Fragments from the Oxford Handbook of Oral History that resonated with that phase of the project

Critical reflection on the experiment of solo autotopography - 12th of December

First of all, I wish I had conducted my solo autotopography earlier, but I often found myself prioritizing the collective aspect of the work. Nevertheless, the process was invaluable in helping me understand certain dynamics and deepening my grasp of how to approach tasks and interact with the environment, which I can incorporate into future activities.

The activity was influenced by two main factors: first, the fact that a collective autotopography had already taken place in the space; and second, the weather, which challenged my resilience and impacted my decision to remain outdoors in the rain.

Simplifying the positional decision—choosing a specific vantage point from which to observe the space—was inspired by my conversation with the topographer Stavros. This, along with my decision to position myself at the center of the space as if I were a 360-degree camera (a tool often used in contemporary topography), shaped my approach.

Each corner of the space revealed a different landscape, and each landscape suggested a unique story. My autotopography evolved into a series of images, each connected to a specific corner, and these, in turn, shaped the final composite image. I believe it would be interesting to map these stories and explore the emotions linked to each one.

Speaking of emotions, I found myself somewhat detached from the feelings evoked by the images. Reflecting on this now, I realize that engaging with an audience while sharing personal stories feels very different than engaging with oneself. When I discussed this with autotopography theorist Heddon, she explained that the self is always relational. This may explain why constructing a particular narrative or emotional resonance feels more compelling when sharing with others. In my solo work, I felt less inclined to delve into details, perhaps because I already knew the stories intimately.

This relational aspect raises critical questions, even in the context of collective explorations: To whom are you speaking and sharing these images? Why are you doing it—what is the ultimate purpose? Which elements require emphasis? By addressing these questions, we can better guide participants (and ourselves in solo work). This approach underscores the importance of framing the process with well-defined, though not overly utilitarian, questions. Allowing space for organic and spontaneous sharing remains essential.

Regarding the future use of the space, imagination—shaped by different participants and pre-existing elements in the environment—played a significant role. This leads me to wonder: What other kinds of questions could be posed about the future of the space? Furthermore, where do we physically situate ourselves within this envisioned future?

Critical reflection on the experiment of solo autotopography - 12th of December

First of all, I wish I had conducted my solo autotopography earlier, but I often found myself prioritizing the collective aspect of the work. Nevertheless, the process was invaluable in helping me understand certain dynamics and deepening my grasp of how to approach tasks and interact with the environment, which I can incorporate into future activities.

The activity was influenced by two main factors: first, the fact that a collective autotopography had already taken place in the space; and second, the weather, which challenged my resilience and impacted my decision to remain outdoors in the rain.

Simplifying the positional decision—choosing a specific vantage point from which to observe the space—was inspired by my conversation with the topographer Stavros. This, along with my decision to position myself at the center of the space as if I were a 360-degree camera (a tool often used in contemporary topography), shaped my approach.

Each corner of the space revealed a different landscape, and each landscape suggested a unique story. My autotopography evolved into a series of images, each connected to a specific corner, and these, in turn, shaped the final composite image. I believe it would be interesting to map these stories and explore the emotions linked to each one.

Speaking of emotions, I found myself somewhat detached from the feelings evoked by the images. Reflecting on this now, I realize that engaging with an audience while sharing personal stories feels very different than engaging with oneself. When I discussed this with autotopography theorist Heddon, she explained that the self is always relational. This may explain why constructing a particular narrative or emotional resonance feels more compelling when sharing with others. In my solo work, I felt less inclined to delve into details, perhaps because I already knew the stories intimately.

This relational aspect raises critical questions, even in the context of collective explorations: To whom are you speaking and sharing these images? Why are you doing it—what is the ultimate purpose? Which elements require emphasis? By addressing these questions, we can better guide participants (and ourselves in solo work). This approach underscores the importance of framing the process with well-defined, though not overly utilitarian, questions. Allowing space for organic and spontaneous sharing remains essential.

Regarding the future use of the space, imagination—shaped by different participants and pre-existing elements in the environment—played a significant role. This leads me to wonder: What other kinds of questions could be posed about the future of the space? Furthermore, where do we physically situate ourselves within this envisioned future?

From the centre of the petanca field, turning slowly as if I were a topography instrument doing a 3D scan, I see a lamppost that doesn't work, a tree, a bench, a no-entry road sign, a building with lights on the second floor, a tree closer, more trees further away, another bench, a fence, a distant van, a white truck, a white car, and between the two a black car, another lamppost that doesn't work, another tree, a hill full of trees, a sign saying not to bring dogs, more bushes, trees, a grandstand, a grandstand with five steps each and in the middle of the two grandstands a canopy with the words CP Armonia, founded in 1967, and three coats of arms, all done in mosaic. I see another metal fence above the grandstands and between the grandstands more plants, a staircase going up to the upper floor, another bench, another lamppost that doesn't work, the bare tree I saw earlier, a green coat hanger where we hung our remarks the other day, a red brick table, a bench, some baskets, some trees, another lamppost that doesn't work, what are probably toilets with other lights that don't work, more trees, a tree, the metal fence a bit hit by who knows what, and more trees, three trees.

Looking up you can see the clouds are darker, it's a sky that is lighter and the foliage of the trees is much darker, they stand out black in the high sky, while down below there is gravel, gravel that is not white but all colours, mostly grey. and a beige earth that has definitely been darkened by the action of the rain. This is what I can see, obviously leaving things out.

One image I can see is this kiosk that can open and serve food. And probably influenced by the memories shared so far I see a community gathering and I see dances. Dances and on the stands people eating and clapping their hands while in the centre of the ground there are people dancing.

I also see a school, I see a school. as if children were coming here for lessons instead of being inside classrooms and they were learning the various subjects and the teachers were doing outdoor activities related to nature. This is my mapping.

This is my autotopography. In all of this I feel in a space that I have already lived a little and to which I don't belong a little, I feel in a space of passage, a space that I may not be able to cultivate but that I will cultivate in other places, so a space that I hope to take with me. And if I had to choose a place from which to look at the space, from which to stand and stay forever, I would perhaps decide on the bottom left corner for the opening to the mountains

Design of the collective performative encounter of autotopography – Thursday 5^th of December

FORM: The experiment takes shape in the form of a collective walk to a specific place, and then some performative, storytelling, collaborative methods are used to research the relationship between public space and imagination.

AIM: The aim of the experiment is to shine new lights on the question of the research on how the performance of autotopographies can help reimagine public space. In this sense, the space of the petanca field has been taken into consideration as it holds much history inside the neighbourhood, and it has been created and decorated thanks to community efforts beck in the seventies. The experiment is also an exploration of different features that could define autotopography as a collective artistic practice.

AUDIENCE: This time the audience will be mixed, in which I have invited both young internationals to take part to the activity, and both people from the neighbourhood.

DOCUMENTATION: During the activity, Francesco (friend and part of the collective) will take pictures and possibly some videos. Also a recorder will be used for the words shared.

Initial monologue - collective performative encounter of autotopography in the petanca field

(People are seated in a circle or gathered space).

Welcome*! Today we are here to explore and measure a space, to describe it together. We are here in this field that is used to play petanca. In this space, Encarna told us, the women of the neighbourhood decorated these steps with these ceramics when this space was built. Today we are here to measure the space, and connect it with memories of the past, and with present and future imaginations.
The proposal is to describe the space in terms of measurements and components of the space, but also in terms of quality. We can use metaphors: like there is a tree that is as green as an emerald.
We can describe space according to what is there or what is missing. For example: there is no ice cream parlour in this space, but there is a tree in this space.

When you observe something, you can write it down on a piece of paper. There are different sizes, because each observation has its own weight and shape. Once written down, the observation should be attached to the string with a clothes peg, and then you can continue with the exploration.

We brought two chairs here.
See these two chairs? They are special. One is called the memory chair and the other is called the imagination chair. When someone decides to sit in one of these chairs, we all* have to stop. We will gather to listen to what the person has to share.

The person who sits down will put on the garment placed on the chair before starting his or her story. The memory chair is used to narrate a memory related to space, real or imagined. Before starting the story, you must put on the scarf.  The imagination chair is for sharing a vision or dream about space, something that could be or become. It could answer the question ‘What could happen in this space tomorrow?’ or even ‘What could happen in this space 20 years from now?’

When the story is finished, we can return to our observations and measurements. The activity ends when 40 minutes have passed. At that point, I will produce a sound to call us all together and conclude with a collective ritual.

I am here as artist and facilitator: I will accompany you in this exploration and keep time for our work. This is not just an exercise in observation, but a way to weave memory, imagination and presence into the space we share.

Thank you for being here. Let us begin!

Design of the collective performative encounter of autotopography with objects - December 1st

Form: the experiment takes the form of a facilitated artistic collaborative activity, which I named collective autotopography. It involves storytelling and working with mnemonic devices.

Setting: this experiment will take place during a meeting of the association “Dones de Montbau”, an amateur theatre group composed of elderly women from the Montbau neighborhood.

Documentation: the process will be documented through photographs and audio-recording. For helping with the documentation process, there are Catarina and Nuria, who are taking care of the pictures and of audio recording respectively.

Aim: the aim of this experiment is to explore the concept of autotopography as theorized by Jennifer Gonzalez in the context of prosthetic territories, politics, and hypertechnology. Gonzalez draws parallels between autotopographies and Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias—countersites that simultaneously reflect and challenge the spaces in which we live. According to Gonzalez, the assemblage of artifacts within autotopographies allows for the reconstitution of personal and social history.

Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of traces, Gonzalez asserts that autotopography represents a combination of “fictional” memory and “factual” history embedded in material objects. She further claims that this representation bridges fiction and history, as well as past and present, making autotopography a powerful tool of “evidence”—a material manifestation of the self that links time, space, and events.

This experiment aims to explore how this “tool of evidence” can function in a collective, performative context. By working with and performing around personal objects, the experiment seeks to investigate how these artifacts can spark different imaginaries. Ultimately, it addresses the question: How can the concept of autotopography be developed as an artistic collective practice.

Collective Autotopography: Activity Plan

Through the facilitator of the theatre group, participants were asked to bring a personal object to the activity. The request reads:

“To carry out this activity, we ask all participants to bring a personal object that they feel is part of their identity, symbolizing an aspect of their life they wish to carry into the future.”

This instruction encourages participants to materialize the tension between their past and future identities, fostering an imaginative engagement with an object that holds personal and symbolic significance.

Introduction and Setup

Arrange chairs in a circle with a space in the center for the altar.

Ask participants to bring an object that represents an important part of their identity and something they wish to carry into the future.

Constructing the Altar

One by one, each participant stands, places their object on the altar, and:

Chooses its position within the altar.

Names the object and shares a brief physical description (e.g., material, size, color, texture, smell).

(This step should take about 5 minutes total.)

Once all objects are placed, the group forms a silent circle around the altar to observe it as a collective creation.

Step 3: Memory and Imagination Chairs

 Place two designated chairs near the altar:

Chair of Memory: For reflecting on the past.

Chair of Imagination: For envisioning the future.

One person starts by choosing an object from the altar (not necessarily their own) and sitting in one of the chairs:

If they sit in the Chair of Memory, they reflect on the past:

This object reminds me of the past. The image I see is…”

If they sit in the Chair of Imagination, they reflect on the future:

“This object makes me think of the future. The image I see is…”

After the initial reflection, others in the group may connect this memory or vision to other ideas.

When finished, the participant can choose to move the object to a new position on the altar, symbolizing a shift in its significance.

Repeat until each participant has had a turn or the group feels complete. Encourage everyone to engage, but participation in the chair activity is optional.

Collective Ending

Provide each participant with a thread.

As a group, tie or weave the threads into a shared pattern (e.g., around the altar, connecting objects, or forming a symbolic web).

Invite participants to share a single word or short phrase about what they’re taking away from the experience.

Close with a moment of silence or a collective gesture of gratitude, reinforcing the sense of shared connection.

Critical observation of the first performative encounter of autotopography

The experiment with Carmen presented just some difficulty but yielded in general very interesting results. The first difficulty is the identification of a place connected to personal history that could be reachable in a physical sense. When Carmen started to talk about this place far-away, I thought that something need to explicitly change in the direction in order for people to identify a reachable place.

