the trip to the city on foot. Thefirst monument was a bridge. Smithson tried to take a photograph, but thelight was strange, it was like taking a photograph of a photograph. This isthe moment in which reality begins to be mixed with its representation. Hewalks down to the banks of the river and finds an unguarded worksite,listens to the sound of a large conduit that sucks up river sludge, and thensees an artificial crater full of clear, pale water with large tubes emerging.He continues to perceive a sense of continuous disintegration. The territoryappears in its primitive state, a “panorama zero,” simultaneously in flighttoward a future of self-destruction. Leaving the worksite he finds himself ina new territory, a used-car lot that divides the city in two: a mirror in whichhe cannot comprehend which side he is on. The reality of the city starts toinfinitely lose itself in its dual reflection, in two representations of itself.At the Dwan Gallery no artwork is shown, at least in the sense of anobject constructed and displayed by the artist. Neither does the work existin the place indicated on the map: the map doesn’t indicate the action of thejourney, and anyone who visits the site will not find a landscape altered bythe artist, but the landscape just as it is,in its ‘natural’ state. So does thework consist in having made the journey? Or in having brought otherpeople to the banks of the Passaic River? Is the work in the photos shown atthe gallery or in those taken by the visitors? The answer is that the work isall these things combined. A series of elements (the place, the journey, theinvitation, the article, the photos, the map, the earlier and subsequentwritings) combine to constitute its meaning and, as in all of Smithson’sworks, the work itself. Even in the case of his large earthworks, once thetransformation of the earth has been completed, giving rise to a work, thework is subjected to a series of extensions in all directions. Smithsoncontinues to rework the photographic and video materials, the descriptions,always postponing a completed sense, eluding any type of definition.Smithson’s works are never concluded, they remain eternally open-ended,reaching for infinity.Before the odyssey along the Passaic River Smithson hadexperimented with the forms of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalistsculpture. In 1966 and 1967 he began to develop the “earthworks” forwhich he will be remembered in the history of art. The Tour took place in amoment of passage and would continue to be present in all the subsequentworks. For Smithson the trips are an instinctive need for research andexperience of the reality of the space around him. Journeys with the mind inhypothetical lost continents, journeys inside maps he folds, cuts andsuperimposes in infinite three-dimensional compositions, and journeysmade with Nancy Holt and other artists to the great American deserts, tourban dumps, to abandoned quarries, to territories transformed by industry.“Toward 1965, somewhat by chance, Smithson began a series of moremethodical explorations of New Jersey. [...] The preliminary phase,” NancyHolt recalls consisted in in-depth explorations of abandoned placesovergrown by weeds, ruined houses where the staircases woundthrough a sort of American jungle [...] opening a path throughthe underbrush, groping one’s way across the cracks ofabandoned quarries, exploring landscapes destroyed by theactions of man. The excursion had become the focal point ofSmithson’s thought: they led him to gradually abandon thealmost minimalist sculptures [...] and they showed him the waythat was to allow his art to free itself of the social and materialobligations imposed by museums and galleries.29 For Smithson urban exploration is the pursuit of a medium, a meansto glean aesthetic and philosophical categories with which to work from theterritory. One of Smithson’s most extraordinary abilities lies in that constantmingling in his explorations of physical descriptions and aestheticinterpretations: the discourse crosses different planes simultaneously, losesits way on unfamiliar paths, delves into the material surrounding it,transforming the stratifications of the territory into those of the mind, asindicated in another article entitled “A Sedimentation of the Mind: EarthProjects,” in which he defines his relationship with time: Many people would simply like to forget time, because itcontains a ‘principle of death’ (as all artists know). Floating onthis temporal shoreline we find the remains of the history of art,but the ‘present’ can no longer defend the cultures of Europe,nor the primitive or archaic civilizations; we must insteadfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXexplore the pre- and post-historic spirit; we need to go wheredistant futures meet distant pasts.30file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe deeper sense of the outing in Passaic is the pursuit of a “landthat time forgot,” in which present, past and future do not dwell, but insteaddifferent, suspended timeframes, outside of history, between science fictionand the dawn of man, fragments of time positioned in the ‘actuality’ ofsuburbia. Unlike Long, who calls him an “urban cowboy,”31 and unlikeFulton, who admits he doesn’t know how to walk in urban space,32Smithson delves into the refuse of the world’s suburbia in pursuit of a newnature, a territory free of representation, spaces, and times in continuoustransformation. The urban periphery is the metaphor for the periphery of themind, the rejects of thought and culture. It is in these places, rather than thefalse archaic nature of the deserts, that it is possible to formulate newquestions and hypothesize new answers. Smithson doesn’t avoid thecontradictions of the contemporary city, he walks straight into their midst,in an existential condition halfway between the Paleolithic hunter and thearchaeologist of abandoned futures. file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe Entropic LandscapeIn Entropy and the New Monuments, written one year before the tripto Passaic, Smithson stated that certain minimal objects celebrate whatFlavin called an “inactive history” and what physicists call “entropy” or“energy dispersion”, the measure of energy utilized when one state istransformed into another. They were objects that confirmed the phrase ofVladimir Nabokov, for whom “the future is simply inverted obsolescence.”According to Smithson, “the new monuments, rather than reminding us ofthe past, seem to want to make us forget the future.”33 In the empty spaces,forgotten by their very inhabitants, he recognizes the most natural territoryof forgetting, a landscape that has taken on the character of a new entropicnature. In the Tour the description of the territory doesn’t lead to ecological-environmental considerations regarding the destruction of the river or theindustrial wastes that make the water putrid, there is a delicate balancebetween renunciation and accusation, between renunciation andcontemplation. The judgement is exclusively aesthetic, not ethical, neverecstatic. There is no enjoyment, no satisfaction, no emotional involvementin walking through the nature of suburbia. The discourse starts with anacceptance of reality as it presents itself, and continues on a plane ofgeneral reflection in which Passaic becomes the emblem of the periphery ofthe occidental world, the place of scrap, of the production of a newlandscape made of refuse and disruption. The monuments are notadmonishments, but natural elements that are an integral part of this newlandscape, presences that live immersed in an entropic territory: they createit, transform it, and destroy it, they are monuments self-generated by thelandscape, wounds man has imposed on nature, and which nature hasabsorbed, transforming their meaning, accepting them in a new nature, anda new aesthetic. The new landscape that appears in suburbia calls,according to Smithson, for a new discipline capable of grasping thesignificance of the transformation and mutation from the natural to theartificial and vice versa: We live in defined structures, we are surrounded by referencesystems—but nature dismantles them, taking them back to anearlier state of non-integrity. Artists today are starting to noticethe strongly evanescent character of this progressivedisintegration of structures. Claude Lévi-Strauss has proposedfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe founding of a new discipline of ‘entropology’. Artists andart critics should orient their efforts in this direction.34 James Lingwood goes back to this statement by Smithson andexplains: According to Lévi-Strauss, the more complex the organizationof a society, the greater the quantity of entropy produced. Themore elaborate a given structure, the more it will be marked bydisintegration. Thus primitive or ‘cold’ societies (whosefunctioning, accordingto Lévi-Strauss, is something like that ofa pendulum mechanism) produce very little entropy; while‘warm’ societies (which are more like internal combustionengines) generate an enormous quantity. The United States, themost highly developed of the warm machines, thereforegenerate the greater part of the disorder. Immersed in hislandscapes in full disintegration, Smithson becomes the artist-entropologist of his era.35 1967 is the year of walking: in England and the United States wefind A Line Made by Walking and A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, twojourneys which in different ways were to have a strong influence on thefollowing generation. One year after the publication of the story of TonySmith, that ineffable experience, extraneous to the field of art, waspracticed, represented and theorized by artists who saw it as the archetypeof primitive art as well as the expressive possibilities of the contemporarycity. The journeys of Long moved through uncontaminated nature, wheretime stood still in an archaic state. To use the terminology of Lévi-Strauss,Long crosses the “cold territories,” reliving a Neolithic spatial situation inpursuit of the origins of art, tracing back from the erection of the menhirs tothe first traces of the path. Smithson, instead, sets off to explore the “warmterritories,” the industrial landscapes, territories disrupted by nature or byman, abandoned zones condemned to the oblivion of the entropiclandscape. A territory in which one perceives the transient character ofmatter, time and space, in which nature rediscovers a new ‘wilderness,’ awild, hybrid, ambiguous state, anthropically altered and then escapingman’s control to be reabsorbed again by nature.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXNotes for Land Walk1 Gilles Tiberghien, author of the first preface to this book, has dealtwith the theme of walking in the history of land art in several texts:Land Art, Carré, Paris 1993; Sculptures inorganiques, in «Les Cahiersdu Musée National d’Art Moderne», 39 (1992); Le principe del’axolotl & suppléments, Crestet centre d’art, Strasbourg 1998;Nature, art et paysage, Actes Sud / École nationale supérieure duPaysage / Centre du Paysage, Paris 2001; Hodologique, in aa.vv.,Cheminements, «Les Carnets du Pay- sage», 11, Actes-Sud/Ensp,Paris 2004, pp. 6-25. On the same theme see also: Anne FrancoisePenders, En Chemin, le Land Art, La lettre volée, Bruxel- les 1999;Jean Marc Besse, Quatre notes conjointes sur l’introduction de l’ho-dologie dans la pensée contemporaine, in aa.vv., Cheminements pp.26-33.2 Samuel Wagstaff, Talking with Tony Smith, in «Artforum»,december 1966, republished in Gregory Battcock (editor), MinimalArt, a Critical Anthology, Dutton & Co., New York 1968, p. 381.Concerning the controversy on «Artforum» after the publication ofthe article see: Gilles Tiberghien, Land Art cit., pp. 29-40; RosalindKrauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture M.I.T. Press, Cambridge(Mass.), 1981. On Tony Smith see: Lucy Lippard, Tony Smith,Thames and Hudson, London 1972; Jean Pierre Criqui, Tric- tracpour Tony Smith, in «Artstudio», 6 (1987); Jean Pierre Criqui ,TonySmith: Dédale, architecte et sculpteur, in «L’Architectured’Aujourd’hui», 286 (1993).3 The reference is to «When attitudes becames form», the title of thefampus exhibition cured by Harald Szeemann at the Berna’sKunsthalle in 1969.4 Phyllis Tuchman, Entretien avec Carl Andre, in Art Minimal II,CAPC, Bordeaux, 1987, p. 3.5 Claude Gintz, “Richard Long, la vision, le paysage, le temps”, inArt Press, 104, June 1986, pp 5-7.6 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, «Artforum», june 1967,republished in Gregory Battcock (editor), Minimal Art, a CriticalAnthology, Dutton & Co., New York 1968, p. 116. See also ClementGreenberg, Modernist Painting, in «Art Yearbook», 4 (1963),file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXrepublished in Gregory Battcock (editor), The New Art, Dutton, NewYork 1966, pp. 101-2.7 Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and OtherModernist Myths, MIT Press, Cambrigde (Mas.), 1985, trad. fr.L’originalité de l’avant-garde et autres mythes modernistes, Macula,Paris 1993, pp. 111-28.8 Ibid.9 Ibid.10 This and the other quotes came from Gilles A. Tiberghien,Sculptures inorganiques…, op cit., pp. 98-115, the refernces to Hegelesthetic came form the translation of Jacques Derrida, Hegel et lapensée moderne, Puf, Paris 1970.11 About the relationship between land art and neolithic art see: LucyLippard, Overlay, Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory,Pantheon Books, New York 1983; Kirk Varnedoe, Contemporaryexplorations, in William Rubin (a cura di), Primitivism in 20thCentury Art, Moma, New York 1985; Kenneth White, L’art de laterre, in «Ligeia», 11-12 (1992).12 Rudy H. Fuchs, Richard Long, Thames & Hudson, London/Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1986.13 Guy Tosatto, Richard Long: Sur la route, Musée départemental deRochechouart, Rochechouart, 1990. About Richard Long see JeanMarc Poinsot, Richard Long. Construire le Paysage, «Art Presse»,november 1981; Marco Meneguzzo, Il luogo buono: Richard Long,Pac, Milano 1985; Richard Long, Piedras, Ministerio de Cultura,Madrid 1986; Anne Seymour, Richard Long, Walking in Circles,Braziller, New York 1991, Marco Codognato, Richard Long, Electa,Milano 1994.14 Hamish Fulton, “Old Muddy”, in Anne Seymour, Richard Long:Walking in Circles, New York 1991.15 About the different ways of walking of Richard Long and HamishFulton see Kennet White, L’Art de la terre…, op cit, pp 11-12.16 Ibid.17 Ibid.18 Claude Gintz, Richard Long, la vision, le paysage, le temps, in ArtPress 104, June 1986, pp 5-7.