Preserving Identities though Participation

Sophie Linnéa Rose Preserving Identities Through Participation STALKER

RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY FOR DESIGN P30026 DESI GN L I TERATURE REVI EW 8 November 2013

NOTE FOR FRONT COVER IMAGE: One architects rather artificial interpretation of social recreation.

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION - PAGE 5 STALKER - PAGE 8 DISCOVERING THE ARARAT - PAGE 13 PRANZO BOARIO - PAGE 17 TAPPETO VOLANTE - 19 TRANSBORDERLINE GAMES - PAGE 21 PARTICIPATION NOW - 23 BIBLIOGRAPHY - 28

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INTRODUCTION This essay aims to highlight Stalkers three important events that originated from the cohabitation in the form of participatory living which can create radical social events that aim to challenge its various occupants, and in the process, examining our accepted standards of relationships, positions and dynamics. However, It is difficult to measure the long-term effects that the radical group Stalker will have on general urban development, in spite of the fact that it is not in their agenda to in anyway influence. Peter Lang is professor in Architecture History the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm

who was actively involved in researching and participating with evolving urban cultures. He has been assisting in the Stalker activities and documented the group’s transit across the Roman urban landscape and therefore had a unique insight to the groups’ function. Exploring the observations made by Peter Lang and Stalker initiator Lorenzo Romito, I aim to examine the process of on-site participatory revelations that are basic to the testing ground that is the Campo Boario and the way this is conceived by and influences the urban design process.

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6 Fig3: Le Corbusiers cityscape arrangement for cohabitation living.

Fig2: Le Corbusier: Lucio Costa Maison du Bresil, Paris, 1954

There is a general assumption by architects that they are ’problem-solvers’ and in our rapidly changing cities there has been a lot of pressure on the fraternity for architects and urban designers to produce a successful and sustainable model of urban living. These conventional urban practices have resulted in many ill-conceived urban renewal programs such as the failures of the unsympathetic modernist movement in the 60’s, inspired by Corbusier’s philosophy of modern living through “Unite d’Habitation”, which in its time had become the official architecture of the welfare state. This involved shortsighted and limited budgets that created low quality developments, which overlooked the humanistic needs of its user. In times past, owners created their own living space and communities to their own requirements, style and design which aided a more organic development of social and cultural conditions.

However, the existing situation is that property developers, in conjunction with architects, generate spaces independently of their users and who consequently have little control and influence in what is produced. Lorenzo Romito, the leading influence of the Stalker group, highlights these concerns about rigid and out-of-date design methodologies that are promoted as essential design steps and believes this approach threatens to create a megalomania attitude towards ‘place-making’: “Today, more and more architects work on the marginal grounds of discipline, using behavior that does not escape from architecture, but expresses the desire to contaminate architecture itself. This contamination evolves through the creation of new and paradigmatic ‘containers’ of architecture, through the realization of a path, an existentialist practice, that consents to mature the consciousness of the worlds becoming and of our taking part in evolution”

(Romolito, 1997 pg.133)

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STALKER The approaches in experimental research through the creation of a narrative, aided by the process of ‘Dérive’, allowed the Stalker group to equip themselves with a unique awareness of certain cultural and social conditions of urban areas that are perceived negatively by the general public. It is important to note that the contributors to the Stalker group consisted of people with different backgrounds that specialize in their own interests and membership fluctuates depending on the circumstance, however their active response is as a collaborative entity. Clearly inspired by the Situationists International through adopting their methods of ‘Dérive’, Stalker also took a similar approach to the resfusal to regulate their principles by calling themselves a movement: “Stalker is not a group: it is an interrelated open system, which is growing and emerging through its actions and through all the individuals that operate with (for and among) Stalker.

It is a collective subject that engages in actions and research to produce creative motions in time and space, to produce self-organized places, environments and situations.”

(Franck & Stevens. 2006 pg.197)

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At a time of significant moments in history, the fall of the Berlin wall in October 1990 meant East and West Germany had been reunited into a single state which laid the foundations of an ongoing debate of the political future of Europe, the Stalker collaborative emerged from a demonstration of their own. Key participants of the group, engaged in a protest as students in the School of Architecture at La Sapienza in Rome, were faced with re-evaluating core principles of the university education system that was experiencing major restructuring through privatization proposed by the government.

