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senza stato una nazione |
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 Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti "senza stato una nazione. Un'opera, un luogo, un libro" Marsilio, La Biennale di Venezia, 2003 pp176, €12,00 acquista il libro online! |
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| C’è
chi chiama questo progetto di Sandi Hilal ed Alessandro Petti un padiglione
Palestinese, potrebbe anche essere questo se però vogliamo considerare
l’idea di un padiglione non un luogo fisico ma un luogo mentale dove
l’identità di ogni individuo si forma non in contrapposizione dell’altro
ma in equilibrio con se stesso. La mia idea per questo progetto voleva
e vuole essere non semplicemente un gesto di riconoscimento del sogno
e della lotta del popolo palestinese ma una riflessione sull’eterno
conflitto fra la nostra identità e quella degli altri, sull’incancellabile
confine fra gli altri e noi. Soltanto accettando la distanza che ci
separa dagli altri , facendo esserci altri, credo si possa realizzare
il sogno comune di definire e trovare la propria identità ed il proprio
luogo. Una nazione che cerca il suo stato , come ogni individuo che
nella sua eterna alterità cerca la radice della propria insopprimibile
identità.
[Francesco Bonami, direttore della 50a Biennale d'Arte di Venezia] BORDERLINE SYNDROME. |
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There is no avoiding it: crossing borders is part of our daily life.
We leave home, we enter our place of work, we return home. And then
there's everything in between: the public transport turnstiles, the
motorway toll gates, customs, speed detectors, security checkpoints,
electronic surveillance systems, the checkout. When you think about
it, you realize that it's scarcely possible to move without crossing
one or another visible or invisible dividing line. It is the spatial
regime of the modern world, where life is subject to compartmentalization
and protocols as if it were a scientific experiment to be carried out
under strictly controlled conditions. Yet for most of us this cross-border
traffic is something that barely impinges on life itself. Of course,
the idea that one is being continually checked up on and monitored is
not a pleasant one. But for the time being it does not diminish one's
sense of self-determination. Your movements may be monitored, but your
motives for moving are as yet relatively unquestioned. But what if those
motives were to become the object of monitoring? Imagine if 'they' not
only wanted to know where you were going, but also why. Imagine if your
'name' were not just a matter of your personal identity but also of
your spatial identity. Worse still, imagine if you were not only required
to declare that you are going from A to B, but also why. And why it
was that yesterday you went from B to A. A world in which the powers
that be want to know who you are, where you are, where you were, why
you were there, why you still are in fact, et cetera. To lead such a
life is no longer to pass through checkpoints, it is to become a checkpoint. |
[30aug2003] | |||
| This
is architecture at its cruellest. A struggle for space and for control
of space. A practice concerned with erecting borders and guarding them.
A continual definition of inside and outside and a war about who should
be allowed to do the defining. A war not conducted by people about people,
but inside people. In the long run it could lead to a spatial policy
more radical than deportation: exile from one's self. Before it comes
to this, a lot will have had to happen in the way we try to come to
terms with mass migration. There is so much more that can be done that
falls within the bounds of the humane and that results in something
resembling society. There is no shortage of historical examples. If
not nation building or melting pot, with an enlightened spatial policy
of mixing programmes and people, then peaceful and respectful co-existence
sustained by zoning, enclaves and, if need be, corridors. If not cohabitation,
then straightforward restraint with gates and walls, strict surveillance,
spying and other forms of spatial apartheid. And if that is not enough, there is still deportation, the simple removal of elements people are unable to come to terms with. Despite their differing degrees of mutual trust, all these strategies attest to respect for other people's lives. But there is a form of mistrust that can no longer be conquered by the strategies that exist between community and removal. It is the state of constant scrutiny. Of endless monitoring and recording of someone's spatial history as an indication of their risk profile. For some, a stamp in a passport is a trophy of cosmopolitanism. For others it's a nail in your coffin. Architecture can not exist without its borders, any more than it can exist without a discussion about what these borders are. Stateless nation: a question of architecture. Ole Bauman |
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