Vesper. Journal
of Architecture, Arts & Theory
Sissi Cesira
Roselli, Teatro Grande, Brescia, 2011
Vesper No. 4 Esili ed esodi | Exiles and Exoduses
Call for abstracts and
call for papers
Two movements,
perhaps antithetical, affect space. Individuals exclude themselves, exit (exilium,
exsul, ex-solum), come out of their own land, withdraw into another
circumstance, depose power from within, shun the power that holds back. Exile
can be an individual choice, but it can also be a constraint that involves, cumulatively,
a large number. At the same time, peoples, animals, and plants are in exodus, moving,
fleeing, migrating, changing the design and the sense of territory and geographies.
Three figures
take shape from these movements: the space of the journey and the traces of the
crossing, the destination or just the place of arrival, and finally the image of
the house, of the city, or of the abandoned “homeland”. These figures
unite the two movements: certainly in exile the journey can be instantaneous; it
can last as long as it takes to make a decision, to refuse, to write a text, to
close a door. During the exodus, by contrast, the journey can prove to be the destination
itself – in flight one may have to stop from necessity, by force, or by choice.
Choice is the
engine that drives self-exile, establishing the impossibility of staying “inside”
a place or a way of living, as well as the origin (also etymologically) of exodus,
that is, of finding a way out, of heading towards a possibility, a promise. History
imposes moments and situations in which it is impossible to stay, to accept the
status quo, to embrace indirectly forced choices, ones that are demanded,
necessary to save oneself. Nature is set in motion as it no longer finds suitable
conditions in which to survive; Birnam Wood shall come against Shakespeare’s
Macbeth, rise up and move to conquer.
In exile many
authors have constructed their work by excluding themselves from the game or yoke
of society or by escaping the violence and censorship of a regime; by fleeing they
have found reserve homelands – they have built distances and
necessary voids to forge their own discourse. Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners
of Architecture: The Strip (1972) is a vision-script by Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis,
Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis, in which a walled city traverses London, alluding
to the situation in West Berlin during the Cold War and echoing some of the dystopias
of the exuberant Florentine radical movement.
The hedge demarcates
an elsewhere to be imagined and the given perimeter of one’s own space; it
is a device for potentiating visions in Giacomo Leopardi’s thought. Today
we seek that limit beyond which to look; isolation is a perspective from which to
find oneself, to see how much everything is illuminated, to reconnect, without
filters, to what surrounds us. In the meantime, bunkers kept in private houses design
“inverse” cities, where shelter is a space conceived to eliminate any
form of contact with the outside. Anonymous buildings hide the lairs of those who
are outlawed and entertain relationships that are difficult to align with the lives
that flow in the sunlight.
Humans are banned
from the territories of Chernobyl, while in the same forbidden zone the flora flourish
and the fauna proliferate: who is the exiled in this game of roles? And how relative
are the positions of “the inside” and “the outside”?
In 2020, the
entire population of the planet has undergone a forced exile inside private houses
or in makeshift shelters away from others: an exile that, by affecting every single
individual, has shaped a mass movement. The only possible journey was, as in Luigi
Ghirri’s Atlas, the one offered by the intimacy of a book. Continuous
and often silent exoduses mark out undrawn maps: hard-hulled boats heaving with
humanity, such as in the odyssey recounted in Lamerica by Gianni Amelio,
people marching and fleeing from wars and cataclysms build other places. In exodus
species get lost, they conquer spaces that are alien to them; roads and bridges
are built to allow them to find their way back, such as the Wildlife Crossing at
Liberty Canyon in the USA.
Exiles and exoduses
sediment themselves in history, sometimes finding space in the chronicle with novel
accents. While the need for a gaze from the optimal distance is reiterated, the
stones of other cities are silently laid, and the blending inheritance is renewed.
The two movements perhaps tell us stories of new and repeating geneses.
Vesper welcomes different types of contributions, the call for abstracts
and the call for papers are organized according to the different sections.
Full-length papers must be submitted once abstracts have been accepted.
Contributions in their final form will be subject to a Double-Blind Peer
Review process.
call
for abstracts and call for papers >
timeline
SECTIONS:
PROJECT, ESSAY, JOURNEY, ARCHIVE, TUTORIAL, TRANSLATION
abstracts must
be submitted by August 25, 2020
abstracts acceptance
notification by September 5, 2020
papers submission
by November 1, 2020
papers acceptance
notification by November 20, 2020
SECTIONS:
TALE, DICTIONARY
papers submission
by August 25, 2020
papers acceptance
notification by September 5, 2020
publication
of Vesper No. 4: May 2021
contacts
+39 041 257 1542