WAI Architecture Think Tank
The Last Glimpse, Collage No. 4 Wall Stalker
Art as deus ex machina Unfolding in three parts, Haze displays the bodies of the dancers in a continuous struggle with the pollution of the contemporary city. In the performance the urban tale is narrated with a strong visual mise en scène that reflects our own behaviour within a hostile environment – the dancers embrace a series of attitudes that include mirroring, judging and persecuting each other. Portrayed through a blurred atmosphere, Haze is a perfect illustration of the potential of dirt to inspire art, and the potential of art to address an unpolished version of reality. When art is inspired by the neglected features of our surroundings, a new dialectic relationship can be established with our urban context. Following a similar strategy, Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 film Stalker exploits a smudged environment and makes it into the visual catalyst of the whole plot. In Stalker , dirt acquires a transcendental role as the plot reveals the journey of three characters that are in search of a mystical zone, and will go from a grimy village to a contaminated landscape of abandoned buildings and polluted ruins of old factories. While the bodies of the personages are constantly dipped into stagnant water, sunk into mud, buried into the soil where syringes, bottles and every kind of dirt lie, the real pollution is converted alchemically into strikingly beautiful imagery.
Has art managed to address a topic so long ignored by the discipline responsible for thinking, understanding and designing cities? Can urbanism learn from other forms of art and deal with the issues it usually ignores? What if, for once, dirt and other neglected, inherent areas of our urban domain stopped being a matter of repulsion and instead were transformed into the source of our inspiration? What if we were able to reconsider the aesthetics of the urban imperfections? Why, if dirt is usually in the city, it appears as if doesn’t belong to it? Why, if art can address the problems of the urban environment, has urbanism distanced itself from them? Why is dirt never diagrammed, mentioned, analysed? Why do renderings always show clear blue skies and immaculate streets? What about the potential of the aesthetics of dirt?
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