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX19 The relationship between the works of Long and the great figuresengraved in the English mountains is explicit in the work A Six DayWalk over All Roads, Lanes and Double Tracks inside an Aix-Miles-Wide Circle Centered on The Giant of Cerne Abbas, 1975. In thiswork the title explains the procedure. Here Long reactivates an age-old tradition of utilization of the earth as a huge canvas, a surface onwhich to draw messages aimed at beings from another world. TheCerne Abbas Giantis one of the large figures engraved on the terrainin England, which together with the White Horse of Uffington and theLong Man of Willington, still constitute one of the major mysteries ofEnglish culture. See also Tiberghien, Land Art… op. cit., p. 102.20 “Walks are like clouds, they came and go” is one of the bestknown sentences of Hamish Fulton, see Peter Turner, An Interviewwith Hamish Fulton, in Robert Adams, Landscape Theory, LustrumPress, New York 1980; An interview with Hamish Fulton, in CommonGround: Five artists in the Florida Landscape, Sarasota RinglingMuseum of Art, 1982; Hamish Fulton, Camp Fire, Stedelijk VanAbbemuseum, Eindoven 1985; Hamish Fulton, One Hundred Walks,Haags Gemente- museum, Den Haag 1991; Hamish Fulton, Walkingbeside the River Vechte, Stä dti- sche Galerie Nordhorn, Nordhorn1998.21 On the relationship between art and cartography see the famousexhibition Cartes et figures de la Terre, Centre Georges Pompidou /Cci, Paris 1980. The text of Italo Calvino was a rewiew of thisexibition and it has been published as Il viandante nella mappa, inItalo Calvino, Collezione di sabbia, Garzanti, Milano 1984, pp. 23-24. See also Omar Calabrese, Roberto Giovannoli, and IsabellaPezzini (editors), Hic sunt leones. Geografia fantastica e viaggistraordinari, Electa, Milano 1983; Michelle Ange Brayer, Mesuresd’une fiction picturale: la carte de gèographie , in «Exposé», 2(1995); Michelle Ange Brayer (editor), Cartographiques, actes ducolloqueà l’Académie de France (Roma, 19-20 maggio 1995), Rnm,Paris 1996; Jean Marc Besse, Voir la Terre. Six essais sur le paysageet la géographie, Actes Sud, Arles 2000; Jean Marc Besse, Face aumonde. Atlas, jardins, géoramas, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris 2003.22 Robert Smithson, “Letter to the Editor”, in Artforum, October1967. Reprinted in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt,file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXNew York University Press, 1979, and in Robert Smithson, TheCollected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press,1996, pp. 66-67.23 Robert Smithson, Towards the development of an air terminal site,in «Artforum», june 1967, republished in Robert Smithson, TheCollected Writings…, op. cit., p. 60. This is the article about theproject he was leading as an associate artist in the Tippets-Abbett-McCarthy-Stratton architecture studio for Dallas-Forth Worth Airport.24 Robert Smithson, Aerial Art, in «Studio International», February-april 1969, republished in The Collected Writings…, op. cit. p. 116.25 Robert Smithson, Towards… op. cit., p. 60.26 Robert Smithson, The Monuments of Passaic, in Artforum,December 1967, reprinted with the title A Tour of the Monuments ofPassaic, in Nancy Holt (ed.), The Collected Writings, New YorkUniversity Press, 1979, and Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings,ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, 1996. See also MaggieGilchrist & Marie-Sophie Boulan, Robert Smithson, Le Paysageentropique 1960-1973, Avignon, 1994; Jean Pierre Criqui, Ruines àl’envers: introduction à la visite des monuments de Passaic parRobert Smithson, in Cahiers d’Art, Musée National d’Art Moderne,43, Paris, 1993, Gary Shapiro, Earthwards. Robert Smithson and Artafter Babel, University of California Press, Berke- ley-London 1995.27 The text of the flyer is published with the title See the Monumentsof Passaic, New Jersey, in Robert Smithson, The CollectedWritings…, op. cit., p. 356.28 See Louise Cummins, La dialectique site/non-site. Une utopiecartographique, in «Parachute», 68 (1992), pp. 45-46.29 Kay Larson, Les Excursions géologiques de Robert Smithson, inMaggie Gilchrist & Marie-Sophie Boulan, Robert Smithson, LePaysage entropique 1960-1973, Avignon, 1994, p. 40.30 Robert Smithson, A Sedimentation of the mind: earth projects, in«Artforum», september 1968, republished in Robert Smithson, TheCollected Writings…, op. cit., p. 100.31 Ann Hindry, La légèreté de l’ ê tre selon Richard Long , in«Artstudio», Fall 1988, p. 130.32 In fact, in recent years Hamish Fulton’s work in urban space haschanged a lot. I have recently talked a lot with him about this themefile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand he told me about many choreographic experiences led in differentcities, see for example Hamish Fulton, Keep Moving, Charta, Milan2005.33 Robert Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments, in«Artforum», june 1966, republished in Robert Smithson, TheCollected Writings, op. cit., pp. 10-23.34 Robert Smithson, Art through the Camera’s Eye (1971), in TheCollected Writings, op. cit. p. 375.35 James Lingwood, L’entropologue, in Le Paysage Entropique…,op. cit., p. 29.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXTransurbance Barefoot in the ChaosDuring the same years in which Robert Smithson was exploring theempty spaces of the American peripheries, architects were trying tocomprehend what was spontaneously growing in the territory before theirincredulous eyes.1 Looking up from their analyses of historical centers,typo-morphological relations, and urban tracings, architects realized thatsomething was happening around them that they had refused to notice, andthat eluded all their categories of interpretation. They couldn’t understandhow a sort of cancer had gotten hold of the city and was destroying it.Around the city something had been born that wasn’t city, and which theydidn’t hesitate to define as ‘non-city’ or ‘urban chaos,’ a general disorderinside which it was impossible to comprehend anything except certainfragments of order randomly juxtaposed in the territory. Some of thesefragments had been built by the architects themselves, others byspeculators, while others still were the result of intervention originating ona regional, national or even multinational scale. The vantage point of thosewho observed this type of chaotic city was located inside the historical city.From this position, the architects approached the thing the way a doctorapproaches a patient: it was necessary to cure the cancer, to restore order;what was happening was unacceptable, it was necessary to intervene, re-qualify, to impose quality. At this point it was also noticed that—once againthere beside the historical city, in the ‘periphery’—there were large emptyspaces that were not being utilized, that could lend themselves to large-scaleoperations of territorial surgery. Given their large scale, they were calledurban voids. Design would have to work on these areas andbring newportions of order into the chaos of the periphery: to reconnect and re-compose the fragments, to saturate and suture the voids with new forms oforder, often extracted from the quality of the historical city. Even todaymany architects approach the cancer of the periphery with these intentionsand these operative modes.With the downfall of these positivist certainties, the debate on thecontemporary city developed other categories of interpretation. Attemptswere made to look at what was effectively happening and to ask why. Afirst step was to understand that this system of disintegration extended farbeyond the limits of what had been thought of as the city, forming a trueterritorial system, “the diffuse city”.2 A system of low-density suburbansettlement that extends outward, forming discontinuous fabric, sprawlingfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXover large territorial areas. The inhabitants of this city, the ‘diffuse settlers,’were people who lived outside of the most elementary civil and urban laws,inhabiting only the private space of the home and the automobile. Theironly idea of public space was the shopping mall, the highway rest stop, thegas station, and the railroad station. They would destroy any space designedfor their social life. These new barbarians had invaded the city and wantedto transform it into that global Happy Valley where everyone lives in asingle-family house, in a habitat whose only outward extensions are realhighways and the virtual highways of the Internet.3Observing this new territory that had sprouted up everywhere, invarious local versions, it became increasingly evident that, apart from thenew objects of anonymous building development, there was also a presencethat, after having long been a mere backdrop, was increasingly theprotagonist of the urban landscape. This presence was the void, empty or‘open’ space. The model of the diffuse city effectively described what hadspontaneously taken form around our cities, but once again it analyzed theterritory by starting with the full parts, the solids, without observing insidethe empty parts, the voids. And the inhabitants of the diffuse city, in fact,did not spend time only in houses, highways, webs, and rest stops, but alsoin those open spaces that had not been inserted in the system. In effect, theopen spaces turned their back on the city to organize their own autonomous,parallel life, but they were inhabited. These were the places where the‘diffusion dwellers’ went to grow vegetables without a permit, to walk thedog, have a picnic, make love, and look for shortcuts leading from oneurban structure to another.These were the places where their children went in search of freespaces for socializing. In other words, beyond the settlement systems, theoutlines, the streets and the houses, there is an enormous quantity of emptyspaces that form the background against which the city defines itself. Theyare different from those open spaces traditionally thought of as publicspaces—squares, boulevards, gardens, parks—and they form an enormousportion of undeveloped territory that is utilized and experienced in aninfinite number of ways, and in some cases turns out to be absolutelyimpenetrable. The voids are a fundamental part of the urban system, spacesthat inhabit the city in a nomadic way, moving on every time the powersthat be try to impose a new order. They are realities that have grown upoutside and against the project of modernity, which is still incapable offile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXrecognizing their value and, therefore, of entering them. The Fractal ArchipelagoObserving the aerial photo of any city that has developed beyond itswalls, the image that immediately springs to mind is that of an organicfabric, of a thread-like form that accumulates in more or less dense lumps.At the center the material is relatively compact, but toward the edges itexpels islands detached from the rest of the constructed fabric. As theislands grow they are transformed into centers in their own right, oftenequivalent to the original center, forming a larger polycentric system. Theresult is an ‘archipelago’ pattern: a grouping of islands that float in a greatempty sea in which the waters form a continuous fluid that penetrates thesolids, branching out on various scales, all the way to the smallestabandoned nooks and crannies between the portions of constructed city. Notonly are there large portions of empty territory, they are also linked bymany voids on different scales and of different types that combine toconstitute a ramified system that permits interconnection of the large areasthat have been defined as ‘urban voids.’In spite of its apparently formless figure, the design of the cityobtained by separating the full parts from the empty parts can, instead, beinterpreted as a ‘form’ of complex geometries, or those used to describesystems that define their own structure and appear as accumulations ofmatter “without form.”4 If we accept the fact that the city develops inkeeping with a natural dynamic similar to that of the clouds or the galaxies,it follows that this process will be difficult to program and predict, due tothe quantity of forces and variables involved. But observing the process ofgrowth, we can see that the islands, as they expand, leave empty areasinside themselves, and form figures with irregular borders that have thecharacteristic of “autosimilarity”, an intrinsic property of fractal structures:on the different scales we can observe the same phenomena, like theirregular distribution of full zones, the continuity of empty areas and theirregular borders that permit the void to penetrate the