This milieu of significant social change and collaborative demonstration would prove to be valuable training in merging practices of political groups organised in engagement, producing a group of activist students under the name of Pantera. The engagement of the Pantera group with the neglected banks of the Tiber in the project entitled ’Long Live the River Banks: For an environmental practice of waste’ was an unauthorised event that used the waste and raw materials to converted the disused space into a temporary public park.

This minor alteration to a derelict urban space was significant as it was an autonomous study of urbanism at a time when architecture students were still being directed by instititions to be autocratic creators of space. The media surrounding the project allowed for the site to be eventually realised by the city and was later converted into a permanent park. These successful means of encountering the urban strata by re-evaluating forgotten spaces through collaborative modes of creative investigation are clearly echoed in the approach of the Stalker collective during their occupation of the Campo Boario in Rome.

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Fig4: Exerpts from the book Stalker; Attraverso i Territori Acttuali which documents the 60km journey through unchartered urban spaces, 1995.

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Stalker is a multidisciplinary collective of people that engages unofficial events in a primitive manner to provide innovative actions in time and space. The Stalker methodology consists of an initial territorial analysis through meandering around Rome, here the students confront and document fragmented parts of the city. Making a journey through the abandoned spaces, which were often depicted as voids on city maps, created an insight to the distinct complexity and at times reckless evolution of the city of Rome. Lorenzo Romito describes the apprehension behind moving through and penetrating vicious physical indicators of property and exclusion.

In documenting the collective experience through territory and the discovery of these isolated worlds that they had faced in their journey throughout Rome over the 5 days in 1995, the ‘dérive’ provided a narrative buried in the environment. It is evident that this method of exploration and analysis of space formed a fundamental part of the digression from conventional architectural concept of division and boundary however, it is the methods of participation, cultivated from this knowledge that created a more active role in the Stalker testing ground of the Campo Boario.

“Our anxiety in entering spaces that lack a main door, tearing apart wire netting, and climbing over walls made our senses continuously alert, our movements cautious; territorial cognition became linked with survival, restoring to our sight the capacity of observation.

Through this experience we crossed a territory, and its discovery became a creative statement.”

(Romito, 1997,pg.132)

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12 Fig6: Ararat social centre, Rome 2012.

Fig5: Political demonstration of Kurds living in Rome for the liberation of political prisoners in Turkey, Rome 2012.

Discovering the Ararat Campo Boario in the premises of Testaccio’s former slaughterhouse in Rome is an area of natural congregation of people who live on the periphery of society, cut from the public domain. The space comprised of Italian homeless people, North Africans and Senegalese, which constituted a diverse community space. Stalker observed this infringed community, in an area of uncertainty and instability, and saw the value of this successful example of intercultural living. ‘The result is a strange cosmopolitan and multicultural universe evoking the surreal city of Pasolini and Fellini, a universe the no one would expect to find in the centre of modern touristic Rome’

(Stalker, 2005,pg.228)

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14 Fig7: Non identity cards which were issued to all inhabitants in the ocasion of the Clandestino Day which was celebrated in the Ararat.

In 1999, Stalker were invited to participate in the Biennale dei Giovani Artisti where the Campo Boario would provide the backdrop for the proposed integration of the Kurdish community which had been dispersed around the city after following their leader Ocalan who was seeking asylum. To focus national attention to their difficulties, about 100 Kurds established a rudimentary settlement called ‘cartonia’, built entirely out of recycled materials located near to the Coliseum and soon after Ocalan’s deportation from Italy, Cartonia was dismantled my officialdom. The project ‘From Cartonia to ‘Piazza Kurdishtan’ was Stalkers quick response to the situation, which offered the Kurdish community a fixed residence on the grounds of the Campo Boario, taking advantage of an invitation from the Binnale of the Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean.

