Articles
As he navigates through the recurrent lockdowns of the pandemic, stranded between hitchiking and muggings, job hunting and separations, Fabio Valerio Tibollo rediscovers photography as a powerful coping mechanism. Recording everything that happened around him for one year straight, from attending momentous events to finding curiosity in shots of simple living,… Read more »
Venice is perhaps the only city in the world where food can only be delivered on foot. Recounting his experience as a delivery “walker”, Giorgio Pirina traces a fresco of his daily shifts, caught between digitalised work and timeless sites, with the liberating experience of walking contrasting with the impact… Read more »
What role can public art play in constituting the experience of a place? For fifteen years, Mili Romano has curated Heart of Stone, a series of multidisciplinary interventions in the town of Pianoro, in the province of Bologna. Morphologically transformed by redevelopment processes imposed from above, this small village, already… Read more »
Forced to leave Italy due to his political activity, artist Pietro Marubi sought refuge in the town of Shkodër, Albania, where in 1856 he founded the first photographic atelier of the country. The hundreds of thousands of photographs produced by Marubi and his sons over the decades became the property… Read more »
Changing a town by the dint of your running. This is what happened to Leadville, Colorado, after a 100-mile running competition was organised there in 1983. So how does sport transform cities? Ultramarathon runner and writer Filippo Caon recounts his first-hand experience of sport-focused places, from the Rocky Mountains of… Read more »
In 2019, the collapse of the Córrego do Feijão dam in Minas Gerais, Brazil, released a mudflow that left environmental and humanitarian devastation in its wake. Two years later, artists Bárbara Lissa and Maria Vaz returned to the zone to document the aftermath. In this text, they consider the limitations… Read more »
For decades, Patras has been one of the main hubs for migration routes to Europe, particularly Italy. A short distance from the inhabited areas and tourist facilities lie entire disused industrial sites occupied by migrants waiting to try their luck at “the game”, namely, illegally boarding westward bound ferries. The… Read more »
One of the main protagonists of Italian radical architecture, multidisciplinary artist and researcher Ugo La Pietra has dedicated his life to the understanding of the power relations embedded into our modern cities. He has seen the city of Milan change considerably over the years, with the development of new neighbourhoods, new… Read more »
The Italian city of Rimini is not only a renowned seaside resort on the Adriatic Sea. It is also the home of a giant: a sixty-year-old skyscraper that stands out, completely alone, against an expanse of small houses. In this contribution, Marco Bertozzi reflects on the making of his film Skyscraper… Read more »
In 1964, British engineer Rod Rhys Jones set off to Antartica to conduct work for the British Antarctic Survey. Fifty years later, he found himself back there installing a monument to commemorate those who lost their lives in the pursuit of science within this harsh environment, including three of his… Read more »
In the winter of 2020, the northern Italian city of Vicenza said goodbye to its most loved football champion, Paolo Rossi. In this urban wandering, Giulio Todescan surveys the visual markers that supporters have left around town to perpetuate Rossi’s memory, revealing how the mundane can become a fresco of… Read more »
In the 17th century, an underground cave was discovered in the depths of the Bristol area. Today, the entrance to the cave, Pen Park Hole, lies adjacent to a housing estate in the northern suburb, Southmead. The site above had plans for residential housing but permission was denied when the… Read more »
In the fishing village of Afurada de Baixo, Portugal, the architectural façade speaks of everyday affairs and circumstances without needing to utter them. In this article, researcher Antigoni Geronta outlines the results of her five-year field research in the village, where thresholds, windows, curtains and tiles give visual clues about… Read more »
In the depth of the Trentino mountains, there is a high-security prison. Amongst the captives is M49, a brown bear classified as dangerous for his reoccurring attacks on livestock and human property. The animal has been the subject of much media attention, both in his homeland and abroad. What are… Read more »
In comics, when do landscapes change from setting to subject? Usually thought of as the backdrop to the unfolding of events, the landscape often plays a deeper role. In this article, semiologist Daniele Barbieri recounts some moments found within the history of comics in which the landscape becomes an important… Read more »
