Theworldwithoutus

La stanza è disabitata. O, piuttosto, è occupata

A.N.D.

solo da un animale, in modo consapevole ma

theworldwithoutus

indifferente. Gli oggetti dell’uomo, le tracce

Il mondo senza di noi

superstiti, sono una memoria culturale e storica

Installazione

a cui la capra non è per niente interessata. Le sue

performance

funzioni vitali, la sua sicurezza possono trovare

nel giardino di villa Obicini

ricovero anche qui, tra i residui abbandonati di

“Paesaggi mirati”

un habitat umano.

Ameno, 2 luglio 2011

A.N.D.

individua

tracce,

testimonianze

e

A.N.D.

space

team

memorie del mondo senza di noi per raccontare

Alessandro Altini

tranche de vie e altri istanti che possono essere

Maria Feller

ricordati. Gli Architetti Non Definiti operano

Marta Geroldi

per produrre situazioni di comprensione e di

Luisa Giovenzana

contatto con lo spazio contemporaneo.

Alessandro Rocca

€ 9,00 $ 7,50

A.N.D.text – 2012

th e w orldw i t hou tus MMXII press

theworldwithoutus Il mondo senza di noi Installazione performance nel giardino di villa Obicini, “Paesaggi mirati�, Ameno, 2 luglio 2011 una produzione A.N.D. 2011 - Alessandro Altini, Maria Feller, Marta Geroldi, Luisa Giovenzana, Alessandro Rocca

1 - A.N.D.text

2 - A.N.D.text

Š2012 MMXII Press I libri di MMXXII Press possono essere acquistati per corrispondenza scrivendo a MMXIIPress@gmail.com.

theworldwithouthouse / A.N.D. (Alessandro Altini, Maria Feller, Marta Geroldi, Luisa Giovenzana, Alessandro Rocca)

MMXII press

4 - A.N.D.text

the world without us 5 - A.N.D.text

La stanza è disabitata. O, piuttosto, è occupata solo da un animale, in modo consapevole ma indifferente. Gli oggetti dell’uomo, le tracce superstiti, sono una memoria culturale e storica a cui la capra non è per niente interessata.

Le sue funzioni vitali, la sua sicurezza possono trovare ricovero anche qui, tra i residui abbandonati di un habitat umano. Quello che avanza, che l’uomo lascia, è un Terzo paesaggio di cui la natura si riappropria. Gilles Clément e Alan Weisman sono i più pronti a indagare le potenzialità estetiche ed ecologiche di questi ambienti, ma il corso (in)naturale delle cose fa di più e oltrepassa largamente i limiti dell’immaginazione e del pensiero umano. Le centrali esplose e per sempre radiottive di Chernobyl e Fukushima campeggiano nella nostra coscienza come due happening terribili e straordinari. Polvere sei e polvere tornerai, dicono le sacre scritture, ma oltre alla polvere c’è altro, c’è lo spettacolo spaventoso e meraviglioso della natura, anch’essa contaminata e 6 - A.N.D.text

mutante, che vive e trasforma i resti dell’uomo.

Il sublime contemporaneo trova nelle centrali atomiche abbandonate l’esperienza più compiuta. In questi luoghi di abbandono e di morte la vita in sé, il puro atto di respirare, di scambiare calore, di lasciare un’impronta sulla polvere, condensa la forza dell’incontro tra la vita e la morte. C’è quindi un erotismo radioattivo che alimenta un turismo di massa, milioni di visitatori sui test-site americani e nel Pacifico; un culto della radioattività che prolifera, nella blogsfera e su youtube, come una polvere finissima che si insinua dappertutto e cambia il colore e il sapore di ogni cosa.

E un timore, o forse un terrore, dell’atomo che porta milioni di persone a prendere posizione contro le politiche nucleari dei governi nazionali ma, soprattutto, a pensare senza posa il paesaggio, il cibo, l’acqua radioattiva che circonda i sarcofaghi delle centrali abbandonate.

7 - A.N.D.text

May 2011, St. Petersburg hosts the “Imperial Gardens of Russia� Festival for the fourth time. The three previous festivals have become the highlight events in the cultural life of the city and attracted the attention of St Petersburgers to the numerous traditional activities of the festival life. The Mikhailovsky Garden of the Russian Museum, the main venue of festival, has become not only the recreation spot but also the place where one could witness and partake in various creative actions.

8 - A.N.D.text

Immaginiamo una dolce capretta che si aggira in una stanza disabitata, una zona di esclusione che potrebbere essere un ufficio di Chernobyl o di Fukushima.

Gli uomini sono fuggiti lasciando i muri e i mobili a invecchiare da soli nell’indifferenza della polvere, del vento che fischia tra i vetri rotti, del gelo dell’inverno e del sole di primavera, della pioggia di stravento che dà vita alle piante che nascono nelle crepe del pavimento.

