Crackology
MANIFESTA12, Palermo Italia, 2017
1
Fellows at Ingruttati Palermo, directed by Sara Kamalvand - HydroCity
Paolo Cascone - CODESIGNLAB
Chris Younès - Gerphau
2
En colabroación con Félix de Rosen
3
Intervención en espacio público y exhibición en La Cripta de Dannisini y publicación digital
4
Regresar al proyecto CLICK AQUÍ
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MANIFESTA12, Palermo Italia, 2017
1
Fellows at Ingruttati Palermo, directed by Sara Kamalvand - HydroCity
Paolo Cascone - CODESIGNLAB
Chris Younès - Gerphau
2
En colabroación con Félix de Rosen
3
Intervención en espacio público y exhibición en La Cripta de Dannisini y publicación digital
4
Regresar al proyecto CLICK AQUÍ
Cracks are devices
Palermo is a decadent city with all of its layers exposed. When you find yourself in it, it feels like if you are walking through somebody’s box of secrets, with all of their fears and joys; the intimate becomes public, the layers are being revealed in front of you with no censure. Palermo is a now city. A place where the ancient and the modern –and all of the time in between– melts in the present, establishing no hierarchy or prejudice on what should have more or less value or attention. A place where archeology deals with the most difficult taxonomic task, whereas the timelines are blurred by its inhabitants, all of them: plants, animals, water, buildings, roads, humans. All that is left, is the present.
In this chaotic ocean of materials, different agents compete and cooperate: seeds of Ailanthus altissima fall amongst the abandoned lots of Palermo and sprout into invasive trees, 1960s modernist apartment complexes coexist with stone Renaissance palaces, and the Manifesta Biennale creates nodes of human knowledge with the intent of enabling new relations and structures within the city.
Our experience of the city as a cacophonous, multi-layered being led us to consider the tensions and cooperations between the various layers. Although the initial research focus were the qanats of the city, it was inevitable to get obsessed with the tectonic fault lines of the city, the fractures, the empty spaces. Suddenly the lack of completeness had more to offer, more to narrate.
The worn out aspect of the city turned to be of most value, it became a way, a portal of entrance to the history, to the understanding of how the elements have played and transformed that arena. Plants have taken control of the abandoned spaces, and structures that were designed for a purpose now serve a new logic, one that doesn’t involve capital productivism, but rather develops a profit of elements against acceleration. Fissures opened to be read as receptacles of different contents, available for us to be curious.
With any kind of movement comes a cadence, a particular rhythm of dynamic. Palermo, withered city, made us wonder about the action of decay… the downfall, the tempo descending in space. In it, a crack might be a passage that allows something to move differently, to change its position by moulding it’s shape according to the fracture. Despite this type of event be natural or artificial, we understand it in different scales, a crack can be a pipe coming out of a wall, a river path, an alley or a whole neighbourhood made accessible by the opening of a road and its connectivity as a result of a smart driven crack.
The concept of the crack becomes more complex and apprehensible as we think of it not only as a failure in a system, but as an effect of the pulsation of different forces that compose space, which might be geological, animalic, ecological, technological, social, perceptual, and more. Humans have planned particular kinds of cracks, as Palermo’s qanats. It’s builders were a generation with foresight who drew a land system which concluded in “La Conça d’Oro” (which means the golden shell), a shore in Sicily so rich in lemons and other citric plants whose brightness shone at distance; it represents a long term approach to urbanism and resilience which clashes with XXth century administration of resources and city development.
The portal of decay that opened up by thinking through the Qanats allows us to enter another aesthetics of material management, not so spectacular as that of the modernity with all it’s machines and pumps, but much subtler, one that finds its way through the means of tension and patience.
The intertwining of time waves available to traverse in Sicily’s capital give the visitor a double sensation, strange, a bewitching of the senses, because at the same time that vibrates with energy and movement, it holds the rock and forms of hundreds of years of architecture styles; a city where nature’s desires are plotting the territory face, meanwhile human material history fuse all of its layers into one.