2015 marked the island city-state Singapore’s golden jubilee. Amongst the festivities and events celebrating the country’s independence was public coverage of the Dakota estate, one of the oldest public housing developments in Singapore. With its impending demolition to make way for redevelopment, the area was featured in numerous arts, culture,… Read more »
During WWII, a high number of bunkers and casemates were implanted upon the territory of the Venice lagoon. How have these massive monolithic shapes contributed to the reorganisation of the postwar landscape? Have they remained as inert forms or have they rather established a relationship with the inhabitants of their… Read more »
In these times of enforced self-isolation, the objects that once constituted the discrete backdrop of our home start to be seen in a different light. In this intimate contribution, radio producer Jonathan Zenti tells us about how being quarantined in one of Italy’s most affected cities has brought his previously… Read more »
Sharing the fabric of our cities with wild animals is the norm. As long as they do not encroach upon the boundaries of the domestic wall, the space in which we live is also that of birds, mice, insects and other species. In London, urban foxes are the most iconic… Read more »
Starting from the exploration of the so-called “viàz”, an arduous mountaineering route in the Zoldo Dolomites, Silvia Segalla reflects upon the concept of “wilderness” as applied to the mountain, which within the social imaginary seems to have become a reserve and bastion of nature. In an era in which a… Read more »
A dive into the period in which skateboarding was blooming: by flipping through the pages of a 1960s issue of Life Magazine, Flavio Pintarelli recounts the way in which the board broke into the city, inaugurating new embodied experiences of space.
One of the most renowned works of land art, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty embodies considerations that share affinities with what will later be found in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Reflecting on notions such as tension and scale, Andrea Mubi Brighenti traces how the spiral’s stone, salt and mud produce… Read more »
Gabriel del Barco’s masterpiece ‘A Grande Vista de Lisboa’ is a patchwork of tiles that pulls our gaze into the heart of a stratified city, where buildings, gardens, people and churches float on the surface of an ever-shifting fabric. This is the image of a Lisbon whose elements are not… Read more »
In West Africa, mnemonic landscapes have been affected by various political and economic inputs, which in many cases have packaged history into a tourist attraction. The monument becomes the locus of a superimposition of local and global narratives. In this comparative field-research of historic and commemorative sites within the area, Sarah… Read more »
Where are marionettes when they are not on stage? Accompanied by Riccardo Giacconi’s camera, anthropologist Andrea Morbio goes behind-the-scenes of Carlo Colla & Sons, the longest-running puppet company in Milan and in the whole of Italy, in order to explore the places in which puppets transform from inert matter into… Read more »
Agnafit – the historical location where Stockholm was founded – is here only a faint echo, and yet its essence quietly permeates this visit to the Swedish capital. Film locations that have become ingrained within a fictitious city coexist here with the mundane reality of the background. Images and roads… Read more »
In Gaza, the experience of perpetual conflict translates into an architecture that rises directly as ruin. The buildings of the territory are the expression of a structural temporariness that paradoxically embeds the weight of an eternal present. Palestinian architect, Hania Halabi, reflects on how architecture may offer the foundations for… Read more »
For the making of his documentary ‘Stories of Land and Water: Adige Etsch’, filmmaker Vittorio Curzel walked upstream towards the source of the Adige river. It was a journey that started at the valleys that face the Adriatic sea and culminated at the doors of Mitteleuropa. In this essay, Curzel… Read more »
What images do we carry of our home cities? How well can we describe them? And are we simply witnesses to their familiarity, or do we feel a part of their shared story? Writer and filmmaker Christopher Thomson returns to his 2011 book ‘Travels Through Absence’ with a new epilogue,… Read more »
The seabed of the Venetian lagoon teems with thousands of bygone objects. The search for the legendary third column of St. Mark, which is thought to lie in these murky depths, is an opportunity to return their shadows to the surface.