In Sicily, Between Now and Eternity / 2

Un percorso in campagna, Sicilia

Après trois jours de pluie, le soleil arrive enfin, d’abord par petites apparitions discrètes et puis les nuages vont se déposer doucement sur l’horizon, laissant la place à une lumière ambre d’aplomb.

Ce matin là, nous partons rencontrer mon futur employeur sur la base militaire américaine de Sigonella, à quelques kilomètres d’ici, dans la campagne qui sépare Lentini et Catania.

Pris par la nostalgie de mes souvenirs, je porte attention sur ce paysage généreux qui s’offre à moi : plaines verdoyantes, champs d’oranges, collines escarpées et puis l’Etna, ce titanesque volcan, qui, profitant d’une percée de soleil remarquable, s’offre enfin à mes yeux.

C’est la première fois que je sors de Lentini. Ce sont les premières parcelles de la Sicile que je découvre, et je me promet secrètement de ne pas rester enfermer trop longtemps dans ce bourg, hypnotisé comme je le suis par la beauté intemporelle de cette nature.

La voiture glisse doucement, de temps en temps secouée par un trou béant. Nous empruntons un chemin, puis un autre, tournons sur une route paysanne et puis parcourons une allée en terre battue. Ces chemins sont si étroits qu’à peine nous y circulerions à deux. Et pourtant ! D’immenses camions nous croisent par surprise, parfois transportant des oranges par centaines de caisses.

Par moment, le trajet est ponctué par la présence d’une prostitué, tel que je l’avais déjà remarqué au voyage précédent plus près de Catania, accotée invariablement sur un arbre ou assise sur une chaise de fortune. La plupart sont des africaines, et il me semble qu’elles ont encore les cheveux mouillés pour avoir traversé la mer sur une planche.

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In Sicily, Between Now and Eternity / 1

Je me retrouve à nouveau coincé dans un avion sordide d’une quelquonce compagnie italienne destinée aux voyageurs pauvres.

Rien à redire sur Meridiana Airline, sauf que je constate que la porte du pilote n’est pas fermée, que la communication interne demeure inexistante, que le personnel semble légèrement affolé et que je pourrais aisément jouer au terroriste. Peut être aussi que je suis paranoïaque.

J’ai des sueurs froides et des vertiges. Malheureusement, je n’ai rien à boire ni à manger. Je ne veux pas allonger l’argent qui pourrait combler mon angoisse. C’est ce qui arrive lorsque l’on voyage pauvrement.

A titre de divertissement, je feuillette sans grande attention les maigres revues où pullule la publicité de mauvais gout destinée aux touristes sans personnalité.

Je parcours la notice de sécurité, ne comprend rien aux ridicules schémas présentés. Je tousse, discrètement, trop paresseux pour aller jusqu’à la seule toilette de l’avion.

Pas de film, pas de musique. L’anxiété m’envahit.

Au bout de deux heures à suer froidement, lors du bref trajet Roma-Catania, je commence à percevoir des petites lumières qui semblent embrasser la cote et éventuellement, s’agglutiner contre les parois de ce que je devine être une montagne large et éternellement longue. Puis les lumières se multiplient et ce que j’ai cru pour Catania était en fait Messina, puisque vient ensuite la grande région catanaise et sa couronne égrainée en altitude.

Vers 23h00, accueillit par une pluie forte et droite, je retrouve l’aéroport moderne, qui m’a surpris lors d’un trop bref passage à Catania, il y à deux années déjà. À la sortie, je rencontre Salvo d’Antoni, cet homme grand et gros qui doit me ramasser et qui me promet un travail. Il porte un carton affichant mon nom. C’est doucement cliché, je me sens important. aussi, il est venu avec une de ses filles, maigre comme un bambou, le nez en relief. Elle a ce petit quelque chose d’exotique, d’arabe, d’excitant.

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La violencia del silencio

Madrid, 2010

La pauvreté et l’exclusion, lorsqu’elles habitent le silence, deviennent une menace pour l’humanité.

Pourtant, il y quelque chose comme une larme que le capitalisme n’a pas su comprendre.

La cité que nous habitons, refuge de nos émotions, parle tout bas de nos espérances.

Et j’ose espérer que demain, des gens plus sages nous dirigerons.

Portraits of a Changing Paris

Chat up a critic of historic preservation and the conversation may turn, sooner or later, toward Paris. What the French capital’s historic center has retained in fin-de-siècle flourish, s/he might claim, it lacks in the dynamism that fuels the growth of other great cities. London, New York, and Tokyo boast continually adaptable, evolving cores. But in attempting to cling to its glory days as “capital of the 19th century”, Paris consigns its modern needs to forgettable, peripheral suburbs. Its heart risks becoming little more than a quaint period museum.