9 - A.N.D.text

Ho parlato a una capra.

Era sola sul prato, era legata.

Sazia d'erba, bagnata dalla pioggia, belava.

Quell'uguale belato era fraterno al mio dolore. Ed io risposi,prima per celia, poi perchÊ il dolore è eterno, ha una voce e non varia.

Questa voce sentiva gemere in una capra solitaria.

In una capra dal viso semita sentiva querelarsi ogni altro male, ogni altra vita.

(La capra, di Umberto Saba) 10 - A.N.D.text

Cosa succederebbe se gli esseri umani sparissero dalla terra? Secondo Alan Weisman, dopo solo 48 ore le metropolitane sarebbero inondate, dopo un anno l’asfalto si spaccherebbe man mano che l’acqua nelle crepe si congela, dopo 4 il ciclo gelo-disgelo sgretolerebbe i palazzi non piú riscaldati, dopo 5 basterebbe un fulmine a incendiare intere città. Solo dopo 500 anni le foreste avanzerebbero con prepotenza, dopo 15.000 il ghiaccio si estenderebbe fino a dare inizio a una nuova era glaciale, e dopo 10 milioni di anni sulla terra non ci sarebbe piú testimonianza dell’umanità. Ma tra 5 miliardi di anni, quando il sole si espanderà in una stella infuocata inglobando tutti i pianeti, forse frammenti di Dna potrebbero muoversi nello spazio, creando le basi per una nuova vita...

- Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, 2007 (ed.it. Il mondo senza di noi, Einaudi, 2008)

11 - A.N.D.text

Unexpectedly apropos of the previous post, Liam Young of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, together with Darryl Chen, has created a series of quite beautiful images called “Postcards from a Green Future” – one of which, seen above, uses the Maunsell Sea Forts as a gantried foundation for suburban antiflood design in an idyllic southeast England.

12 - A.N.D.text

The entire suite of images is almost farcically green – it’s sustainability redone as Grand Guignol. These speculative scenes of “a green future” show us an over-the-top, solar-powered utopia of detached single-family houses and wind turbines, woven together with light rail and renewable energy technologies; it’s an Eden of sprawl spreading out into London’s most distant scattered cityscape.

13 - A.N.D.text

DIS

Simulazionisti: artisti che realizzano installazioni come scenografie di spazi abbandonati, illusioni spaziali e ambienti immersivi in cui lo spettatore viene di solito gettato in una replica di uno spazio domestico o architettonico che è accuratamente ricostruito per creare effetti di spaesamento.

(Massimiliano Gioni)

14 - A.N.D.text

Eric Tabuchi produce serie di paesaggi dell’abbandono, produzioni involontarie del tempo e della natura in azione su luoghi che all’uomo, almeno momentaneamente, non servono.

Zone di esclusione, frammenti di terzo paesaggio che continuamente nascono e muoiono, luoghi dell’indifferenza melanconica in attesa di metamorfosi.

15 - A.N.D.text

Kévin Bauman s'est affairé à la vaste zone urbaine de Détroit et environs, à la recherche de pavillons abandonnés. Si sa série s'appelle 100 Abandonned Houses, la région en dénombrerai aujourd'hui pas moins de 12000 : la population est en très net déclin depuis ces dernières années, passant de 2 millions d'habitants à moins de 800.000.

16 - A.N.D.text

17 - A.N.D.text

18 - A.N.D.text

A Metaphysival Survey of British Dwellings (Available in two formats: 98x127 & 1.2x1.5m in an edition of 5 & 3 as well as 98x250cm & 1.2x3m in an edition of 5 & 3)

Structured into an urban topographic survey, this series seems, at first glance, to deal with the aftermath of that rickety project called Modernity.

Nothing moves in or through these buildings.

The urban fabric fades into the twilight, forcing us to fill in the absences that the night relentlessly exposes.

An ambiguous game of identity and relation is played out, a game which encompasses an enigmatic assemblage of everyday life, transmission and flow, dislocation, bewilderment and solitude.

The real has become unreal. Or is it the other way around?

My images depend on photography’s inherit tendency to make each space believable, but there is a disturbing suggestion that all is not what it seems.

This process of slow revelation and sense of temporal manipulation is crucial to the work.

Shot entirely in a mock-up town built in 2003 to train the Firearms and Public Order Units of the UK’s Metropolitan Police, this series deals with urbanism in all its contradictoriness and ambiguity.

This ultra-realistic specialist training centre is not just a simulacrum of contemporary British towns but also acts as a metaphor for the modern asocial city.

This is the setting of Augé’s ‘ethnology of solitude’.

19 - A.N.D.text

/// D.M.Z.

DEMILITARIZED ZONES

20 - A.N.D.text

Bridge of No Return.