solids. This system,by nature, does not simply tend to saturate itself, filling the spaces that haveremained empty; it also tends to expand, leaving a system of voids in itsinterior. While the original center has less probability of developing andchanges more slowly, at the edges of the system the transformations aremore probable and rapid. At the margins we find those landscapes Lévi-Strauss would define as warm and Robert Smithson would define asentropic. Urban space-time has different speeds: from the stasis of thefile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXcenters to the continuous transformation of the margins. At the center timestands still, transformations are frozen, and when they happen they are soevident that they cannot conceal any-thing unexpected: they happen underthe close surveillance and rigid control of the city. At the margins, on theother hand, we find a certain dynamism and we can observe the coming-into-being of a vital organism that transforms itself, leaving entire parts ofthe territory in a state of abandon around and inside itself, in a situation thatis difficult to control.It is important to emphasize the self-representative character of thefractal archipelago form: our civilization has constructed it on its own todefine its own image, in spite of the theories of architects and townplanners. The empty spaces that define its figure are the places that bestrepresent our civilization in its unconscious, multiple becoming. Theseurban amnesias are not only waiting to be filled with things, they are livingspaces to be filled with meanings. Therefore we are not looking at a non-city to be transformed into city, but at a parallel city with its own dynamicsand structures that have yet to be fully understood.5As we have seen, the city can be described from an aesthetic-geometric, but also an aesthetic-experiential, point of view. To recognize ageography within the supposed chaos of the peripheries, therefore, we canattempt toestablish a relationship with it by utilizing the aesthetic form ofthe erratic journey. What we discover is a complex system of public spacesthat can be crossed without any need for borders or buffers. The voids ofthe archipelago represent the last place where it is possible to get lost withinthe city, the last place where we can feel we are beyond surveillance andcontrol, in dilated, extraneous spaces, a spontaneous park that is neither theenvironmentalist’s re-creation of a false rustic nature nor the consumer-oriented exploitation of free time. The voids are a public space with anomadic character, that lives and is transformed so rapidly that it eludes theplanning schedules of any administration.If we climb over a wall and set off on foot in these zones we findourselves immersed in that amniotic fluid that supplied the life force of thatunconscious of the city described by the Surrealists. The liquid image of thearchipelago permits us to see the immensity of the open sea, but also whatis submerged there, on the seabed, at different depths, or just below thesurface. Plunging into the system of voids and starting to explore itscapillary inlets, we can see that what we have been accustomed to callingfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX‘empty’ isn’t really so empty after all; instead, it contains a range ofdifferent identities. The sea is formed by different seas, by a congeries ofheterogeneous territories positioned beside one another. These seas, ifapproached with a certain predisposition for crossing borders andpenetrating zones, turn out to be utterly navigable, so much so that often byfollowing the paths already traced by the inhabitants, we can walk allaround the city without ever actually entering it. The city turns out to be aspace of staying entirely crisscrossed by the territories of going. ZonzoIn Italian andare a Zonzo means “to waste time wanderingaimlessly.”6 It’s an idiomatic expression whose origins have been forgotten,but it fits perfectly into the context of the city wandered by the flâneurs, andthe streets roamed by the artists of the avant-gardes of the 1920s, or thesites of the ‘driftings’ of the youthful Lettrists after World War II. TodayZonzo has been profoundly changed, a new city has grown up around it,formed of different cities, crossed by the seas of the void. When “going toZonzo” at the beginning of the last century, one was always aware whetherthe direction of the wanderings led toward the center or toward theoutskirts. If we imagine walking through the Zonzo of yesteryear in astraight line from the center to the outskirts, first we encounter the denserzones of the center, then rarefied zones of small buildings and villas,followed by the suburbs, the industrial zones and, finally, the countryside.At this point we could have found a lookout point, to enjoy the view: aunitary, reassuring image of the city surrounded by countryside.Following the same route today, the sequence of spaces is no longerso simple. We encounter a series of interruptions and reprises, fragments ofconstructed city and unbuilt zones that alternate in a continuous passagefrom full to empty and back. What we thought of as a compact city isactually full of holes, often inhabited by different ethnic groups. If we getlost, we cannot easily figure out how to head toward an outside or an inside.And if we do manage to find a high spot from which to observe thepanorama, the view will no longer be very reassuring: it would be hard torecognize, in this strange magma, a city with a center and a periphery.Instead we are faced with a sort of leopard-skin with empty spots inside theconstructed city and full spots in the middle of the countryside. Getting lostoutside the walls of Zonzo today is a very different experience, but webelieve that the modes and categories made available by the artisticexperiences we have analyzed can help us to understand and transform thissituation without erasing its identity.Dada had discovered, in the tourist-attracting heart of Zonzo, theexistence of a banal, quotidian city in which to continuously run intounexpected relations; with an act of attribution of aesthetic value, the ‘urbanreadymade,’ it revealed the existence of a city that opposed both the hyper-technological utopias of the Futurist city and the pseudo-cultural city oftourism. The Dadaists understood that the entertainment system of thefile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXtourist industry had transformed the city into a simulation of itself, andtherefore they wanted to call attention to the nonentity, to reveal the culturalvoid, to exalt banality, the absence of any meaning. The Surrealists realizedthat something was hidden inside the void indicated by Dada, and theyunderstood that it could be filled with values. Deambulating in the banalplaces of Zonzo, they defined this void as the unconscious city: a large seain whose amniotic fluid we can find what the city has repressed, territoriesnever investigated but dense with continuous discoveries. Rejection and theabsence of control had produced extraneous, spontaneous places insideZonzo, that could be analyzed like the human psyche, and the Situationists,with their psychogeography, proposed a tool for their investigation. TheSurrealist-Situationist city is a living, empathic organism with its ownunconscious, with spaces that elude the project of modernism and live andtransform themselves independently of the will of the urbanists and, oftenenough, of the inhabitants themselves. The dérive made it possible to steerone’s way through this sea and to direct the point of view in a non-randomway toward those zones that more than others appeared to embody anelsewhere capable of challenging the society of the spectacle. TheSituationists sought out, in the bourgeois city of the postwar era, the placesforgotten by the dominant culture, off the map of the tourist itineraries:working-class neighborhoods off the beaten track, places in which greatmultitudes lived, often far from the gaze of the society, waiting for arevolution that never happened. The concepts of psychogeography, thedérive and unitary urbanism, once combined with the values of the nomadicuniverse, had produced the city in permanent transit of Constant, a cityaimed at being just the opposite of the sedentary nature of Zonzo.New Babylon was a system of enormous empty corridors extendingacross the territory, permitting the continuous migration of the multiculturalpopulations. Empty corridors for nomadic wandering took the place of theconsolidated city, superimposing themselves on the land like a formless,continuous, communicating spiderweb, in which life would be anadventure. But if we venture today into the empty wrinkles of Zonzo we getthe impression that New Babylon has finally been realized. The seas ofZonzo are like a New Babylon without any mega-structural or hyper-technological aspects. They are empty spaces like deserts, but like desertsthey are not so empty after all; in fact, they are city. Empty corridors thatpenetrate the consolidated city, appearing with the extraneous character of anomadic city living inside the sedentary city.New Babylon lives inside the amnesias of the contemporary citylike an enormous desert system ready to be inhabited by nomadictransurbance. It is a sequence of connected sectors, no longer elevatedabove the ground, but immersed in the city itself. Inside the wrinkles ofZonzo, spaces in transit have grown up, territories in continuoustransformation in time and space, seas crossed by multitudes of ‘outsiders’who hide in the city. Here new forms of behavior appear, new ways ofdwelling, new spaces of freedom. The nomadic city lives in osmosis withthe settled city, feeding on its refuse and offering, in exchange, its presenceas a new nature,a forgotten future spontaneously produced by the entropyof the city. New Babylon has emigrated, it has left the outskirts of Passaic,crossed the oceans and reached culturally different, ancient climes, raisinginteresting issues of identity. Venturing into New Babylon can be a usefulmethod for the interpretation and transformation of those zones of Zonzothat, in recent years, have thrown the disciplines of architecture and urbanplanning into crisis. And thanks to the artists who have roamed its interior,this city is visible today and appears as one of the most importantunresolved problems of architectural culture. To design a nomadic citywould seem to be a contradiction in terms. Perhaps it must be done inkeeping with the manner of the Neo-Babylonians: transforming it playfullyfrom the inside out, modifying it during the journey, restoring life to theprimitive aptitude for the play of relations that permitted Abel to dwell inthe world. Good transurbance.Notes for Transurbance1 The references are to the two fundamental texts: Kevin Linch, TheImage of the City, University Press, Cambridge 1960; Robert Venturi,Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas,M.I.T. press, 1972.2 On the Italian sprawl, that is called città diffusa, see: BernardoSecchi, Analisi delle strutture territoriali, Franco Angeli, Milano1965; Stefano Boeri, Bernardo Secchi e Livia Piperno, I territoriabbandonati, Compositori, Bologna 1990; AA.VV., La città diffusa,Daest, Università di Venezia, 1990; Bernardo Secchi, La periferia, in«Casabella», 583 (1991); Jean Francois Lyotard, Periferie, in«Millepiani», 2 (1994); AA.VV., Itaten. Indagine sulle trasformazionidel territorio italiano, Bari 1996; Gabriele Basilico e Stefano Boeri,Sezioni del paesaggio italiano, Art&, Udine 1997, p. 13; StefanoBoeri, Arturo Lanzani and Edoardo Marini, Il territorio che cambia,Editrice Abitare Segesta, Milano 1993; Stefano Boeri, I detectivedello spazio, in «Il Sole 24 Ore», 16 marzo 1997; Stefano Boeri,Eclectic Atlases, in «Documenta 3», Kassel 1997.3 About the themes of non-site, urban heterotopics and the poetics ofterrain vagues see: Marc Augé, Non-lieux. Introduction à uneanthropologie de la surmodernité, Seuil, Paris 1992; MIchelFoucault, Eterotropia, luoghi e non-luoghi metropolitani, in«Millepiani», 2 (1994); Paolo Desideri, La città di latta, Costa &Nolan, Genova 1995; AA.VV., Architettura della sparizione,architettura totale, in «Millepiani», 7 (1995); Massimo Ilardi,L’individuo in rivolta. Una riflessione sulla miseria dellacittadinanza, Costa & Nolan, Genova 1995; Massimo Ilardi, La cittàsenza luoghi, Costa & Nolan, Genova 1995; Ignasi de Solá Morales,Urbanité Intersticielle, in «Inter Art Actuel», 61 (1995), p. 27; Ignaside Sol á Morales, Terrain Vague, in «Quaderns», 212 (1996); Ignaside Sol á Morales, Città tagliate. Appunti su identità e differenze, in: Iracconti dell’abitare, Editrice Abitare Segesta, Milano 1996;L’architetto come sismografo, Biennale di Architettura di Venezia,Milano 1996; Mirko Zardini (ed.), Paesaggi ibridi, Skira, Milano1996; Paolo Desideri e Massimo Ilardi (editors), Attraversamenti,Costa & Nolan, Genova 1997.