Page 226 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

226 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
in this sense: Totò and Ninetto take a walk through a Rome that is in transformation, they walk and talk without interruption, on viaducts under construction, abandoned farms, and ancient Roman ruins, as well as their copies by Mussolini. There they also find inhabitants who are poor but with an ancient culture that has always learned to rebuild from the ruins. Last year we organised with Stalker, together with the Swiss Institute of Rome, a three-day hike that only traversed contemporary ruins. We went to see how international star projects have once again destroyed our city: Rem Koolhaas, Fuxas, and Calatrava have built projects for the World Cup or the 2008 World Swimming Championships, resulting in monumental ruins, such as the unfinished pool, which cost ten times more than initially estimated. The most incredible thing is that they managed to go unnoticed: a real monument to the plundering of the citizenry. The problem is that even today there is no one on the horizon who knows how to deal with these ruins for the construction of a new world. The contemporary, says Lorenzo Romito from Stalker, has this great capacity of not dying, of absorbing everything and the opposite of everything. Escaping and hiding is becoming increasingly difficult.
JC: On those walks through Rome you made some documents from which one can recreate the experience, imagine it, get closer, videos, photos ... but also that video “Savorengo Ker – La casa di tutti”, about the concentration camp for the Roma (gypsies) and your stimulus to create a new prototype of room built by the inhabitants themselves, in order to replace the inhuman “containers”, that ended in tragedy, ultimately burned down at the end. It’s a very exciting video. I wanted to ask you about your relationship to fiction and to the documentary and how you organise that production of documents.
FC: The issue of representation in Stalker, or better, that of the restitution of experience, would require a lot of space to be recounted; what’s more, it has been transformed over twenty years of working together. I’ll try to be brief. At first our approach was very pure, we were afraid of representation, we were sure that it could not in any case recount the original experience, it would be a substitute for it. If you wanted to understand Stalker, it was necessary to come and walk with us, to be part of Stalker. We did not want to succumb to traditional forms of representation and we wanted to avoid spectacle. Many of us were architects who did not want to draw, nor do architecture, nor painting or sculpture, and we were also opposed to fiction. We wanted the territory to self-represent itself through our experience. We had a photo camera and a film camera that was always connected. We produced an infinite amount of videos, many slides, and then created maps that looked like those of ancient navigators, with islands – the full spaces, the sedentary space of everyday life – and seas – the vacant spaces, the nomadic space of “getting lost” that we had called the present territories. In the exhibitions we mounted all this material together: on the maps we projected the slides and the video in real time, lasting as long as the excursion. Then when we started working with refugee communities and the Roma, we began to edit the videos, to give space to the encounters with people, and we moved towards a more documentary format. But in some cases we also made a kind of fiction, for example the video Otnarat. Taranto in the inverse future, which is imagined as if it were twenty years later. We never used theatre,