Cracks are devices
One of the evidences of the living pulse of the now city is the garden in which the workshop Ingruttati Palermo was allowed to work. Inside of Danisinni neighbourhood, a few blocks away from the Norman Palace, the church of St. Agnese community has brought back the functionality of one of the exiting qanat system. The locals grow urban orchards, made possible by a communitarian effort to transform a wasteland into a paradisiac garden, with fruits, flowers, animals, fountains and art. The success of this project has pulled together the community members, as well as artists from all over the world, to witness the possibility of imagining new social and land dynamics inside the city.
Reflecting on the farming project of the Danisinni community some of the participants of the workshop felt the desire of tracking and mapping the infrastructure ramifications which make the fertility of a place like this possible. In order to achieve it, each engaged in a different manner with the urban environment elements, displaying particular orders of sensibility, in spite of it, we can coincide that in each work there’s evidence that “...the interactions between bodies condition a sensibility, a proto-perceptibility and a proto-affectivity… What is called “perception” is no longer a state of affairs but a state of the body as induced by another body, and affection is the passage of this state to another state as increased or decrease of potential-power through the action of other bodies… Even when they are non-living, or rather inorganic, things have a lived experience because they are perceptions and affections.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 154) The effect of each body with one another, as well as the net of meaning that each artist drew from the material regime of the city, reveal the structure of the crack: it starts with a main gap –a dynamism towards a direction– which in the case of Ingruttati Palermo workshop was water management in Persian occupation. As time flows and the breach outbreaks into several branches, the phenomenological capacity of the cracks unfolds, revealing themselves as devices to calibrate the spatio-temporal variables that compose the city memory through water.
Crackology
For artists Fèlix de Rosen, landscape architect(USA) and panosmico, qanats are understood as enormous cracks that represent portals to the material history and character of the city of Palermo. Their way to perceive the influence and presence of the artificial or natural fissures in the human landscape was directed into creating an polymorphic conception around them. Here Cracks are understood as a source of information about the city’s layers, hydrological conditions, urban planning and flora’s adaptation features. This acted as a departing point for drifting through Palermo’s open sources of information and holes through which to peek into.
Looking for cracks that talked about the presence or absence of water, asking if it’s attitude was menacing or positive, wondering about what the materials felt of being traversed by plants, dirt, trash, human waste or water flows, gave way to another mode of sensing the city; a phenomenological perspective which abounds from the falling down of the unity of stuff, that is, their resistance to the passing of time: weather, human activity, plants struggle for space, society’s abandonment, among other conditions favourable to cracks appearance.
Crackology project was conceived as an anti-anthropocentric guerrilla action. Mapping down some of the geological depressions, architectural faults, plant’s appropriations, water filtrations, among other decaying aspects (for human perspective) of the city, so that any pedestrian would pay attention to the presence of non-human forces which are giving shape to the city, as an homage to cities liveliness, to nature’s dynamics and opportunism.
Pasting signs with the perceived characteristics and causes of different kind of cracks in the landscape of Palermo, invite people to look at their quotidian space through another gaze, as an oblique strategy to provoke anyone’s curiosity and to inspire them to keep on researching until they get to the main crack that once opened the space of possibility for the whole city: qanats.
As Collovà writes in the Palermo Atlas: “In the dimensions of the buildings, in the distances, in the relative positions, in the light, in the ‘spaces between things’, in the behaviour of the inhabitants, we can always read the ‘fixed residue’ of architecture, we can still learn” (Collovà 2018, 231). The cartography of the natural degradation of the urban space, that marks the levels of time-interaction within the materials and the affective relationships between the elements that constitute the city landscape has its human metaphor in the last marked crack: the mortuary chamber of the crypt of St. Agnese church, were bodies were prepared for the next phase of existence, another kind of breach between tempo-spatial conditions, that between death of the human and the next phase of organic life occurs.
In further work after the workshop, the identified cracks were mapped in their different attitudes and characteristics, these maps were juxtaposed to go deeper into the outfolding of the landscape. A cartography of the land affections effected through human architecture and the environment play.
