The Ground Tour E-Book

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 145

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Ground Tour is a journey starting in Vienna, cruising the outskirts of Rome, touching ground in Prato and Florence on our way to the depths of the Venice Lagoon. The tour will grind much too common assumptions about Italy's beauty and culture and will bring onto surface a different portrayal of a country as it is acting at the edges of mainstream society. The journey evocatively recalls the historical Grand Tour of the period of Enlightenment which aimed to educate and open horizons to a privileged class of people which nevertheless tried to contribute to human progress and learn from the experience of travelling.

Leseprobe

Our nature lies in movement;

complete calm is death.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

drawn by Bruce Chatwin, The Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected writings, 1969-1989

This book is dedicated to my mum and my dad who have never stopped fighting. It is also dedicated to all my friends here and there, in the now and in the future.

Index

The Ground Tour Transformative Manifesto

The Ground Tour Project:

Claims, aims, margins and openness

The Ground Tour:

Why do we set sails?

Eastern Rome

Michel Gölz - On the beaten track

“The Moon is already here, the crossbred story of the MAAM-The Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere” interview with

Michela Pierlorenzi

Matteo Locci - #RB#N STR##T #RT, flooding Eastern murality

Miriam Hübl - Romes, a reflection on a city

“Il Quarticciolo, a rebellious hood” interview with

Emanuele Agati

Thi Que Chi Trinh - A forgotten city, a forgotten island of my own

Florence

Fabrizio Ajello - A critical walk, reflections on a walk through the ruins of Florence

Benedetta Bendinelli - The only place on Earth

Milly Reid - The poetics of a Florentine wall

MEP G.67 - Firenze

Francesco D‘Isa - Mind geographies, a visit through your idea of Florence

Prato

Emanuele Barili & Olivia Gori - An Italian Hong Kong, a story of a vibrant Italian neighbourhood

Virginia Lui - Chinese New Year,the year I brought home a Gweilo

No conclusion

Travellers

Thanks

The Ground Tour Transformative Manifesto

The Ground is our common denominator: our space of action.

The Ground is the result of our grinding action. It is the base from which we start; it is a transitive action.

We are neither underground nor overground: we are on the ground; we are settled and unsettled; we belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

We seek physical encounters.

Travel is a state of being that reshapes settled identities.

It creates a transformative space.

We are a transnational and hybridizing liquid entity. We are amplifiers and agents of political change. We struggle to be self-determined beings of all ages, not refraining from our future by creating and narrating another present.

As such, we aim to create moments of extreme beauty where arts and politics, participants and spectators, dreams and actions meet. Where immensity is touched even for a brief second.

We are a system of interlocking lines that make borders “borderless”.

The Ground Tour ProjectClaims, aims, margins and openness

The Ground Tour Project has the aim to support and organize Ground Tours. Every Ground Tour has the intent to form an impermanent and transdisciplinary international collective of travellers.

The Ground Tour Project is an open travelling practice that through the means of artistic strategies, aims to form a critical mass in order to intervene in different geographical areas around the world and to connect a multitude of diverse socially engaged projects and individuals.

A Ground Tour can be proposed by any group of people or individuals that recognize in themselves the values and hopes of the open travelling practice. At the base of every tour there is the preparation of a route and an open dramaturgy set along different localities and encounters.

Each Ground Tour is the result of a negotiation between the travellers and the hosts, of whom the roles can interchange along the open script of any tour.

A Ground Tour opens channels of communication in between otherwise alienated localities and individuals. With each tour the travellers are jointly invited and supported to produce a collective output, depending on the different synergies, in which the travellers continue their collaborations on shared surfaces of dialogue.

Ultimately, The Ground Tour Project is not an advisor but rather redefines travelling as a state of belonging that escapes the definition of a commodity.

The grinding man, illustration by Marcho

The Ground TourWhy do we set sails?

The “Ground Tour” is a journey starting in Vienna, cruising the outskirts of Rome, touching ground in Prato and Florence on our way to the depths of the Venice Lagoon. The tour will grind much too common assumptions about Italy’s beauty and culture and will bring onto surface a different portrayal of a country as it is acting at the edges of mainstream society.

The journey evocatively recalls the historical “Grand Tour” of the period of Enlightenment which aimed to educate and open horizons to a privileged class of people which nevertheless tried to contribute to human progress and learn from the experience of travelling.

The “Ground Tour” has the intent to connect with projects and bottom-up actions if not social movements where arts and radical forms of politics go hand in hand, where contemporary practices get in necessary conflict with the load of Italy’s built heritage to eventually give birth to unexpected futures and new solutions in a society with urgent needs and high potentials of conflict. On the “Ground Tour” contacts and networks among artists, activists and institutions will be enforced and created. Social change is only possible in networks and across given national borders.

