Josè de Sousa Saramago suggests how we live in many places but, in fact, we inhabit the memory. In the German culture, the idea of ‘inhabiting the memory’ is captured by the expression: Heimat. This word refers to the meaning that we...
moreJosè de Sousa Saramago suggests how we live in many places but, in fact, we inhabit the memory. In the German culture, the idea of ‘inhabiting the memory’ is captured by the expression: Heimat. This word refers to the meaning that we assign to a place perceived as owned and formative. Heim (home) and Heimat (fatherland) have the same root. The former defines the domesticity, the latter the known places, those in which we are safe. However, the dimension of these certain places, namely our ‘Heimat’, is today, de facto, only one part of our living spaces.
For many generations we have been living in many places, very often ‘undifferentiated’ places, ‘meaningless’ for negligence and ‘forgettable’ for urgencies and immediacies. As a result, the urban spaces we live in appear to us either astounding or banal. Very often they remind us ‘other scenarios’ we have actually lived in or we have seen as ‘transmitted images’.
Perhaps only a ‘strong’ memory and, thus, a grounded culture, allows us to recognize them and to express a balanced judgment, meaning neither dazed nor annoyed.
For how long have cities lost their being a ‘collective home’?
The ‘villages’ we come from (also, old quarters?) can generate the intimate sense of the Heimat; however, have urban peripheries ever generated memories? In fact, it is difficult to believe so! For relational spaces, that is, for spaces of active social interactions, being able to generate memories, it is necessary that they enable a collective ‘transformation’ together with allowing for the flourishing of singularities and exceptions, provided also that the precariousness and individualism of social and economic expectations are reduced.
Do multiple collectivities and, thus, multiple ‘memories’, prevent the construction of urban spaces which can be knowable/recognizable by all people who live them?
Perhaps overcoming such apparent impossibility might result from taking inspiration from consolidated experiences in other disciplines. Let us think of International Orchestras such as the Baremboim’s West Eastern Divan or Dance Companies such as the one led by Pina Bausch.
An Arabic-Israeli orchestra operates as a unit because it needs to construct a structure, a symphony for example, through a musical form which derives from a precise discipline: they represent where a discipline can and must lead us. As stressed by Baremboim, together with the discipline there is the ‘passion’ through which the Director extracts the ‘domesticity’ embedded in the musicians, all different in culture and ‘memories’.
The Tanztheater Wuppertal builds a representation in slow motion, by adding the different origins and experiences of dancers coming from all around the world and by sharing the common end, as Pina Bausch clarifies, of making people able to ‘grasp by intuition something that has been living within us all along’.
This existence ‘within us all along’ may restore trust in the possibility of building the city of the future, going back to a measure of the city articulated as recognizable parts and not by functional hierarchies, in other words to ‘dis-measured’ cities.