Ingruttati Palermo team was attracted by the underground water flows of Palermo. The qanats, ancient civilizational structures that kept the material history of the city alive, led the fellows of this research to question the consequences of the water’s presence on the different layers of urban conditions. Thus, we came to understand the qanat as a crack in Palermo’s geology. If qanats are purposefully designed cracks to channel water through ground, can the Danisinni neighborhood be understood as a crack in the city of Palermo? Furthermore, what is the relationship between the geological cracks and the fabricated ones? Our investigation of the qanats and Danisinni neighborhood was a broader exploration of infrastructures as mediators between “nature” and “culture”. Understanding the crack as a wide concept existing at multiple scales was the trigger to explore the Danisinni neighborhood through a new lens: crackology. The strategy was to step out of size dimensions as the main criteria for judging the importance of a crack and to replace them with five archetypes to focus attention on less obvious features to read the city’s decaying body. The moon, devil, hermit, emperess, and magician archetypes allow us to understand cracks as carriers of a variety of processes: opening, unifying, destroying, transforming, nurturing, etc.
Crakology team made a diagram with four concentric categories to serve as a hydraulic thermometer that could be applied through urban environments. The thermometer measures physical attributes (materiality, location, and presence/absence of water), as well as social and poetic ones. The center is an image of the related archetype, whose voice can be read at the bottom. After this reading tool was finished, the team spread through the streets of Danisinni neighborhood to label the different cracks found on the way with the diagram, thus creating an extended plane of all kinds of cracks and enhancing the city dweller’s experience of spatial dynamics in a broader sense. They completed each diagram by hand on carbon paper, so that each diagram on the street had an exact copy, that was then presented inside the mortuary chamber of the Danisinni crypt as part of the Manifesta 12 biennale. The mortuary chamber was the last crack, which it was expressed by painting the diagram around the chamber’s entrance, allowing the visitor to enter the crack. On the street had an exact copy, that was then presented inside the mortuary chamber of the Danisinni crypt as part of the Manifesta 12 biennale. The mortuary chamber was the last crack, which it was expressed by painting the diagram around the chamber’s entrance, allowing the visitor to enter the crack.
Bibliography
James Lingwood (2002): The weight of time, in RUINS, Contemporary Art Documents. Whitechapel gallery, THe MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Laparelli, Ippolito (2018): Palermo Atlas. Humboldt Books. Milan.
Palermo is a decadent city with all of its layers exposed. When you find yourself in it, it feels like if you are walking through somebody’s box of secrets, with all of their fears and joys; the intimate becomes public, the layers are being revealed in front of you with no censure. Palermo is a now city. A place where the ancient and the modern –and all of the time in between– melts in the present, establishing no hierarchy or prejudice on what should have more or less value or attention. A place where archeology deals with the most difficult taxonomic task, whereas the timelines are blurred by its inhabitants, all of them: plants, animals, water, buildings, roads, humans. All that is left, is the present.
In this chaotic ocean of materials, different agents compete and cooperate: seeds of Ailanthus altissima fall amongst the abandoned lots of Palermo and sprout into invasive trees, 1960s modernist apartment complexes coexist with stone Renaissance palaces, and the Manifesta Biennale creates nodes of human knowledge with the intent of enabling new relations and structures within the city.
Our experience of the city as a cacophonous, multi-layered being led us to consider the tensions and cooperations between the various layers. Although the initial research focus were the qanats of the city, it was inevitable to get obsessed with the tectonic fault lines of the city, the fractures, the empty spaces. Suddenly the lack of completeness had more to offer, more to narrate.
The worn out aspect of the city turned to be of most value, it became a way, a portal of entrance to the history, to the understanding of how the elements have played and transformed that arena. Plants have taken control of the abandoned spaces, and structures that were designed for a purpose now serve a new logic, one that doesn’t involve capital productivism, but rather develops a profit of elements against acceleration. Fissures opened to be read as receptacles of different contents, available for us to be curious.