You don’t have to be a Paris detractor to buy into such a narrative. Luc Sante, the author of a recent look at two new Paris histories in the New York Review of Books, has noticed the city’s chroniclers shifting their gaze, increasingly focusing on the large-scale changes now taking place outside Paris’ core. Today they find it impossible to even conceive of the city as a living, breathing organism without casting their glance toward its roiling, occasionally riotous, undeniably more au courant satellite settlements. As Eric Hazan writes in his new book, The Invention of Paris:

[A]nother “new Paris” is taking shape…it is leaving the west of the city to advertising executives and oil tycoons…crossing the terrible barrier of the Boulevard Périphérique…and stretching towards what is already de facto the twenty-first arrondissement, towards Pantin, Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Bagnolet, Montreuil…

There’s no question that much of Paris’s cultural and economic dynamism alike is now weighted toward its outskirts. But to what extent is its center’s supposedly stultifying over-preservation to blame? Images taken by Laurent David Ruamps, an architecture enthusiast who has rephotographed a number of old postcard views of early 20th century Paris, suggest that the idea itself that Paris has been frozen in architectural time might not be so fully borne out.

Ruamps’ then-and-after views of Le Corbusier’s modernist Villa Bresnus, swallowed by denser, more street-sensitive construction, demonstrated the resilience of traditional urban development in a Paris suburb. That makes it less surprising to consider that, much more than many casual observers would suppose, the central Paris we know today was a relatively recent invention.

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Modernism Debauched

Villa Besnus in 1922 and 2010.
Photo compilation by Laurent David Ruamps

In 1922, Le Corbusier was hired by a man named George Besnus to build a new house in the Paris suburb of Vaucresson. It was the architect’s first chance to put the Purist ideals he had been toying with to practice: an architecture stripped of its excesses, made as clean, clear and efficient as possible. The house was meant as a statement, from the gracefully rounded edges of its balcony to the bathroom, which was placed in the centre of the building, allowing for an uninterrupted flow of interior space.

As you can see in the photo compilation above, though, Le Corbusier’s original design has been altered beyond recognition. Gone are the carefully-considered proportions, the clean contrast with scrubby surroundings. A four-sided roof replaced the original flat one and shops were built in the house’s front garden. It now looks like a slightly more modern version of the petit bourgeois houses that surround it, which is ironic, considering that Le Corbusier’s Modernist villa predates them by at least several years. In a way, knowing that those fuddy-duddy traditional houses were built during the emergence of Modernism makes you all the more sympathetic to Le Corbusier’s ideals. You can see very clearly what he was working against.

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Europe on Two Wheels

Barcelona by the sea

Barcelona

Over the hill in Madrid

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Ghosts of Occupied Amsterdam

Amsterdam’s Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse lives history. The company for which she works as a historical consultant, Historisch Adviesbureau 30-45, specializes in digging up archival material for clients pertaining to “daily life in the years 1900-1950″. In addition, Jo confesses in her Flickr profile, she has “a 1930s lifestyle,” donning clothing from the era and “attending 1930s theme parties”. Even her house has been carefully decorated to look not a day older than 1943.

But Jo is more than just a professional researcher and history buff. Beyond her archival sleuthing, she’s engaged in a number of reconstructive and interpretive projects that bring to life historical material in the present day. One is an effort to recreate 1920s Berlin as an environment for the virtual world of Second Life, allowing users to immerse themselves in the German capital’s long-gone prewar heyday.

In 2007, Jo embarked on what might have seemed like a more conventional project — she took her camera around Amsterdam, capturing street scenes from the same vantage points as old photos she’d found of the city under Nazi occupation during the Second World War — in addition to the archives, she’d located many of the shots in flea markets or on other Flickr members’ accounts. What she did next was less conventional: Jo fused the then-and-now shots into singular collages, juxtaposing ghostly remnants (and residents) of the occupied city with representations of the present day.

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Time Travel With Nick DeWolf

Penn Station, New York, 1958

Three years ago, people were still complaining that photo-sharing websites like Flickr were home mostly to “thousands of pieces of shit” — few good photos, endless amounts of clichéd snapshots that nobody really wants to see.

Since then, of course, Flickr has proven its worth by attracting plenty of good, serious photographers, and inspiring many more to improve their work and learn more about photography. It has also become something unexpected: a window into the past. Recently, a number of organizations, including Library of Congress, NASA and the Ville de Montréal, have put portions of their photo archives on the website, taking advantage of its user-friendly format and ready-made connection to social networks.