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX4 The concepts here are the contribution of astrophysicist FrancescoSylos Labini to the Stalker urban art laboratory. His research on theapplication of fractal geometry to the description of the distribution ofgalaxies in the universe gave the lab a fundamental contribution tounderstanding the urban dynamics of the fractal archipelago. See alsoMichael Batty and Paul Longley, Fractal Cities: a Geometry of Formand Function, Academic, San Diego 1994; Pierre Frankhauser, Lafractalité des structures urbaines, Anthropos, Paris 1994; MichaelBatty, New ways of looking at cities; Francesco Careri, Rome archipelfractal, voyage dans les combles de la ville, in «Techniques &Architecture», 427 (1996).5 The following reflections came from the research carried out in theStalker urban art laboratory at the beginning of the 90’s. The nameStalker is a tribute to 1979’s Andrej Tarkovskij’s homonymousmovie, which takes place in the mutant zone, a land where nature,after landing extraterrestrials, has developed its own autonomousevolution. The zone is blocked and fenced and the Stalker are thepasseurs, the guides who know the gates and the access modes, whohave a strategy of walking. “Stalker through the Actual Territories” isthe title of the first suburban drift conducted in Rome by the lab inOctober 1995. Adapting the concept of the “unconscious territory” ofthe surrealists and the “objective passionate terrain” of thesituationnists, Stalker has conducted his first erratic paths taking theconcept of “actual territory” of Robert Smithson read in the key ofFoucault, where the actual “is not what we are, but rather what we arebecoming, that is the Other, our becoming-Other”, MIchel Foucault,Eterotropia…, op. cit., p. 53.6 Zonzo in Italian language indicates a sort of metaphorical place ofwandering. It is used only in the sense “go to Zonzo”, to stroll, towalk without a goal, to waste time: “Instead of studying, he goes tozonzo”. It seems that the first time that zonzo appears officially in theItalian language is in the translation of the famous book of Jerome K.Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, London, 1900, translated intoItalian in Tre uomini a zonzo. Probably the word zonzo is likely to bean onomatopoeic derivation from zone, from the Greek zonninaiwhich means to “crawl”, “to go around”, a verb daily used by theAthenian peripatetics. In Paris la zone still indicates that band on thefile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXedge of the industrial city where fleas markets are. In this sense,zonzo seems to be almost a shamanic repetition dzion zon = to go tothe Zone, an exotic place where to find strange objects and to haveunexpected encounters. 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Une utopiecartographique, “Parachute” n° 68, 1992Flam, Jack, editor, Robert Smithson, The collected writings,University of California Press, Berkeley Los Angeles London 1996Fried, Michael, Art and Objecthood, “Artforum” giugno 1967Fuchs, Rudy H., Richardby events, headingtowards more impenetrable paths where it is possible to ‘stumble,’ maybeeven to get stuck, talking with the people you meet or knowing how to stop,forgetting that you were supposed to proceed; to know how to achieveunintentional walking, indeterminate walking.Another passage has been that of a deeper understanding of the termdérive (drift) in the sense of an “indeterminate project” and its potential forthe transformation of the nomadic—or more precisely informal—city.Therefore the term is seen not only in its meaning of “letting oneself goadrift,” of getting lost, at the mercy of the currents, but also in a moreproject-ive sense, as a tool to “construct a direction:” a “playful-constructive situation” (Debord), “to make in the form of a dynamiclabyrinth together with the inhabitants of New Babylon” (Constant). Whatappeals to me about the seagoing metaphor of drift is that the land on whichwe move is indeed an uncertain sea that constantly changes based on theshifting of winds, currents, our moods, our encounters. The point, in fact, ishow to designate a direction, but with extensive openness to indeterminacy,and to listen to the projects of others. Helming a sailboat meansconstructing a route and continuously adjusting it, reading the ripples on thesea, seeking zones with gusts and avoiding doldrums. In short, finding theenergies, in the territory and the people that inhabit it, that can take anindeterminate project forward in its becoming: the right people, the rightplaces and situations in which the project can grow, change, and becomecommon ground. It is clear that if we have a determinate project, it willonly fall to pieces at the first gusts of wind. There are definitely greaterhopes of achieving an indeterminate project.What we have said thus far has a lot to do with ‘relational’ or‘participatory’ creative processes, both words that have been sorely abusedof late in the world of art and architecture; let’s say that they are creativeprocesses that cannot meet fulfillment without an exchange with the Other.In these situations, the operation usually happens in one of two ways: eitheryou get the ‘other’ involved in your own project, to obtain consensus, oryou cancel out your own creativity, leaving the completion of the workcompletely up to the other. Instead, I believe it is interesting to navigatebetween these two shores, aware of the fact that we have our own creativeproject (even our desire to participate is a project in its own right), but alsoknowing that we want to leave it open, indeterminate. The steering willtherefore be done by the inner coherence between the things we comeacross and those we create, between things that happen and things we makehappen, the ongoing discovery of a hidden order we can observe as it comesto life beneath our feet and the perspective they afford us, the possibility ofconstructing a meaning and a coherent, shared story-route.At the beginning I mentioned a house-manifesto made with thedescendants of Abel, the so-called ‘nomads.’ This was Savorengo Ker (“thehouse of all” in the Romané language), built together with the Romani ofthe Casilino 900 camp in Rome in July 2008. It was supposed to be the firststep in the transformation of the Romani camp into a neighborhood, a citypiece, maybe an unstable Sahel between nomadism and steady settlement.After writing the book, the word ‘nomadism’ has taken on many othermeanings for me. I began to spend time with people who have firsthandexperience of nomadism, not by choice or cultural tradition: those who havehad to give up and live in the apartheid of migrant camps, those who stilltry to inhabit the world in a totally free way but run into infinite barriers tomovement. The story of the Savorengo Ker is long and very complex.Perhaps one day I will be able to write a book about it. In the meantime wehave made a film, which I urge you to watch on the web. But what I want tosay right now is that this was an important phase of the ‘indeterminateproject.’ The house’s design did not come from a drawing but from anencounter, a mutual exchange of distrust and fears, then of knowledge anddesires. Its idea, its form, its technology, its economics were continuouslydiscussed, negotiated—sometimes heatedly—in a continuous open dialoguebetween a community of ‘nomads’ by now forced to remain in one place,and a variegated group of ‘settlers,’ stable residents with a passion fornomadism, indignant about the situation of apartheid that is now forcing theRomani into increasingly sophisticated concentration camps. The result wasa wooden house with two levels, with imaginative Balkan decorations and avery ambitious project: to tell Cain that Abel too has the right to live in theintercultural city, and that his presence is a great boon precisely because itbrings with it an age-old conflict that will never be pacified.From this standpoint, I think the story of Cain and Abel and thegesture of the ‘ka’ still have much to teach to the arts that focus on thetransformation of space. In the first chapter, we left off at the point when,after the first murder in the history of humankind, God punished Cain bybanishing him to wander in the desert. I have never stopped wonderingabout Cain’s reaction. His fear is not of getting lost, but of meeting theOther; he is afraid the Other will kill him, and his sole concern is how toapproach that conflict. The Bible tells us God gave Cain a ‘sign’ to protecthim. A mark? The mark of Cain? I began to study this, and it seems to methat in the imagery of Cain this sign does not appear; instead, he carrieswith him the walking stick of the wayfarer. I am becoming convinced thatthe Lord did not exactly “give a sign” (signum) to Cain, nor a walking stick,but instead “taught” (insignare) Cain to do something he did not know howto do. God taught Cain to greet, to go towards the Other making a non-belligerent ‘sign.’ And I am increasingly convinced that the greeting is thesame as the ‘ka’ symbol (part of the etymology of the name Cain): tworaised arms of a person walking towards you, approaching the Other, nolonger to kill him as Cain had just done with his brother, but displayingempty hands, disarmed, unthreatening, reaching for an embrace. I amconvinced that those who wrote the Book of Genesis understood that thisfirst revolutionary act of peace was connected with walking and stopping.The art of wandering is followed by the art of meeting, of the constructionof a threshold, the creation of a border outside Space and Time, in which toapproach conflict between differences with a non-belligerent greeting.Maybe I will begin my next book here. It might be calledStopscapes. Stopping as an aesthetic practice. I would like to stop talkingabout walking in order to lose one’s way, and instead talk about walking tostumble on the Other, the decision to stop somewhere to construct a spaceof encounter among diversities, the birth of Kronos and the Space of LosingTime, the indeterminate project and participation as citizens in the hybridevolutions of those New Babylons that already exist in our cities. Rome, 4 August 2012Gilles A. TiberghienNomad CityIntroduction to the Frst Edition (2002) In Walkscapes, Francesco Careri does more than write a book onwalking considered as a critical tool, an obvious way of looking atlandscape, and as a form of emergence of a certain kind of art andarchitecture. Into the bargain he gives the Stalker group, originally made upof young student architects, a work that partly roots its activities in the past,gives it a genealogy in any event, as did André Breton when he consideredSurrealism historically as a sort of comet’s tail of German Romanticism,and as did the Jena Romantics themselves in their review of the Athenaeümby annexing Chamfort, Cervantes or Shakespeare and declaring them to bepremature Romantics. Or then again like Smithson in his text onLong, Thames and Hudson, London andSolomon Guggenheim Foundation, New York 1986.Fulton, Hamish, Camp Fire, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindoven1985Fulton, Hamish, One Hundred Walks, Haags Gementemuseum, DenHaag 1991Fulton, Hamish, Walking beside the River Vechte, Stadtische GalerieNordhorn 1998Fulton, Hamish, Keep Mooving, Museion Bolzano, Charta, 2005Garraud, Collette, L’idée de nature dans l’art contemporain,Flammarion, Paris 1994Gilchrist, Maggie e Boulan Marie-Sophie, Robert Smithson, Lepaysage entropique 1960-1973, Avignon 1994Krauss, Rosalind, Passages in Modern Sculpture (1981), tr. It.Passaggi, Storia della scultura da Rodin alla Land Art, BrunoMondadori, Milano 1998Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of Avant-Garde and OtherModernist Mytes, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Mass. (1985), trad. Fr.L’originalitè de l’avant-garde et autres mythes modernistes, Macula,Paris 1993Krauss, Rosalind (1981), Passaggi. 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Indagine sulle trasformazioni del territorio italiano,Bari 1996AA.VV., Città - Natura, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Palombi, Roma1997AA.VV., Suburban Discipline, edited by Lang Peter, PrincetonArchitectural Press, New York 1997AA.VV., La ville, le jardin, la memoire, Villa Medici, Charta, Roma1998AA.VV., “Art Press” n° 243, fèvrier 1999AA.VV., Neobabylonians, “Architectural Design” vol. 71, n°3, 2001AA.VV., Francis Alys, Musée Picasso d’Antibes/RMN, Lyon 2001AA.VV., Modos de acer. Arte, critico, esfera publica y action directa,Universidad de Salamanca 2001AA.VV., Promenaden / Promenades, “Topos” n° 41, Callewey,München 2002AA.VV., User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life,MassMoCa, MIT Press, New York 2004AA.VV., Em Transito, Mobilidade e vida urbana, Goethe InstitutLissabon, Lisboa 2004AA.VV., Babel 2. 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Zone temporaneamenteautonome, Shake, Milano 1991Berenstein, Jacques Paola, Estètica da ginga: A arquitectura dadfavelas através la obra de Hélio Oiticica, Casa da Palavra, Rio deJaneiro 2001Basilico, Gabriele e Boeri, Stefano, Sezioni del paesaggio italiano,Art&, Udine 1997Boeri, Stefano, Secchi, Bernardo e Piperno, Livia, I territoriabbandonati, Compositori, Bologna 1990Boeri, Stefano, Lanzani Arturo e Marini Edoardo, Il territorio checambia, Abitare/Segesta, Milano 1993Borden, Iain, Rendell Jane, Kerr Joe, Pivaro Alicia edited by, TheUnknown City.Contesting architectural and social space, the MITPress, Cambridge / London 2001Burckhardt, Annemarie et Burckhardt, Lucius, Barbecue City.Spaziergangswissenschaft in Bordeaux / Promenadologia a Bordeaux,in: AA.VV., “Mutations”, Arc en Reve, Bordeaux 2001Lucius, Burckhardt, Le design au-delà du visible, Centre GeorgePompidou, Paris 1991Careri, Francesco, Rome archipel fractal, voyage dans les combles dela ville, «Techniques & Architecture» n° 427, 1996Careri, Francesco e Romito Lorenzo, Stalker and the Big Game ofCampo Boario, in Blundell Jones Peter, Petrescu Doina and TillJeremy edited by, “Architecture and Participation”, Spoon Press –Taylor & Francis Group, London 2005Careri, Francesco, Jean Marc Besse e Gilles Tiberghien, BandeItinerante: Stalker a la Praille, Institut D’architecture Université deGenève, Genève, 2005Careri, Francesco, L’apartheid dei Rom e dei Sinti in Italia,“Urbanistica Informazioni” n° 238, pp. 23-25Careri, Francesco, Of Sailing and Stopping, in Marc Schoonderbeek(ed.), Border Conditions, A&NP – Architecture and Nature Press andTU Delft, Amsterdam 2010, pp.221-227http://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/goto/author_Boeri+Stefano/shelf_BIT/Boeri_Stefano.htmlhttp://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/goto/author_Secchi+Bernardo/shelf_BIT/Secchi_Bernardo.htmlhttp://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/goto/author_Piperno+Livia/shelf_BIT/Piperno_Livia.htmlhttp://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/goto/publisher_Compositori/shelf_BIT/Compositori.htmlCohen-Crux, Jan (edited by), Radical Street Performance. 