Flavia Brustolin – A CIASCUNO IL SUO POSTO: PER UN’ANALISI DI FOGLI D’ARCHITETTURA

TO EACH THEIR OWN PLACE: FOR AN ANALYSIS OF THE FOGLI D’ARCHITETTURA

In 1920, Paul Klee painted the Angelus Novus: a small fragment of paper depicting an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. […] But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings […]. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.1 These words were written by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, the owner at the time of this drawing. Benjamin immerses us in an apocalyptic scenario, similar to that brewing on the horizons of a man of the twentieth century – and not only. The only possible redemption? Memory: constant remembering, the contemplation of a past made of ruins, capable of ferrying anyone willing to look back toward a better future. Hence it is perhaps no accident that the architect Paolo Conrad- Bercah – exactly a century later – began his lengthy reflection on the aesthetic time of Rome precisely with a citation from Paul Klee’s diaries. Certainly influenced by the global pandemic, Conrad-Bercah chose to set out from two simple activities: walking and reading the newspaper. The impalpable advance of time and the perception of that deafening ticking of clock hands in empty cities produced in Conrad-Bercah the desire to put pen to paper, to draw fragments of ideas. He thus attempted a great leap, leading the reader, supported by cultured philosophical references, through his contest against time. Fogli di architettura takes the form of a “gentil” pamphlet, in which the pages of the Italian daily newspaper Il Foglio are transformed into a playing field for this intense intellectual match. Even the choice of Il Foglio – intended as the space of drawing – Conrad-Bercah explains, is not accidental: Il Foglio Quotidiano is the only newspaper I read because it present current events in profiles, reportages and investigations written in a style as limpid as a game of hopscotch.2 This affirmation opens up two new scenarios, useful to a better understanding of the publication’s declarations of intent. Firstly, the very concept of the newspaper, a physical element, evidence of everyday life and, at the same time, a place of the past. Secondly, but of no less importance, the reference to the game of hopscotch, a witty device applied to a scheme for interpreting the drawings – created by Conrad-Bercah – and dedicated to Rome. This enriches a vocabulary of key words, useful pairings that help us move into the treatment of time and ruins, hopscotch and the atlas.

Time and Ruins

If the twentieth century is to be recognised as the century of destructions and reconstructions, we could also say that the twenty- first century inverted this course. The experience of the pandemic revealed something to us that became “normal”, particularly with respect to the surrounding environment to which, perhaps, we had paid far too little attention and largely undervalued. The urbanisation of the world subjected us to a see-sawing mechanism that Marc Augé coherently defined the too-full and the void. Space is dominated by excess and frenzy: an excess of products, and excess of stimuli and an excess of human begins. The spaces of passage and transit are those that demonstrate with greater force the signs of the present […]. The spaces of the void are closely intermingled with those of the too full. They are often the same, but at different times.3 Thus it is significant that, as mentioned in principle, the only path to redemption from a similar scenario is represented by memory. How can we make it possible for the current city to break this chain of an eternal present where buildings appear fungible with one another? Only a catastrophe, at the scale of the virus with a corona4, was capable of stopping everything and generating effects comparable to the slow working of time. All the same, there remains an essential difference: the gradual action of time produces ruins, and ruins represent time that escapes history; the destructions provoked by natural, technological or political catastrophes belong to the world of the so-called too full. It is significant that, to restore time to the city, artists need ruins: when they escape the spectacularisation of the present, ruins assume the likeness of art, an invitation to perceive time. Conrad-Bercah reconciles himself with the inexorable hands of time. The time of ruins; a pure time, impossible to date, absent from our frenzied lives and from this angry world whose debris no longer has the time to become ruins. A lost time that art sometimes manages to rediscover.

Hopscotch and the Atlas

An attentive observation of the collection of drawings produced by Conrad-Bercah clearly reveals how the use of a hopscotch pattern, used here as a tool for visualising the drawings themselves, in turn becomes a desire to be part of a broader vision, very close to and inspired by the Atlas5 which fascinated so many throughout the history of the arts. In 1924, the art historian Aby M. Warburg left the clinic in Kreuzlingen to return to Hamburg. During the years that followed Warburg synthesised his ideas, which reached their maximum expression in two projects: the Library and the so-called Atlas of Memory or Mnemosyne Atlas. During this period, Warburg adopted a visual alphabet to express his intellectual reasonings, with the objective of schematically organising his thoughts. At the same time, language written in allegorical terms delineated a way of thinking with a conceptual-visual function, analogous to that which would later be assumed by the photographs presented on the pages of the Atlas. Moreover, during the course of his lectures, Warburg focused his programmatic intentions on the vast theme of the cultural transmigration of motifs and themes through images, in temporal and environmental-cultural terms, for the most part related with the original value of antiquity. All of the themes Warburg chose to reflect on during the final years of his life were founded exclusively on the Nachleben der Antike, the Afterlife of Antiquity. For the Mnemosyne project, visual perception played a fundamental role: images, despite being arranged based on specific paths, proposed continuous and diverse environmental relations, themes and guidelines while remaining open to new interpretations that rotated essentially around two fundamental aspects of civility: expression and orientation, in other words, the representation and the transmigration of images.6,7 What is more, if it is true that by adopting the structure of a game of hopscotch Conrad-Bercah offers the reader/player the possibility to leap from pole to branch in order to offer a personal testament to that aesthetic dialogue between Rome and itself, that dialogue between pagan Rome and Christian Rome, he sets himself in direct and open conflict with Warburg, picking up the threads of the theme of the transmigration of images and the survival of antiquity. Since the Renaissance, “the classical world in ruins” has synecdochically represented that complexity of that civilisation of the past, now lost but continually corroborated. There are countless writings on the concept of time and ruins, in concert with the experiences that historically followed Cubism and Futurism with regard to the perceptive fragmentation of the experience of a metropolis. Augé, Benjamin, Baudelaire, Calvino, Léger, Simmel – to mention only a few – have offered a dynamic-vitalist reinterpretation of this lack of unity in the impulse of the metropolitan flâneur. If it is true that only a man without value has no interest in his past, to each his place and time for doing so. The architect Conrad- Bercah, a man of his era, joins this chorus, where the ruin is no longer defined in terms of the past or some happy future of the metropolis, but becomes the existential present of a civilisation.