Space and Love
My final prayer: o my body, make of me always a man who questions. Frantz Fanon
Space and love is a research project that intends to shift the conventional observation point on the city and look at the urban space from the perspective of those who cross it, make it and are constantly made by it. In other words, space and love looks at the city from the height of human eyes and at the scale of affections and emotions. Rather than observing and analysing the master-plans, which draw the city on paper, the idea is to look at the urban as a lived and liveable space; as the frame of ordinary life and daily interactions; as an actor in the construction of social relations. The strategic shift is therefore in suggesting a non-hierarchical approach that looks beyond authoritative disciplinary understandings and reverberates the scale of human experience.
Focusing on the sensual perception of such a space, the proposal is to try and understand the city through an epidermic point of view. The attempt is thus to look at the skin-to-skin contact zone between human beings and urban space in order to get a privileged entry point to urban corpo-reality. Keywords of this approach are therefore osmosis, reciprocity and generosity. Through these lenses, the challenge is to overcome the risk of romanticising interpretations of the city while constructing a view that relies upon relational engines and dynamics.
If the core of the question is still the idea of transformation, the theoretical mode of exploration is that of empathy as the facilitator of a bodily relation between wo/man and city. The possibility to look at the micro-movements and exchanges which take place in the space of such a vicinity allows to trace what Suely Rolnik has defined a cartography of affections and intensities.
This perspective calls also into question the very notion of public sphere: its constitution in fact no longer takes place through functions and institutional destinations. It is rather embodied in the chance to perform an act of reciprocal generosity that allows this very space to take place.
Space and love is articulated in a number of different formats. The idea is to initiate the project with the publication of a book that will function as a starting point for different activities such as a conference and a workshop. Rather than using the book as the final result of a process, the idea is to strategically reverse the perspective and use it as the shared platform to create a common ideological and theoretical ground of activities and research.
Space and love intends to involve international cultural practitioners coming from different disciplines and backgrounds. All the participants are in their thirties; the intention is to create the bases for an equal exchange and interaction, while also attempting a sort of generational view on contemporary urban condition.
Space and love: 2a+p, Andrè Amtoft, Lucia Babina, Shumon Basar, Alexandre Canonico, Alessandro Floris, Emiliano Gandolfi, Matteo Ghidoni, Thomas Groves, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Francesca Recchia, Alex Vollebregt.
Activites
Bibliography
- R. Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux, Broché
- G. Perec, Especes d'espaces, Broché
- H. Szeemann, Inszenieren ist Lieben