The narrative that Carmen brought up when analysing her connection to the space, is one of family. It sounds like her worries are mainly related to the relationship that she had with her parents, because they were people who lived a one or two wars, and then a dictatorship, and as Carmen said, they didn’t know any better. And from the other side, her personal relationship with her children, now adults. This is foreseen also in the future, because when asked about a special day, a special event taking place where she brought me, she thought about herself, as an older granny, together with her children and her grandchildren, happily strolling in the park.

The most recurring object is indeed the book, taken as a companion that can improve your mood and used to help process emotions.

What I feel it’s missing now is the sharing of this process with a larger audience, to see what things spark reflections and imagination.

To me, the autotopography of Carmen sparked several images of potential “futures”. For example, I saw how she is admiring the people living up in small villages in the Pyrenees, their simple and yet cheerful way of going through life, even though the village is very small and weather and position condition not so simple at times. This made me reflect on the importance of going slow, connected to the current pace of the world, and that peaceful life need to go hand in hand with this approach.

Also, the choice of the park as a place to inscribe herself as an important part of her stories, and sharing how she shares it with other people, made me connect to a future world in which everybody has more time on their hands, to be reflective, to go and process emotions in green spaces. The restorative and community-building potential of the space made me imagine of a collective, reading sessions in open public spaces.

The future focus on the nuclear family being happy and strolling in the park, made me think on the concept of family as a whole, and how we can actually take care of each other with people and ways that are not included in our blood family. I think it will be very interesting to carry out the experiment with people in different phases or their lives, as clearly something that she is looking forward in life at the moment is peace, relaxation, and the places where she can find it.

It was also interesting that she didn’t go into the depth of specific events but rather taking pivotal moments or emotions for her autotopography.

This experiment raised several points that I would like to further explore:

•        The importance of the physicality of the space – why do we have to be present in the space? Why is it important in the research?
•      The role of objects. The symbolism that came out of the choice of Carmen objects is striking. A book, which speaks about family relationships, and at the same time a book from which she used real sentences to close chapters of her life. The material objects has the potential for symbolizing identity and stories to a very “essencial” level.
•        How to transform either the process, or the result in a more “public” way. Is the key to make the process of autotopography more collective? Of course the concept of autotopography feels deeply personal. Would there be a way and an objective to transform this process into a collective one, or at least bringing the results to a more “public” level?
•       The concept of slowness – see if it would come up in later autotopographies.
•      Concreteness of stories versus emotions and feelings generally connected to the space. The sharing of Carmen made me realize that someone might be more eager to speak in abstract terms of what makes them connected to a space. Is this something that I want to counteract or actually invite? Is it making the connection to a place more accessible and less private to enter from the emotions’ and thoughts’ doors?

Observation from the right, upper corner, in the petanca field. There is rain. The sound of rain is influenced by the fact that he is wearing a hood.

The light. It is characterised by the sunset, but it is not a sunset with warm colours, but a sunset with cool, white, blue colours. It is cloudy and, as mentioned, it is raining.

There are four trees along the border of the Petanca field and others outside, many. Inside the Petanca field there are several puddles, but also other parts without puddles, which makes it clear that there are some parts deeper and others shallower. The field is divided into four parts with long lines running from one end to the other.

And behind the field is a silver metal barrier. The lampposts are lit, so there is a yellow light in the field. The first thing that came to mind in relation to a memory or a feeling is the rain and how the weather affects the view of space a lot.

I think of the flood in Emilia-Romagna, the first one, and I think of the image of the rains that I did not experience, because I was not present during the rains each time. Or rather, during the first flood I was present, but during the second I was not. And during the first one I was only present at the rain, but not at the moment when the embankment broke in Lugo.

Being in the rain also leads me to quicker, less safe, more unstable observations, as I don't want to spend time in the rain.

Here I would like to write down some reflections on two different talks I had with some experts in different fields. One was with Stavros, who is both a topographer and an actor. The other one was with professor Deirdre Heddon, one of the theorist of the concept of autotopography.

Critical reflection on the experiment of solo autotopography - 4th of February

The experiment highlighted the very prominent role of the poetry when defyining how I would interact with the space and my reflections that were sparked on identity.The choice of this particular poem, that is already somehow connected to my identity made me struggle to imagine or reflect in other ways about myself. Nonetheless, I took the opportunity to focus on which part of the space my gaze and reflection fell upon after the reading of specific paragraphs of the poem. I will post next to it several images that I took of the space that I could instictively relate to the reading of the poem. It is interesting to note that the poem also have a place in the space, both when written, but also mostly when spoken out loud, and I did, in the end of my walk, repeated it three times from the beginning until the end, while walking, and I could see how I was literally "walking" and embodying the poem.

This activity also prompted some tasks that could be useful to further explore the space, especially collectively. So in specific moments of intersection between the poem and the space, I was being suggested with prompts that people could carry out in the space to experiment with it, in specific in the collective performative encounter that I plan to do on the 21st of February.

This is the list of prompts that the activity produced:

• Find a geometric space and follow its lines
  
• Squeeze yourself in the least possible space and within 5 minutes enlarge as much as you can
  
• Pretend you stumble five times and have someone to help you stay on your feet
• Bark at someone until you recognize them
  
• Walk as if you're crossing the Amazon
  
• Write down all the things you wish you didn't know
• Crawl on the floor and invite someone else to crawl on the floor with you
• Create a physical divide with another person or with a group of people
• Write down all the privileges you will never have
• Create a hole somewhere
• Created a magic formula and say it aloud three times and wait for what will happen
  
• Create a mosaic
• Climb 50 steps together with another person

If I would experiment with this format again, I would maybe choose another poem, or even better, write a poem starting from the interaction with the space.

Performative encounter of autotopograhy - individual

FORM. This artistic experiment takes the form of a facilitated walk and imaginative talk. It is inspired by the concept of autotopography as appeared in Heddon (2002). It happens on an individual level, where I facilitated the process for another person.

LOCATION. This experiment happened in the location of the neighbourhood of Montbau, where Carmen, the person who was chosen for this first experiment, lives.

AIM. The aim of the experiment is to find out how personal memories and identity relates to the public space, and how the individual identity is shaped and shapes the environement around us. Specifically, the experiment tries to give new perspectives to the question "In what ways can public spaces act as an arena for performing memory and sparking the collective imagination for alternative narratives?". The aim of the experiment is to also provide the initial matter for the development of the investigation of the public space for a future performance.

My hypothesis is that the space chosen and interacted from the participant will unveil different layers of meaning for the individual and the community, providing not only space for exploring more in depth the identity of the self and of the place, but also opening up new possibility for envisioning images and stories that are yet to be seen.

DOCUMENTATION. The experiment will be document through the use of a voice recorder, and then scripted through an AI tool for automatic transcribing. Pictures will be taken in specific moments of the activity. A descriptive text of what happened during the activity will be written down by me, together with a critical reflection on it.

SCRIPT. Here is the script of the activity.

After having selected the person and concordated on a time for the activity, we sit down in a traquil space outdoor. I explain the purpose of the activity, and then we begin.

Before we begin:
Two-minute meditation. Objective: an inner search for a place of identity significance.

While seated, let’s close our eyes. Feel your feet firmly planted on the ground. Imagine small roots sprouting from the soles of your feet, digging and anchoring themselves into the earth to give you stability. These roots begin to travel up your ankles, calves, knees, thighs, pelvis, belly, sternum, chest, hands, arms, neck, all the way to your hair, where colorful leaves start to grow and reach upwards. Our breath serves as the lifeblood of these roots. With each inhalation, we push life into our cells, and with each exhalation, we allow it to flow throughout our body.

Now, let’s activate our imagination. In front of our closed eyes, a red curtain appears, like one in a theater. We are watching a play called “Who I Am.” We don’t know which part of the play we are in, but we know it is about us, that this story tells our life. Gradually, the curtain begins to open. And we start to see a place. It’s a place that others can access. A place of great importance in our life. A place deeply connected to our identity. Perhaps several images flash by quickly, and different scenes pass and intertwine before our eyes. But we feel that, in this moment, there is one—a specific space tied to our story—that we want to explore. Breathe, give life, let it flow. When we see the space clearly in front of us, let’s describe it aloud. What colors are there? What scents do you notice? How is the light? Are there other people?

(Allow the person to share what they see.)

Alright. Now, let’s return to our breathing. The curtain closes. We know we will be heading toward this space, the space of your story, here. When you’re ready, you can open your eyes, and I’ll invite you to accompany me to this place in silence, where we will try to explore this space with new eyes, and see the stories it contains and those it might hold in the future.
As we walk, I’ll follow you in silence, and you can begin to reflect on the stories this place connects you to. Are you ready? Let me know when we’ve arrived.

While walking:
We walk in silence. Objective: connecting with the various events, stories, and emotions linked to the place.

As we walk, you may think about the different events associated with this place.

Upon arrival:

Thank you for bringing me here. Now, I’ll ask you some questions about this place and your connection to it. Take as much time as you need to respond.
First, I’d like to know…

Describe it as if it were a painting. Can you point out specific details?
Objective: exploring the entirety of the space, noticing elements, focusing on details.

What’s the first image that comes to mind when you arrive at this place?
Objective: stimulating visual imagination.

If this place could tell me a story about you, what story would it tell?
Objective: shifting focus to an external perspective, how one sees themselves from the outside.

-If this place could speak, what would it say? Where would its voice come from? Which element of the space would be speaking?

-Imagine taking a photograph of the space—where would you capture it from? What would the frame look like?
Objective: seeing the space with the perspective of the participant.

-Now, imagine that you are also in the photograph—where would you place yourself?

Obejctive: highlighting the relationship of the person with the space.

-Imagine it as a video recording an action—what would you do in this space?

Objective: putting
-If you could leave a note here for everyone to read, what would it say?

-If you could bring an object here, what would it be? Why?

-What kind of marks would you like to leave in this space? (not used)

-Bringing an object which is meaningful in their provate sphere, asserting their resence in public space. (just notes for next exp.)

-Sound, neighbours. (notes for next exp.)

---

Now, close your eyes again.
Imagine that time has passed. Let’s say twenty years have gone by. Breathe into this vision of the future. Playfully imagine that, twenty years from now, something special is happening here, on this very spot, on a special day. Picture this moment in the future. What is happening? Are there people? What are they doing? Are there objects? How are the relationships between people?
Tell me about this event as if you were telling a story to a child.
Begin like this: “Once upon a time, in Montbau (or name of the space we are in)…”

After the individual experiment, I understood I wanted to ge deeper into experimenting with the collective side of autotopography, to see how people would hae influenced each other during the activity, and to create some kind of spect-actor, to use Boal's term from Theatre of the Oppressed. So I drafted and conducted two more experiments of collective autotopography.

Solo autotopography – Tuesday 4^th of February

FORM: The experiment takes shape in the form of a walk in a space, relating it to a poetry constructed as a form of flow of consciousness.

AIM: The aim of the experiment is to better understand from a personal perspective how images and memories springing from the relationship between the space and my voice are connected to my identity.

AUDIENCE: This is a solo experiment.

DOCUMENTATION: During the activity, I take pics with my phone of what I observe and write down notes.

SCRIPT: Back in November 2023 I have written a poetry in a form of stream of consciousness, with every question starting with the words "I come from..." in the context of a artistic residency. I am using that material, which is imaginary but strictly linked to my identity, and connecting it to a walk in a space, following prompts that are found in the book "The Walkbook: recipes for Walking and Wellbeing", in the article Re-compostition: A poetry walk by Sonia Overall. In particular:
Walk for a couple of minutes to clear your head.
Stop somewhere safe. Read the first line of your poem. Read it aloud if you can; to yourself, to a tree, to your walking companion(s).
Walk on, holding the poem, allowing the line to play over in your head. What words catch your attention? What images present themselves? How do these relate to your walking environment: do you notice any connections? Does the shape of a line, metre or rhythm affect your way of walking?
Stop again. Repeat with the next line of your poem.
Continue until you have walked all the lines of your poem.

