Vesper. Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory
Giacomo
Brunelli, Untitled (Bird and Trees),
2006, From “The Animals”. Gelatin silver print
Vesper No. 11 Miserabilia
Call for abstracts and Call
for papers
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social
condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on
earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality so long as
the three problems of the age – the degradation of man by poverty, the
ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and
spiritual night – are not yet solved; as long as, in certain regions,
social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended
point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this
cannot be useless.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Tschumi’s cases are vides, necessarily emptied of nostalgia
in order to prepare for another kind of inhabitation, one not predicted by
functionalist taylorization or cozy family myths. It is for this reason that
Tschumi builds cases and not maisons: “case, a poor
and wretched house, a hovel, as in the ‘hovels of natives in the
colonies’”, from the Latin casa or cottage, as opposed to
the maison, manse or mansion, from the Latin manere, to dwell in.
Tschumi’s cases vides echo, but form a long way off and with
little desire to return, the forgotten huts of numberless peoples, displaced by
war, famine, or agrarian depression. Their red frames stand not as signs of
some romantic ruined cottage but as open structures for the nomadic banlieue.
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern
Unhomely
Miserabilia aims to focus on spaces and spectres of misery in imagination and
reality.
Two assumptions underlie it:
the removal of the space of existence of misery in the concrete and immaterial
context of the West in favour of ‘measurable conditions of
poverty’, and the presence of buildings in cities as evidence of a past
in which poverty was a ‘matter’ of governance and planning.
Misery in Western societies is
today unthinkable and unrepresentable, unspeakable and invisible, exiled to a
historical, geographical, cultural elsewhere. Yet, in the past, misery took
majestic forms in Italy, for instance, from the Great Schools of Venice to the
almshouses for the poor. Monuments gave way to the anonymous architecture of
service centres or temporary structures responding to emergency situations. If
the monumentality of misery expressed an aesthetics, the architecture of
poverty rejects it in the name of functionality: today the space of misery is
emptied of phenomenology, evidence, quality, quantity, scale, extension,
discourse.
At Iuav in Venice, the theme
shaped studies that insisted either on the links between capitalist system,
spatial configuration, and social production and control, or on the methods of
managing imbalances and conflicts in the city (Astengo, Cacciari, Ceccarelli,
De Carlo, Indovina, Secchi, et. al.). The end of the ‘political’
season which envisioned remedial solutions with a view to the ‘abolition
of misery’ coincided with the fading of the dialogue between the
disciplines engaged in the pursuit of bringing it into focus.
In architecture, misery
was the subject of specific observations in historical studies concerned with
the massive structures that, by accommodating, educating, and controlling
outcasts, compensated for the grandiose displays of power. In 1929 Le Corbusier
designed the ‘floating asylum’ for the homeless in Paris; in 1933
the same architect created, with Jeanneret and always inside the French
capital, the Citè de Rèfuge: a monument to misery. In 1986 Hejduk
designed Abandoned Chapel: Housing for the Homeless for Bovisa, and in
1994 Vidler published The Architectural Uncanny, in which he emphasized
the theme of vagabonds in Hejduk’s work. In 2004, Clèment in Manifeste
du tiers paysage overturned the negative meaning attributed to the
discarded space, showing it as a place rich in biological diversity.
Photography keeps investigating the vitality of the ‘zones’ in
which misery is the driving force for experimentation on public space.
In 2015 Branzi and De Lucchi
curated ‘The Aesthetics of Misery’ exhibition in Milan, presenting
an investigation into forms and scenes of misery. In 2022 in Munich
‘Who’s Next? Homelessness, Architecture and Cities’ exhibited
historical and contemporary architectural projects for the homeless.
Deliberately removed from cities – consider ‘hostile
architecture’ and anti-homeless devices – or associated with studies
on the scarcity of resources and materials, misery has no space. Scarcity today
is, in the research of various making works in rich territories and cities, a
language, often not associated with its content.
In philosophy, misery appears
in one of the most classic places of Western thought, Plato’s Symposium:
Penia (Misery and Poverty), coupling with Poros (Plenty and Resource), begets
Eros (Desire). In modern times, misery remains just as central, but associated
with the scarcity of natural resources for subsistence, it becomes increasingly
the prerogative of the economic discourse of early liberalism, which, for
example in Smith and Malthus, revolves around need rather than desire,
polemicising the nascent socialism of Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Misery
(1846), to which Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) responds.
Foucault in Sécurité,
territoire, population (2004) speaks of the ‘invention of
poverty’ by the arts of governance from the 17-18th century onwards,
which ends up concealing the philosophical significance of misery. In
Benjamin’s Erfahrung und Armut (1933) and Deleuze’s Kafka.
Pour une littérature mineure (1975) we witness a recovery of misery as a
philosophical category, where the already Platonic sense of
‘potentiality’ is highlighted, configuring the possibility of a
form of communal life as pointed out in Altissima povertà by Agamben
(2011). In even more recent times, the link between desire and the potentiality
of misery is seen again in the debates on the environmental crisis as an
alternative to the ‘governmental’ implications of the discourse on
scarcity and debt.
In sociology, misery represents
a kind of limit concept. The exclusion to which it alludes seems to exceed any
form of solidarity, as well as the scope of the Weberian Verstehen and
the Marxian idea of class itself. Even an eccentric essay such as Soziologie
(Simmel 1908) avoids it: the miserable are not included in the interplay of
forms of society unlike the foreigner, the enemy, or the poor. Yet even misery
has a spatial form. This ‘space of representation’ was denounced as
a scandal in How the Other Half Lives (Riis 1890) or explored by
documentary sociology after 1929.
However, misery remains an objet
caché of the sociological imagination, relegated to areas that are
underdeveloped or affected by catastrophic events. Its everyday life re-emerges
in an attempt to give voice to ‘invisible’ subjects (Bourdieu
1993). And it forms the background of various ethnographies on extreme forms of
marginality, informality and violence interpreted as the result of a punitive
turning point and of production processes of hyper-ghettoes and urban
outcasts. As Avery Gordon writes, if the
feminist, postcolonial and intersectional theory helps to consider misery as
sexed, racialized and materially (re)produced, the excessive dimension that
defines it, however, would seem to be one that ‘unites’, indicating
something that remains and looms, like a spectre.
Misery is therefore a question
of space and spatiality, in the reality and in the collective consciousness. In
the first place, the architectural space: the evident, theatricalized and
flaunted one in the past and the invisible, anonymous, residual and looming,
therefore ghostly one, which has gradually taken over. Secondly, the philosophical
space of words to designate and speak about misery. Thirdly, the space of words
between people, or the social space, what Henri Lefebvre designated as the
territory of representation. Where misery is not represented or representable,
it does not disappear at all: in anonymity it rather ends up being
internalized, expressed at the most in blaming and indebtedness, even in the
criminalization of poverty, which is counterbalanced by the moral immiseration
of affluent neighbourhoods, increasingly isolated and closed to the rest of the
city. The result is an urban space in a permanent state of crisis, where the
spectre of impending poverty everywhere ends up legitimizing an art of
governing emergency and precariousness.
Only the
‘boundless’, discarded, forgotten space persists as an environment
in which misery can settle, set up camp, recognize itself.
Vesper welcomes different types
of contributions, the call for abstracts and the call for papers are organized
according to the different sections. 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, Fundamentals
Abstracts must be submitted by
March 1, 2024
Abstracts acceptance
notification by March 15, 2024
Papers submission by May 6,
2024
Sections:
Tale
Papers submission by March 1,
2024
Papers acceptance notification
by March 15, 2024
Publication of Vesper No. 11, November 2024
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