[im]possible living: mapping the abandoned

The recently launched [im]possible living platform/app presents new models for envisioning, mapping, and experiencing the abandoned landscape.

"It sometimes happens that in Jersey or in Guernsey, in the country or even in the city, in passing through some deserted nook, or in a street full of inhabitants, you will meet with a house whose entrance is barricaded; holly obstructs the door; plasters of planks, well nailed on, close up the windows of the ground floor; the windows of the upper stories are both open and shut, all the sashes are barred, but all the panes are broken." Anthony Vidler cites Victor Hugo at the beginning of his famous text The Architectural Uncanny as he sets out to describe the "unhomely" (unheimlich). Effective symbols of alienation in the soul of the exiled French author, in the Romantic period abandoned homes played a primary role in the construction of narrative landscapes, embodying precisely the topos of the uncanny. No longer Piranesian ruins that slip from the paper of the etchings "to materialize in space where flâneries philosophiques now interweave" [translated from the Italian –ed] represented by the garden through the late eighteenth-century taste for the burgeoning genre of travel literature, but ghostly presences/absences that replace melancholy with a more disturbing and ambiguous strife of the soul. The ruin gives way to the frenetic pace of modernity—unable to wait for architecture to become ruins.

Abandoned buildings—while providing the perfect backdrop for hundreds of shootouts in Hollywood and Cinecittà westerns—live in a limbo between two temporal conditions: not yet remote past as historic ruin and no longer narrative present as human habitation, its future uncertain and mysterious. Some important features are similar to ruins, such as the relationship between oblivion and memory; but in their specific condition of incompleteness and ambivalence, they are different. In their apparent futility, the ruin is, in itself, fully functional, demanding to be preserved and narrated for exactly what it is and not for what it was. Its semantic power lies in the very nature of the historical time that passes through it and, if deprived of this powerful statute, it no longer serves the evocative function it is called upon to play. "Allegories," Walter Benjamin reminds us, "are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things."

The abandoned building, on the contrary, never completes its metaphoric ritual: the story it tells is interrupted abruptly in its very act of being emptied—both physically and in terms of meaning; and the forms of its stories, its walls and rooms, do not know how to completely recover this aphasia.

Often, film and literature have found more suitable shelters for illegal actions in abandoned buildings rather than in ruins. Their well-preserved form and no-longer-available content enhance their mystery and curiosity. Like ruins, abandoned buildings claim rediscovery, but their cycle of rebirth extends beyond their simple return to vision: in this case reappearance does not mean concrete existence. The narrative's fragmented time can be welded together only through reuse; a new function clarifies the latent ambiguity of the abandoned site. The eroticism of the unspoken, the unsaid, turns the abandoned building over to a destiny of denial and the place's fascination exists only in the absence of specificity of use. Once resuscitated, these architectures, whose authors are known or anonymous, lose their seductive power. The determination of survival erases the sensuality of indeterminacy. In the new locus, transgression is no longer possible.

The world of architecture has been sensitive to this device of estrangement and in recent years—just to narrow the scope of the discussion—it has highlighted projects that can preserve the dimension of ambiguity necessary for the existence of abandoned buildings. In Italy, experiments like those carried out by the Stalker group or the Alterazionivideo collective express a desire to put the system of abandonment into focus, promoting a vision and leaving intact the uncertain and disturbing aspects, which, are often, if anything, enhanced in their work. An additional degree of design—classified as ephemeral, that can promote the observation of abandoned places and drawing much from the more institutional and programmatic experience of the Palais de Tokyo—is proposed by Luca Emanueli in the toreplace.bzproject, in which the identification of abandoned sites is associated with projects for semi-permanent reuse that avoid damaging the most qualifying aspect of places characterized by ambivalent semantic meanings.

Created a year ago by Andrea Sesta and Daniela Galvani, the [im]possible living platform opens the field of abandonment to a broader public. Fascinated and intrigued by the presence of a multitude of disused buildings in Italy, the engineer and the architect imagined an effective way of mapping these architectural presences—extending the scope to a global scale—involving a community of non-specialized users at the same time. The idea is simple but well thought out; through a website and with an iPhone or an Android, any interested party can send a picture along with a brief description of the place identified.

This strategy responds primarily to the need to reassess the world's patrimony of abandoned buildings, contrasting the continuous and steady consumption of land perpetrated by the construction of new buildings destined for abandonment even before their construction is terminated. Secondly, the involvement of the public through a system of active participation can stimulate visual awareness that, by publishing the pictures on the website, has the potential of becoming a critical system. A perpetually growing archive created by a variegated and aware community through the use of daily technology like the web or the smart phone. A way to demonstrate that the architectural object exists in relation to its photographic traces, guaranteeing its memory in a broader field of selection.

The web is the natural place for [im]possible living, because, as the two creators claim "it is the only place that can create the critical mass necessary for tackling the problem of abandonment in its globality. From this observation emerges the desire not to represent the detail of each project, but to work as an enabler, catalyzing energy and services for those directly involved with the single project." Thus far, [im]possible living has been totally self-financed and is currently looking for the seed capital to complete the definition and implementation of a professional web/mobile product and to support the company's start-up.

If, as Elena Pirazzoli states in her recent book A partire da ciò che resta (Starting from what Remains), memory seems to be the obsession of our times, then the [im]possible living database is a powerful receptor that can normalize the deviations of abandoned places, nullifying part of their ambiguous sensuality. But it seems that creating catalogs of the ghostly forms of architecture is the only tool that can preserve these sensitive and unprotected properties from oblivion and so there is a fair price to pay—a kind of didactic leveling off—in order to preserve memory, or at least part of it. Certainly the formula invented by [im]possible living allows each user to maintain a special relationship with the sites selected and photographed through an identity-oriented dialogue between object, description and geo-location.

When Susan Sontag wrote about our obligation to look at photographs of cruelty and war, she also writes that "one should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity to actually assimilate what they show". If contemporary architecture knowingly set aside dialogue with the vast audience of the world's citizens, the invitation to the public to observe, select and describe by a project as delicate as [im]possible living could be a possible solution to the growing evils of the discipline. We suggest that everyone take to the streets armed with a camera to seek their own, very personal, abandonment.
Elisa Poli

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