This is the prompt that I am going to follow with this poem.

Here it is to be noted that I had taken up the possibility of changing my supervisor, as suggested by the program. Of course, switching the external eye supervising the project meant that I needed to deal with different questions thrown at me. That's why I began questioning the very basis of my project until this point, which were the contact with the elderly ladies and the neighbourhood itself... Might have they become a comfortable setting?

Critical Reflections on the experiment of Polytopography in Barcelona

The experiment was a frustrating experience.

First: it was cold and windy. So people were not happy of mving in open spaces to avoid the wind, and directions took together were influenced by one person being more cold than others.

Second: one person came half an hour later to our appointment, which meant we began half an hour later, and some people had a very sharp timing on how much time they could have spent in the experiment.

Third: in general one person was not really up for doing the experiment in the end, and kind of influenced the vibe of the other two people. So i perceived the environment as more carefree than I would have loved it to be. Engagement was scarce. This, at a certain point, enhanced my frustation.

Fourth: the person doing documentation needed to take a train, so I needed to take over and couldn't finish my own part in the experiment.

I think all these points in general impaired the correct functioning of the experiment, and for sure enlightened me with the consciousness of having to organize the experiment in a much more structured way, not relying on people who are doing this out of friendship but rather having people who could be a bit more responsible during the activity.

In general, I also feel I couldn't see my part in the experiment, so the next thing I should do is trying it either on my own or just with another person. I added tasks to the script, and I think the collective graffiti works quite well.

Another thing that doesn't work that well is mixing me, that I do know the experiment already with people that don't know, and them relying on my knowledge of the experiment and hence asking a lot of questions while the activity should be carried out mostly in silence.

Documentation - Polytopography

For now I am recollecting the collective biography texts.

The first one I received, also recited from the participants, is the following:

We come from the warmth of the pavement?
We come from the laughter in the air
We come from grandmothers
We come from the wasps who work without pay
We come from the food that our mothers made
We come from the woods and strawberry fields
We come from the womb that comes from the story of courage
We come from a place of mourning and joy
We come from the shadows on the wall
We come from the shadows on the wall
We come from the forest
We come from a run in the water and winds that sing songs of change
We come from our kins, brothers and sisters
We come from empty space
We come from a shared sense of self
We come from the moment before time had its say
We come from others

Collective poem number 2


If I were grass I’d be as green as a spring leaf

And if you were gravel you would crunch under my feet

Sunlight through leaves beam back my memories

To a time before this one and the other and other

When a cypress tree was 8 Slades tall

a trash can 10 doves high

And a man hole cover just under a trash can long.

Vagina trees, here and in Ghent

And bees of 1 staple buzz to Slovenian hydrangeas

Tengo muchos porros aquí

No te haces drogas! Soy napolitano así que yo lo sé

says the man who proceeds to leave a pile of weed on the ledge next to us

An offering

A gift never asked for

Not deserved

Precariously placed on a ledge

Waiting for a breeze to scatter it across the road

And imagining all the things that had to happen for this little pile of weed to be placed at our feet.

First you need land, then a seed then a grower and a mule, a smuggler and a dealer and a man who smokes the weed and you need the same man to happen to be a homeless italiano gift giver.

And what about the diamond perched on your joint?

Collective poem number 3

We come from gardens

We come from planty spaces

We come from a family, a mother, a vagina

We come from a place where people generously open the doors of their houses to strangers, we are the daughters and the sons, of the planet sun

We come from frictions

We come from a place where we can choose to stay or not

We come from a lot of memories

We come from places that are surrounded with mother nature

We come from far

We come from good and bad smells

We come from the places where mountains stand still

We come from roses and revolutions

We come from secrets, kept and told

We come from a lot of experiences

Theoretical inspiration solo autotopography - 16th of February

The experiment has been inspired by the reading of a book, called "Towards the city of thresholds" by Stavros Stavrides (2010). In the chapter "Traces and individuality", Stavrides reflect on two different types of individuals/systems, that are able to express their identity, in two different ways. The first one, what Stavrides call "the collector" inspired by Benjamin, is an individual who crystallizes the past, traces of its individuality and of its past, into objects. The collector basically owns things, trying to resist the loss of its individuality. As Stavrides writes: "Resisting this loss, the private individual builds a shelter for his individuality." In particular, Stavrides believes that objects present an illusion of individuality, a mythologized version of it.
To the figure of the collector, Stavrides points out the figure of the flaneur, which is a city wanderer, an active and passive observer at the same time, reaching to grab peaks of individuality through the lived experience of the public space. Stavrides writes: "Whereas the private individual collects in his private shelter traces of a studiously fabricated individuality, the flaneur searches for traces that will reveal individual trajectories in public space. (...) whereas the private individual dedicates the phantasmagorias of interior to a ‘monumental’ individuality that resists the transitoriness of modern life, the laneur discovers in the depth of this transitoriness traces of an ephemeral, anonymous – if this is not a contradiction in terms – individuality."

Here Stavrides refers to a specific figure who actually existed and it is connotated by the Parisian life, but it is interesting for me to reflect on how, starting from the concept of autotopography from Gonzalez, I was focusing on a probably specifically "bourgeouis" way of understanding identity through objects kept in private space.

In particular, the conceptualization of the figure of the flaneur, which wanders in the public space, grabbing glimpses of individuality, made me think that for connecting the space with autobiography, and in particular through a creative writing technique, people would have been helped by a wandering in the public space, rather then being helped by objects in which they immortalised their identity. As autobiograpy is a relational matter, as it deals with the ego, which is always relational, I play at the border with individual identity and collective identity.

I worked with the notion of the threshold, because it seemed relevant to explore this border between individual and collective identity. As cited in the text: "To experience the power of thresholds means to realize that nearness and distance are simultaneously activated in the dialectics of comparison: the separating action of thresholds diferentiates adjacent areas."
That is why my idea is to play in an activation of an urban threshold, to separate not only the everyday experience of the environment, but also to start separating the individual and collective identity arising. Again: "Thresholds create out of distances a nearness without which differences will never be able to constitute themselves as mutually “others”."

The texts that came out of my autotopograhy

On this threshold I recognise myself in:

- a pine tree crooked and full of pine cones, it reminds me of the bricks I used to break them with as a child

- the birdsong at sunset, they taste of something new

- a smell of smoke, like an industrial revolution in its early days

- the sounds of village bells in the flat countryside

- a ball that keeps bouncing like me

- this grey building with small windows where I would like to open more windows

- a lady who talks to herself

- the ground collapsing and holding me up

- the old age that terrifies me

- trees taller than houses, like nature that always wins

- someone who watches me not understanding why he watches me

- a bunch of keys jangling-what are keys for?

In this threshold I recognise us in:

- we want to control everything, from nature to humans

- the need to connect

- papier-mâché colours yellow and pink, a light attitude to the world

- the constant movement, the uninterrupted machines

- an upward tendency

- something moving among the trees waiting to blossom

- activating to look at itself

- a sense of change that is a sense of stasis

- that some trees have leaves in this season, and others do not, but do not seem to care

- that my back is still supported by earth, with a plastic net over it

Polytopography – Friday 21st of February

FORM: The experiment takes shape in the form of a collective performative encounter in the outdoor public space of Turin, in a workshop divided in three parts, namely:

- presentation and warm-up for the activity

- performative activity in groups in the public space

- collective sharing of the experience in a free spoken form

AIM: The aim of the experiment is to:

- better understand how the process of giving tasks to the participants work and what could be improved.

- understand how the different creative processes are producing different sensations around the relationship with our collective identity.

- give insights on what could be the best "gathering" practice to build together the collective identity of the group starting from the smaller groups.

AUDIENCE: This is a collective experiment, involving around 50 people, mainly activitists, attending a School of Politics focused on post-growth, in Italy, Turin.

DOCUMENTATION: Francesco Bignardi as a collaborator, has been asked to take video-documentation of the activity in different groups, and to record the sharing moment at the end of the activity.

SCRIPT: find the script the participants had on the right in a PDF form. The activity opened with me, explaining the activity to the audience. Afterwards, I propose two short activities of 3 - 4 minutes each, with the purpose of sharpening the senses of the participants.

1. Imagine you are a 360 degress tower that topographer are using to measure the space. Now slowly turn around yourself, covering a 360 degree circle, and name all of the things that you see, describing them.

2. Now close your eyes, and notice all the sounds that are around the room. Together with the sound, focus on what you feel inside yourself, trying to understand what you're feeling.

In the end of the activity, participants where asked to sit in the space where they felt more comfortable. Then, they were asked to share either texts produced during the activity, or any other reflections that came up for a specific task.

Solo autotopography reflections – Thursday 16th of February

The activity provided interesting reflections on task, specifically:

- Very different to write with the prompt "I come from..." rather than the "We come from...". The first one focuses on the very personal, while in the second I really started thinking in a collective way, but maybe doing it by myself made me fall into stereotypes or things we believe to be true collectively but they are not.

- The ritualistic aspect of the activity helps putting the mind in a different observational mood.

- Doing the activity alone made me feel observed even if there were not many people around, especially taking pictures.

- The more physical observation, once re-read, helps people figuring out which kind of space the activity is carried out in.

Critical Reflections on the experiment of Polytopography

I observed that there were several different places that were explored for the start of the activity. One difficulty for me to understand how the activity was going was that people spread out quite a bit (as expected), and so I wasn't fully aware of all the spaces in which people were performing. This would need to be thought in the future, in case I want to support them during the activity. People seemed to follow quite well the script, even though I had the sensation that the suggestion of following the activity more in silence was not taken into consideration that seriously. But clearly groups behave differently.

Things that I would need to take into consideration for the future will be:
- Consider and refine warm-up activity, as it was thought kind of last minute and I think I can come up with more specific activities that are relating better to the polytopographic encounter.

- Make the script simpler and more direct, trying to be more specific. I realised a little bit too late that the instructions could be maybe made clearer but I didn't have time anymore.

- Make clearer that people can/would need to consider more space around them. Most group when performing the actions were still very close to each other, and it didn't give the sensation of a stage (with one or two exceptions).
- Make clearer that they need to physically engage with the space when making measurement. A lot of people just watched objects and then described it.

- I realised the moment in which people come together again after being divided in smaller groups is much more important than I realised at the beginning. It is very important for me to understand how the decided the place but also the story they shared, to understand this connection between individual and collective identity.

- And MOST importantly, connected to this last point, I realised that the activity cannot end there. I think it would be important to develop and deploy a method with which I or they can work with the material that they produced in smaller groups to make it collective and make other people realise what happened in different groups.

Sharing session - Polytopography

We come from Mars and we go to explore the Earth.

We are from many places in the world and we are going to make a revolution. We come from a fucking shed on the outskirts of Turin and we are going to explore a flowerbed. We come from a scholastic, intellectualist culture and we are going to get out of our comfort zone.

We come from the centre of the beloved Earth, but in exploring the surface we got lost. And now we are heading for the drift or a new world, it is up to us to decide.

This base of a log, broken, reminds me of the time in the Alps when we prepared wood by chopping it with an axe to heat the house.

We come from concrete cubicles, suffocating. We are suffocated. Oxygen enters through small cracks, when we could open doors to let air in. We are going against walls.

This grate reminds me that the perception of safety is subjective.
This track in the concrete reminds me that life is a winding path.

These three damp patches remind me that grey is not uniform. These people talking through the window remind me that talking is good.

Shitty surveillance makes me claustrophobic. Big brother is watching you.

We come from the street, from the silver earth. We come from the hero who breaks into the car park, but if it is true that on the other side of the road is the flower point and that this is not the right flow, the right direction of the feathers, then we are going, we are going to the river.

These blades of grass coming out of the cracks in the concrete in this billboard remind me of Piazza Navona in Rome during the pandemic where the grass from the St. Pietrini's was able to show us when mankind and people take a little step back nature takes more space and takes a little step forward.

We come from noises that whiz by, lights that dazzle and speak of prices that plunder life and earth, life on earth, with ineffable, elusive, mocking speed.

