Page 190 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

18 Íd., p. 12.
This leads Craig to evoke “those moving cities which, as they travelled from height to plain, over rivers and down valleys, seemed like some vast advancing army of peace.”18 At this point, we may return to the urban panels in X-Ville and the mobility that is revealed by the mutable, intermittent life of stage scenery. Items the city is built from or abstracted into, like elements in a live sculptural assemblage: army of peace or utopia. Again we must resort to the cinematic camera’s ability to circumscribe within a bartering field the connections between streets and stage sceneries, acts and deeds, person and persona.
The items in the scenery-as-character are tools for the actors’ work; the city’s movements (translocations, metaphorai) are the actions through which they become a temporary, nomadic community. This theatrical format comes through as an architectural manifestation in its constructional, processual moment, but not in the finalized shape of a building: that’s when we reach sculpture. Besides, the cinematic medium that encompasses this process is also nomadic, replicable, portable. Objects require a certain activation, though not necessarily of the functional kind. Let us consider for instance the scale model of a phalanstery that agents in L’avenir (2011) carry through endless sands until they reach the spot where they decide to set it up and use it as backdrop stage for cooking and eating a paella. There’s much more wind and sand than scenery in the scene. While these agents (people) eat the rice and engage in inconsequential chatter, the wind from the delta seems to sharpen their tin boxes into Fourierist emblems. Once again, action goes beyond reference. The action is not representing a situation, but rather exposing representation itself to the rigors of the situation, with all its sweat and dust. Somehow we envision Charles Fourier’s text hanging from a clothes line stretched across a town hall square somewhere, like a sort of readymade malheureux.
“The theatre’s architecture, Erwin Piscator claimed, was intimately bound to the structure of drama; they determined each other. But the roots of architecture and drama reach deep into their epoch’s social forms.”19 The blend of artistic media in Colomer’s works may be read as a further recombination of the languages that intermingle in Documentary Drama, and a commentary on Piscator’s political theatre. Once again we have theatrical performance, music, lights, discourses, screenings of films and
19 Juan Ignacio Prieto López, Teatro Total: Arquitectura y utopía en el periodo de entreguerras. Buenos Aires: Diseño Editorial, 2015, p. 154. My reflection in what follows may be seen as a commentary on Prieto López’s book and an attempt to link the illuminations his research affords to the cross-disciplinary, and historically wider, context addressed in this essay.
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