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In tondo e senza fermarsi mai,Laterza, Bari 2012Glissant, Edouard, Poétique de la Rélation. Poétique III, Gallimard,Paris 1990Godfrey, Mark (ed.), Francis Alys, a Story of deception, Tate Modern,London 2010.Herzog, Werner, Sentieri nel ghiaccio, Milano, Guanda, 1980Hocquard, Emmanuel, “Taches Blanches”, in Ma Haie. Un privé àTanger II, P.O.L., Paris, 2001Hughes, Jonathan and Sadler, Simon, Non-Plan: Essays on FreedomParticipation and Change in Modern Architetcture and Urbanism,Oxford University Press, London 2000Ilardi, Massimo, La città senza luoghi, costa & nolan, Genova, 1995Ingersoll, Richard, L’internazionale del turista, “Casabella” 630-631,1996Indovina, Francesco, Matassoni Francesco, Savino Michelangelo,Sernini Michele, Torres Marco, Vettoretto, Luciano, La città diffusa,Stratema Collana R - Ricerche e Convenzioni n.1, luglio 1990Labucci, Adriano, Camminare, una rivoluzione, Donzelli, Roma 2011Lefebvre, Henry, The production of space, Basil Blakwell, Oxford1991Lefebvre, Henry, Il diritto alla città, Venezia - Padova, Marsilio, 1970Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge-Mass1960, trad. It. L’immagine della città, Marsilio, Venezia/Padova 1985Lugon, Olivier, Le marcheur. Piétons et photographes au sein desavant-gardes, «Etudes Photographiques» n° 8, novembre 2000Lyotard, Jean François, Periferie, “Millepiani” n° 2, 1994Maspero, François, Le passager du Roissy-Express, Seuil, Paris 1990Pasolini, Pier Paolo, La lunga strada di sabbia, (fotografie PhilippeSéclier), Contrasto, 2005Petti, Alessandro, Arcipelaghi e enclave, Bruno Mondadori, Milano2007Pernet, Alexis, L’idée du bord, «Le Carnet du Paysage» n° 7 automne2001, Acte Sud et Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paysage, Versailles2001Romito, Lorenzo, Stalker, in: AA.VV. “Suburban Discipline” editedby Lang, Peter, Princeton Arch. Press, New York 1997Romito Lorenzo, Ecouter, interagir, in “Mutations”, Arc en Reve,Bordeaux 2001Romito, Lorenzo, “Walking out of Contemporary,” in MitrasinovicM.(Ed.), Concurrent Urbanities: Designing infrastructures ofInclusion, Routledge, 2015.RoToR, Terrae, Water Air, manuals (2001 – 2008), dispari & dispari,2009Rowe, Colin, and Koetter, Fred, Collage City, Il saggiatore, Milano1981Secchi, Bernardo, Analisi delle strutture territoriali, Angeli, Milano1965Secchi, Bernardo, La periferia, “Casabella” n° 583, 1991Scott-Brown, Denise, Learning from Pop, “Casabella” n° 359-360,1971Sennett, Richard, The Uses of Disorder. Personal Identity and CityLife, New York 1970http://www.marsilioeditori.it/Sinclair, Iain, London Orbital, a piedi attorno alla metropoli, ilsaggiatore, (London 2002) Milano 2008de Solà Morales, Ignasi, Urbanité Interstitielle, «Inter Art Actuel» 61,Québec 1995de Solà Morales, Ignasi, Terrain Vague, «Quaderns» n° 212,Barcelona 1996Stalker, Le Stazioni, in: Desideri Paolo e Ilardi Massimo edited by,Attraversamenti, costa & nolan, Genova 1997Stalker, Attraverso i Territori Attuali, Jean Michel Place, Paris 2000Stalker, Stalker / Ararat, in “5tudi” ed. Dedalo, Roma 2000Stalker, Stalker, capcMusée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, Fage,Lyon 2004Venturi, Robert, and Scott-Brown, Denise e Izenour Steve, Learningfrom Las Vegas, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge-Mass. 1972, trad. It.Imparando da Las Vegas, Cluva, Venezia 1985Villani, Tiziana, I cavalieri del vuoto. Il nomadismo nel modernoorizzonte urbano, Mimesis, Milano 1992Wenders, Wim, L’ atto di vedere, Ubulibri, Milano 1992Zardini, Mirko, Paesaggi Ibridi, Skira, Milano 1997Photo Creditsgray08.jpg (left side): Courtesy Galerie Baudoin Lebon.gray16.jpg (left side): Collection of Jon and Joanne Hendricks. TheGilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Foundation, 488Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10013gray16.jpg (right side): Taken from the book: André Parinaud (ed.)André Breton-Entretiens, Arturo Schwarz (translator), Edizioni ErreEmme, Roma, 1991.gray23.jpg: Taken from the book: Gerard Berréby, Ralph Rumney, LeConsul, Éditions Allia, Paris, 1999.gray26.jpg and gray27.jpg: Constant (Victor Nieuwenhuys), Ontwerpvoor Zigeunerkamp, 1957; Symbolische voorstelling van NewBabylon, collage, 1969, VEGAP.gray30.jpg (upper left side), gray33.jpg, gray34.jpg, gray35.jpg (rightside): Richard Long, Walking a Line in Peru, 1972; A Line Made byWalking, 1967; Dartmoor Riverbeds. A four Day Walk Along All theRiverbeds Within a Circle on Dartmoor, 1978; A Six Day Walk OverAll Roads, Lanes and Double Tracks Inside a Six-Mille-Wide CircleCentered on The Giant of Cerne Abbas, 1975; Dartmoor Wind Circle,1985, courtesy of Anthony d’Offay Gallery.gray30.jpg (lower left side): Carl Andre, Sixteen Steel Cardinal 16,1974. VEGAP; Carl Andre, Secant, 1977. Courtesy Paula CooperGallery, New York. VEGAP.gray32.jpg (left side): Georges Maciunas [et. al.] Free Flux Tours,05/1976. Courtesy of Jon Hendricks. The Gilbert & Lila SilvermanFluxus Collection, Detroit.gray32.jpg (right side): Bruce Nauman, Slow Angle Walk (BeckettWalk), 1968. Musée Picasso, Antibes. VEGAP.gray38.jpg (left side): Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 3-25/10/1969,activities New York City, various locations. Courtesy BarbaraGladstone Gallery.gray38.jpg (right side): Walter de Maria, film Two Lines, ThreeCircles in the Desert, 1969, Mojave, California, courtesy of DiaCenter for the Arts, NY.gray39.jpg (left side): Dennis Oppenheim, Ground Mutations-ShoePrints, 1968. Collection Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, courtesy ofDennis Oppenheim.gray39.jpg (right side): Stanley Brouwn, This Way Brouwn,Amsterdam, 25-26/02/1961.gray40.jpg (left side): Dani Karavan, film Dunes, Water and theVenice Biennale 1976, courtesy of Dani Karavan.gray40.jpg (right side): Christo, Wrapped Walk Way, courtesy ofChristo & Jeanne-Claude. © Christo 1978. Photo Wolfgang Volz,VEGAP.gray42.jpg, gray43.jpg: Robert Smithson, The Monuments of Passaic,1976. Sucession Robert Smithson, courtesy of John Weber Gallery,New York, VEGAP.gray44.jpg: © Stalker, Planisfero Roma, courtesy Stalker NomadArchive.gray45.jpg to gray47.jpg: Lorenzo Romito and Romolo Ottaviani,Stalker Attraverso i Territori Attuali, courtesy Stalker NomadArchive.Acknowledgments First of all, I would like to thank Mònica Gili and DanielaColafranceschi for having made my driftings public. Particular thanks toFranco Zagari and Gianpiero Donin for their indications of the path oflandscape in the territories of architecture, and Alessandro Anselmi forhaving pointed to the menhirs and the ways of Dada in those zones. A“merci beaucoup” to the Institut d’Arts Visuels d’Orléans for the invitationto help their students get lost, to Didier Laroque and Gilles Tiberghien fortheir precious advice during the Parisian phases, and to Yves Nacher andGuy Tortosa for always encouraging me to wander off into the forest.Affectionate thanks to Cristina Ventura, with whom I shared beautifuladventures amidst the stones of Sardinia, and to Paolo Bruschi and LorenzoRomito, with whom I have playfully roamed many a byway. I would alsolike to thank Studiofrankus, a safe haven for arrivals and departures, theArarat that is the final landing place, and Stalker, a case in which more thanthanks are in order: in October 1995 we found ourselves tangled for fivedays in the brambles of the first transurbance in Rome. I decided to writethis book to try to explain that first step to myself.WalkscapesContentsForewordWalkscapes: Ten Years LaterNomad CityNotes for Nomad CityWalkscapesErrare Humanum Est...Anti WalkLand WalkTransurbanceToward A New Expansion of The FieldErrare Humanum Est…Cain, Abel, and ArchitectureFrom the Path to the MenhirThe Benben and the KaNotes for Errare Humanum EstAnti WalkThe Dada VisitThe Urban ReadymadeSurrealist DeambulationCity as Amniotic FluidFrom Banal City to Unconscious CityLettrist Drifting (Dérive)TheTheory of the DériveL’Archipel InfluentielPlayful City versus Bourgeois CityWorld as a Nomadic LabyrinthNotes for Anti WalkLand WalkThe Voyage of Tony SmithField ExpansionsFrom the Menhir to the PathTreading the WorldThe Wayfarer on the MapThe Suburban OdysseyThe Entropic LandscapeNotes for Land WalkTransurbanceBarefoot in the ChaosThe Fractal ArchipelagoZonzoNotes for TransurbanceBibliographyErrare Humanum est...Anti WalkLand WalkTransurbancePhoto CreditsAcknowledgmentsCentralPark, making its creator, Frederick Law Olmstead, an ancestor of Land Art.More than the Surrealists—whom he nonetheless opportunelyrereads here via André Breton’s Nadja and Mad Love, or Louis Aragon’sParis Peasant—it is Dada and its outings in the capital, its randomwanderings through the French countryside, that Francesco Careri claimskinship with. Nearer still to our own time, it’s the Situationists that theStalkers can be compared to. The two groups share a taste for urbaninvestigation, and a sensitivity to contemporary change as beingsymptomatic of a society in a state of mutation, not to say ‘decomposition.’They know how to scrutinize the unconscious of the city, as Benjamin oncedid in studying 19th-century Paris.When Francesco Careri writes in “Rome archipel fractal” that“We’ve chosen the trajectory as a form of expression which accentuates aplace by physically tracing a line through it. The act of traversal, aninstrument of phenomenological knowledge and symbolic interpretation ofthe territory, is a form of psychogeographical reading of it comparable tothe ‘walkabout’ of the Australian aborigenes,” the references, be theyimplicit, are clear.iBut make no mistake about it: neither the Stalkers nor FrancescoCareri are neo-Situationists. Stalker is a group, to be sure, but a completelyinformal one, and if Francesco Careri and Lorenzo Romito are its two mostprolific theoreticians they have no final say in the matter. Furthermore, eachmember of the group knows what he or she owes to the others in thefile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXcollective, the number of which varies momentarily between seven andtwenty individuals. This is its fundamental difference with the avant-gardegroups that sprang up in the 20th century, alternatively enrolling andexcluding their members. We are faced, here, with an experimental praxisthat avails itself of theoretical tools when and as they are needed, andalways with a sense of appropriateness, something which gives it greatsuppleness and considerable intellectual mobility. Indeed, the grouplaunched a manifesto in January 1996,ii but reading it quickly convinces usof its non-dogmatic quality and its essentially heuristic function.Walkscapes partakes of this same spirit. It gives point to a practice of whichStalker seeks to be the prolongation, the amplification, the adjustment, and—why not?—also the culmination, in a sense. Francesco Careri puts hisresearches, and also his theoretical inventiveness, at the disposition of thegroup. At the same time he offers us a rereading of the history of art interms of the practice of walking (such as he conceives of it), from theerection of the menhirs, through Egypt and Ancient Greece, up to theprotagonists of Land Art.The anthropological, philosophic, sociopolitical, and artistic insightsthe author presents us with serve, at any one moment, a discourse of greatlucidity, the ambition of which is to bring us up to today, to Zonzo, thatpurely linguistic place encountered in the expression andare a Zonzo, andwhich means drifting without a goal, as did the walker in the 19th-centurycity.Such an expression is what’s called a “fixed syntagm”, one whichmay only conform to a timeless reality. Today the landmarks havedisappeared: one no longer traverses Zonzo as before, with the guarantee ofgoing from the center to the periphery. There was a time when the centerwas dense and the outskirts of the city increasingly dispersed; right now thecenter is riddled with empty spaces.The idea suffusing the book as a whole, and which the authorconvincingly describes—and what does it matter if it’s historically corrector not, as long as it’s operative—is that walking has always generatedarchitecture and landscape, and that this practice, all but totally forgotten byarchitects themselves, has been reactivated by poets, philosophers andartists capable of seeing precisely what is not there, in order to make‘something’ be there. Hence, for instance, Emmanuel Hocquard andMichael Palmer, who in 1990 founded the Museum of Negativity afterfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXhaving spotted an immense hole beside the Autoroute du Nord in France.Or Gordon Matta-Clark, who in the 1970s bought up tiny bits of land inbetween almost touching buildings, and who declared that “through the‘negative space’ a void exists so that the ‘ingredients can be seen in amoving way or a dynamic way.’”iiiWe find the inventory of a certain number of these attitudes, and thephilosophical reflections elicited by walking, in a Bruce Chatwin bookCareri often cites, The Songlines, a sort of paean to nomad