But we are also a closed kiosk, a crouching foliage that quietly observes. We are going deep, like the roots of that tree, upwards, like its branches, like its sap towards the care of the essential or its rediscovery.
We come from the well to fetch water, we are going back to the well because we have poured out water.

We are coming from the sea, we are rising, we are going to the alps and falling.

A hesitant rider at the darting of cars, even if the traffic lights give him permission. We are coming from the fear of dangers, watchful explorers, dumbly absorbed in our prey, vulnerable because we are naked. We are on our way to aseptic empty rooms, no danger but pavements and sofas away from trouble.

We are coming from home, work, friends, bars, restaurants, shops, banks, supermarkets, offices, so close that we risk a collision, so far away that our gaze does not reach, we are going to unknown places, we are going from where we came.

I have a moment in which I felt very much a part of a public space, it was when I had to reach a critical Mass and I was late and so I had to reach her by following on Telegram the position in real time and at a certain point they were in front of me, they were arriving and so to reach them I would have had to go the wrong way up this giant avenue that is Prince Oddone which is in Turin and then the avenue that usually if you're on a bicycle you don't do it but on the other side of the avenue there is the bike path. Instead there was the good fortune that the critical mass was coming from the other side with the police in front who were stopping the traffic and so the whole avenue was free. And I was alone in the alleyway with my bicycle to reach this heap of colour, of lights, of music, and in a alleyway that I would never have thought of going down, I was going down it the wrong way, alone, in the middle of the road totally, and there I was not only truly empowered but also belonging, that is, the road is mine, I ride it all.

So, we measured that the column of the little park is ten hooks high placed vertically, or one me from the tip of my toes to the tip of my fingers. On the other hand, the round design, also in the little park, is as long as a child's jump.

We come from research, from difficult notions but the car dominates over everything uffa, but why the fuck are they honking, on a planet where the 600 is in pandan with its phone box, we are going towards the shoots of a second sixty-eight.

The telephone receiver was the exact size of our two hands put together.

The way the kids were playing football, not counting goals but counting how many tunnels they had made between them, gave them an eight out of ten on the scale of style you can have playing sports.

At first I was convinced it wasn't a car park because it was too small, so we could stay there, and every so often a car would drive by and ask us if we were leaving and what we were doing there. And by then I had decided that that wasn't a car park, and so to everyone, even a bit brusquely, I would say: that's not a car park. Until then, boh, in a moment towards the end I was caught by a kind of enlightenment and I realised that actually that was a car park, there were cars there, which we had been occupying the whole time and no cars had parked there. So there are still a lot of motorists looking for parking. But a mini-parking lot, which is usually a car park, was ours for an hour and nobody came near it.

We are coming from car parking, we are going to a world where car parking doesn't exist, because the car doesn't exist, let alone the Porsche.

A column between buildings is three and a half twerks long, and the window grille is as long as an ‘aserehe, eh eh eh!

Documentation - Polytopography

This time I managed to recollect all the observation from the activity.

UNITS from the imaginary measuring of the space.

- this tag is as volatile as enamourament

- this house is as empty as the houses in Lutzeratwhen we arrived

- this layer of stucco is as deep as the shaved part of my pencil

- plant pot would fit 13/4 heads of mine

- this hallway might fit all my spanish vocabulary

- the pidgeon's body might fit 1/80 of the kindness I feel for lovers

- the big black car is about the size of the feeling of heaviness

- behind this closed door anything and nothing fits

- the way this man walks fits many men I've seen walking

- this piece of bread can be eaten in a week from 1073 ants

- these holes in this net are the size of how much love my heart can take before exploding

- this flower pots are as big as my balls when I have had enough

- this motor plate is as yellow as mustard

- these roof tiles are the colour of which I imagine hell is painted of.

- the missing brick is as long as my forearm

- the style of the elf is 50% solarpunk

What this element of the space reminds me of

- the graffiti (es oficial estem enamorados -it's official, we're in love) reminds me of the non official relationships I have had in my life.

- the pidgeon crossing the road could be a friend of my friend the pidgeon lady of Montjuic

- the syrian restaurant at the end of the road reminds me of my aunt martine and her syrian husband smoking cigarettes in her tiny kitchen calling Islamic c'est a mitraillette (?)

- this closed door reminds me of that time when I jumped on an elevator and it stopped and I was very scared and I was there trapped for a while

- this bakery reminds me of that time I ate arancini in Sicily as a snack

- These 2 people passing from the streets reminds me of then I used to go to school by bike with my best friend

- the movements of leaves in the wind reminds me of many lsd trips

- the acacia trees remind me of the moment in Leipzig with orlando when we looked at similar trees.

- the blue of the shopsign reminds me of the top I bought in Sri Lanka and gifted to Sahar today

- the pidgeons remind me of when I got shat on by one on my first trip to London and then went to Abercrombie and Fitch

- this tree reminds me of the taste of tamarind rice

- the red car reminds me of my elementary schoolmate Fabio Moras

Task of the poem

-the holes un these brickes were punched in by an angry angineer. the squatters got inspired by them and broke the male (?) to cut the lock. The municipality evicted them after 2,5 days. They subsequently emigrated to the canaries and currently live in a cave

-the peugeot boxer has been painted black

like my hair in 2023

the windows are covered up and

there is on fire on its dashboard

pidgeon have pooped on its root

leaving white specks on its

covered up windows

what's inside

remains a mistery like the geometrical

3d shapes on this piece of paper

-we come from volcano dust

pidgeons are cousins of dinosaurs

inhabiting cities like

forgotten ancestors

living of breadcrumbs

we are going to dust again

What is missing in the streets

-the space is missing an outlet for the grief and streets
it has accumulated for all the violence that was done to it.

-the sun is missing in the streets

Polytopography – Tuesday 8th of April

FORM: The experiment takes shape in the form of a collective performative encounter in the outdoor public space of Barcelona.

AIM: The aim of the experiment is to:

- better understand to integrate the concept of biography in the task

- understand how the collective poem can be created out of the activity

- understanding better the relationship between individual and collective biography

AUDIENCE: This is a collective experiment, involving 35 people who are students in the Masters Political Ecology and Environmental Justice at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

DOCUMENTATION: I took videos and pictures together with a friend, Moritz.

SCRIPT: The participants were given the script of the activity on a printed paper. (see on the right the full script)

Polytopography – Tuesday 18th of March

FORM: The experiment takes shape in the form of a collective performative encounter in the outdoor public space of Barcelona.

AIM: The aim of the experiment is to:

- better understand how the process of giving tasks to the participants work and what could be improved.

- understand how the different creative processes are producing different sensations around the relationship with our collective identity.

- give insights on what could be the best "gathering" practice to build together the collective identity of the group starting from the smaller groups.

AUDIENCE: This is a collective experiment, involving 5 people of the artistic collective of whom I am part called Arraiga.

DOCUMENTATION: A person of the collective, not being able to attend the whole experiment, is taking videos and pictures.

SCRIPT: I read the script of the activity to the participants from my phone. 

Reflections on the experiment - Fragmented walk.

Thursday, October 24, I went to the gym session with Nuria. Nuria recently moved to Barcelona, but she’s half Spanish and speaks Spanish very well. She came at my invitation to help document the walk around the neighborhood.
The ladies in the gym welcomed her warmly and enthusiastically. After the session, I called for their attention with a brief monologue:

Hello! I am a historian of the future. Do you know what a historian of the future is? Basically, I study what will happen in the future, even though no one knows yet. I don’t even know the future, but I try to study it starting from the present. Today I’ve come here to Montbau because I want to study the future of Montbau. According to my research, it will become a place of vital importance for Barcelona. In what way? I don’t know. To study the future, you have to connect with the past from the present. Quite a puzzle, right? That’s why I came to see you all—because you are the past, present, and future. Quite a responsibility, huh? I should warn you that I don’t study facts but stories. I am convinced that stories are what shape our future. After all, what do we call the past? History! Stories are important. So today, I’d like to ask you to tell me everything through stories, moments that come spontaneously to mind. And it doesn’t matter if they’re true! We all know that each time we tell something, consciously or unconsciously, we add details that weren’t there, words left unsaid, things that never happened. And that’s okay! So I’d like to ask you to take me to those places that are full of your stories, your memories, your experiences. And then tell them to me! Or share them in pairs, in groups of three, or four.

The objective of the monologue was to capture their attention, pique their interest in participating in the activity, and at the same time emphasize that I was more interested in their personal stories related to the neighborhood than in any actual historical data about it.

After the monologue, four out of the fifteen people decided to stay, while some opted to join another day. Some pointed out that they don’t live in the neighborhood.
Nuria had brought a high-quality recorder, and we tried to capture everything they said. Initially, I asked them to take me to the place that they considered most significant in their lives in the neighborhood. Although I had requested them to show us the location before sharing stories, some began talking immediately. As we started walking, they tended to speak all at once, discussing the various buildings and when they were constructed. There was a lot of emphasis on letting us know what came before and after. Two of them have spent their entire lives since their twenties in the same building.

It’s hard to ask questions or guide them in discussions. They tend to talk over each other without necessarily following a narrative thread, but rather a chronology: “This was here first, then that, those were for law enforcement…”

Their names are Encarna, Fina, and Isabel. Another lady decided to leave us shortly after we started the walk because she had somewhere to be at noon and, despite using a cane to walk, felt we were going too slowly for her.

Sometimes the stories split into two parts; two talk together, one speaks to me and Nuria. Or one talks to me, another to Nuria, and another walks alone.

At times, memories and images surface, like the moment Encarna points to the path she took to walk her daughter to school, saying there used to be pine trees there, and a man would often appear, doing a certain thing—then she mimics a man opening his raincoat to reveal his naked body. I’m quite shocked and ask, “Naked?” She says yes but doesn’t seem to want to elaborate when I ask if anyone in the neighborhood knew him.

Other stories emerge, like one about an old man who owned all the land where the hospital now stands. Apparently, after selling it, his partner ran off to America with all the money, leaving him with nothing, not even his house. He then began living in a storage room in the hospital and ate leftovers from the hospital’s cafeteria.

Then they tell us about the petanque field, which they built in the sixties. Encarna recounts how the men took care of building the seating steps, while the women decorated them with ceramic pieces, gathering there in the afternoons to work. Encarna still plays petanque on the same field today.

Another neighborhood story is about a retired firefighter. From the time he stopped working, he began building a sort of stone garden, collecting stones that all the locals brought him. Fina even remembers bringing some from Alicante. Encarna and Fina say he would stay there all day, and sometimes others helped him. The town council decided to take care of the garden after he died, and now there’s a small inscription bearing his name.

Shortly after showing us the garden, Isabel leaves, and Encarna and Fina start arguing about the position of a fountain. They can’t agree. Encarna secretly taps her temple, seemingly implying, “She’s crazy.” But Fina is adamant, wanting to go up and see. It seems important: both want us to believe them—their version of the story must be the correct one. What if they’re both right? What if there is no right version? What are they remembering?

We need to return “down” from the mountain. Encarna bids us goodbye after showing us a park that used to be a dumping ground where people would throw anything they wanted. Now it’s a well-kept garden with a new fountain. Encarna tells us that it used to be a place where all the women gathered to talk. Now it’s empty.

On the way back, Fina shows us some galleries, saying they used to be bustling with activity; there was even a perfume shop. Now, only the cobbler and a butcher remain.

Fina invites us to her house. I hesitate—is it appropriate? But I see in her eyes the hope for a bit of company. So Nuria and I accept. Fina shows us the garden in front of her house, where she planted some now-large plants. She used to take care of them with a friend, but now she can’t anymore, and it’s all dirty because the council says it belongs to the building she lives in. She takes us upstairs and shows us her home. It’s very clean. It’s the same house where she’s lived her entire life in Barcelona. She shows us a picture of her husband, says he was very intelligent, and shows us his chess trophies. There’s no nostalgia in her tone. In fact, Fina always seems to have a pleasant smile on her face, laughing discreetly. She shows us a Christ figure hanging in her room, a gift from a man without legs when she worked at the hospital. She also shows us the book with her father’s name, whom she never knew, killed during the war. She offers us a drink and then asks if we’d like to have lunch together another day, her treat. We say goodbye, and she walks us to the elevator. Before we go, she tells us that we’re doing very important work, even though she hadn’t quite remembered what kind of work it was just a moment earlier. She thanks us and then adds, “I’m sad because none of the people who used to be on my floor are left.” She begins listing their names. At 91, she’s the last one left. We smile at her and say we’ll return.

