Fernando J. Devoto
Thoughts on the Notion of ‘Exile’ and ‘Exodus’, and Their Usages
The article explores the two notions of exodus and exile in their multiple uses and meanings. Starting from the almost unlimited potential of language, and from the strategies of diverse scholars, the same words acquire new and opposite meanings depending on times and places. In other respects, the uses of the researcher and those of the protagonists are different. This makes the notions of exodus and exile better understood when placed in a larger set of related words. It is suggested here that no use is prohibited, even if researchers from the field of social sciences would be required to indicate in what sense they use the words, for the benefit of the reader. In any case, in a context of inevitable instability one can find in these two polysemic words the tenuous persistence of some original traces: epic-mythical references in the entry ‘exodus’, for instance, or an ambivalence between the punishment of power and the freedom of the subject in the entry ‘exile’.
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Fulvio Lenzo
Ambassadors, Bandits, Spies. The liste in 18th Century Venice
The gradual loss of Venice’s political weight on the international scene during the 17th and 18th centuries corresponds to an increase in its relevance as a neutral place of confrontation – and dispute – between international diplomacies. It was the physical location of the embassy that took on the role of ‘battlefield’ for confrontations that, although often reduced to seemingly banal questions of priority and protocol, were actually a figurative representation of real power relations. Diplomatic offices enjoyed diplomatic immunity, a right that ambassadors sought to enforce also in close vicinities, named liste. Here the servants and the dealers in the service of the embassy found accommodation, and their goods enjoyed tax exemptions only for being destined for the representative of a foreign sovereign. But the liste, impenetrable to the guards (sbirri), were also safe havens for smugglers, gamblers, and adventurers ‘banned’ from Venice. Moreover, frequently ambassadors recruited these individuals for classified operations and secret intrigues. For this reason, the liste were closely watched by the spies of the State Inquisitors.
The inhabitants of this lively underworld shared with their more influential neighbors the condition of being excluded from the life of the city, since ambassadors too were constrained to a similar segregation. They were forbidden by law not only to have direct contact with Venetian patricians – thus being excluded from parties, social events, and cultural circles – but even to visit the same barber shops, casinos, or brothels attended by local aristocrats.
The ‘question of the liste’ broke out in 1769 and ended in 1772, when it was finally possible to regulate the situation by exactly defining their extension. The complaints of different ambassadors outlined an international problem and for some time the discussions on the Venetian liste held sway in the salons of European capitals. Survey drawings of buildings and urban areas circulated too, in official and unofficial ways, and are currently to be found in countless copies in the most diverse Italian and European archives. Of particular interest is the documentation preserved among the papers of the State Inquisitors at the Archivio di Stato di Venezia.
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Luca Molinari
The Solitudes of an Architect
In the ‘Closed Sea’ of the Mediterranean, a series of micro-stories unfolds, bringing together the two apparently separated, yet profoundly integrated paths between exile as a radical choice of autonomy and exodus as a suffered condition leading to forms of mixing that are necessary for the architectural project to successfully take root in the place.
Mixing and autonomy are two conditions that nourish, in different ways, the original research of authors who cannot bear the state of cultural, political, and social flattening in which they are immersed. And the current circumstances, dominated by a technical and linguistic Esperanto that seems to annihilate all differences in the name of total environmental and financial efficiency, are facing a deep crisis of autonomous research and experimentation that could lead to alternative scenarios. The critical reflection proposes and analyses in parallel the quest for autonomy, through extreme forms of self-exile (Utzon’s experience in Majorca) and the search for forms of linguistic and design creolisation (the ‘local heroes’ in Beirut, Istanbul, Marseilles, Barcelona, and southern Italy), seen as the two poles necessary for rethinking contemporary architecture and overcoming a condition of crisis that has wrapped it up for at least two decades. The authors featured in this article appear as tragic figures because they represent the end of the modern demiurge architect and the emergence of figures steeped in reality and its contradictions, giving a sense of fragility to the architectural project that could definitively free us from the romantic sacredness of the author, replaced by designers immersed in the world. Suffered and sought isolation acts as a resource for reducing background noise and seeking new trajectories of dialogue and new visions that are helpful in overcoming this condition.
Exodus and exile are two sides of a single phenomenon stating the centrality of the autonomous thought of an author and at the same time the vital need to mix thoughts, actions, and symbols to renew them and make them useful for the community they will affect.
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Daria Ricchi
Jet Lag. Exodus from the Journey and from the Domestic in the Work of Diller + Scofidio
Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have explored the topic of the journey and, quite the opposite, that of domesticity, in many of the late 1980s and early 1990s works of their studio. The journey is intended as the exploration of both the psyche and the body, as well as of personal and collective histories, and as an incursion into foreign territories other than the everyday. The journey is also codified as an escape and exodus from oneself in search of an elsewhere. More often, the tension and lack of balance between journey and exile in search of domesticity and familiarity lie at the centre of their design and artistic experimentations. The New York-based studio suggests and offers several prompts to dig deeper into the innate human need and urge to place oneself in time and history, to escape from oneself. The result is the production of other stories about one’s own life and the attempt to keep trying to escape, seeking exodus from another elsewhere.
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Dario Cecchi
Exodus Montages. The Image between Ethical Tensions and Political Directions
Exodus and exile can be rightly considered as true modern figures of the political. Whilst ‘exodus’, following the biblical model, points out to the idea of emancipation, ‘exile’ rather refers to the idea of either a possible repatriation or a farewell with no return.
Looking at the philosophical-political tradition of the 20th century, these two categories appear intertwined and overlapping with each other. They refer indeed to the question of the re-foundation or new foundation of a public space in which the claims for freedom and justice are formulated according to unprecedented schemes. It is to Walter Benjamin in particular that we owe the development of the idea that politics can be traced back to its ‘dialectical image’; it is to Hannah Arendt that we owe the merit of having reconsidered the political actor as a storyteller, who exhibits an exemplary judgment of the facts in which she or he is personally involved. If the figure of the ‘exodus’ opens up a virtually infinite horizon of freedom in the public space, the figure of the ‘exile’ shows the boundaries of the justice that can be demanded in the single exemplary case. This topic has emerged strongly in recent years, with regard to the migration and humanitarian crisis, and has found multiple echoes in the arts. In all these cases, the exiles seem to play the role of ‘ghosts’ of the political, who paradoxically exist only in the future, as they negotiate the terms for their return and thus reconfigure the space shared with others. In the wake of the paradigm of the image conceived as holding ‘signs in reserve’, we could speak of the figure of the exile as an operator of the violence removed in the figure of the exodus.
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