October 2016

Enrico Tomassini and Brigitte Felderer

1 – Eastern Rome The Roman Strut Art guide an urban exploration of banal stratification

keywords: #stratification #unintentionalart #banality #facade #use #rituals #history #realstreetart

Main host: -ATI Suffix

-ATI suffix is a multidisciplinary collective whose name changes on a project base in order to deny closed identities. The adoption of the Italian grammatical suffix -ati is methodologically devised to allow each project to be conceived and understood as reciprocal: imperative to the public and self-transformative for the project members. [-ATI Suffix]

Looking up towards the sky before venturing on walking Photo © Sebastian Kraner

Thursday 3rd November

Vienna Erdberg 20.35 - Roma Tiburtina 11.45

Clouds: the pavement is wet. The sun is coming to warm the souls. A varied group of travellers awaits guidance. Eyes half-closed.

-ATI Suffix denies closed identities.

The word “buongiorno” resounds: it’s cappuccino time.

This is going to be the Roman Strut Art Guide but no-one knows what it precisely means. An ironic statement; a mockery of institutionalized street art guided tours or just us free to decide.

A research, a thought of everything we would like to call art and yet is not defined as such: the art of people.

|: Cities are dynamic environments traced by the layerings of use, conflicts, rituals and daily banality. :|

Someone says you can do a city, we decide to walk, to walk the talk.

The travellers while observing and reading the layering of use of an edifice somewhere in Eastern Rome - Photo © Sebastian Kraner

Michel GölzOn the beaten track#edgesofthecity #center

We do not belong to those that have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors – walking, leaping, climbing, dancing preferably (…) where even the trails become thoughtful. Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

drawn by Frédéric Gros, The Philosophy of Walking

Upon our bus arrival in Rome, I’m trying to get an idea for the program of the next days. My mind is following a script, a thought-process programed by myself. At this point, the situation feels precarious if one does not let oneself be led into safe channels. The centre of the city is a port expecting my arrival. It has the hooks to wrap your rope around, and a bed to sleep in. It offers comfort and cultural achievements organized and indicated as touristic destinations. All entertainment possibilities are offered on a tray, ready to take a bite.

The backpacker’s first anchor and source of information are oftentimes youth hostels. Local knowledge obtained in the sheer period of a few days are passed on as consumption recommendations through generations of travellers. A city is framed as a conglomeration of touristic activities. A city becomes something that one can “do” – a trudging around of an assembly of defined imagery and motifs.

The local residents of the social housing complex in the neighbourhood of Casilino tell us more about the place and its history Photo © Sebastian Kraner

Regardless of where I travel to exactly, there is a tendency to acquire a naïve view forming a coherent image of the visited city through the impressions of a short time. This time, our trip took me to unknown locations occupied with few expectations and clichées. The appearance, liveliness and deterioration of buildings, courtyards, streets and squares seemed particularly characteristic for Borgota Quarticciolo, and placing these impressions in the same pot with the memories of Rome’s city centre seemed oddly contradictory.

The conditions of sharing experience is contributing to the confinement of touristic activities to the centre. If clichées are confirmed, it is already a way of communicating with the outside. Especially when travelling individually, some experiences are more easily communicated than others. We experienced alternative forms of sharing knowledge on this tour, always asking who are the local experts that are asked to tell stories, and from which perspective and what sort of involvement are they speaking? Occasionally, residents who were glad to share their views with us became local guides.

In touristically barely tapped areas, the societal richness and documents of domestic culture are not as singled out, objectified, and placed in a showcase. Of course, the visible history of the ancient Roman civilization goes back a lot further. But also on the edges you can find remnants of a cultural and material history. Understanding urban transformation and collective struggle by ‘reading’ signs of abrasion and individual artistic expressions on facades can be just as fantastic. And yet, the place marketing agents of potential touristic areas have also learned to capitalize the graffiti trend by commissioning works. Anyhow, surely travelling the edges is only from a touristic perspective off the beaten track.

Whereas parts of the centre are preserved to maintain a representative image, the edges of the city are in ways more susceptible to transformation. On our strolls, we viewed an unpredictable sequence of architecture and urban planning styles that demonstrated how unlike each other the single blocks often are. Interesting to me were the parts of the city where it presented itself to me as a stranger, in such a way that I could get to know, to whom also I was a stranger. Unidentified are the objects that I look forward to seeing.

The travellers of The Ground Tour in MAAM’s courtyard in Rome Photo © Alessia Scuderi

The bus stops. High above the sun projects the travellers’ shadows onto the ground. A glimpse to the sky and a Hollywoodian writing recites the word FART on top of the old factory they are about to enter.