thinking, morethan to nomadism itself, it has to be said. By dynamizing them, the act ofwalking in fact makes the songlines crisscrossing Aborigine territoryvisible, those perspective lines which cleave the screen of the landscape inits most traditional representation, “witch lines,” as Deleuze would say, thatsweep thought along in the wake of the movement of things, along the veinsthe passing whales delineate at the bottom of the sea, described so well byMelville in Moby–Dick.But the world Careri and his friends elect to explore is that of theurban changes wrought to what used to be called the countryside, and ofwhich nothing more remains than a “holed” or “moth-eaten” reality—theauthor utilizes the image of a leopard skin “with empty spots in the builtcity and full spots in the heart of the countryside”—, a group of territoriesbelonging to the suburbs, a word that, as Smithson explains, “literallymeans ‘city below,’” and which he describes as “a circular abyss betweentown and country, a place where buildings seem to sink away from one’svision or buildings fall back into sprawling babels or limbos.” There, headds, “the landscape is effaced into sidereal expanses and contractions.”ivThis notion is not—or no longer is—uniquely European: far from it,as the reference to Smithson demonstrates. One also thinks of JohnBrinckerhoff Jackson, a great observer of landscape, who was extremelyinterested in the traces and organization of roads across American territory,showing how, far from just traversing landscapes and built-up areas, theyengendered new forms of inhabitable space, thus creating new kinds ofsociability. “Roads no longer merely lead to places,” he wrote, “they areplaces.”v And so are the paths the Stalkers follow during their walksthrough “the city limits,” far from the main communication routes. As it is,Jackson observed exactly the same thing as the group of Italian nomads: theformation of a new landscape that didn’t correspond to either the one in theclassical representations power had described or to their ‘vernacular’ form,file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXwhich is what he preferred to scrutinize. This unprecedented landscape iscreated by roads, new habits of mobility and the transporting of goodspreviously stockpiled at home. It is characterized by mobility and change,and it is on the approaches to these thoroughfares that encounters, as well asan indubitably new type of mutual aid, occur. Thus, “churches used asdiscothèques, dwellings used as churches […] one encounters empty spacesin the very heart of dense cities and industrial installations in the middle ofthe countryside.”viThe interstices and voids Careri observes, and which aren’t just onthe outskirts of the city but in its very center, are nevertheless occupied by‘marginal’ populations who have invented branching systems that arelargely unknown, unnoticed places that, because they are always shifting,come together, theauthor says, like a sea whose islets of dwellings wouldbe the archipelagos. This image is a good one, since it illustrates the relativeindeterminacy of these limits incurred by walking.The ‘marches’ was the name traditionally given to territoriessituated at the confines of a territory, at the edges of its borders.vii Walking[la marche] also designates a shifting limit, which is nothing other, in fact,than what’s called a frontier. The latter always goes hand in hand withfringes, intermediary spaces, with undeterminable contours that can onlyreally be made out when travelling through them. It’s walking, too, whichmakes the internal frontiers of the city evident, which, by identifying it,reveals the zone. Whence the beautiful title Walkscape, which stresses therevelatory power of this dynamism mobilizing the entire body—social aswell as individual—in order to then transform the mind of he who knowshow to look. Such an enterprise has a genuine ‘political’ stake—in theprimal sense of the word—a way of keeping art, urbanism and the socialproject at an equal, and sufficient, distance from each other in order toeffectively illuminate these empty spaces we have such need of to live well. file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXNotes for Nomad Cityi Francesco Careri, “Rome, archipel fractal. Voyage dans les comblesde la ville,” in Techniques & Architecture, 427, August-September1996. “Psychogéographie: étude des effets précis du milieugéographique, consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant sur lecomportement affectif des individus,” in InternationaleSituationniste, 1, June 1958, p. 13. (English version: Andreotti,Libero; Costa, Xavier (eds.), Theory of The Dérive: Art, Politics,Urbanism, Museu d’Art Contemporàni de Barcelona/Actar,Barcelona, 1996).ii Republished in French and in Italian in Stalker: À travers lesterritoires actuels, Jean Michel Place, Paris, 2000.iii Emmanuel Hocquard, “Taches blanches”, in Ma haie. Un privé àTanger II, P.O.L., Paris, 2001. V. A. [various authors] Gordon Matta-Clark, R.M.N., Marseilles, 1993.iv Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,”in The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York University Press, NewYork, 1979.v John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, YaleUniversity Press, New Haven & London, 1994.vi John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape,Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1984. I’m using hereLuc Baboulet’s translation from Le Visiteur, 6, 2000. One can relatethis text to what Francesco Careri writes: “We’ve visited churchesthat resemble industrial hangars, abandoned factories similar to ruinedcathedrals, Roman ruins in the state Goethe, Poussin or Piranesi sawthem in.” Cf. Francesco Careri, “Rome, archipel fractal,” op. cit.vii Cf. the suggestive book by Piero Zanini, Significati del confine,Mondadori, Milan, 2000.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXWalkscapesThe list on the previous page contains a series of actions that haveonly recently become part of the history of art. As a whole they can be auseful aesthetic tool with which to explore and transform the nomadicspaces of the contemporary city. Before erecting menhirs—known asbenben in Egyptian, “the first stone that emerged from the chaos”—manpossessed a symbolic form with which to transform the landscape. Thisform was walking, a skill learned with great effort in the first months of life,only to become an unconscious, natural, automatic action. It was bywalking that man began to construct the natural landscape of hissurroundings. And in our own century we have formulated the categoriesfor interpreting the urban landscapes that surround us by walking throughthem. Errare Humanum Est...The act of crossing space stems from the natural necessity to moveto find the food and information required for survival. But once these basicneeds have been satisfied, walking takes on a symbolic form that hasenabled man to dwell in the world. By modifying the sense of the spacecrossed, walking becomes man’s first aesthetic act, penetrating theterritories of chaos, constructing an order on which to develop thearchitecture of situated objects.Walking is an art from whose loins spring the menhir, sculpture,architecture, landscape. This simple action has given rise to the mostimportant relationships man has established with the land, the territory.Nomadic transhumance, generally thought of as the archetype forany journey, was actually the development of the endless wanderings ofhunters in the Paleolithic period, whose symbolic meanings were translatedby the Egyptians in the ka, the symbol of eternal wandering. This primitiveroving lived on in religion (the journey as ritual) and in literary forms (thejourney as narrative), transformed as a sacred path, dance, pilgrimage, andprocession. Only in the last century has the journey-path freed itself of theconstraints of religion and literature to assume the status of a pure aestheticact. Today it is possible to construct a history of walking as a form of urbanintervention that inherently contains the symbolic meanings of the primalcreative act: roaming as architecture of the landscape, where the termlandscape indicates the action of symbolic as well as physicaltransformation of anthropic space.This is the perspective in which we have taken a deeper look at threeimportant moments of passage in art history—all absolutely familiar tohistorians—in which an experience linked to walking represented a turningpoint. These are the passages from Dada to Surrealism (1921-1924), fromthe Lettrist International to the Situationist International (1956-1957), andfrom Minimal Art to Land Art (1966-1967). By analyzing these episodeswe simultaneously obtain a history of the roamed city that goes from thebanal city of Dada to the entropic city of Robert Smithson, passing throughthe unconscious and oneiric city of the Surrealists and the playful andnomadic city of the Situationists. What the rovings of the artists discover isa liquid city, an amniotic fluid where the spaces of the elsewhere takespontaneous form, an urban archipelago in which to navigate by drifting. Acity in which the spaces of staying are the islands in the great sea formed bythe space of going. Anti WalkWalking was experienced for the entire first part of the 20th centuryas a form of anti-art. In 1921 Dada organized a series of “visit-excursions”to the banal places of the city of Paris. This was the first time art rejected itsassigned places, setting out to reclaim urban space. The ‘visit’ was one ofthe tools selected by Dada to achieve that surpassing of art that was tobecome the red thread for any understanding of the subsequent avant-gardes. In 1924 the Parisian Dadaists organized trips in the open country.They discovered a dream-like, surreal aspect to walking and defined thisexperience as ‘deambulation,’ a sort of automatic writing in real space,capable of revealing the unconscious zones of space, the repressedmemories of the city. At the beginning of the 1950s the LettristInternational, disputing Surrealist deambulation, began to construct that“Theory ofDrifting” which, in 1956, at Alba, was to come into contact withthe nomadic universe. In 1957 Constant designed a camp for the gypsies ofAlba, while Asger Jorn and Guy Debord provided the first images of a citybased on the dérive. Lettrist urban drifting was transformed into theconstruction of situations, experimenting with playful-creative behavior andunitary environments. Constant reworked Situationist theory to develop theidea of a nomadic city—New Babylon—bringing the theme of nomadisminto the sphere of architecture and laying the groundwork for the radicalavant-gardes of the years to follow. Land WalkThe second half of the 20th century viewed walking as one of theforms used by artists to intervene in nature. In 1966 the magazine Artforumpublished the story of the journey of Tony Smith along a highway underconstruction. A controversy broke out between modernist critics andMinimalist artists. Certain sculptors began to explore the theme of the path,first as an object and later as an experience. Land Art re-examined, throughwalking, the archaic origins of landscape and the relationship between artand architecture, making sculpture reclaim the spaces and means ofarchitecture. In 1967 Richard Long produced A Line Made by Walking, aline drawn by stepping on the grass in a field. The action left a trace on theland, the sculpted object was completely absent, and walking became anautonomous art form. That same year Robert Smithson made A Tour of theMonuments of Passaic. This was the first such voyage through the emptyspaces of the contemporary urban periphery. The tour of the newmonuments led Smithson to draw certain conclusions: the relationshipbetween art and nature had changed, nature itself had changed, thecontemporary landscape autonomously produced its own space, in the‘repressed’ parts of the city we could find the abandoned futures producedby entropy. TransurbanceThe interpretation of the present city from the point of view ofroaming is based on the ‘transurbances’ conducted by Stalker since 1995 ina number of European cities. Losing itself amidst urban amnesias Stalkerhas encountered those spaces Dada defined as banal and those places theSurrealists defined as the unconscious of the city. Repressed memory,rejection, and absence of control have produced a system of empty spaces(the sea of the archipelago) through which it is possible to drift, as in thelabyrinthine sectors of Constant’s New Babylon: a nomadic space ramifiedas a system of urban sheep tracks that seems to have taken form as theresult of the entropy of the city, as one of the “forgotten futures” describedby Robert Smithson. Inside the wrinkles of the city, spaces in transit havegrown, territories in continuous transformation in time. These are the placeswhere today it is possible to go beyond the age-old division betweennomadic space and settled space.Actually, nomadism has always existed in osmosis with settlement,and today’s city contains nomadic spaces (voids) and sedentary spaces(solids) that exist side by side in a delicate balance of reciprocal exchange.Today the nomadic city lives inside the stationary city, feeding on its scrapsand offering, in exchange, its own presence as a new nature that can becrossed only by inhabiting it.Transurbance is, just like the erratic journey, a sort of pre-architecture of the contemporary landscape. The first aim of this book,therefore, is to reveal the falseness of any anti-architectural image ofnomadism, and thus of walking: hunters of the Paleolithic period andnomadic shepherds are the origin of the menhir, the