The collaboration between the students and Kurds allowed them to recreate and integrate the elements of the previous ‘Cartonia’ city into the existing fabric of the disused old veterinary clinic.

With careful listening and creative interaction, the students used the narratives communicated by the Kurds about their mythology, crafts, displacements and desires to create several rooms and the building was renamed ‘Ararat’, the title of the sacred mountain where Noah landed after the universal flood.

However, this sudden incursion of the different cultural group created social tensions in Campo Boario. Up until then these obstinate refugee populations had no supervisory structure to settle disputes among themselves, to aid this Stalker encouraged civic participatory activities to reestablish the peace in the community and break down barriers of social prejudice.

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Fig8: Shots that show 3 stages of the transformation of the asphalt central ground of the Ararat into a social feast.

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Pranzo Boario.

On the occasion of the Caldestino Day, on the 14th of November 1990, a collective culinary experiment was implemented on the asphalt central ground of the Ararat which was overseen by Asako Iwama; an artist and cook whos practice has developed around the idea of the ontology of eating. Imitating the idea of the Tokyo pop-up cafÊ, which usually results the illegal occupation of a public space, a chalk circle was drawn on the ground and then replaced by tables and chairs that provided the setting for a feast of Kurdish-Japanese-Roma food. This is probably Stalkers most conformist architectural act – a project that moves from the plan, to construction to inhabitation and involves their characteristic style of protest and a radical act. That action of cooking and eating was experienced by Boarios communities of different ethnic groups and has set a motion of people contact and interaction process and even captured the curiosities of the citizens of Rome. This event revealed unexpected opportunities of central, yet hidden places in the capital.

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18 Fig11: Image shows the interaction between people under the Tappeto.

Fig10: Digitalised model produced by Stalker which was printed and used as a template for production.

Fig9: A Kurdish woman particiating in the creation of the installation.

Tappeto Volante.

One notable and effective artistic venture was the ‘Tappeto Volante’ (flying carpet) that was a re-interpretation of Palmero’s Cappella Palatina for a drifting exhibition called ‘Islam in Italy’, which aims to demonstrate, in the camp and on a national level, the historical influence the Arab-Muslim world has had on Italian culture. The simple yet beautiful contemporary recreation of the Palmero’s chapel ceiling, which combines Romanesque, Byzantine and Arab features, was completed through the collaborative efforts of the Stalker, Kurdish and Senegalese immigrants of the Campo Boario. The labor-intensive process of constructing the Tappeto Volante required the participants to listen and learn from each other. Stalker incorporated their own knowledge of computeraided design to create a print of the ceiling, which communicated a template to which the lengths of rope could be measured against. It was in this simple process producing a new space through the use of 1710 sections of 24 ropes that brought people together. The immediate effect of this collaboration created greater understanding of the cultures amongst the participants and then the exhibition itself would encourage international public reaction to the site to reverberate throughout Europe and Africa.

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Fig 12: Interior perspectives of the activities within the Transborderline tunnel.

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Transborderline Games.

On the 10th -11th of June 2000 ‘Transborderline’ is a concept that became a project for a proposal for a type of habitable border that took the form of a spiral of barbed wire, created to stimulate a debate on the conditions and lingering issues of current border controls. It is one of the Stalkers most distinguished projects, having appeared at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000 and Manifestas 3 in Ljubljana. The construction was a concept in which borders could welcome meetings and public confrontation and the created prototypes were given to any researcher who was interested in participating in their own research and experiments of its possible application.

The first Tansbordeline was constructed on Campo Boario and then located on the boarder between Slovenia and Italy. Romito’s diary entry during the first Stalker ‘dérive’ through Rome show an understanding of the anxieties behind urban territory control and it was perhaps these moments of crossing these territories that inspired a concern for the passage of people over national borders.

Monday, 9 October 1995 diary entry: ‘Every time we climbed over a wall or we went through a hole in a chain-link fence, we experienced apprehension, which made us more attentive to these unknown places, even if they are in our backyard’

(Romito, 1997,pg.140) The ‘Glaball Game’ originated from this spontaneous arrangement where public intervention would be created by 2000 footballs throw from the windows of the Ararat, each ball containing a message or illustration to be received by cross-boarder participants and collected into the third Transborderline test structure. These Games left no traces, but were a continuing addition to the revolution of space by producing involvement that challenged one another through play.

