NARROW SPACES, REDUCED HOPES, OR ELSE: WAYS OF RUNNING IN PLACE Emanuela De Cecco SPAZI STRETTI, SPERANZE RIDOTTE, MODI DI STARE OVVERO CORRERE SUL POSTO

The premise's premise: is it only a matter of limits? Skimming through an anthropological essay, I find myself (curiously) in a chapter in which the author analyzes questions of language, affinity, and differences between different ethnic groups. Here I run into translations of various terms of the Burundi language, and I discover that in this language, the word "aha-ntu" is used to indicate "space" as well as "place." Let's verify that in the Italian language "place" is understood as "a portion of space ideally or materially limited," and that by "space" we mean a "boundless and indefinite entity in which bodies are situated." I couldn't quite believe that the literal difference, free of higher implications, was tied primarily to a matter of delimitation. That would be somewhat like if when speaking about places we would always need to specify, while when speaking about spaces we could be less precise. If it is only a matter of limits, it means that in our civilization, the delimitation or the specification of a space comes as a big relief: this seems to allude implicitly to the matter of ownership and of privatization. Furthermore, we see that there remains a strange perception of modesty. Once in possession of all the space we need, we find ourselves feeling instantly out of place, and then ill at ease. At least, this often happens to me. If on a first level the sense of the passage could be reduced from the notion of space (understood as endless) to that of place (which is a portion), it is worth taking the matter from the beginning again-to depart from spaces (thinking about big lowlands, horizons, skies, whatever passes through your mind, or wherever you have thrust your head) and the next moment arrive to specify the places, and therefore delimit and recover, in the end, the knowledge of limits. premise: lack of spaces 1 One of the episodes of Sandro Baldoni's film Strane Storie (Strange Histories) focuses on a man who is suffocating because he is late making a payment on his air bill, and thus the city council has suspended its service. The film was shot in Milan and I recognize the offices in which the accounts are regulated-or will be regulated-as one of the super-modern edifices behind my house, part of an agglomeration of buildings. The story moves from the surreal to closer, exceeding the first comic and Orwellian level to create a familiar sense of suffocation. Without a doubt, the film presents a big idea: paying to breathe could be the next frontier in the dismantlement of the social state. In the meantime, a complex series of problems rotate around the concept of "space," which can be thought of in meters cubed (air), or in meters squared (space in which to act, to live, to inhabit), public (which space for which public?), or private (yes, but whose and what are the confinements?); this is being shaped as one of the most urgent puzzles at the end of this millennium. If you happen to go to New York (the ticket costs less than a round trip to Catania on Alitalia), you should step into the new Sony emporium on Madison Avenue. It's a visit worth fifteen essays alone: the passage at the entrance from which you approach the main shopping space introduces itself with a large banner on which is written: "Public Space: Sony Plaza/Public Arcade." All the theory you've read has become fact: where does the authoritarian territory of the multinational end? Will it at least stop in the space that divides my ear from my Walkman? My eye from the videocameras (which are all aimed from inside to outside to spy on the passers-by)? Does my will and freedom to enter and buy, however, not weigh upon all this? Spaces, places, and limits of the environment, and the forms by which the individual relates to them, are becoming complicated. America, you will tell. But how to create a natural relationship (better, that is) with the urban territory here at home? I live in a city (Milan) in which a mayor, in the footsteps of Haussmann, has just rearranged the large plaza in front of Stazione Centrale in such a way that visibility of the "dirty, ugly, and bad" has been definitively eradicated, 360 degrees, with no way out. Yet boys on their skateboards reinvent the space. And another proposition of reinvention: from the window of my home I have a clear view of the yards of an abandoned farmhouse, which along with many other old dwellings still exists in the middle of this city. There's air left in this building's space, around the farmhouse in which a group of people, of whom I know nothing, live, but whose active logic of re-use or recycling I share. This is a habitation solution, once more correlated to space, that does not (I believe) follow local rules very well, but these rules are carrying us towards paralysis in great haste. Virginia Woolf wrote about the need for "a room of one's own" as a first condition for the development of creativity (and the possibility of expression). Will there be anybody from any place? Certainly, yes. It is spaces that interest me most of all. lack of spaces 2 We have come to art and to the condition of a whole generation that labours to occupy spaces, to take them, manage them, and transform them into "places." Our generation, made up of people born in the Sixties, is too old for the "paninari"1 and La Pantera2 , too young for the protests of '77 and the Yuppie age-in our 30s right now, we are right in the middle with memories neither of wars nor revolutions. Perhaps there is a problem of character, but there is no doubt that by alternating the excuse of our youth (with good-natured tolerance of immaturity, ingenuity, enthusiasm, etc.) with that of the emergency (little time + little space = young artists with few pretensions, for instance), the monuments of recent art history (those of meat and bones, i.e. the people in power now) have constructed effective cordons and planted flags of conquest across the whole national territory. One of Italo Calvino's fables tells of an overly nice man who, locked up in a cave, continued to ask permission to leave and died of exhaustion, because there was no-one on the other side, and nobody arriving, to tell him to go ahead. To take spaces But of course, taking space is not always easy, it is much better when it's offered to you. The power to occupy space, in this case, is a privilege that extends slightly towards a trap. Being able to occupy it without being seen, to camouflage yourself in order to be able to observe the reactions of whoever you're looking at, is a good idea (Stefania Calegati). The space weaves inexorably with the fourth dimension... I am not able to disregard the pitiless fact that I have had at my disposition twenty-three days to occupy my space (to write this text), the beauty of 552 hours (which seem like many, put like this), and this brief time does in any way not concern the reader, who wants a reason, even just one, to justify the occupation of