With any kind of movement comes a cadence, a particular rhythm of dynamic. Palermo, withered city, made us wonder about the action of decay… the downfall, the tempo descending in space. In it, a crack might be a passage that allows something to move differently, to change its position by moulding it’s shape according to the fracture. Despite this type of event be natural or artificial, we understand it in different scales, a crack can be a pipe coming out of a wall, a river path, an alley or a whole neighbourhood made accessible by the opening of a road and its connectivity as a result of a smart driven crack.
The concept of the crack becomes more complex and apprehensible as we think of it not only as a failure in a system, but as an effect of the pulsation of different forces that compose space, which might be geological, animalic, ecological, technological, social, perceptual, and more. Humans have planned particular kinds of cracks, as Palermo’s qanats. It’s builders were a generation with foresight who drew a land system which concluded in “La Conça d’Oro” (which means the golden shell), a shore in Sicily so rich in lemons and other citric plants whose brightness shone at distance; it represents a long term approach to urbanism and resilience which clashes with XXth century administration of resources and city development.
The portal of decay that opened up by thinking through the Qanats allows us to enter another aesthetics of material management, not so spectacular as that of the modernity with all it’s machines and pumps, but much subtler, one that finds its way through the means of tension and patience.
The intertwining of time waves available to traverse in Sicily’s capital give the visitor a double sensation, strange, a bewitching of the senses, because at the same time that vibrates with energy and movement, it holds the rock and forms of hundreds of years of architecture styles; a city where nature’s desires are plotting the territory face, meanwhile human material history fuse all of its layers into one.
Cracks are devices
One of the evidences of the living pulse of the now city is the garden in which the workshop Ingruttati Palermo was allowed to work. Inside of Danisinni neighbourhood, a few blocks away from the Norman Palace, the church of St. Agnese community has brought back the functionality of one of the exiting qanat system. The locals grow urban orchards, made possible by a communitarian effort to transform a wasteland into a paradisiac garden, with fruits, flowers, animals, fountains and art. The success of this project has pulled together the community members, as well as artists from all over the world, to witness the possibility of imagining new social and land dynamics inside the city.
Reflecting on the farming project of the Danisinni community some of the participants of the workshop felt the desire of tracking and mapping the infrastructure ramifications which make the fertility of a place like this possible. In order to achieve it, each engaged in a different manner with the urban environment elements, displaying particular orders of sensibility, in spite of it, we can coincide that in each work there’s evidence that “...the interactions between bodies condition a sensibility, a proto-perceptibility and a proto-affectivity… What is called “perception” is no longer a state of affairs but a state of the body as induced by another body, and affection is the passage of this state to another state as increased or decrease of potential-power through the action of other bodies… Even when they are non-living, or rather inorganic, things have a lived experience because they are perceptions and affections.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 154) The effect of each body with one another, as well as the net of meaning that each artist drew from the material regime of the city, reveal the structure of the crack: it starts with a main gap –a dynamism towards a direction– which in the case of Ingruttati Palermo workshop was water management in Persian occupation. As time flows and the breach outbreaks into several branches, the phenomenological capacity of the cracks unfolds, revealing themselves as devices to calibrate the spatio-temporal variables that compose the city memory through water.
Crackology
For artists Fèlix de Rosen, landscape architect(USA) and panosmico, qanats are understood as enormous cracks that represent portals to the material history and character of the city of Palermo. Their way to perceive the influence and presence of the artificial or natural fissures in the human landscape was directed into creating an polymorphic conception around them. Here Cracks are understood as a source of information about the city’s layers, hydrological conditions, urban planning and flora’s adaptation features. This acted as a departing point for drifting through Palermo’s open sources of information and holes through which to peek into.
Looking for cracks that talked about the presence or absence of water, asking if it’s attitude was menacing or positive, wondering about what the materials felt of being traversed by plants, dirt, trash, human waste or water flows, gave way to another mode of sensing the city; a phenomenological perspective which abounds from the falling down of the unity of stuff, that is, their resistance to the passing of time: weather, human activity, plants struggle for space, society’s abandonment, among other conditions favourable to cracks appearance.