At the end of the Korean War, POWs were given the choice to either cross this bridge or remain where they were, but if they crossed, they could not return.

21 - A.N.D.text

During the Vietnam War, the US flew more than 580,000 bombing missions over Laos, equal to one bombing mission every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 full years. In fact, the country's Xiengkhouang Province, where the famous Plain of Jars is located, is considered the most heavily bombed place on earth. This intensive bombing campaign left the landscape pockmarked with craters.

22 - A.N.D.text

In any case, the Klimt-like pattern of these circular craters embedded into a tapestry of rice fields may be mesmerizing to look at, nevertheless, these aerial photos belie the fact that millions of unexploded bombs remain on the ground, all posing a deadly threat to civilians. There are still millions of silent craters waiting for that human touch.

23 - A.N.D.text

UNKNOWN FIELDS is a nomadic studio that will throw open the doors of the AA and set off on an annual expedition to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies. You will join the AA’s Unknown Fields Division as each year we navigate a different global cross section and map the complex and contradictory realities of the present as a site of strange and extraordinary futures. You will be both visionaries and reporters, part documentarian and part science fiction soothsayers as the otherworldly sites we encounter will afford us a distanced viewpoint from which to survey the consequences of emerging environmental and technological scenarios.

This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight, we will pack our Geiger counters and space Suits as we chart a course from the atomic to the cosmic to investigate the unknown fields between the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in the Ukraine and Gagarin’s launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Beginning under the shadows of Nuclear disaster we will survey the irradiated wilderness and bear witness to a sobering apocalyptic vision. Along our way we will tread the edge of the retreating tide of the Aral Sea and mine the ‘black gold’ in the Caspians’s floating oilfields and caviar factories. We will wander through the cotton fields of Kazakhstan and tread the ancient silk road before ending on the shores of the cosmic ocean bathed in the white light of satellites blasting into tomorrow’s sky. In these shifting fields of nature and artifice we will re-examine our preservationist and conservationist attitudes toward the natural world and document a cross-section through a haunting landscape of the ecologically fragile and the technologically obsolete.

Joining us on our travels will be a troupe of collaborators, photographers and 24 - A.N.D.text

"After Sputnik there is no nature, only art." Marshall McLuhan 25 - A.N.D.text

filmakers from the worlds of technology, science and fiction including the Phillips Technologies Design Probes research Lab and Archis/Volume magazine.

Together we will form a travelling circus of research visits, field reportage, rolling discussions, and impromptu tutorials. Across our journey The Unknown Fields Division will identify opportunities for tactical intervention and speculative invention that will be chronicled in an annual publication and travelling exhibition. It is a unique opportunity to be a part of an extraordinary research project that will examine the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness.

26 - A.N.D.text

Nevada Test Site. Sedan Crater was formed when a 100 kt. Explosive buried under 635 feet of desert alluvium was fired at the NTS on July 6, 1962, displacing 12 million tons of earth. The crater is 320 feet deep and 1,280 feet in diameter.

27 - A.N.D.text

This book — shot in only 3 days — presents an unexpected look at what remains of Chernobyl and the town of Pripyat, Russia.

In the 11 days following the Chernobyl catastrophe on April 26, 1986, more than 116,000 people were permanently evacuated from the area surrounding the nuclear power plant.

Declared unfit for human habitation, the Zones of Exclusion includes the towns of Pripyat (established in the 1970s to house workers) — and Chernobyl.

In May 2001, Robert Polidori photographed what was left behind in this dead zone. His richly detailed images move from the burned-out control room of Reactor 4 — where technicians staged the experiment that caused the disaster — to the unfinished apartment complexes, ransacked schools and abandoned nurseries that remain as evidence of all those people who once called Pripyat home.

Nearby, trucks and tanks used in the clean up efforts rest in a car graveyard.

Some are covered in lead shrouds — and others have been robbed of parts.

Houseboats and barges rust in the contaminated waters of the Pripyat River.

Foliage grows over the sidewalks — and hides the modest homes of Chernobyl.

In his photographs, Polidori captures the faded colors and desolate atmosphere of these two towns. He produces haunting documents that presents not just a disastrous event — but a place and the people who lived there. Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and lives in New York City.

28 - A.N.D.text

29 - A.N.D.text

Guards in front of the Unit 4 sarcophagus (June 6-9, 2001).

Waiting room in hospital #126, Pripyat (June 6-9, 2001).

30 - A.N.D.text

31 - A.N.D.text

These amazing photographs from the camera lens of Jonathan Andrew capture the strange and eery beauty of these abandoned World War II battlements. From the aptly named Dragons Teeth anti-tank defence (the big jagged stones in the ground) to the silo like SK Observation Tower in Belgium Jonathan’s images of these monolithic buildings perfectly captures their sentinel-like nature. Originally from Manchester in the UK, Jonathan now lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

32 - A.N.D.text

SK Observation Tower in Fliegerhorst, Belgium.