From a research perspective, I’m not sure how effective this activity was. Certainly, my main question didn’t come up as a priority. But in general, it’s very difficult to control and guide the stream of consciousness of these people. Sometimes they think they’re responding to what interests me, even if it isn’t. Sometimes I feel extractive, thinking I need to steer the conversation toward what I want… But does what they want to share not matter? The truth is that my research question, my theme, is probably not yet refined enough.

And after the first experiment, more reflections came, triggered by the experiments itself and by the theoretical readings... the last reflections before the third turn of the research.

29th of October - Reflections on the project and new assignment.

The mythological turn.

Yesterday I was reading more in depth about oral history in the Oxford Handbook of oral History, and I found fascinating and inspiring how memory, the recollection and sharing of our experiences, is far from being just a retrieval of information in a very practical way, but it is an intricated process that is more similar to storytelling, and specifically how we generally (often unconsciously) focus on narratives of ourselves that we find coherent with who we are. In this sense, the process of remembering, even by ourselves, has to deal with the ongoing formation of our identity. Memory and identity are thus strictly interconnected.

Another interesting suggestion from the reading is that of the concept of collective memory, and how the term has come to mean too many different things, and that there is a reductionist approach to say that we make sense of our individual memory only thanks to the collective memories and the social and cultural framework that we filter ourselves from.

So more research need to be done from my side to actually understand what kind of collective memory I am referring to.

Activity must contain:

FORM (Is it a performance? Is it a participatory approach? Is it a workshop?)
LOCATION

WHO IS THERE

AIM of the experiment - to which one of your research questions does it relate to?

Hypothesis for the experiment (could be coupled with aim)

SCRIPT with materials, actions...

DOCUMENTATION

Realistic agenda of what needs to be done in advance

Reflections after Bootcamp #1

Provisional title:
Performing oral herstories: contextualising Montbau through memories of elderly women

I have been reflecting on the title, also with Danae. It seems like I might have to take a decision in between the concept of memory and the concept of oral history. Oral history is defined as follows:

Oral history is a technique for generating and preserving original, historically interesting information – primary source material – from personal recollections through planned recorded interviews.

While memory, more complicatedly, it is both:
the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information, and something remembered from the past.

While speaking with Danae seemed that oral history and memory are "incompatible" as fields of research, or that I would have need to choose, (and it might still be the case) I continue to investigate on the main differences with memory and oral history, finding this interesting paragraph in "The Oxford Handbook of Oral History".

October 24th - a collective walk experiment

After the first bootcamp, especially after Danae's artistic research workshop I understood that I needed to focus my research. I am going to then leave here some reflections that sprang after the first bootcamp on the relationship between oral history and memory, and the overall framework of the project.

There are also more reflections from care practices, as well as the first collective experiment of the research, a memory walk through the neighbourhood with the elderly ladies.

Reflections from the space - 17th of October - Gymnastics with the ladies

I arrive 5 minutes earlier. Some part of the group is already there. I have been missing for two weeks, and I see a new face. I can feel I have been missing. I meet Joana, who is talking to another friend about her daughter, who has cancer at the moment. I speak with her, ask her how she's doing. She's tired, her daughter is not feeling well cause she is undergoing chemiotherapy. She tells me her daughter would like her to not go to gymnastics and stay with her instead, but Joana doesn't want to go. She's tired. It makes me reflect on caring, how carers also need care: she's already cooking for her, and going to her house, in this neighbourhood which has lots of ups and downs, it is not easy for her. How can we care for the carers?

The group alternates themes of conversations. Speaking of cats and dogs, I perceive my view of temporality in such a different way. Elisabeth says, yes, at our age, we can't take dogs. They live 10, 12 years, and we don't know how much we will live. Do you know what they do with dogs when we die? I never thought about dogs in that way. They speak, again, about death, in a very practical, rooted way. For them death is a reality, more than a concept or something to fear. They seem much more conscious about their life stage than I am.

Then Elisabeth takes out a book, called "Unforgettable Songs", and hands it to Maria, who provides facilitation and guidance for the group. Marìa starts to sing some songs, and some other people join, they have fun, they sing together like a little choir. I admire their playfulness, their easiness in alternating speaking about death, and finding joy in a playful singing together. Is this key to approach life and death?

We begin gymnastics, somebody again is asking me where are my friends. If they are going to come. Unfortunately not, I reply. They don't seem sad, it's more curiosity about what I am doing.

While we do exercise, I noticed there are quite some new movements. Carmen confirms: Marìa added new exercises. And I can notice. Right now they I was able to follow almost all the routine by heart, things are changing. And they are changing for everybody, and it makes me think about renewal, autumn, and how we think as being old as something very static, when in fact you can notice changes in a much more powerful way when you are rooted in some sort of routine.

Encarna tells me she also has been in the Netherlands previously. it was really intense and she really liked it but when I suggest she could go back and maybe take more break times, she is saying that probably now she couldn't do it anymore. "Remember, I am 87, I am not a baby anymore".In between taking pride of her age and the acceptance of it.

We finish everything with a song I have never heard before: "from Santurce to Bilbao". I am sad I can't sing with them, but I still try somehow. We are holding hands in circle, and walking like children do in kindergarten.

Speaking with Encarna, I understand it is best if the walk for the neighbourhood would be organized right after gymnastics. So I plan to tell them on the gymnastics session of Tuesday that, whoever wants, can stay for having a walk in the neighbourhood.

..the most precious information may lie in what the informants hide, and in the fact they do hide it, rather than in what they tell.

Portelli (1998 p. 69)

Monologue writing experiment

To engage with facilitation in the exploration of the concept of Polytopography, that is the exploration of people's identities to space, I came to want to create a character that I could impersonate to guide the process of the audience into the activity itself.

To start creating the character, I took inspiration from Heddon's article Autotopography: Graffiti, Landscapes, and Selves (2022), where she gives the most practical and direct example of autotopography, which is to write a graffiti on a wall. In this specific example, you are writing down/confirming your identity, in a physical way, in relation to a physical space.

From this I started imagining a graffiti artist, a character that instead of using paint to write sentences on the walls, engage in observing and doing activity in the space, to make a lived place a their identity. In particular what the character does is inviting a constellation of people to write themselves in the space and be written in the space by a series of activities.

This is the result of my writing:

Deliziosi commensali,

Mi presento arrivato qua,

benvenute e benvenutu,

al nostro grande varietà.

Un bel modo di iniziare

Ho detto mi presento

Non c’è da preoccuparsi

Datemi solo un momento

Mi chiamo Oscar stasera per voi

E non indovinerete

Neanche i più astuti

La mia professione

Non siate abbattuti

Io sono un graffitaro

Dall’aspetto non statisticamente plausibile

Un graffitaro di sorta

Che mi rende più appetibile

Alle orecchie di chi mia chiama

Perché non uso colori indelebili

Non uso molti colori in generale

Lavoro con materie flebili

Io scrivo sui muri

di questi palazzi

Ma anche soffitti

Pavimenti, spiazzi

Che cosa lascio cambia ogni volta

Mi lascio sorprendere

Dalla mia intuizione

Chi vivrà, vedrà,

magari una canzone.

Sento il bisogno di lasciarmi

imbrattare dallo spazio

il bisogno di lasciarmi

inzuppare dai posti

dare pausa al mio strazio

Stampare le mie membra nei luoghi

Trovare la saggezza delle piastrelle

Far cadere la mia testa nei lampadari

Non pensiate che mi droghi

Guardare nell’orizzonte di un tavolo

Così mi smollo anche io,

mi sciolgo nel moccio che pulisce il pavimento

scrosto una sfumatura di bianco dalle pareti

inalo il trentasette percento di umidità

nell’angolo sinistro del terzo cesso da destra.

Cerco materiale concreto

L’unicità della crepata

La scartavetrata trave esposta

Particolare della finestra rotonda

E’ solo così che riesco a vedere

Che questo luogo in realtà

Ha dentro tutti i posti da cui vengo

E tutti i posti da cui vengo hanno dentro

Questo luogo.

Stasera vi invito a stamparvi

In questo luogo

Che nulla ha di speciale

Se non per il fatto di essere unico

Come tutti i luoghi

Creiamo passiamo da uno spazio

Ad un posto

Abitiamolo

Per abitare noi stessi

E soprattutto per abitare gli altri.

In un’ora vedremo un panorama collettivo

In un’ora vedremo una urgenza collettiva

In un’ora saremo di nuovo carne

Per ora facciamoci spazio

Translation:

Delicious guests,
I introduce myself here,
welcome and welcome
to our great Varietá.

A nice way to start
I said introduce myself
No need to worry
Just give me a moment

My name is Oscar tonight
And you won't guess
Not even the most astute
My profession
Don't be downcast

I am a graffiti artist
Not statistically plausible looking
A graffiti artist of sorts
Which makes me more palatable

To the ears of my callers
Because I don't use indelible colours
I don't use many colours in general
I work with faint materials

I write on the walls
of these buildings
But also ceilings
floors, clearings

What I leave changes every time
I let myself be surprised
By my intuition
Who will live, will see
maybe a song.

I feel the need to let myself
to be soiled by space
the need to let myself
soak up the places
give pause to my torment

To print my limbs in places
Finding the wisdom of tiles
Dropping my head in the chandeliers
Don't think I'm on drugs

Looking into the horizon of a table

So I melt too
I melt into the snot that wipes the floor
I peel a shade of white off the walls
I inhale thirty-seven per cent humidity
in the left corner of the third loo from the right.

I look for concrete material
The uniqueness of the cracked
The exposed beam
Detail of the round window

It is only in this way that I can see
That this place actually
Has inside all the places I come from
And all the places I come from have inside
This place.

Tonight I invite you
In this place
Which has nothing special
Except that it is unique
Like all places

We create we go from a space
To a place
We inhabit it
To inhabit ourselves
And above all to inhabit others.

In an hour we will see a collective panorama
In an hour we will see a collective urgency
In an hour we will be flesh again

For now let us make space

What remained of that process was actually the willingness of staying with them, with this group of elderly women, to be in touch, for once, with a stable community of people who were very different from the people that we were and are used to spend time with. Slowly, over a process that was not even that I long, I started perceiving the importance of being in touch with those lives, and maybe part of the reason behind it. I will share now, what I have written now almost three months ago, back in September... A motivation, a worry that has been pushing me to go on with this project in a different form.

