Page 167 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

ThE COMING CITIzENRY MANUEL SEGADE
167
sets at the Plateau de Gravelle (Vincennes, France) in Tati’s 1967 film Playtime, but when the wind blows and they move by themselves, they seem to be alluding to Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928), or to other instances of popular culture such as the Minga20 (tiradura de casa or “house pulling”) tradition of communal work in Southern Chile, whereby a whole village may help move a stilt house to a new location by placing it on top of logs and having a group of oxen pull the structure uphill, downhill, or across a river.
The last scene renders the immanence of the group’s activities even more explicit, revealing a movement’s ability to go viral within the social body. The mobile pavilion is standing on an embankment, fully unfurled under the rain, and its flock awaits an event. Once again in many languages, Laura tells them Kafka’s story of the second generation of builders of the Tower of Babel. In the narrative, the original plan to build the Tower – which justifies the construction of the city – is gradually forgotten for the sake of coexistence: The succession of periods of calm when the main concern is increasing the citizens’ welfare, and periods of conflict when the priority is appeasement, result in the city, rather than the Tower, being the true event. Babel is not a construction but a process of change, a social site whose raison d’être is transformation itself, in all its successive mutations, and where collective goals lose their meaning as compared with the need to imagine through what means life in common is going to be made possible.
Lydia
Lydia Lunch is an American singer, writer, and self-empowerment speaker. A pioneer spoken-word artist, she founded the band Teenage Jesus in New York’s 1970s no wave scene. Her militant, activist voice adds another dimension to the narrative: countercultural identification. From a stationwagon convertible, Lunch asks people to join her (from whence the title of the piece) for a later visit to the Parthenon. The dissemination of modes of subjectivity is always enmeshed with the existence of a counter-public, a parallel subaltern discourse that a given community or collective develops in order to generate contrary accounts of their needs, their identities, and their interests.21 Lydia summons pedestrians and motorists – all kinds of citizens – with an explicitly political
20 From mink“a, a term found in Quechua, Aymara and Mapundungun, denoting a form of contract to carry out communal work in favour of the group
(< Quechua minccacuni: “to ask for help in exchange for a promise”) [Translator’s note].
21 See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books, 2005, pp. 113-118.