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22 Fig12 and 13: The Ararat continues to transform itself through new and artistic initiatives with c ultural and political outcomes.

Participation Now The Stalker agenda in 1990 of relieving social tension in Campo Boario after their act of helping the Kurdish community provided a unique setting for experimental forms of participation and research.

Through understanding and witnessing the urban change first hand, Stalker was able to comprehend and absorb the delicate dynamics of coexistence that exist in the deep folds of unmapped urban space. They employed strategies that collected direct, unedited forms of cooperative documentation that contributed to promoting self-awareness and environmental stability specific to the community.

Inspired by the Situationists International, the Stalkers principles stemmed from the idea of constant reassessment of current conditions. This shaped Stalkers elusive operations and selfconscious efforts to not physically impact on an existing space, which allowed for the ultimate goal to stay unchanged where the ideas and identities of communities can be preserved through healthy participatory events.

Lorenzo Romito states in an online published interview with Elena Biserna, a student participant in Stalker Primavera Romana project: “I like the idea that our work is shared and spread but you should not forget “popular”… I remember what Guy Debord wrote in the first issue of International Situationist about Surealism: ’Surrealism gained success and that is why its dead now’”

(Biserna, 2009) However, despite good intentions with the Ararat, taking on such politically complex issues can result in inadvertent consequences.

After a lot of successful funding and even a permanent finished house for the Roma community, the Italian government decided to commandeer Stalker’s research and perverted it to promote an agenda resulting in further marginalisation of the group.

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It appears that unfortunately government policy in Europe has made participation a necessary part of public work; themselves adopting and marketing this ideal have thus effectively institutionalised it to the benefit of their own commercial needs and creates more red tape to be countenanced in order to get approval and funding. This has undoubtedly promoted an additional and irrelevant part to the urban-public design process, which has been endorsed by the authorities themselves. It is apparent that Stalker has little interest in developing the existing state of Campo Boario but their primary objective is obviously in making the space habitable and this primitive approach should be one of the ultimate aspirations of architecture.

Regrettably student architects have been continually exposed to and institutional interpretation of the Stalker ethic, which has been appropriated by the design fraternity, and this has diluted the radical Stalker approach to participation. An example of this trend by institutions is the adoption and control of the Campo Boario site, almost certainly motivated by the benefit of local politicians who would receive a large amount of praise and public support to be associated with such a commendable gesture. It appears that the 30,000 protesters who took to the streets in 1990 in support of the Kurdish communities’ immigration situation will now be impressed by this political initiative and consequently the ruling administration would presumably benefit from this political manoeuvre.

“Everywhere small groups of young people, even temporarily working together to tackle some specific problems, are paving new roads such as the identification with the laws and rhythms of nature, of the active redefinition of the territory as cause and effect of spatial event: they aim at “reading” the city and the region, no longer as an analytical collection of data but as a physical and mental interpretation of places to spy out real history and its probably evolutions”

(De Carlo 2004,pg.61) Ambiguity of roles was significant for the Stalker to become organizers of collective games that take subtle steps towards examining the condition of this immigrant settlement and it was through this self-effacing attitude of the Stalker the Ararat was born which transformed the idea of boundary and space through events and acts of occupation rather than building form alone.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Blundell-Jones, Peter; Petrescu, Doina; Till, Jeremy. (2005) Architecture and Participation. London: Spon.

Rendell, Jane. (2006) Art and Architecture: A Place Between.

London: I. B. Tauris.

De Carlo, G. (2004)”The memory of Architecture.” Domus.870 (reprinted in Writings for Domus. Milan: Domus.

Romolito, Lorenzo. (2007) The Politics of Making. Oxon: Routlage

De Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life.

Berkeley ; London : University of California Press 1984

Romolito, Lorenzo. (1997)”Stalker.” In P. Lang and T. Miller (eds) Suburban discipline, New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Franck, K. and Stevens, Quentin. (2007) Loose Space. Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, London, New York: Routledge.