Reflections from the space - 19th of September 2024 - Gymnastics with the ladies

I arrived at the space, and find the group of elderly ladies already there, chatting with good humour. As soon as they see me they erupt in a “ohhhh” that makes me feel very welcome, they are surprised I am there and it seems they are happy to see me after the holidays. The start speaking a bit about our performative reading of the ethnographic script we performed in May, and they ask when are we going to do it again, because some of them couldn’t be present the first time. I haven’t considered that, and now that the group is separated, I realise it is going to be difficult to gather again to do it. But in a way we owe it to them, even if it is not the finished product of the residency. Then they start getting excited about the new baciata classes that are going to start soon in Sala Polivalente, and some of them want to go. I might consider starting to go, as a way of spending more time with them, as a way of living the moving archive fo their body. We then start gymnastics, and this time I am alone with them. It is a strange feeling to come back, and not being with the group. I am also wondering what they are thinking, these people coming and going, not being really there. Someone finds a job, another interniship and they are just gone and not in the project anymore, and how wonder how they feel about this inconsistency of the people that approached them in the first place.
After five minutes, another person joins gymnastics, and she is welcomed with a lot of warmth, even when continuing doing the exercises. I suppose, from the way her head is covered, and from the sentences addressed to her, that she might have been just recovering from a cancer treatment. This makes me notice that some people are missing, and I am realizing I am scared about asking about them. I do feel a tension, exploring the vulnerability and the normalization there is at a certain age about death and sicknesses. After a while also Sofia arrives, the only other person in the group that sticked to the project. I am glad she is there.
I find the movement in the gymnastics revealing of a simplicity and yet precision that really reminds me of an older age. I will experiment with these movements later in the day.
The first exercise is to move your hands on your face to remove wrinkles. The facilitator throw jokes at me: “ You don’t have wrinkles!”. “Well, I start having them, I turned 30 this year…”. “We have two times 30 years, some of us even…” But she doesn’t go that far to say three times.
A new person in the gymnastic group is puzzled about my presence: “ I thought this group was just for females! I am talking with Encarna in that moment, that is telling me about her holidays in the Pyrenees, and so I can’t really hear what they are saying about it, but Maria, the facilitator, she is telling her that they allow me to be there. I am honestly surprised because nobody ever told me it was a female-only group, and this sparks feeling of insecurity in me, together with a vague pain of thinking that I don’t even identify as a male, but I for sure do present myself as one. But in fact, until now, I never felt my presence aroused insecurities in the group.
Mid-way through the session two people start staring from the open door on the outside. It seems they might be from Japan. I will discover that one is the daughter and the other one the mum. We have spectators” people joke. The older lady would like to join but Maria is kind of protective of the group, and so she decides she is going to have to register and stuff before joining today.
The group always finish with singing a children song in circle. It makes me reflect on the connection between being children and being very old, how sometimes we as a society treats them in similar ways. I reckon this is the song we sang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3fwzYUn27Y
When we finish, I speak with Carmen, the former butcher-shop owner, who asks me when are we going to go for walks int he neighborhood, as I proposed when we did the performative reading. I am pleasantly surprised that she remembers this, and even if I didn’t confirm a specific date, I said I would have been in touch to organize that. Probably next week would already be a good day as after I am leaving to go to Tilburg for the Masters. I forgot to ask her phone, so I need to ask Maria about that.
I ask Fina about a missing person, Paca. She tells me that she has been ill the whole summer and she also has been in the hospital. She is now 35 kg according to Encarna. She has a carer staying with her 24 hours, as she doesn’t have family here. I ask Fina, who lives in the same building, to bring her my greetings and to ask her if she would like us to visit her. I also come to know that Joana, who has also been interviewed by us, is not coming these days as she is caring for her daughter, who now has lung cancer. In addition to this, she still goes to visit her son with Down syndrome several days per week, as usual. I am again puzzled by the fragility of life, that is kind of normalized in these environments. I feel so much life coming from these ladies… I feel life is springing in the places it is most fragile.
Later in the day I speak with Sofia to understand her intentions about the project, now that it is just the two of us left in the group. She will keep me updated, but she wants to continue, and learn, and create, but also understand her role in the project and what is her exact intention with continuing with it, now that for me it is also a Master project.
When she leaves, I start experimenting with my body in the space, playing with movements from the gymnastics session. I think Studying and repeating the movements is helping me getting closer to the group and to explore the semantics of these movements. Instead of repeating them ten times as it is usual in the session, I mix them up, seeing them as a dance rather then exercises. I attached a little video exploration of this.
Some reflections that came to my mind while dancing: I don’t want to focus just on what these people have lived, as if they were gone already, but also focus on all the life that they are living now, and how important their presence is, and what activities they are doing. It is not just an exploration of the past, but also of the present, and how they impact the present with their past. How they care for their families, for the neighborhood, they volunteer to cook, they gather together…
I speak with Ana, who is in charge of the residency program, to explain her that this project is going to be the project for my Masters, and that we are planning to work on the exhibition and also on an archive. She says she is happy to prolong the residency until June, for every Thursday all the day. They are supportive of the project, and this makes me feel empowered to go on, because I need all the help I can gather because the project is, in fact, a collective one. Marina also tells me they just proposed to a nearby teenager school to build little models of the neighborhood based on interviews with people, and on what people wonder important in the map. We think there could be space for further collaborations with that.
For now I leave it here, I will need to think about how to structure the walk, about writing a presentation of the project for the ladies, and to create an informed consent form for them, as they are collaborating to this research. I am still unsure in what ways they would like to be involved in the performative pills. It’s to be understood and seen with them.

So, the focus I had before the first October bootcamp in Tilburg, was on a more preservative focus of the stories of the neighbourhood in which the elderly ladies lived. On top of that, I was starting to be mostly interested in  how can the "true" nature of memory be performed. By that time, through the reading of an article from Nicholson called "The Performance of Memory: Drama, Reminiscence and Autobiography" I understood that memory is not that rational, factual, linear function that we feel like can rely on living our lives. But rather a storytelling device, something we use for bringing on a personal narrative, something that is usual fragmented, and as Verma's citation suggests at the beginning, is not uncommonly mixed with imaginative elements.

That is why I, firstly, continued cultivating what I called care practices with the group of elderly ladies, which meant not only being consistent with my presence attending their gymnastics sessions, but also being present and contributing to their neighbourhood life, attending events and giving space and talking to them. And secondly, I started experimenting with my body to see what role physicality could play in the perfomance of memory, as well as reflecting on how the ladies shared stories, and the prevailing themes of their conversations.

Period 1

September to December 2024

 Polytopography - performative experiment in Barcelona with students of the Masters in Political Ecology - part 2

The background of the project

 Polytopography - performative experiment in Barcelona with students of the Masters in Political Ecology

Pictures from the encounter - the altar, ladies interacting with objects, storytelling, weaving objects together

The change in the project outline and questions - a reflection.

After the initial meeting with Danae, I was confronted with some questions that I hadn't been analysing properly, maybe because of an utilitaristic perspective they were uncomfortable to actually ask. For example, since my question seemed more concerned with the performativity of memory and its interaction with the public space, questions that arouse were:

Why am I focusing just on the elderly?

Which of course, it did make sense because of my easy access to the elderly women community of the centre, but from my interest and motivation perspective, it didn't make necessarily so much sense to only limit myself to the older age.

And again: Why only Montbau? And it can't be because it is easy. So, since I don't have a specific interest in the neighbourhood of Montbau, and I don't live there either, I had to come to terms that the decision regarding the framework of the project had been dictated by an easy accessibility to the environment in which to carry out my experiments.

That said, my first interest when starting the project was not only how to not lose important memories (regarded from an individual perspective, and not losing as to make them collective), but also how we can collectively learn and imagine new futures from people's life stories.

In this sense, I started getting more and more into memory studies term, to finally encounter a term that hasn't been studied in depth, and that it seemed to be fitting the interest of my research, which is autotopography.

My effort will therefore be of transforming autotopography into an artistic practice that can inform the creation of one or more performances that can help envisioning new futures starting from material memories.

Online call with professor Deirdre Heddon

Call with professor Heddon, scholar who gave another meaning to the term of autotopography was illuminating. She eagerly gave me her own explanation of the term, and stated that the term hadn't been work that much artistically before, being a more "academic" term in a way.

She mentioned a project that was the closest that went into an artistic autotopographic direction, that is the One Square Foot project, where some artists designed steps to be followed to create material for a site-specific performance, to be followed by other people: professor Heddon participated as a creator in such a project.

Online call with Stavros Efkolidis, Greek topographer and actor

Stavros is a friend of Danae, my supervisor, who suggested I speak with him to better understand topography and its connection to performance. We met online on December 9th.

Note: The interview was conducted in English, which is neither of our native languages. Additionally, it was not recorded, so the reflections below are based on my understanding of our discussion. Any misinterpretations are my responsibility, and the opinions expressed here are my own takeaways from the conversation.

Stavros has been working as both an actor and a topographer from the beginning of his career, sometimes working more as an actor, sometimes more as a topographer. He said he is very interested in what I am doing because his whole life has been focused on trying to show himself as “pure” in the fields he is working in. In theatre, artistic people usually think you need to dedicate yourself fully to art, without distractions. On the other hand, if you are working as a topographer and people know you also work as an actor, they might think you are not good enough as a topographer or that you are not serious. When I presented him with a concept that tried to engage both sides of his life, he seemed quite happy to discuss it.

What follows are some reflections on topography and the artistic connection it can create, based on Stavros’ conversation.

Topography’s main subject is geometry. It is about putting on paper what you see outside. For example, Google Maps are created by topographers. But you can also work on maps for a single space, such as a parking lot. Topography also deals with and helps in the planning of spaces: for example, determining where a football field is or where a guesthouse will be located.

It also requires knowing the rules of each place. You can’t build everywhere. How big should a building be? Everything is mapped on paper, including the written rules.

Stavros said he studied a bit about autotopography before our meeting. This brought to his mind the schoolyard during breaks, where children sit in specific areas. For six years, he always went to the same one or two places. This meant something to him. Even today, he says he prefers the back-left part of a room. In every school he attended, he would sit in the back corner. Everywhere you sit has a meaning. There is a “topography” of the classroom: in the first row, the quieter students, etc.

Topography also deals with new buildings and how they influence life around them. For example, a new building brings more people and more cars, changing the flow of the city.

Of course, people are tied to places. As you get older, Stavros says, you become more romantic. Your points of reference stay the same: in your mind, it doesn’t matter that some shops have closed or that an old house has been dismantled. Those places are still part of you and your mind.

The narration of a place becomes more emotional as time passes. Stavros said he now understands why there are paragraphs describing spaces in books. When he was younger, he found them boring, but now he sees that they contain more than just descriptions of spaces—they include descriptions of internal feelings and mental spaces.

I asked Stavros about the connections, in his opinion, between theatre and topography. He first shared a memory. In high school, they had to do an exercise where everyone went on stage and found a spot where they could be seen by everyone. The teacher told him he was very good at this. He also mentioned that the scenographer is a kind of in-between: part architect, part topographer, and part painter. In general, he pointed out that theatre is all about deciding what to place and where to place it on the stage.

Topography is similar. Sometimes you need a plan that shows the placement of trees; other times, a plan with traffic lights. Maps often combine different layers of information.

Stavros went on to say that the subject of topography is land, which can get personal for people. The connection people have with their land reveals their character. Every time he talks to someone, he comes back with a little play, a small dramaturgy, because the people he speaks to always start with a story. He said he sometimes feels like a psychologist. Some people like to share their land, while others don’t. He noted that reactions would likely vary in different places if someone were to find three African refugees on their land.

Everyone has patterns: like Stavros’ habit in the classroom. The same thing happens in a square. He also said that not just the space you occupy is important but also the path you take. This shapes who you are. A fascinating reflection he shared was imagining yourself doing the same things you do now but in a bigger city or a smaller flat—you would be a different person. He concluded: “Stavros in a different place is a different person.”

I then asked about the instruments a topographer uses. The first instrument he described is a total station (or what used to be a theodolite), which measures angles, distances, and height differences. It creates several points that are then connected to make a plan. Another instrument is a livella connected to GPS. Lastly, in modern times, drones and airplanes are often used to take pictures, which are then stitched together to create a bigger picture, like Google Earth.

I asked if they worked with materials. He said they do a bit, identifying the percentage of different types of ground and measuring how deep or shallow waters are. But in general, topographers are accompanied by geologists for these tasks.

When I asked about imagination, he shared a memory from theatre school. Someone from the Actors Studio asked him to perform a monologue from Julius Caesar. The teacher then asked what he imagined during the monologue. Stavros instinctively described to whom he was speaking and where those people were around him. It came naturally to him to imagine the space while performing.

This conversation with Stavros unlocked several thoughts and inspirations for future experiments. I want to reflect more on imagination in space itself, as Stavros did with the monologue. I’d like to experiment with guided movement in space, creating different paths that lead to different versions of ourselves. I’ve already started incorporating technical inspirations from topography. For example, in individual autotopography, I placed myself in the center of a space and observed with a 360-degree view. This discussion also makes me think about how familiarity with a space—whether it’s deeply known or newly encountered—affects identity and can influence the activities designed for those engaging with the space.

 Polytopography - performative experiment in Barcelona with members of the Arraiga collective

Solo autotopography – Thursday 16th of February

FORM: The experiment takes shape in the form of a creative walking, and creative poetry writing on identity.