his or her time that requires reading. In short, we are here together as artists and critics focused upon a reflection on space, or perhaps place, but which space, which place? Espèces d'espaces ("Types of Spaces") by George Perec sounds like it might be good in this discourse. Up to now I have not read it, but Les Choses ("The Things") (Perec again) speaks about the accumulation of objects, of lives characterized by the silent and slightly obsessive company of goods. As much as you try to contain them, they are always there to remind us of their existence (Premiata Ditta). Meanwhile, I would like to say that I love the void-space, yes, but preferably empty. Perhaps for now it is worthwhile to concentrate on the play of words and the "specie" (kinds/species) it introduces to singularity, to the diversity of paths, positions, and points of view gathered here. The possibility, therefore, to delimit space and transform it into place, a limited portion in which the configuration of that which we're discussing derives from an encounter between a space and a subject that engage a point of view and draw out strongly personal visions. Travel, instead, produces visions in movement, making static images exist, photograms of an artist's mental film (place) in which the landscape, the external one, is a kind of accessory (Luisa Lambri, Luca Pancrazzi, Alessandra Tesi). Histories of spaces The history of the criteria with which space has been represented in art has ancient roots. It is enough think about perspective, which in the past constituted one of the more effective conceptual keys for the comprehension of work and the world that it implied. Today, a matter like this is anything but a simple reconfrontation. The representation of space no longer has this function, but in each case it could be a useful pretext, a sign, as defined by Carlo Ginzburg, to record passages consolidated in the art of the Nineties. We're speaking of Italy-here I am already on hour 496-and I cannot disband, but I can say that at least some of the work here has been picked for anagraphic and generational reasons. However, it is different in fact as well; it does not emphasize the neo-expressionist painting of the preceding decade, and it has renewed ties to the daily dimension, with the possibility of communicating individual conditions into which are added lived experiences, memories, meetings, relationships in action, bonds with other cultures and the material culture (which some think of as a minor art but which really constitutes a base without which our country, it seems to me, could understand very little in the end) (Luca Vitone). The subject in Italian art has dealt too often with courtly assignments, histories of solitary inspirations, geniuses and genius loci that with time have lost vitality; in the meantime the place did not remain the same... to leave the studio is not a strongly recurrent given in a tradition which not by chance has made its more recognizable and appreciated results in indoor elaborations. Let's suspend for an instant the thread of history. Let's concentrate on a sampling of artists who, in their twenties and thirties, constitute an underground plot, and then let's take a breath of relief: perhaps the possibility of dialoguing with the outside in a disenchanted manner, without feeling obliged to carry the testimony of a high tradition is indeed a new given, and something to take seriously. Spaces of histories: where are you? -When I call anybody who possesses a cellular telephone, the first question that comes spontaneously out of me is: "Where are you?" -A distant friend, with whom I exchange words written in the weavings of the Net, has a portable computer. From his house in New York he travels often for work, but his address never changes. However, he always lets me know where he is when he writes. -The new telephone that I have at work displays the number of the person calling me. Telecom is obviously making progress, but I am still undecided as to if they're making steps forward or rather creating ulterior sophisticated forms of control. This is to say that where you are, from where you write, the transparency of the phone call, are questions that on the one hand break the all magic of the contemporary interlocutor's thought, like an immaterial fluctuating body in space, and on the other allow a possible physical configuration, or one at least relative to the condition of the interlocutor's momentary thought (Deborah Ligorio, Sara Rossi). In this sense, it becomes an idea that at times consents to imagine one response or another, and so on. The use of spatial metaphors in the description of bodies that landscapes become, of subjects that maps become, of identity whose confinements we are unable to define with certainty, is to spy on an alteration of relief. As if to say that one doesn't want to do without the concrete object, that a reason to make it to scale surely exists, but that the map will always remain an abstraction-if it won't take a body, won't talk of a body, it doesn't exist. Delimited spaces as if to say more confinements, places? When speaking about representation and reasoning on various formalities put in action to configure a relationship with reality, there is no doubt that to attribute importance to scale (it is mainly a matter of dimensions from body to landscape, but very similar criteria can be applied to one or another), brings the matter of confinements to the center again. Inside versus outside, it's worth it to debate on the relationship between public and private, inside and out, showable (visible) and obscene: these are only some of the passages that allude to a possible place, they engage a different sense each time and often add and multiply contradictions rather than decontrol them. It's like saying that one dimension doesn't exist without the other, that it is no longer possible to think of your studio like a shelter-place separated from the outside (Cesare Viel), that there's no more sense in speaking about one's self (and much less to make art) in an isolated and private dimension, because we exist only in relationship to contexts and people (Enzo Umbaca, Wurmkos). In the Seventies they said that the political and the personal coincided, in the Eighties this thread was for the most part interrupted, and we now understand that the personal in and of itself does not help, and that perhaps it is even only and always and anyway the sum of two aspects which constructs a possible dimension. This, then, is the possibility to continue to depart from oneself in order to speak of oneself and of others, and to re-evaluate the materiality of the subject, for as battered as it is, perhaps it is better off for being in crisis. Public is private, and vice versa. Emanuela De Cecco 1 (the late-80s phenomenon of middle-class young adults gathering exclusively at fast-food establishments such as McDonalds) 2 the students' movement of the early 90s which concerned itself not with politics, civil rights, etc., but merely with funding for studies and new computers, etc.