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Isolario
Maps of visible and invisibles islands and archipelagos
with Graziano Martignoni
Isolario
Maps of visible and invisibles islands and archipelagos
Hi,
there is a disturbing phenomenon:
people spend their time more
by walking around in shopping malls,
maybe without buying anything.
Do you think it's just a fashion
or something more?
We had already met the picture of the desert,
the figure of the American desert
evoked by Baudrillard,
which is quite different obviously
from the desert of conquest.
Think at these two deserts.
The desert which Jack Kerouak
tells us in his crossing of America,
in his famous book of the years
of the season of '68,
of "the big generation on the road",
the initiatory journey,
the desert as the place and the time
of initiatory journeys,
the desert of the highway
to the desert which Baudrillard
tells us in America, in his book,
where it is the advertising desert,
the desert which is scattered
with those which we have already met,
this simulacrum figures which find
their representation in
the advertising icons
along these big roads
which cross America,
or in these places which are not places,
which are the fast-foods,
which you meet along the road,
all looking the same,
where you eat more or less always the same thing.
Well, the emotional landscape,
the mental landscape which
is represented in these two,
paintings of the American desert,
beyond that America which
in this sense is simply a prototype,
speaks about the dimension of the place,
the space and the place
where we live today.
And here we get help,
somehow, from another important image
is that of the sociologist Marc Augé,
of the anthropologist Marc Augé,
who speaks of the so-called non-places.
What are the non-places?
The non-places are places
which don't have a meaning,
which are containers of everything
and of the contrary of everything.
And what are they?
Marc Augé speaks of the stations,
of the airports, of the supermarkets,
of all these anonymous places,
we would say, of transit,
of ephemeral parking, episodic,
where man does not recognize anything,
if not the return,
the recuperation, the putting back
into play of the same.
They are the same everywhere.
So, these non-places which include
this idea so new
and modern of the everywhere,
of being everywhere,
and obviously also Internet
is the place of the everywhere.
You can be everywhere,
but this everywhere, after a while,
erases the here and there,
the before and the after.
Well, inside of these non-places,
inside of these advertising deserts of simulacra,
man can not do anything more than,
find great difficulty in orienting himself.
When you go in the cloister
of an old church
and you find out that in this cloister,
- here I refer to a beautiful image
of Carlo Sini in his beautiful book
called "The game of silence", -
where he tells the story of a writer,
of a philosopher,
who enters inside the cloisters
of the big French churches,
of the big French monasteries,
and he finds out that inside these cloisters
the images that are painted,
often animal images,
from the lion,
to the peacock,
all these images are similar
to the musical notes.
And there is this extraordinary feeling
that the monk,
while he walks and prays,
how to say, enters in an inner relationship
of harmony with the music of the world.
It is the world's music
which speaks through those symbols,
so, that place becomes the place
of the epiphany of the world,
quite different from the poor
and somehow
flat place,
not even able
to refer to anything,
if not to a here and now,
always the same,
always somehow enclosed inside
the aridity of those
advertising images.
Isolario
Maps of visible and invisibles islands and archipelagos