Elements of Territorial Proxemics: Questionnaire

On February 12, 1968, a 100 meter-long, semi-transparent, inflated plastic tube appeared in the city of Florence, carried by the students of the city’s architecture school, then under occupation.

The labyrinthine tube, initiated by UFO, was inflated on the atrium floor of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence. Held over the students’ heads, moving from hand to hand, it soon penetrated the great hall, came out of a window, moved out to the street, and ended up parading the city, passing by its monuments, leading the crowd. People spontaneously wrote slogans on its surface, from plays on words to political statements, overloading it with meanings and turning it into a support for words, desires, and voices for all.

Some days before, a semi-transparent plastic sheet was hanging in the same Faculty entrance hall covered with messages, assemblages of words written in many hands. A screen of words against the rationalist architecture of the school, a fusion of words and space, that seemed to merge reality with communication as a true semantic device: an architecture that talks. For UFO, the city is a place of history, traditions, and culture, where people live together, and where collective beliefs, desires, and creative energy exist. UFO projects always place the city and its people at their centres.

UFO projects give a voice to the city. What would the city say if it had a voice? For once, it becomes possible to hear it. People are not just users, or inhabitants, but mediators of the city’s voice. UFO projects cannot exist if we try to think of them without the city or without the people. Words, objects, spaces, city, and people merge. They become equally important, and together they are able to create that language never spoken before or since. The projects are situations, mediums through which the city is revealed in new ways. They are definitely not simply about architecture, at all.

UFO, Festa de l’Unità, Parco delle Cascine, Florence, 1968, Patrizia Cammeo/Riccardo Foresi Archives, Florence