Dragon's Teeth Anti Tank Defence, Den Helder, The Netherlands.

33 - A.N.D.text

34 - A.N.D.text

Graffiti in the Dead City /// Graffiti nella cittĂ morta

35 - A.N.D.text

Graffiti in Pripyat is directly connected to the motive of the lost childhood and fear of the artists painting the abandoned town. This place causes mingled feelings: interest from one side and pity from the other. Pity for those people who used to live here and especially children whose childhood was stolen.

36 - A.N.D.text

Pryp"jat' (Прип'ять in ucraino, Припять – Pripjat' in russo) è una città fantasma ucraina situata vicino al confine nord bielorusso, a circa 110 km a nord della capitale Kiev, nella vastissima area paludosa della Polesia. È una città fantasma in quanto sorge accanto alla centrale nucleare di Čornóbil's'ka (conosciuta ai più con il nome inesatto di centrale nucleare di Černobyl'), nota per il più grave incidente nucleare della storia umana e ormai in disuso.

37 - A.N.D.text

38 - A.N.D.text

Radiating Places | Город Излучающий Сияние The determining factor is absence

No human being enlivens the desolate scene. No sound of activity penetrates the grim silence. Only the incessant wind seems to grab at everything and blows through everything.

Pripyat is affected most immediately by the reactor disaster in Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.

According to the current publication by the UN 4000 human beings die of the direct impact of the accident. Thousands suffer from the long term effects until today. Five million people still live on contaminated terrain today. There is an uncounted number of people who suffer trauma and the effects of a questionable policy of relocation that made the inhabitants of Pribyat displaced persons.

On the initiative of Vitali Shkliarou and Sergey Abramchuk who witnessed the catastrophe as a child a project of a special kind emerges. In October 2005 seven artists from Moscow (RUSSIA), Minsk (BELARUS) and Berlin (GERMANY) travelled to the hostile restricted area.

With their artistic work they want to commemorate the catastrophe that can happen again anytime and should not do so.

The foundations of the work are the urban walls: Konstatin Danilov, Denis Averyanov, Ivan Malakhov, Kim Köster and Tobias Starke painted their pictures directly on the walls of houses and industrial facilities. The attempt to absorb the place in its alienated but depressingly substantial reality and to reflect it in their work stands in the foreground of their endeavour.

39 - A.N.D.text

They are recorded and transported by the photography and the films of by Sergey Abramchuk and Niels Grugel.

The individual concepts of the artists approach the subject in different ways: some projects are kept in black and white. Despaired faces and faces contorted with pain appear on the grey walls and entrances of industrial compounds.

Nearly disembodied and shadowlike shapes emerge in other spots. Their mute screams and their despair robs us of our answers.

Other images emphasize the abrupt destruction of the living space by contrasting the void with something assumedly alive: Suddenly we see a girl jumping on a bright red ball. A little further a face appears unexpectedly behind a breach in a wall. A playing boy revives a balcony all of a sudden.

These images tend to be absurd. At the same time they anticipate and caricature our expectation to find something human in this place of destruction.

They develop new rooms for association: A flower takes up the tone of withering leaves thereby pointing at the revival of the vegetation; but at last it is a flower on a grave.

Despite the large size of some pictures they stay reserved and fit in with the hortative and sombre cityscape. They blend into their surroundings respectfully.

The photos create impressive extracts. They show the images in their contexts: You see the decayed houses, staircases and doorbell panels and sometimes you discover a detail, a left towel or a toppled cupboard in the middle of a backyard. On other images the observer can take the perspective of the former inhabitants. You look down on towers of destroyed industrial facilities from an abandoned balcony or out of a busted window; and always on the ominously close reactor of Chernobyl. The 40 - A.N.D.text

41 - A.N.D.text

decay, the forgotten rest of industrial society has already been inspiration and projection screen in the former works of the artists. The works play with the paradoxical beauty of the corrupt, with the morbid charm of fugacity. These images go much further. They are both, more political and quieter.

It hopes to draw attention to the place of events once again. With the pictures from the centre of the catastrophe it wishes to keep the memory of the suffering of the people alive.

To arrest oblivion; to pause – and understand the responsibility for the future that lies in our hands.

Radiating Places – A Requiem of a Special Kind.

42 - A.N.D.text

43 - A.N.D.text

44 - A.N.D.text

45 - A.N.D.text

and/ənd/ conjunction connecting two identical comparatives, to emphasize a progressive change. connecting two identical words, implying great duration or great extent. to connect two numbers to indicate that they are being added together. a logical operation which gives the value one if and only if all the operands are one, and otherwise gives a value of zero.

Electronics: denoting a gate circuit which produces an output only when signals are received simultaneously through all input connections.

46 - A.N.D.text