Forsyth, Leslie. Jenkins, Paul. (2010) Architecture, Participation and Society. Abingdon: Routledge

Publications:

Goodson, Lisa. Phillimore, Jenny (2012) Community research for Participation: From Theory to Method. Bristol: Policy

Doron, Gil. (2000) ‘Fourth Dimension’. Blueprint December 2000, no. 178: pg. 56-59.

King, Stanley. Ferrari, Drew. Conley, Merinda. Latimer, Bill (1989). Co-design: A process of design Participation. New York:Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Romito, Lorenzo. (2000) ‘Observe and interact: Listening processes, practices of relation and play’. Mutations, Centre d’Architecture Arc en Reve, Bordeaux, ed. Actar, Barcelona, pg.

433.

Lang, Peter. (2008). Heterotopia and the City: Pub¬lic Space in postcivil Society. London: Routledge. pp 215-224.

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Soya, Edward W. (2000) Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Oxford:Blackwell Publishing

Peter Lang with Stalker/ON, “Imagining Corviale.” in “Talking Cities” Curator: Francesca Ferguson. Zeche Zollerein, Es¬sen, Germany, August 26 (December 3, 2006).

Available: http://www.roulottemagazine.com/2011/04/immaginare-corviale-osservatorio-nomade/

Stalker (2000) “Transborderline: Project statement, Manifesta 3 Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Available: http://www.manifesta.org/manifesta3/index.htm Biserna, Elena (2009).The Roman Spring by Stalker. Wandering around with Lorenzo Romito. Interview with Lorenzo Romolito conducted by Elena Biserna, Phd in Audiovisual Studies and Writer.

Available: http://www.digicult.it/digimag/issue-064/the-romanspring-by-stalker-wondering-around-with-lorenzo-romito/ Volume: CB.01.AR.01/AR.01/ARARAT.Centro Socio-culturale Kurdo.

Available: http://issuu.com/stalkerpedia/docs ararat?e=2376446/3579710 Volume: CB.02.PG.01/Playground 1 Available: http://issuu.com/stalkerpedia/docs/ playground1?e=2376446/4671225 Volume: CB.03/Laboratorio Boario.

Available:http://issuu.com/stalkerpedia/docs/laboratorioboario ?e=2376446/3579762 http://stalkerpedia.wordpress.com/ http://www.osservatorionomade.net/ http://www.petertlang.net/ http://issuu.com/stalkerpedia/docs

Images: Cover Image: http://litspat.medialoperations.com/files/2010/05/ slet-for-le-corbusier-705329.jpg (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) Fig2: http://francheteauolivier.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/ sans-titre-111.jpg (Accessed: 3 Nov 2013) Fig3: http://chum338.blogs.wesleyan.edu/files/2011/05/LeCorbVoisin.jpg (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) Fig4: http://issuu.com/stalkerpedia/docs/stalker_attraverso_i_territori_attuali (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) Fig5: http://www.mariobadagliacca.com/myreportage.php?id=1694 (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) Fig6: http://www.mariobadagliacca.com/myreportage.php?id=1694 (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) Fig7: http://issuu.com/stalkerpedia/docs/playground1 (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) Fig8: http://asakoiwama.net/Campo-Pranzo-Boario (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) Fig9: http://www.stalkerlab.org/TAPPETOVOLANTE/inaugurazione.html (Accessed: 3 Nov 2013) Fig10: http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/tappeto/html/ stalkertappeto3/stalkertappeto3.html (Accessed: 3 Nov 2013) Fig11: http://www.stalkerlab.org/TAPPETOVOLANTE/inaugurazione.html (Accessed: 3 Nov 2013) Fig12: http://issuu.com/stalkerpedia/docs/playground1 (Accessed: 3 Nov 2013) Fig13:http://www.mariobadagliacca.com/myreportage. php?id=1694 (Accessed: 3 Nov 2013) Fig14: http://ararat-roma.blogspot.co.uk/ (Accessed: 5 Nov 2013) 29