first object of thelandscape from which architecture was developed. The landscape seen as anarchitecture of open space is an invention of the civilization of wandering.Only during the last ten thousand years of sedentary living have we passedfrom the architecture of open space to the architecture of filled space.The second aim is to understand the place of the path-journey in thehistory of architectural archetypes. In this sense we must make a journeyback to the roots of the relationship between path and architecture, andtherefore between roaming and the menhir, in an age in which architecturedid not exist as the physical construction of space, but as a symbolicconstruction—inside the path—of the territory. Toward A New Expansion of The FieldThe term ‘path’ simultaneously indicates the act of crossing (thepath as the action of walking), the line that crosses the space (the path asarchitectural object) and the tale of the space crossed (the path as narrativestructure). We intend to propose the path as an aesthetic form available toarchitecture and the landscape. In this century the rediscovery of the pathhappened first in literature (Tristan Tzara, André Breton, and Guy Debordare writers), then in sculpture (Carl Andre, Richard Long, and RobertSmithson are sculptors), while in the field of architecture the path has led tothe pursuit of the historical foundations of radical anti-architecture innomadism, and has not yet led to a positive development. Through the pathdifferent disciplines have produced their own “expansion of the field”(Rosalind Krauss) for coming to terms with their own limits. Retracing themargins of their disciplines, many artists have attempted not to fall into theabyss of negation consciously opened by Dada at the beginning of the 20thcentury, but to leap beyond it. Breton transformed the anti-art of Dada intoSurrealism through an expansion of the field toward psychology; theSituationists, starting again from Dada, attempted to transform anti-art intoa unified discipline (urbanisme unitaire) through the expansion of the fieldtoward politics; Land Art transformed the sculptural object intoconstruction of the territory by expanding the field toward landscape andarchitecture.It has often been observed that the architectural discipline has, inrecent years, expanded its field in the direction of sculpture and thelandscape. In this direction we also find the crossing of space, seen not as amanifestation of anti-art but as an aesthetic form that has achieved thestatus of an autonomous discipline. Today architecture could expand intothe field of the path without encountering the pitfalls of anti-architecture.The transurbance between the edges of the discipline and the place ofexchange between the nomadic and the settled city can represent a first step.In this space of encounter walking is useful for architecture as a cognitiveand design tool, as a means of recognizing a geography in the chaos of theperipheries, and a means through which to invent new ways to intervene inpublic metropolitan spaces, to investigate them and make them visible. Theaim is not to encourage architects and landscape architects to leave theirdrawing boards behind, shouldering the backpack of nomadic transurbance,nor is it to theorize a total absence of paths to permit the citizen to get lost,although often errare could truly be seen as a value instead of an error. Theaim is to indicate walking as an aesthetic tool capable of describing andmodifying those metropolitan spaces that often have a nature stilldemanding comprehension, to be filled with meanings rather than designedand filled with things. Walking then turns out to be a tool which, preciselydue to the simultaneous reading and writing of space intrinsic to it, lendsitself to attending to and interacting with the mutability of those spaces, soas to intervene in their continuous becoming by acting in the field, in thehere and now of their transformation, sharing from the inside in themutations of these spaces that defy the conventional tools of contemporarydesign. Today architecture can transform the path from anti-architectureinto a resource, expanding its field of disciplinary action toward somethingclose by, taking a step in the direction of the path. The following reflectionsare intended to be acontribution in this direction. Errare Humanum Est… Cain, Abel, and ArchitectureThe primordial separation of humanity into nomads and settlersresults in two different ways of living in the world and therefore of thinkingabout space. It is widely believed that the settlers—as the inhabitants of thecity—can be considered the ‘architects’ of the world, while the nomads—asthe inhabitants of the deserts and the open spaces—should be seen as ‘anti-architects,’ experimental adventurers, and therefore against architectureand, more generally, the transformation of the landscape.1 But perhapsthings are a little more complex. If we look back on the story of Cain andAbel in architectural terms, we can observe how the relation nomadism andsettlement establish with the construction of symbolic space springs froman original ambiguity. As we read in Genesis, the first sexual division ofhumanity—Adam and Eve—is followed, in the second generation, by adivision of labor and therefore of space. The sons of Adam and Eveembody the two souls in which the human race is divided from the outset:Cain is the sedentary soul, Abel the nomadic one. In keeping with God’swill, Cain devoted his time to agriculture, Abel to sheep rearing. Adam andEve thus left their sons an equal legacy, dividing the world in two: Cain wasthe owner of all the land, Abel the owner of all the living beings.But the parents, ingenuously relying on brotherly love, didn’t thinkabout the fact that all living things need land to move and to live, and aboveall, that shepherds need pastures for their flocks. Thus it happened that inthe wake of an argument Cain accused Abel of trespassing and—as we allknow—killed him, condemning himself to a destiny of eternal wandering aspunishment for his fratricidal sin: “When thou tillest the ground, it shall nothenceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thoube in the earth.”2 According to the etymological roots of the names of thetwo brothers, Cain can be identified with Homo Faber, the man who worksand tames nature to materially construct a new artificial universe, whileAbel, whose job was, all told, less tiring and more amusing, can be seen asthat Homo Ludens so dear to the Situationists, the man who plays andconstructs an ephemeral system of relations between nature and life. Theirdifferent use of space also implies a different use of time derived from theoriginal division of labor. The work of Abel, which consists in going tofields to feed his animals, is one of privilege with respect to the labors ofCain, who has to stay in the fields to plough, sow and reap the fruits of theearth. While most of Cain’s time is spent on work, and is therefore entirelyfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXa useful, productive time, Abel has a great quantity of free time to devote tointellectual speculation, exploration of the earth, adventure and, therefore,to play, the non-utilitarian time par excellence. This free and thereforeplayful time leads Abel to experiment and to construct an initial symbolicuniverse around him. The activity of walking through the landscape towatch the flocks leads to the first mapping of space and to that attribution ofsymbolic and aesthetic values to the territory that was to lead to the birth oflandscape architecture. So from the very beginning artistic creation, as wellas that rejection of work and therefore of the opus that was to develop withthe Parisian Dadaists and Surrealists, a sort of recreational-contemplativesloth that lies at the base of the anti-artistic flânerie that crosses the 20thcentury, was associated with walking. But it is interesting to note that after the murder Cain is punished byGod by being condemned to roam the face of the earth: Abel’s nomadism istransformed from a condition of privilege to one of divine punishment. Theerror of fratricide is punished with a sentence to err without a home,eternally lost in the land of Nod, the infinite desert where Abel hadpreviously roamed. And it should be emphasized that after the death ofAbel the first cities are constructed by the descendants of Cain: Cain, thefarmer condemned to wander, gives rise to the sedentary life and thereforeto another sin, he carries with him the origins of the stationary life of thefarmer and those of the nomadic life of Abel, both experienced as apunishment and an error. But actually, according to Genesis, it is Jabal, adirect descendent of Cain, “the father of such as dwell in tents, and of suchas have cattle.”3 The nomads come from the lineage of Cain, who was asettler forced to become a nomad, and they carry the wanderings of Abel intheir roots (also etymologically).Bruce Chatwin reminds us that “no people but the Jews have everfelt more keenly the moral ambiguities of settlement. Their God is aprojection of their perplexity. […] Yahwèh, in origin, is a God of the Way.His sanctuary is the Mobile Ark, His House a tent, His Altar a cairn ofrough stones. And though He may promise His Children a well-wateredland […] He secretly desires for them the Desert.”4 And Richard Sennetcontinues, stating that in reality “Yahwèh was a God of Time rather than ofPlace, a God who promises to give his followers a divine sense of theirmournful wanderings.”5 This uncertainty about architecture dates back tothe dawn of humanity. The two great families into which the human race isdivided have two different spatial experiences: that of the cave and theplough, excavating space from the body of the earth, and that of the tentthat moves across the earth’s surface without leaving any lasting traces.These two ways of dwelling on the Earth correspond to two conceptions ofarchitecture itself: an architecture seen as physical construction of spaceand form, as opposed to an architecture seen as perception and symbolicconstruction of space. Observing the origins of architecture through thenomad-settler polarity, it would appear that the art of constructing space—or what we normally call ‘architecture’—was originally an invention of thesettlers which evolved from the construction of the first rural villages to thatfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXof the cities and the great temples. The commonly held belief is thatarchitecture was born of the necessity for a ‘space of staying,’ as opposed tonomadism, understood as a ‘space of going.’Actually, the relationship between architecture and nomadismcannot be directly expressed as an opposition of “architecture ornomadism.” There is a much more profound relation that connectsarchitecture to nomadism through the notion of the journey or path. In factit is probable that it was nomadism, or more precisely ‘wandering,’ thatgave rise to architecture, revealing the need for a symbolic construction ofthe landscape. All this began well before the appearance of the concept ofnomadism itself, during the intercontinental roving of the first men of thePaleolithic period, many millennia before the construction of the templesand the cities. Nomadic Space and “Erratic” SpaceThe division of labor between Cain and Abel produced two distinctbut not fully self-sufficient civilizations. The nomad, in fact, lives incontrast but also in osmosis with the settler: farmers and shepherds need tocontinuously trade their products and require a hybrid, or more preciselyneutral, space in which this trade is possible. The Sahel has precisely thisfunction: it is the edge of the desert where nomadic sheep-rearing andsedentary agriculture mingle, forming anunstable buffer zone between thesettled city and the nomadic city, the full and the empty.6 Gilles Deleuze andFélix Guattari have described these two different spatial concepts with avery clear image: “The sedentary space is striated by walls, enclosures androutes between the enclosures, while the nomadic space is smooth, markedonly by ‘strokes’ that are erased or shift with the journey.”7In other words sedentary space is denser, more solid, and thereforefull, while that of the nomad is less dense, more fluid, and therefore empty.The nomadic space is an infinite, uninhabited, often impervious void: adesert in which orientation is difficult, as in an immense sea where the onlyrecognizable feature is the track left by walking, a mobile, evanescent sign.The nomadic city is the path itself, the most stable sign in the void, and theform of this city is the sinuous line drawn by the succession of points inmotion. The points of departure and arrival are less important, while thespace between is the space of going, the very essence of nomadism, theplace in which to celebrate the everyday ritual of eternal wandering. Just asthe sedentary path structures and gives life to the city, in nomadism the pathbecomes the symbolic place of the life of the community.