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35 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, p. 234.
36 X-Ville was performed and shot on location in Annecy, France, and more specifically near Lake d’Annecy at the
Haras compound, a former army stable long disused and recently re-opened to the public by the Jardin-Fabriques association. On the day of the re-opening, X-Ville was screened at the “Volcano,” a wooden amphitheater that also features in the video.
37 As far back as
1961, Jane Jacobs identified
the perishable nature of
suburbs in the US: “The semi- suburbanized and suburbanized messes we create in this way become despised by their own inhabitants tomorrow. These thin dispersions lack any reasonable degree of innate vitality, staying power, or inherent usefulness as settlements. Few of them, and these only the most expensive
as a rule, hold their attraction much longer than a generation; then they begin to decay in the pattern of city gray areas. Indeed, an immense amount of today’s city gray belts was yesterday’s dispersion closer to ‘nature.’” Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 445.
38 Jordi Colomer, Interview, op. cit., p. 66.
And yet the city is still there, with buildings constantly growing as incomprehensible emblems. They are abstractions. The workers-actors in X-Ville need little else besides cardboard in order to efficiently bear the effigy of a city whose fate ceased to belong to them long ago. Their work imitates work with the – sometimes hilarious – ineptitude of someone who has forgotten about it. If there is a dimension of epic theatre in the action in X-Ville, it lies in the collective attempt to recondition a ruin into stage scenery, in order to turn it into an ever-unfinished construction. Sculpture here does not aspire to become architectural, but is rather architecture’s second life. The reactivation of discourses, the retrieval of labor practices, all the tricks of tactical craftsmanship, no less than modern theatre as memory – all these materials must necessarily unfold in a no-man’s land, off the grid. This might be what Rosi Braidotti calls “remembering in the nomadic way”.35
It’s not clear whether the action in X-Ville takes place in a park or at some empty grounds, nor is there any clue as to the site’s location with regard to the city;36 however, it suffices to imagine the place as a margin, as hinterland or back country, as derelict suburb in the city center, as internal residue.37 Most of Colomer’s works are located in city outskirts: “a generic space that belongs to everyone, perhaps more intensively than other places because it’s more clearly perceived: in their particularity, [these spaces] hold something essential.”38 In such a space erosion may change course and processes of construction and ruination may cooperate in a two-way game. “Crossroads. Way station. Space inscribed into its own exile. Interval”.39 This is where Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism – as expounded in a canonical manifesto of postmodernism – might be staged and brought into play. If there is an architecture of resistance, it must move (metaphora) to the rearguard, detaching itself from both Enlightenment myths and any illusion of return to a preindustrial past, avoiding any resurrection of what Frampton calls “the vernacular.”40 Suburban space is the gray belt “liberated” by erosion where unskilled multitudes drift; it’s the framework for entropic-creative processes, and “ever-perishable” constructions. The question is not whether it is possible to build something, but rather whether what’s built must be petrified into some conclusive edification or relocated inside an endless cycle of ever-shifting forms. The process whereby sculpture sheds its goals and the sculptor becomes a performer is familiar to us
39
p. 127.
40
“Towards a Critical Regionalism”, in H. Foster ed., Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, 1983, p. 20.
Juan Muñoz, op. cit.,
Kenneth Frampton,
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