London, 21th March 2016
This book is an attempt to give an alternative and fresh response to the theme of the representation of the city. As an architect the main aim of my work is focusing on the idea of architecture as a space, considering the public and the private spaces of the city as if they were not defined by walls but by bodies: nonetheless the space of the city has always been the theatre where bodies act a political dance. This book intends to research a new possibility for reflecting upon and mapping the architecture of the city through bodies’ movements. Building upon Giorgio Agamben’s idea that certain movements imply a certain form-of-life (forma vitae), the book will explore those movements starting from the urgent contemporary migrants’ crisis, the last of a long series of rituals that characterised our cities, going backwards to the ancient processions such as the Eleusinian Mysteries of the ancient Greece, rituals that were utterly describing the geography of a city. Through different perspectives the topic will thus be dissected, considering the body not just as a single subject since its “use can never be individual or private but only common” (Agamben 2011). Migrants’ bodies are therefore a collective moving act, literally walking from one place to another, they produce new forms of life, which imply the elimination of the idea of the border as one of the first act of the creation of space. They help us to understand how the absence of fringes may nowadays define new spaces and consequently a new form-of-life, “that is to say”, again quoting Agamben, “a life that is linked so closely to its form that it proves to be inseparable from it” (Agamben 2013). And isn’t this exactly what it meant to witness, though with different intents, during the ancient Greek rituals? Those processions more than trace a new geography of the city, were able to narrate its own history, the myth and the legend hidden beneath its spaces. The way of accomplishing this exercise is a simple but thorough analysis of the phenomenon together with a cartographic translation of it, which should be considered as a different but parallel layout apparatus. Maps are a useful medium through which the territory can be examined as a whole entity, and they can easily make explicit and physically clarify some of those territorial changes that we will take in consideration. Maps are moreover a pragmatic but eloquent strategy that can help us to avoid being stuck at a theoretical and ideological level, due to the delicacy of the topic –such as the one of the contemporary migration waves. Two different apparatuses –writing and maps– will therefore create a careful narration of the body as a political act, which through intertwined episodes of history, will help us to construct this unified portrayal that will hopefully meet your interest into an upcoming publication.
Your sincerely, Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio
BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben 2011 Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, Stanford CA 2011 Agamben 2013 Giorgio Agamben, The Highest poverty: monastic rules and form-of-life, Stanford CA 2013