CARERI Errantry and Zonzo
CARERI Errantry and Zonzo
100 words to
inhabit it
Daniela Colafranceschi
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Index of definitions
Francesco Careri
By the same author: Transurbance and Zonzo
Ethics
“You who read this probably know what it is
like to stretch out on the ground—be it in
a meadow, on a sports field or the tundra—
gazing up at the skies. Allowing time to
pass before the sky’s impressive and pub-
licly accessible vault. Reading the skies as
teacups or long-nosed faces. Observing the
Celano-Foggia drover’s
road. A tour by Stalker of
the age-old drover’s road
that harks back to the
transhumance of yore.
Transurbance 182
among them know how to assume the deal of work was necessary, starting with a
necessary distance so as to modify their sense of history: “This historical sense, which
meaning and to integrate them in our perceives that which escapes time as well as
contemporary world. Thus, for her Whitehead that which pertains to it, and perceives both
Institute Splice Garden (Cambridge, Mass., things at once, is what makes a writer tradi-
1986) Martha Schwartz used the classical tional. And it is what simultaneously affords
motifs one finds in the parterres in Villandry. the writer the most acute awareness of his
Likewise, when she intervened on Jacob place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”
Javits Plaza in 1996, after the removal in
1989 of Richard Serra’s Tilted arc, her design Gilles A. Tiberghien
By the same author: Indeterminacy
for a sinuous bench in arabesques was a
clear homage to Frederick Law Olmsted.
The latter has recently inspired the French
landscape designer Michel Desvigne, who Transurbance
studied him in depth during a year’s stay at
Harvard, where he’d been invited to teach. Transurbance, from the Latin trans, “across”,
What particularly struck him is the way in and urbis, “city”. 1. (geog.), meadows that
which the works of a technical kind that develop within city walls. The t. mountain
Olmsted had undertaken for the cleansing pasture; to go in t., sin. of wander, roam, rove.
of the stagnant waters bordering the 2. (aesthet.) search for new places, extrapo-
Charles River had been the driving force lation of concepts from urban territories
for an aesthetic design capable of producing but outside the city. To carry out a t., sin. of
new forms of nature. Desvigne was also visit-excursion, ambulation, urban drift, errantry.
inspired by this in his way of planting or 3. (scient.) action searching for pedestrian
of “greening” and then of cutting back the viability and for its possible implications in
plant masses, a technique he continues to the general system of urban mobility.
use in his most recent projects.
One could furnish many other examples An aesthetic–scientific practice that crosses
that show how tradition decomposes and the inner edges of cities, permitting new
is recomposed in many contemporary pro- connections between empty spaces. It is a
jects, how it enriches these projects without nomadic action that crosses truly nomadic
holding them back, how it can be a proposi- voids, territories that extend suburban
tional force if, in order to respect it, one pastures, which insinuate themselves in a
has the capacity to subvert it. In speaking capillary way among the solids of the city
of writers, although this applies to anyone and which still today allow flocks of sheep
taken up with the problem of creation, to cross suburbia. (See Interscapes) Thanks
T. S. Eliot wrote in his essay “Tradition and to these urban sheep-tracks, the city becomes
the new” 65 that it was better to innovate wholly practicable: where sheep pass, human
than to repeat, but that to do this a great beings do too. Other nomadic corridors
183 Transurbance
Francesco Careri
By the same author: Errantry and Zonzo
its discards “make space”. In the beginning transformation represented in the film by
it was the city of the flâneur described by an uninterrupted flow of rubbish that
Baudelaire and by Benjamin, that idler who provided nourishment and life for an entire
lost himself among the shop-windows of the derelict humanity. Again in the 1920s,
boulevards and the new buildings in iron wandering about became the object of Dada
in Paris at the end of the 19th century. “visits” and Surrealist “deambulations”; they
But soon it was transformed into that “else- declared the existence of “banal places” and
where” which, in Paris, was placed between “unconscious places” to be explored as in
the périferie extérieure and intérieure and which the mind; places in which to intervene with
in French is called la Zone. It is probable a nomadic attitude. Visiting them on foot
that Zonzo derived etymologically from this and without leaving any traces, without
zone, which is an onomatopoeic and almost leaving any artworks. The ambulatory paths
shamanic repetition of zon-zon, that is, would then be travelled by Lettrists and
“to go to the Zone,” an exotic place where Situationists, who, in the 1950s, by means
chaos reigns, where strange objects can be of the subversive théorie de la dérive, or drift
found and unexpected encounters made. theory, discovered a “playful” and “nomadic”
Here, in 1928, Georges Lacombe filmed city that opposed the homologation of the
La Zone, a zone on the edges of modernity modern project and the society of spectacle.
that lives a state of constant entropic (See Transurbance)
Planisfero Roma, map of Stalker attraverso i territori
the four-day tour through attuali, Jean-Michel Place,
the Existing Territories of Paris, 2000.
Rome, and from the book
187 Zonzo
Francesco Careri
By the same author: Errantry and Transurbance