2011 (re)adjusted territories : Madrid etc …

Studio 12 (2010-2011) : (re)adjusted territories … Madrid, etc
Jeanne Sillett and Mark Rintoul

‘(re)adjusted territories : Madrid, etc’ began with choreographed surveys in and around Madrid. A city described as ‘baffling’ … it’s location a royal decision in 1561 to fix the seat of government at the geometric centre of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish empire. Perched on an arid escarpment overlooking a plain, it is Europe’s highest capital city and has expanded to be one of its largest. Roads and railway lines radiate from Madrid confirming its strategy of positioning.

Madrid’s complex topography is countered by the artifice of flatness … platforms at all scales on which the rituals of everyday life can secure a reliable purchase … squares, terraces, rooms, pools, bridges, cellars, tables … datum points defining the co-ordinates of occupation.

All distances in Spain are measured from the stone slab in the Puerto del Sol known as Kilometric Zero.

How might we observe and respond to the circumstance of Madrid and its underlying surface … what fresh initiatives and oblique logics might be applied here … as critical interventions … or moves of radical delicacy … ?

Madrid
40*25′N 3*42′W
654m above sea level

Continue

2010 (re)adjusted territories : aberrant conditions, Napoli etc …

Three hundred years ago Napoli was the southernmost end point of a Grand Tour of France and Italy undertaken by the wealthy and educated English aristocracy chasing the origins of western civilisation.

Missing from the itinerary and the Grand Tourists’ documentation is the in-between … the untidy, non-conforming reality of one of Europe’s most densely populated cities. A city of dark reputation … considered unfathomable and twisted even before the Camorra … always culturally on the edge of Europe … established in a volcanic landscape by the sea that is simultaneously terrible and benign … volatile, unpredictable, fertile, strategically desirable, hot and strange … where ‘aberrant conditions’ are the norm.

Napoli has lived with the fact of instability for centuries. It is undeniably layered, unstable, entangled, contradictory … an accumulation of violent disruption, of ordinary contingencies and accommodations, of exquisite aspirations and extremes of making-do.

We devised a survey strategy for Napoli …

… anchored to the notion that everything exists in the present. Assuming antiquity and the accidental, the erudite and the expedient, the intentional and the unintentional, the refined and the popular, the natural and the artificial are all legitimate subjects for observation and documentation …

… conceived and executed as an ‘aberrant tour’.

Napoli is evidently a (re)adjusted territory … over and over …

… layer upon layer of geography and history, anecdote and artifice, space and survival, the banal and the baroque all juxtaposed …

It’s untidy and labyrinthine … extraordinary and uncomfortable. Chaos and density erected on an underlying Roman grid.

Its exaggerated section incorporates subterranean spaces … catacombs and underground aqueducts, sewers and caves …  extending the verticality above ground which includes arcades and alleys, the one room dwellings of the very poor, the attics and terraces of the professional classes and aristocratic relics hanging on at the top in the strata of baroque spires and bells.

Napoli’s old city centre is now protected by UNESCO…

…which means it’s a zone of selective autonomy, of special consents and waivers, of accommodations beyond the status quo in recognition of its legitimised value and unique qualities.

Paradoxically this city that breaks all the rules has been a formative influence in the digested and translated circumstance that guides our sense of the normal.

Our aberrant tour appropriated some of the unquestioned itineraries of the Grand Tour as alibis for a contemporary sequel. In the sequel the given cultural landmarks and edifices and artistic attractions would be deemed equal to parallel curiosities, incidents, conditions and events. Indeed their juxtaposition would seem an appropriate quest. And the appropriate means of representing these dual observations another crucial endeavour.

The preparations for this aberrant tour and its duration and expense contrasted with the Grand Tour model from which it borrows and departs.

It was rigorous in its concepts, aspirations and organisation but open ended about its discoveries and their implications.

We combed the centre of Napoli using the Grand Tour’s recognised attractions as a start but not an end. We visited the shoreline and the islands in the Bay of Naples, and the horizon that the introverted and vertical city denies. And Pompeii and Herculaneum, both devastated by an erupting Vesuvius in 79 A.D. and both on the Tour’s essential agenda.

High and low culture collided in our aberrant tour as we borrowed the Grand Tour itinerary and also the devices of the flaneur … to explore the old city, the landscapes beyond the problematic suburban ghettos and toxic industries and landfills, volcanos and ruins, islands and coasts … all as contemporary phenomenon, aspects of the here and now …

Our survey strategy was developed, agreed, documented, arranged and acted on early … catching the last sunny days of October … and established a common resource and backdrop to the individual projects that emerged from the unpredictable experience.

Napoli’s aberrant conditions can be viewed negatively and positively … perhaps it is a potential paradigm of a city after modernity … linked by its contingencies and uneven conditions to emerging global cities … perhaps it represents an interruption to our inherited assumptions about urban life, architecture and planning.

Responses to this city’s bizarre history and its equally bizarre present, its volatile and tricky spaces, involved critical incisions, strategic counterpoints, radical optimism, oblique potentials, unexpected delicacy, and/or … ideas at all sorts of scales …

Napoli, in spite of its many problems, is not a museum, not sanitised or scrubbed clean, not normalised or nostalgic … simply aberrant.

ab.er.rant

adjective

departing from an accepted standard

2009 (re)adjusted territories : double take(s), cyprus

 We began with choreographed surveys in and beyond Nicosia, oscillating between North and South Cyprus across the ‘green line’.

Since 1974 the political act of partition has been manifest as a hastily erected and expedient physical partition a soldier’s sketch constructed at 1:1 scale.

For older generations the memory of a complete island and a complete city are contradicted by this barrier, while younger people have only experienced one or other half as if the whole. Two realities have developed back to back, separated and joined by the third space of the UN patrolled buffer zone.

The current potential for re-unification seems an optimistic moment and also a tangle of riddles and contrary perceptions engraved in a territory that was once one.

We imagined from afar the recent opening of border crossing points doubling the space like a hall of distorting mirrors … exposing similarities, differences, paradoxes and slippages.

Twenty people attempted a survey in October 2008 conceived as an island-sized choreography hinged on the crossing points.

The project intends a fresh way of seeing to match a fresh circumstance setting out to observe whatever presents itself equally interested in the famous, the beautiful, the ordinary and the mundane. The deliberate viewing of both sides of the line anticipates a harvest of double-takes prompting a miscellany of questions that might be re-phrased as speculations.