Private individuals have followed their lead, giving old film photos new life. One such photographer is Nick DeWolf, a American engineer who lived in Philadelphia, Boston and later Colorado, and who never left home without a camera. For decades, starting in the 1950s, he documented almost everywhere he went. After DeWolf’s death in 2006, his son-in-law began putting his photos online.

There are now more than 43,000 images in DeWolf’s Flickr photostream, with 20 more added each day. Among these are scenes of everyday 1950s, 60s and 70s life in cities like New York, Boston and Hong Kong, shot with the passion, curiosity and loose focus of an amateur.

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Barcelona: tapas et soleil?

Poble Sec, Barcelona

Je viens de quitter Madrid, après un passage à Barcelona au préalable, question de me faire une opinion sur ces villes. Et quel regard : pas celui du citadin qui connait trop bien – et donc déforme – sa vision urbaine d’une cité. Plutôt celui du voyageur, curieux et anthropologue, qui n’a que le passage et l’insouciance pour se faire une idée – un cliché au sens photographique – et dessiner une esquisse de la ville.

Déjà lorsqu’on débarque à Barcelona, au coeur de Poble Sec, à un jet de pierre du vieux Barrio Chino – El Raval – et du port industriel, poussiéreux, de l’antique cité maritime, l’on élimine tout les stéréotypes qu’on rêvait à l’écoute de l’Auberge Espagnol (Klapisch : 2002) et autres Vicky Christina Barcelona (Allen : 2008). Exit la musique, l’innocence et les courtisans, guitare à la main. Exit la ville balnéaire à l’insouciance légendaire. Nous sommes davantage dans le monde noire et migratoire de Biutiful (Iñárritu : 2010).

Barcelona, au sens du rêve, n’existe pas dans le réel, et prend forcément son ancrage dans le désir et la volonté pour la culture catalane de s’exprimer en terme de mondialisation et d’internationalisation.

Barcelona, ville encore plus désirable, de par sa substance réelle, pauvre et industrielle, riche et balnéaire dans une certaine mesure, et certainement une terre d’accueil pour les chercheurs d’asile et de refuge.

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Madrid rebelde

Utopia, Lavapiés

Rebelde, Lavapiés

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255 Years Ago Today: The Lisbon Earthquake

On this morning 255 years ago, Lisbon was one of the richest cities in the world. Wealth had been flowing in from Portugal’s colonies ever since the great wave of Portuguese exploration began in the 1400s. A new palace and opera house had recently been completed, and the 300,000 or so residents were observing one of the biggest feasts of the church calendar, All Saints Day.

Then disaster struck in the form of a massive earthquake, estimated to be about 9 on the Richter scale of intensity (by comparison, February’s Chilean quake measured 8.8 while Haiti’s one a month earlier was 7.2). Fires and a tsunami followed, and by the time fires had burned themselves out, the waterfront and much of the sumptuous new construction was gone.

But the city was rebuilt quickly, under the guidance of a man who was, in effect, probably the greatest urbanist of his day, the Marquês de Pombal. Evidence of his leadership can be seen still in the lovely centre of Lisbon.

After the Great Fire of London in 1666, a portion of London’s centre was rebuilt along lines suggested by Christopher Wren. In the early part of the 1700s, Turin had also been expanded beyond the city walls, following plans which featured squares and streets laid on grids. Pombal, acting as the king’s right hand man, and his engineers looked to both these major changes in urban structure for ideas, but in the end forged ahead to plan a new city center that was the largest urban reconstruction project ever undertaken until Napoleon III hired Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to remake Paris more than 100 years later.

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Un descans a Barcelona

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A Walk Through San Lorenzo di Roma

Aux portes de Rome

Un quartier singulier. La seule zone de Rome bombardée, lors de la deuxième guerre.

Quatre mille bombes ; trois mille victimes, dont le souvenir flotte toujours autour de ces rues.

Ces quelques rues, un kilomètre carré tout au plus, où se regroupe la Rome révolutionnaire.

Malgré tout, ce qui choque le visiteur, ce sont ces milliers de mètres de graffitis.

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What is Venice’s Future?

Abbiamo un futuro ? Venice (2010)

Venice is an extraordinary city — as long as you love old architecture and incredible landscapes of ancient houses and canals going out to sea. But it is also overcrowded by tourists. Is it still possible to actually live in such a city? Does Venice still belong to the Venetians?

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