AIM: The aim of the experiment is to better understand how to create task for collective exploration of the space and on how to connect individual with collective identity.

AUDIENCE: This is a solo experiment.

DOCUMENTATION: During the activity, I write down in a creative form what the prompts suggest me.

SCRIPT: I choose to derive in the space, walking until a find a place that I identify as liminal, something that suggests me the concept of a threshold. A place that has the potentiality of alteriting the way I see the space around me. I will then perform a ritual with the space I identified. The objective is to reverbate with the space in a way that I both get in touch with it, and it reverberates giving me a sensation of having unblocked the way I look around: the objective is for me to create a steage around that space.

- To beat my hands on the entrance of the threshold for twenty times (for physical touch with the space

- To sing a song in the wormhole of the threshold (for sonic reverberance)

Once opened the portal:

- I close my eyes for one minute, brething into the journey through the threshold.

- When I reopen my eyes, I imagine I am looking at a stage. I observe what is going on on this stage, and I write on the notebook every time:
"At this threshold, I recognize myself in..."

- After writing for 5 minutes, I can decide to carry out 3 actions in the stage, and then return to the threshold.

- After returning to the threshold, I take 5 minutes to write
"At this threshold, I recognize ourselves in..."

- After this, I perfom another ritual to reopen the portal, stay one minute with my eyes closed, and then leave and go back.

Solo autotopography – Thursday ^12th of December

FORM: The experiment takes shape in the form of a reflective description and exploration of a space.

AIM: The aim of the experiment is to better understand from a personal perspective how images and memories that arise from the space are connected to the description of the space.

AUDIENCE: This is a solo experiment.

DOCUMENTATION: During the activity, I record on my phone my observation and my mental images.

SCRIPT: I decided to go in the four different corners of the space, and focus on the image that I could see from there, and connect a mental image/event to every corner, to then finally going to the center of the space, and, as if I was a 360 degrees camera, describing all the things that I could see while turning, and then finally describing the final images that came to my mind when thinking about a future for that specific space.

A picture from the experiment

  Reimagining public space through performative encounters of autotopography

Camp Petanca, lower corner, left. From here you can clearly see the stairs, the three steps with mosaics that I know were made by the women of Montbau when the camp was founded in 1967. The first thing that comes to my mind, even before the observations, is to see how the space is different from when we came to do the collective autotopography.

Then from here I recognise very well the mountain standing there outside the space. Interesting how I can focus more on what's out there in space than what's in it. If it were on a map there would be various levels of altitude and you can see how the stand defines another level of space.

And I see the blankets that are under the canopy, which at this moment is very useful for shelter from the rain. I see four benches outside the confines of the petanca field and I think of burnt wood, mountains, I think of Marradi, this place where friends have a home, I think of kissing one night on my 18th birthday where I kissed three different people on the same night apart from the one I really wanted to kiss

 Polytopography - performative experiment at the School of Politics in Italy

  First phase: the ethnographic / nature of memory focus

Welcome to my Masters documentation process. Before continuing reading, as I have been delving more and more into memory and storytelling, I would like you to read and briefly reflect on these two citations. Even though they were just notes to myself to continue the study, I believe they prove to be very actual when starting the read this documentation... After all, am I not telling a story? After all, am I not sharing memories?

  Third phase: the discovery of autotopography

  Second phase: the focus on the neighbourhood oral history

The project before the Master thesis started in January 2024, when I gathered a group of people (students and young professionals) to attend an ethnographic theatre course that I was facilitating. After the first month and a half spent to engage with the group through autoethnographic exercises, we started an ethnographic relationship with a group of elderly women who is doing gymnastics right before the space is open for my artistic residency. From this encounter, after a couple of rounds of collective interviews, I revised the material and turned it into a 9-pages script, which was performatively read in front of a smaller group of elderly ladies at the end of May 2024. After the summer break, I continued going to gymnastics, but the group has been split due to work commitments, and now the exploration enlarged to include the making of an archive and the artistic research of my Master thesis.

 Solo autotopography - 16th February

  The talks with experts

PERIOD 2

 Dramaturgy - 14th February

 Solo autotopography

(stream of consciousness, beginning of September 2024)

What am I worried about? I have always felt that my memory slips away, and for a long time, I’ve had the feeling that I don’t really remember the trips I took with my parents, except for a few specific details. Sometimes, I feel both distant and yet nourished when, during family conversations, we talk about a particular trip or moment. At times, I wish I had kept a journal, because not even photos help me remember much, perhaps because I was quite young. As I was saying, sometimes I think a journal would have helped me recall specific experiences or images tied to certain moments. And lately, I’ve often been thinking about death—what it means for the people close to me, and specifically, what remains of us after we die. I listen to stories, stories that belong to a time that has passed and will never return, and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to understand that world anymore, that it’s slipping through my fingers. Especially, I fear that after a certain period, there will no longer be anyone who has experienced that kind of world with those kinds of stories. How do we preserve these experiences in our collective memory? Only through historical events? I believe that a good story can change people’s minds and make them reflect on the past, and consequently on the future, much more than official “historical” events. The stories Pina tells me are raw, real, sensitive, and they get under your skin, bringing that old world to life. Pina herself embodies these stories in a way that I never could.

What worries me about the elderly women of Montbau? I never knew two of my grandparents—my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandmother—and the other two died when I was 5 and 7 years old, respectively. I have suffered a lot from not having had their guidance, their experience, to help me navigate my adolescent years. And, above all, I have suffered and still suffer from not having been able to hear about their past, their lived experiences, which are also my past and my lived experiences. I feel that we could all learn from people who have more experience than us, that we can take root in these stories, make them our own, and understand the past better in order to live the present more fully.

I don’t want their stories to be lost. I want their grandchildren, who are yet to be born, to be able to hear them, and also young people who don’t have grandparents, because these experiences are public wealth. It is important to share them, if they are willing, so that even those who don’t have elderly people around them can benefit from it, and so that the elderly can once again feel important in a society that often marginalizes them and literally leaves them to die in hospitals or relegates them to caregiving roles for their children.

Video showing the process of writing the poetry in a threshold place in the traffic of Turin.

Descriptive observation of the first performative encounter of autotopography

Today, I completed the first artistic experiment to try to answer the question of how topographical activities can ignite a type of public imagination.

After doing exercise with the women of Montbau, I met with Carmen, a woman just under seventy years old who was willing to participate in the experiment. While having coffee at a café, I began to explain in broad terms what we would be exploring. We moved outside and sat on a bench.

There, I asked her to start with a guided meditation designed to help her identify a place connected to her personal history and identity. Here is the meditation text:

Two-minute Meditation. Objective: An inward search for a place of identity significance. (READ out loud to Carmen)

Sitting down, we now close our eyes. We feel our feet firmly planted on the ground, sensing small roots sprouting from the soles of our feet, penetrating the ground to give us stability. These roots begin to pass through our ankles, calves, knees, thighs, pelvis, abdomen, sternum, chest, hands, arms, neck, and finally reach the hair, from which leaves of every color sprout, pushing us upward. We generate the sap of these roots through our breath. We feel that with every inhale, we push sap through our cells, and with every exhale, we let it flow throughout our bodies.

Now, we activate our imagination. Before our closed eyes, a red curtain appears, as if we were in a theater. We are watching a play titled “Who I Am.” We don’t know at which point in the story we find ourselves, but we know it is deeply relevant to us—it speaks of our life. And here, slowly, the curtain begins to open. And we begin to see a place. It is a place accessible to others, a place fundamental to our lives. A place connected with our identity. Perhaps several images pass quickly, mixing different scenes before our eyes. But at this moment, we feel that there is one particular space tied to our story that we want to explore. We breathe, letting the sap flow. When we have this space before us…

Before even finishing, Carmen tells me that she sees her place. It is in the Pyrenees, and she describes the sensations connected to it:

“I can still hear the rivers flowing down from 3,000 meters, the mountains, that fascinating sound of water mixed with the birdsong you hear, with the cows, with the air you breathe there, which seems to fill your soul’s breath. For me, that place is infinite. And it is a zone where I can walk alone without fear of anything happening or of getting lost, nothing at all.”

It is clear that this place not only inspires security but also feels idealized and “infinite.” She goes on to share that this is where she would like her husband to scatter her ashes if she passes before him.

She also adds:

“When I’m there, I get the feeling that I lived there in another time. I can’t explain why I feel that way; I don’t know if it has anything to do with the idea that we have more than one life, but it feels like I have lived there for many generations, maybe two or three centuries, or even more.”

This suggests a connection with the place that goes beyond the rational. She also describes the people who live there as kind and open. It is a place where she finds peace. Unfortunately, we cannot physically access this place as it is far from us. I consider whether I need to adjust the meditation to specify a place we can visit and explore together. But is it necessary? For the purpose of this experiment, yes, it is crucial to be in a physical location.

So, I ask her to imagine the red curtain closing and reopening to reveal a place we could go to right now. Without hesitation, she chooses Parc de les Heures. She recalls her daughter’s wedding in 2005 and how they took wedding photos in that park. Carmen focuses particularly on the flowers that filled the park at the time:

“For me, the scent of gardenias evokes great romanticism. It fills my lungs with such a soft fragrance that it relaxes me. The gardenia is a flower that for me symbolizes all love, everything, everything.”

When I ask her to open her eyes so we can walk to the park, she tells me she chose to sit on this particular bench because she enjoys this park. She shares an image from her memory:

“In the good times of the neighborhood, the Explanada was full of flowers, and when my children had their communion, the photographer came here. Especially my daughter—my son wasn’t interested as much—my daughter had many pictures taken here. Imagine this space filled with flowers of all colors—reds, greens, not greens, reds, pinks, whites—all the colors of spring.”

Shortly after, she reflects on life’s milestones, highlighting how even the hardest moments can teach valuable lessons. She recalls one of the toughest times, when the neighborhood was afflicted by drug problems:

“I already told you the other day; for me, one of the hardest times in this neighborhood was when I first moved here and there was so much drug activity. It had a huge impact on me. I remember telling my husband, ‘Where have you brought me to live with our children?’”

I notice that many spaces overlap as Carmen recounts her life stories, stories shared by the entire community. At other times, she had spoken of the post-dictatorship years when drug use surged and the neighborhood became dangerous. Many families lost children to drugs.

At this point, I ask her to walk silently to Parc de les Heures. At first, she talks to me, but then realizes she is breaking the rules of the “game” and falls silent until we reach the park about ten minutes later. The transition seems significant; attention shifts inward, and for a moment, it feels like we are mapping out our path. I do not know what she is thinking. But upon arrival, she remarks that we were quiet for quite some time.

We begin to walk through the park, and she asks where we should sit. I tell her to choose the exact spot she wants to explore. After some back-and-forth, we settle on a bench. I ask her to describe what she sees as if she were looking at a painting, but instead, she tells me about the grocer who used to paint here. I ask what details catch her eye most, and she mentions the stone balcony. I ask what first comes to mind when seeing the space, and she recalls her daughter dressed as a bride. Regarding her personal history with the place, she remains reserved but conveys that, once again, it is a spot where she seeks peace.

“I always come here alone and find people like me, here just to be alone, wrapped in nature. Because you can’t hear even the cars from the ring road; you hear nothing.”

“It’s all about this feeling I get here—peace, tranquility. I connect with these spaces. I don’t like noisy places.”

It is a place where others come alone too, to read or seek peace. In this sense, it seems like a community care space—a tranquil, green spot without noise where people can reflect. When asked what the space would say to her, she replies:

“What I was saying before: that it doesn’t overwhelm me, that it calms me and lets life follow its course, and everything will sort itself out. When I come here, overwhelmed with worries, even to the point of tears sometimes… You have those moments in life that are tough, but yes, it calms me.”

This demonstrates a deep connection between anxiety and peace—a place that inspires calm when anxiety is overwhelming in life. A place that suggests everything will work out in the end. A place to process life’s worries and pains. Reading becomes a kind of imaginative escape; Carmen speaks of choosing books aligned with her emotional state when she visits. One book she often brings is The Shell Seekers, about a woman in her sixties and her adult children. She talks about how she had to close an intense chapter of her life by speaking with her son, using a line from the book:

“Happiness is made up of the small moments you live. Wealth is built from the little moments you’ve experienced. This is what I was telling you—it is the good moments that must prevail because they give you the strength to endure the less good.”

