(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Wolfgang Scheppe and others:
Migropolis Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation
Hatje Cants Foundation, 2016
For the commodity the strangers have
With us in Venice, if it's denied,
Will much impeach the justice of his state;
Since that is the trade and profit of the city
Consists of all nations.
Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice
In a four-year study, Wolfgang Scheppe, a philosopher from the University of Venice, together with a team of staff and volunteers, created a study of an urbanity under social control where migration and tourism are interdependent, all in an effort to to explain the global city. But how to explain the global city by means of pictures and maps [maps, ed.] Without falling into the same visual pleasing image effect that controls and controls the spectacle communities of the global cities? Scheppe and his team have made use of the situationalist of French artist Guy Debord leads – critical tools for data visualization, multifaceted maps that layer by layer describe, for example, work permits all the way down to specific cases: arrival, residence, daily movements – in other words, the hunted worker. Derivatives that move away from the spectacular and the recognizable towards the everyday, the marginal, the peculiar, the anonymous. The method is called diversion, a distortion that creates new knowledge about the existing. Just as photographs are not sufficient in themselves to understand Las Vegas (Robert Venturi), so does the case in Venice – yes, in any city. Rather, it is the variation and detail of the interweaving of maps, graphs, photos, text, and interviews that make it possible to understand changes in human action and thus explain the global city. Migropolis Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation represents a transversal exploration of two heterogeneous subjects – the migrant and the tourist – whose interests and ways of life intersect.
The generic city. The key to understanding the global city lies in the local. However, one should not succumb to the temptation to idealize the local, but zoom in on it and in this way create atlases for the global. As Venturi said of Las Vegas, one has to grasp "the archetype rather than the prototype, the exaggerated example to derive a lesson about the typical". This means that instead of characterizing the city as a series of iconic images that highlight spectacular scenery, the focus is on the generic, that is, the anonymous: the ordinary details, the housing conditions of freelancers, street vendors dragging their illegal goods around in an alley [back street, editor's note], the bedroom of a young South Korean chef, the one-day tourist bus, migration papers, klondike department stores outside Venice's historic center, immigration queues, prisons, fences [fences, editor's note], zones, dogs. Migropolis Venice is an analysis of this Venice's "normality" and its relation to the rest of the world.
Bizarre fetish or all cities by? "Every time I describe a city, I say something about Venice." (Marco Polo, in Calvino: The invisible cities.) «That one cannot find one's way in a city is no art. But getting lost in a city like getting lost in a forest requires training, "Walter Benjamin writes in his childhood memoirs. Rather than just strolling around randomly, the flan strives to discover hidden alleys and backyards and moving countercurrents. And is there a better place to stroll than Venice? Since the Middle Ages, Venice has served as a model for urban complexity and the labyrinth of the Baroque mirror cabinet as a catalyst for the tourist's longing. Today, the city has one million visitors a year whose commercial resources act as a magnet for emigrants. One of Scheppe's main points is that Venice is not a global city at all, but a product of the ruins of industrial society. The movement from utility to symbolic value has transformed Venice into a drawing studio, a kind of timeless island, a seductive real abstraction. You walk around, not in a city, but in a theater of remembrance (Guilio Camillo), which is not only what you can see with your eyes, but precisely a camera that also inspired, among others, Marcel Proust. "Venice is an urban copy, its own iconicity that has lost its master," writes Scheppe. One could also argue that the condensed surface helps to activate the imagination because it does not illuminate a master narrative, but a baroque world on the verge of collapsing. But from an economic-social and aesthetic point of view, Scheppe's point is difficult to overlook: It is easy to entice a Chinese tourist to buy a fake bag of an African refugee; the mere fact that the bag was bought in Venice adds a special value to it. The city as brand has created his own extreme fetish.
The facade and the lie. The English art historian John Ruskin documents in the book Stones of Venice how Renaissance architecture during the 1800th and 1900th centuries has served the powerful elite, maintained through the theatrical decoration of the facade, and paralyzed innovations and intellectual experiments. The use of marble and the construction of Byzantine and ancient ruins confirm this imperialism. Ruskin's strong metaphor describes Venice as a «quarry of past significance». And history goes on: In the 1920s, industrial giant Volpi used the monumental building program in the historic center to manifest its power and fascist propaganda. Globalization reduced to privatization and standardization begins already here. Since then, the city has lived off a preservation and make-up machine that makes it appear like a decorated corpse. Migropolis Venices main focus, however, is not the consumer culture as such, but how useless consumption produces an increasing human waste.
Instead of spectacular scenes, focus is on the anonymous: casual workers' housing conditions, street vendors and their illicit goods, the one-day tourist bus, out-of-town clondike department stores, prisons, fences, dogs.
The divided city. The book explores this meeting place between leisure-based mobility and mobility motivated by financial distress, the tourist versus the refugee. Well known is the European view that sees illegal migration as «a quasi-natural event that makes the Western world a passive witness». This even though migration is actually the result of a global economy that has transformed even the most remote areas of the world into the private property of the world's privileged, something that is gradually eradicating local ways of life and traditions. Furthermore, the very fact of crossing a border has turned people into criminals. As liberal legal-political culture continues to equate individuals' individual and abstract rights, such as citizenship and the right to contract, one supports and recognizes a legal system that, in effect, condemns the existence of countless people. Many of these are de facto stateless and can not return to their home country, but also can not be assimilated into the new country. This abstract depoliticization of the migrant misses an opportunity to treat the refugee as a political man whose uniqueness is rewarding for integration: "The refugee must be seen as he is, namely as a border concept" (Giorgio Agamben). Migropolis Venice fully demonstrates how the migrant acts as what German poet Rainer Maria Rilke called "the wasted, not just beggars" [...] "debris, shells of people whose fate has spit out" ... those who have crept into one or second hole ». IN Migropolis Venice we have pictures of the boat washer (Africans, Eastern Europeans) who lives in a damp basement room before he trudges off in the early morning hours with his cloth and bucket so the gondolas can be ready for the next day's tourists; we have the young beggar boy who for months walks dressed like a blind old lady with a downcast back in hopes of being able to scrape together a few shillings; the African who sells counterfeit goods, who often hide in the same place where he hides his bags and goods: under bridges, under stairs, in his constant flight from the police.
Migropolis Venice / Atlas of a Global Situation is more than a picture collage; it presents a new way of creating knowledge about our world, cities and people. A return to the generic, the inconspicuous, the things, the objects, the life in the space. For the politics of power, there are no objects. This is the new discursive future of the image: to resume contact with the inhuman surprises of the world, to show that reality is more than what we want to defend in a model of progress or a protective attitude. A new thinking for images and text where we first see the politics of border states, in that which divides, that which excludes, the invisible, those who are not seen and heard, those who live life in the space, life on the border.