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX The nomadic city is not the trail of a past left as a tracing on theground, it is the present that occupies, again and again, those segments ofthe territory on which the journey takes place, that part of the landscapewalked, perceived, and experienced in the hic et nunc of the transhumance.It is from this vantage point that the territory can be interpreted, memorized,and mapped in its becoming. Lacking stable reference points, the nomadhas developed the capacity to construct his own map for every occasion,whose geography is in constant change, deformed in time due to themovements of the observer and the perpetual transformation of the territory.The nomadic map is a void where the paths connect wells, oases, holyplaces, good pastures and spaces that change rapidly. It is a map that seemsto reflect a liquid space in which the full fragments of the space of stayingfloat in the void of going, in which always shifting paths remain visibleonly until they are erased by the wind. The nomadic space is furrowed byvectors, by unstable arrows that constitute temporary links rather thandefined roads: the same system of representation of space found in the planof a Paleolithic village carved in stone in the Val Camonica, in the maps ofthe “walkabouts” of the Australian Aborigines, and in thepsychogeographic maps of the Situationists.While in the settler’s eyes nomadic spaces are empty, for nomadsthese voids are full of invisible traces: every little dissimilarity is an event, auseful landmark for the construction of a mental map composed of points(particular places), lines (paths), and surfaces (homogeneous territories) thatare transformed over time.The ability to know how to see in the void of places and therefore toknow how to name these places was learned in the millennia preceding thebirth of nomadism. The perception/construction of space begins with thewanderings of man in the Paleolithic landscape. While initially men couldhave used the tracks created by the seasonal migrations of animals throughthe vegetation, it is probable that from a certain period onward they beganto blaze their own trails, to learn to orient themselves using geographicalreference points, and to leave increasingly stable recognizable signs on thelandscape. The history of the origins of man is a history of walking, ofmigrations of peoples and cultural and religious exchanges that took placealong intercontinental trajectories. The slow, complex operation ofappropriation and mapping of the territory was the result of the incessantwalking of the first humans.The ‘walkabout’ is the system of routes with which the indigenouspeoples of Australia have mapped the entire continent. Every mountain,river and spring belongs to a complex system of path-stories—the songlines—that continuously interweave to form a single “history of the DreamTime,” the story of the origins of mankind. Each of these paths is connectedto a song, and each song is connected to one or more mythological tales setin the territory. The entire culture of the Australian aborigines—passeddown from generation to generation thanks to a still-active oral tradition—is based on a complex mythological epic of stories and geographies thatexist in the same space. Each path has its own song and the complex of thesonglines constitutes a network of erratic, symbolic paths that cross anddescribe the space, like a sort of chanted guidebook. It is as if Time andHistory were updated again and again by ‘walking them,’ re-crossing theplaces and the myths associated with them in a musical deambulation that issimultaneously religious and geographic.8This type of journey, still visible in Aboriginal cultures, belongs to aphase of human history preceding that of nomadism. We can define thistype of path as ‘erratic.’ It is important, in fact, to make a distinctionbetween the concepts of roaming (errare) and nomadism. While thenomadic journey is linked to cyclical movements of livestock during thetranshumance, erratic movement is connected to the pursuit of prey of thehunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era. In general, it is not correct to speakof nomadism before the Neolithic revolution in the seventh millennium BC,because nomadism and settlement are both the result of the new productiveutilization of the land that began with the climate change following the lastglacial period.file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXNomadism takes place in vast empty spaces, but spaces that arefamiliar, and a return trip is planned; wandering, on the other hand, happensin an empty space that has not yet been mapped, without any defineddestination. In a certain sense the path of the nomad is a cultural evolutionof wandering, a sort of ‘specialization.’ It is important to remember thatagriculture and livestock-raising are two activities derived from thespecialization of the two primitive productive activities—gathering andhunting—, both of which required wandering. These two activities, whichconsisted in obtaining food by roaming the land, evolved over time thanksto the gradual taming of animals (sheep-rearing) and of plants (agriculture),and only after many millennia did they begin to generate sedentary spaceand nomadic space. Therefore both the routes of the sedentary world andthe journeys of the nomad are derived from the erratic, Paleolithic path. Thenotion of path belongs simultaneously to both cultures, i.e. to the builders of‘settled cities’ and to those of ‘errant cities.’Space before the Neolithic era was utterly free of those signs thatbegan to mark the surface of the Earth with the advent of agriculture andsettlement. The only architecture in the Paleolithic world was the path, thefirst anthropic sign capable of imposing an artificial order on the territoriesof natural chaos. Space, which for primitive man was empathic—experienced as being animated with magical presences—began to includethe first elements of order in the Paleolithic period. What seemed like anirrational, random space based on concrete material experience slowlybegan to transform into rational and geometric space generated by theabstraction of thought. This was a passage from a mere utilitarian use forthe finding of nourishment to an attribution of mystical and sacredmeanings to physical space. A passage from a quantitative to a qualitativespace, filling the surrounding void with a certain number of full places thatserved for orientation. In this way the multidirectional space of naturalchaos began to be transformed into a space ordered, in keeping with the twomain directions clearly visible in the void: the direction of the sun and thatof the horizon.At the end of the Paleolithic era, therefore, the landscape decipheredby man probably resembled that of the walkabout: a space constructed byvectors of erratic pathways, by a series of geographical features connectedto mythical events and assembled in sequence, and it was probably orderedin keeping with the fixed directions of the vertical and the horizontal: thesun and the horizon.Walking, though it is not the physical construction of a space,implies a transformation of the place and its meanings. The mere physicalpresence of man in an unmapped space and the variations of perceptions hereceives crossing it, constitute a form of transformation of the landscapethat, without leaving visible signs, culturally modifies the meaning of spaceand therefore the space itself. Before the Neolithic era, and thus before themenhirs, the only symbolic architecture capable of modifying theenvironment was walking, an action that is simultaneously an act ofperception and creativity, of reading and writing the territory. From the Path to the MenhirThe first situated object in the human landscape springs directlyfrom the universe of roaming and nomadism. While the horizon is a stable,more or less straight line depending upon the landscape itself, the sun has aless definite movement, following a trajectory that appears clearly verticalonly in its two moments of vicinity to the horizon: sunrise and sunset. Thedesire to stabilize the vertical dimension was probably one of themotivations behind the creation of the first artificial element in space: themenhir.Menhirs appear for the first time in the Neolithic age and representthe simplest objects, but with the greatest density of meaning, of the entireStone Age. Their raising is the first human act of physical transformation ofthe landscape: a large stone lying horizontally on the ground is still just astone without symbolic connotations, but when it is raised vertically andplanted in the ground it is transformed into a new presence that stops timeand space: it institutes a ‘time zero’ that extends into eternity, and a newsystem of relations with the elements of the surrounding landscape.An invention of such scope could satisfy many different aims, andthis partially explains the great number of different interpretations that havebeen made of the menhirs. It is probable, in fact, that many menhirs hadmultiple, simultaneous functions: it is almost certain that, in general, theywere connected to the cult of fertility, of the mother goddess Earth and theworship of the Sun, but the same stones probably also indicated the placeswhere legendary heroes had died, sacred sites of potent chthonic energy,places where water was found (another sacred element), or boundaries andproperty lines. What interests us about the megaliths is not so much thestudy of the cults involved as the relationship established by the stones withthe territory: where they were placed. We can approach this question byconsidering the name still used today for the menhirs by the shepherds ofLaconi, in Sardinia: perdas litteradas or ‘lettered stones,’ ‘stones ofletters.’9 This reference to writing can, in fact, explain at least threedifferent uses of the monoliths: surfaces on which to inscribe symbolicfigures, elements with which to write on the territory, and signals withwhich to describe the territory. The first interpretation of the term litteradassimply refers to the fact that on the main face of some of the stonesdifferent symbols are placed, as on the Egyptian obelisks. The secondindicates that these stones were used to architecturally construct thefile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXlandscape as a sort of geometry—seen in the etymological sense of‘measurement of the earth’—with which to design abstract figures tooppose natural chaos: the point (the isolated menhir); the line (therhythmical alignment of multiple stones); the surface (the cromlech, or theportion of space enclosed by menhirs placed in a circle). The thirdinterpretation indicates that the stones, beyond geometry, also revealed thegeography of the place, serving to describe its physical structure and itsproductive and/or mystical-religious utilization. In other words, they weresignals placed along the major routes of crossing.It has been noted that often the zones of megalithic activity in theNeolithic era coincide with those of the development of hunting in thePaleolithic period. This prompts reflection on the link between the menhirsand the paths of Paleolithic roaming and those of nomadic transhumance. Ineffect it is hard to imagine how the travelers of antiquity could have crossedentire continents without the help of maps, roads and signs. Yet anincredible traffic of travelers and merchants continuously crossed nearlyimpassable forests and uncharted territories, apparently without excessivedifficulty. It is very probable that the menhirs functioned as a system ofterritorial orientation, easily deciphered by those who understood itslanguage: a sort of guide sculpted in the landscape, leading the traveler tohis destination from one signal to another along the intercontinental routes.The menhirs had a relationship with the routes of commerce, whichwas often driven by activities of livestock-rearing. For the Romans themenhirs were simply simulacra of Mercury, or the natural predecessors ofthe Hermae that guarded the quadrivium, the crossroads symbolizing thefour directions of the world, where man encountered different possibilitiesfor the future, where Oedipus ran up against his incestuous fate, where itwas best, therefore, to seek the protection of a god. Hermes or Mercury, themessenger of the gods, was the god of wayfarers and of commerce (mercari= to trade), of thieves and profit, and the protector of the roads andintersections, in the dual sense of earthly roads and those of the soul to theafterworld.10Even today, in Puglia, in the south of Italy, certain menhirs standalong the boundaries separating different territories, places which wereprobably the sites of clashes or encounters between different villages inancient times. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the raising ofsuch monoliths required the work of an enormous number of men, andfile:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXtherefore the inhabitants of more than one village had to be involved.Malagrinò cites the example of the largest monolith of Carnac, the menhirLocmariaquer, 23 meters high, weighing 300 tons, whose erection iscalculated as requiring the force of at least 3,000 people. If such a largenumber of people did not come from a concerted effort of differentpopulations, we would have to posit the existence of a village so large as tobe a veritable megalopolis for the time. The impossibility of the existenceof such large tribes leads to the hypothesis that the menhirs were notpositioned in territory belonging to one particular village, but in ‘neutral’zones with which multiple populations could identify, a fact which wouldalso explain the use, on a single site, of stones from different regions, someof which were even hundreds of kilometers distant from the site.11file:///tmp/calibre_5.8.1_tmp_l7aod2ja/f0jws7vg_pdf_out/text/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXThe zones in which the megalithic works were built were, therefore,either a sort of sanctuary utilized by the surrounding populations forfestivities, or more probably stopping places along the main routes oftransit, places with the function of today’s highway rest stops. These placeswere visited throughout the year—and especially