The F is leaning as if to say: fuck art for art. For art, fuck art.

Just the time to arrive in Eastern Rome to find the travellers landing on a lunar colony. We are not astronauts nor do we have a flag.

The moon is to the people.

Welcome to the crossbred city of Metropoliz. Welcome to the MAAM - The Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere.

Here art protects refugees.

Someone says to stay with the feet to the ground: we opted for outer space.

Michela Pierlorenzi

The Moon is already here, the crossbred story of the MAAM - The Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere

interviewed by Enrico Tomassini, translated from Italian by Beatrice Alessia Pignatelli

Michela Pierlorenzi is a volunteer at MAAM - Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere in the crossbred city of Metropoliz. Within the MAAM she is in charge coordinating the different activities, events and give assistance to the artists who contribute to the collection of the museum. She also takes care of setting-up the spaces and restoring the exhibited works. We had the pleasure to land with her on this piece of Moon on Earth.

”In this place, which has no comparisons I know of, art protects refugees,“ commented anthropologist Marc Augé, recognising a vivifying character in the artists, a revolutionary and democratic instance, the ability to evoke against the apparent immutability of things, a rising state that “gives everyone and anyone the opportunity to live a new beginning.“ The non-places theorist has come to define a “super-place“ as a space where people’s cultures meet and where a real community is created. In regards to the relationship between I and the Other, Augé has explained:“It is because every individual is aware of the presence in him of a generic dimension that can feel close to any other human being. However, the awareness that, according to Rimbaud‘s words, ‘I am Another‘, does not necessarily lead to the reverse and reciprocal proposition: ‘The Other is an I‘“.

Marc Augé

Extract from an article of “Più Libri, Più Liberi”

10 December 2016

Hi Michela, how are you? I’m going to start by asking, where the MAAM - Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove (Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere) is and what is the reason behind its specific location in this area?

The collectively built rocket of Metropoliz – Photo © Luca Ventura Courtesy of MAAM-Museum of the Other and Elsewhere

The MAAM is located in the east of Rome, inside the former Fiorucci factory, that was built in the 60s and used for about 30 years after which it stayed empty and unused until 2009. We are in the industrial area of Rome or at least of what, since the 1950s, became the main industrial zone after Ostiense and has been expanding ever since. The building was bought by the entrepreneur Pietro Salini but remained abandoned for at least 14 years. In 2009, the BPM, Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (Metropolitan Precarious Blocks) a political struggle movement for Roman housing, occupied the complex – which today is called Metropoliz – housing 200 homeless people, among which there where Peruvians, Ukrainians, Eritrean, Italians, Moroccans and a Roma Community.

A quick question before we continue: who is Pietro Salini and what does he represent for Rome?

Not only for Rome but rather for all of Italy. Salini is one of the most important Italian building contractors. He is a pretty tough guy to pick a fight with.

So would you say that MAAM was conceived from a housing occupation and in a certain way as an encounter between art and politics? If so, how do art and politics meet and mix in this space?

That is the way it has been since the beginning. The small town that has since sprung from the housing occupation is called Metropoliz City Meticcia whilst MAAM is the ‘Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere of Metropoliz.’ In 2011, after a year of making the documentary film, Space Metropoliz, which was the first work curated by Giorgio de Finis, as director, in Metropoliz, MAAM was born. So, Space Metropoliz is a bit like the father of what later became the museum. In truth the project is based on the imaginary travel to the Moon. Clearly, when the museum was created, the movement together with Giorgio formed a sort of strategy in order to defend the housing occupation with art.

Could you tell me a bit more about when the idea of MAAM really took shape? How did Giorgio de Finis launch the artistic production of this fictional documentary that was the initial pretext for the founding of the museum?

The documentary was not born as a pretext: the idea of the museum came as a consequence when the movie was completed. I think that Giorgio could explain this better than I can, as I have only been working here for two and a half years. One day Giorgio was walking along the great ring road with STALKER, a group of architects that are known as the Stalker Mobile Lab. They often go on these long walks together and so they arrived at Via Prenestina where they found the factory, Metropoliz, and that triggered an idea. It came about in a relatively simple way. Once the film production was underway, the first artists that were called by Giorgio had begun to intervene and by the end of the documentary’s production at least 10 artists had contributed. The idea of being able to continue in this direction and work with art came naturally. Therefore we continued with this strategy by enhancing the complex with artwork of economic value, so that the building would not be demolished. Which is exactly what Salini would like to have done: knock down the entire factory and turn it into private residences.

The documentary invited the inhabitants to imagine themselves as part of a Lunar colony, how did they react to this idea?