Page 230 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

230 ¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER
in the eternal wandering. I have not yet seen the videos that will be projected, because as we write this you are wandering around the world (I would love to be with you!) with your itinerant community of Neo-Babylonians. I imagine a continuous walking, crossing borders, constructing nomadic cities, transforming into art this infinite movement of a migrant humanity that would like to return to a nomadic life. I see a proposal for an alternative nomadic life, but I cannot help but think of refugees forced into exile and kept away by our walls of well-being. When I met Constant in the last years of his life, when he was painting long lines of people escaping from war and hunger, I told myself that New Babylon was a project still alive, that one day it would be possible to realise it, not in the form of his models, but in those that the Neo-Babylonians choose. But the Babylonians we see today are the ones we see drowning in the Mediterranean every day. It is a terrible thing to think that the signing of the next agreement with Libya will put refugees in camps forever, as is the case in Turkey. Europe has decided to channel the problem away by funding new dictators. The idea is, essentially, to no longer see them on television. I am very curious to see how you resolve relating the nomadic utopia and the reality of this tragedy in the theatre of Venice.
JC: In part, the project ¡Únete! Join Us! for the Spanish Pavilion is derived from Constant’s New Babylon and also from a project close in time (both started in the late 1950s) as well as in spirit: the ville spatiale by Yona Friedman. I was fortunate enough (like you met Constant) to meet Friedman – who at 93 is still in top form. The two projects describe – through drawings and models, texts, and collages – the idea of cities whose inhabitants are nomads, that pass through them and change the space – of environments – at the same time that they build it. For Friedman that clearly puts the question of the notion of use far above that of property. These projects, incorrectly called utopian, are the perfect platform for the imagination. What would life in New Babylon, in the ville spatiale, be like in detail? How would people gather together? What would they dance? Would they transport things? What, in what way? So I started to think about the seemingly contradictory idea of a ”nomad city” and in the end we have brought together many people who are part of this movement, touring and occupying very different, fragmentary sites, a caravan winter parking lot, no-man’s-lands in the heart of Barcelona, or the Parthenon in Nashville. Our society has created a taboo around the nomadic. Hopefully these videos, which are something like a documentary of an invented life, perhaps of the future, could serve to perceive in another manner those who have not been able to choose their destination, the forced nomads, obliged to leave their cities, their homes, devastated by bombs.