Crackology project was conceived as an anti-anthropocentric guerrilla action. Mapping down some of the geological depressions, architectural faults, plant’s appropriations, water filtrations, among other decaying aspects (for human perspective) of the city, so that any pedestrian would pay attention to the presence of non-human forces which are giving shape to the city, as an homage to cities liveliness, to nature’s dynamics and opportunism.
Pasting signs with the perceived characteristics and causes of different kind of cracks in the landscape of Palermo, invite people to look at their quotidian space through another gaze, as an oblique strategy to provoke anyone’s curiosity and to inspire them to keep on researching until they get to the main crack that once opened the space of possibility for the whole city: qanats.
As Collovà writes in the Palermo Atlas: “In the dimensions of the buildings, in the distances, in the relative positions, in the light, in the ‘spaces between things’, in the behaviour of the inhabitants, we can always read the ‘fixed residue’ of architecture, we can still learn” (Collovà 2018, 231). The cartography of the natural degradation of the urban space, that marks the levels of time-interaction within the materials and the affective relationships between the elements that constitute the city landscape has its human metaphor in the last marked crack: the mortuary chamber of the crypt of St. Agnese church, were bodies were prepared for the next phase of existence, another kind of breach between tempo-spatial conditions, that between death of the human and the next phase of organic life occurs.
In further work after the workshop, the identified cracks were mapped in their different attitudes and characteristics, these maps were juxtaposed to go deeper into the outfolding of the landscape. A cartography of the land affections effected through human architecture and the environment play.
Ingruttati Palermo team was attracted by the underground water flows of Palermo. The qanats, ancient civilizational structures that kept the material history of the city alive, led the fellows of this research to question the consequences of the water’s presence on the different layers of urban conditions. Thus, we came to understand the qanat as a crack in Palermo’s geology. If qanats are purposefully designed cracks to channel water through ground, can the Danisinni neighborhood be understood as a crack in the city of Palermo? Furthermore, what is the relationship between the geological cracks and the fabricated ones? Our investigation of the qanats and Danisinni neighborhood was a broader exploration of infrastructures as mediators between “nature” and “culture”. Understanding the crack as a wide concept existing at multiple scales was the trigger to explore the Danisinni neighborhood through a new lens: crackology. The strategy was to step out of size dimensions as the main criteria for judging the importance of a crack and to replace them with five archetypes to focus attention on less obvious features to read the city’s decaying body. The moon, devil, hermit, emperess, and magician archetypes allow us to understand cracks as carriers of a variety of processes: opening, unifying, destroying, transforming, nurturing, etc.
Crakology team made a diagram with four concentric categories to serve as a hydraulic thermometer that could be applied through urban environments. The thermometer measures physical attributes (materiality, location, and presence/absence of water), as well as social and poetic ones. The center is an image of the related archetype, whose voice can be read at the bottom. After this reading tool was finished, the team spread through the streets of Danisinni neighborhood to label the different cracks found on the way with the diagram, thus creating an extended plane of all kinds of cracks and enhancing the city dweller’s experience of spatial dynamics in a broader sense. They completed each diagram by hand on carbon paper, so that each diagram on the street had an exact copy, that was then presented inside the mortuary chamber of the Danisinni crypt as part of the Manifesta 12 biennale. The mortuary chamber was the last crack, which it was expressed by painting the diagram around the chamber’s entrance, allowing the visitor to enter the crack. On the street had an exact copy, that was then presented inside the mortuary chamber of the Danisinni crypt as part of the Manifesta 12 biennale. The mortuary chamber was the last crack, which it was expressed by painting the diagram around the chamber’s entrance, allowing the visitor to enter the crack.
Bibliography
James Lingwood (2002): The weight of time, in RUINS, Contemporary Art Documents. Whitechapel gallery, THe MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Laparelli, Ippolito (2018): Palermo Atlas. Humboldt Books. Milan.