I then ask her where she would take a photo of this place, and I take it from that spot.

When I ask where she would position herself, she initially says she doesn’t want her photo taken. But after a little encouragement, she removes her jacket and asks where to stand. I tell her to place herself wherever she wishes and do whatever she feels like doing. And here are a few shots.

Finally, when asked what written note she would leave in this space, she says:

“That it never disappears.”

Adding:

“Because it is a refuge for many people. On Saturdays and Sundays, you see people here—each one on a bench with their story, their book, or just looking at their phone.”

We close with one last imaginative exercise with eyes closed:

“Now, close your eyes again. Imagine time has passed. Let’s say twenty years have gone by. Breathe into this vision of the future. And, just for fun, imagine that something special is happening right here, on this special day, twenty years from now. What is happening? Are there people? What are they doing? Are there objects? How do people relate to each other? Tell me about this event as if you were telling a child a story. Begin with: ‘Once upon a time, in Montbau…’”

And she replies that she already sees this image very clearly. She sees herself, as a little old lady, with her children and grandchildren walking through the park.

A grandmother who came here to stroll with her grown children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. That’s how I see myself right now here. And what is happening at this special moment, on this special day? I see myself very happy.

For now, I see myself with everyone and I am happy because I always say, and I will continue to believe it until the end, that as long as my mind works well, I can do many things for myself, for my family, and seeing myself with my loved ones would be one of these here. I don’t know what this park will be like in 20 years, but I would like to see myself here like this in 20 years, just as the park is now. It’s difficult, but I don’t see anything else being built here.

Then we stop and continue talking about other things, but I consider the activity completed in this regard.

Video showing the process of becoming a graffiti at an oil station.

Critical reflections on the experiment

The activity brought up compelling insights regarding identity, materiality, and collective identity. Ten elderly women participated in the activity, along with the group’s regular facilitator, who chose not to participate directly. In addition, Catarina and Nuria were present to assist with documentation. The activity lasted from 18:35 to roughly 20:10.

The purpose of the activity was twofold: it served as an experimental exercise for my master’s research, while also gathering material for a larger archival and performative study of the Montbau neighborhood. This dual focus required us to start by explaining the aims of the activity, describing the archival project we are working on, and briefly outlining the objectives of my master’s research.

Participants were asked to bring an object from home. The objects they brought included: an old lipstick, a painted metal butterfly, a black shawl, a copy of Doctor Zhivago, a more recent book on sex and gender, two kitchen utensils that were asked to be imagined as a gardener tool, a spatula with a dancer painted on one side and a nutcracker on the other side, a pair of sunglasses, two family photographs, a pendant, and a santino of San Pancracio.

The activity encouraged participants to “collectivize” the objects, meaning that they did not need to share their personal stories connected to the objects. Instead, they could choose any object and weave an imaginative or real story around it. This approach opened up space for creativity and collective storytelling.

For example, the first participant picked up the black shawl and connected it with an imaginative story:

            “the situation in the world nowadays is very very difficult, but i think this manto will give us heat and will give us carino because this material with the winter that is coming, this will cover many peopl and i want to send it with all of my heart to people who are in need of it.”

Here, the materiality of the object inspired a sense of care and generosity, symbolizing a shared desire to help others.

Another participant focused on the cover of the book on sex and gender, using its visuals to imagine a profound connection between people:

            “That is to say, for example, I imagine in a job where you go to work and that day you have to go to Paris and it turns out that your work colleague is not going, so you exchange a little piece of his body with a little piece of yours and you take that person who is also going to the country with you and he can take advantage of it and do what he has to do. In the same way that sometimes we suffer because we can't be in two places at the same time, it happens to me with you because I have a lot to do. So sometimes I would love to transfer my cells to someone who could help me to be there, because I trust a human being more than a machine, which will probably be the future.

(…) because this describes for me what society will be like, it will be much more mixed. Well, I would like it to be like that, that we could all mix and understand each other better and that the essence of the human being is not lost.”

This reflection sparked a conversation about connection and unity, with another participant adding:

            “I think it doesn't have to be human, because if we know that we are energy, our energies go together, even if she is here, but her energy can be with the other person.

While many participants shared memories linked to their past, several found themselves connecting with objects brought by others rather than their own. Their memories often revolved around family members or friends who had passed away.

This dynamic revealed an intriguing interplay between individual memory and collective imagination. Although the exercise aligned with González’s concept of autotopography—typically focused on individual altars of personal objects—the collectivization of the objects seemed to spark shared creativity and imagination.

Reflections on Future Directions

I feel that this experiment uncovered something valuable but left room for further exploration. The collectivization process generated imaginative responses, but I wonder if it could benefit from more explicit prompts to bridge memory and imagination. For instance, participants could be invited to explore both the past and the future of their objects. This could help illuminate how past memories inform future visions.

To achieve this, I propose introducing specific questions that encourage participants to move from “the seat of memory” to “the seat of imagination.” For example:

            •          After sharing a memory, I could ask: “How do you see this object—or the idea it represents—existing in the future?”

            •          Alternatively, more thematic prompts could be used, such as: “How do you imagine the food system working in the future?” or “What could happen in this space 20 years from now?”

In a previous experiment, I tested the idea of imagining a collective event in a specific space 20 years into the future, and this approach might be useful to develop further. By framing these imaginative exercises more clearly, we could better understand the type of collective imagination we aim to evoke and how it manifests.

There is indeed another reflection to be done. This collective autotopography presented here, as theorised by Gonzalez, could be identified as a specific “lieu de memoire” with a term borrowed from Pierre Nora from “Between memory and history: les lieux de memoire”. These lieux de memoir could provide not a personal, in this case, but a more collective revision of the totalising narratives of history, as Gonzalez suggest. But a question arises: how is it collectivised, a part from the fact that the activity took place at the same time? Are the objects now incorporting in themselves also the memory of this event? Did they come to embody other memories?

And another reflection the sprang from the activity: I am ultimately seeing that in the activity memory is, in fact, treated a bit as the reality of things, when it comes to be contraposed to “the future”, or something more imaginative. When I know it is more the case that there is an imaginary side to memory, a constant reconstruction, “open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting”. I am asking myself if I want to continue on the path of presenting the past opposed to “the future”, or the imagination of the future, and embracing instead a mixed mode in which people can pass from memory to imagination in a smoother way.  

And maybe it can be exactly the specific imagination that is linked to the specific place in which the activity takes place, in which the collective autotopography takes place. So in the next experiment, where i will explore more the concept of autotopography in a more material spatial way, I could ask specific imagination of the place. It needs also this indeed to be specificed, as reflected before, because anything could be asked in terms of magination, it could be a real event, it could be complementing the space with something else, it could be “what other things would be here instead otf the space etc…

The Poem

i come from

bastard worms who have

been conquering the world

eating up

other worms’ flesh

building tunnels and making the ground

fall.

i come from my mother’s uterus

bleeding all of my tears as I do now

wandering in other uteruses.

i come from my dad’s butt

i come from a shithole

i come from comedy and despair and

a bad night of sex

smoke and a moon which was low and red

i come from a bad joke

feeling in my guts the embarrassment of life

feeling

in my invisible uterus my already dead children

because

i come from a place that has no future

i come from a place

that has been declared dead seventy years ago

now

i come and go and come from 29 years

of despair i come from not knowing and maybe

not wanting to know

i come from europe

motherfucking mother

europe

the great rapist

who got impregnated

with gold earth and flesh

and now i come from that bloody

uh so bloody

uterus

with privilege i come from the privilege

of being free to think about my privileges and also

of being free to not think about them

i come from blood

blood in the hands (are those my hands?)

it doesn’t really matter

i come from the sentence

“it doesn’t really matter”

i come from disillusioned worlds

in which i can’t raise a finger because

i come from exhaustion

the tiredness of being alive of recognising

the beauty

i come from fire

i burned myself several times and never learned anything

not

how to not get burned

just how to fear the fire

how to be scared of touching it experiencing but not

how to not burn myself

i come from a provincial town i am even scared

of pronouncing its name

i come from a town which is cursed and

every time i say its name out loud it haunts me

i come from dreams haunted by the town in which

i was born and raised

i come from the fireplace

the place in which fire can burn protected from dangers and outside

i come from anger and hunger

two indissoluble ones

one foster the other and every time i eat

i show my teeth

everytime i eat my gums bleed

not of my blood but of the sweetest darkest blood and

i come from that time

the one in which my anger burst into a cake and that cake exploded into my stomach

and the stomach of two other friends

and they are still vomiting

i come from these explosion of which

i forgive myself everytime when i don’t care about them

i forgive my motherfucking mum

everytime when she doesn’t care about them

i come from italy i come from europe

i come from forgiveness and cowardice and

power and i wish something else could explode

i wish i came from far away

where the willingness to live is what only counts

i come from power

and i don’t know if i wish i wouldn’t come from power

i come from a place in which how i write matters

not only what i write but also how i write it

i come from the fear they will discover

i am crazy

by reading my handwriting

by now only my english teach has noticed and

it seems she still wants to be friends

i come from the passion of my teachers and from the chats and talks we had

after they discovered i am crazy

i come from the ground in which

i continuously put my head in

hiding my hair and my diseases

inside the mouths of red-looking-hungry worms

i come from my brain

slowly fading away

turning into worm shit

i come from the flower springing from that shit

i come from the happiness

buried under that flower.

Critical reflections on the experiment

To prepare the field for the experiment, I went to the petanque court with Catarina an hour before the activity began. We tied a red string to a coat rack on the side of the petanque court, where participants would attach their physical observations of the space. There were seven participants in the activity: three elderly women from the gymnastics group and four younger international students. Francesco, who was responsible for documenting the project, was also present.

We picked up the elderly women from their gymnastics location and walked together to the petanque court, about 200 meters uphill. When we arrived, I had everyone sit on the stone bleachers—the so-called “tribune”—and began explaining the activity. My first observation is that I provided far too much information at once, both for the elderly participants and the younger ones. This is because I explained all the actions and goals at once, whereas in the future, I should experiment with giving specific actions one at a time. This will likely help not only with understanding but also with participation. After clarifying participants’ doubts, the activity began.

As somewhat expected, one woman in particular, having experienced many moments in that space, started talking to Catarina without following the structure of the activity. I tried to encourage her to sit in the “memory chair” if she wanted to share something with everyone, and she did so. Overall, the time people spent observing and writing descriptions of the space was much shorter than I had anticipated. It was interesting to mix people with many memories and familiarity with the space with those who had none. What I noticed was that people unfamiliar with the space were much more inclined to observe and describe it than the two people who knew it very well.

One important note is that one of the women needed one of the younger participants to follow her and write for her. Although not explicitly stated, there is a suspicion that she might not know how to write. This will need to be considered when designing future activities.

Physical Observations:

•Disordine e abbandono dei campi e dell’intorno. Disorder and neglect of the fields and surroundings.

•The metal fence looks like it was smashed from above by a heavy object.

•There is “boom hours” coming out of the tree where the screw penetrates its bark.

•All the leaves have gathered in the corner of the petanque field → it reminds me of spotting a hedgehog in the Netherlands.

•La cocina de Suli en Venezuela mide un octavo de este campo de petanca. Suli’s kitchen in Venezuela measures one-eighth the size of this petanque court.

•Vemos acacias, plataneros, dos mimosas, un níspero, yuca mejicana, dos pinos, acanto e dimorfoteca. We see acacias, plane trees, two mimosas, a loquat tree, Mexican yucca, two pines, bear’s breech, and dimorphotheca.

•Un rettangolo all’interno del quale c’è ghiaia sparsa. A rectangle inside which there is scattered gravel.

•All the tiles of the mosaic are placed the right way up with respect to the design.

•There is a sign that says “respetar las plantas” (respect the plants).

•There are beautiful hills just above this neighborhood that remind me of the Dutch dunes.

•Las escaleras tienen pedacitos de mosaicos coloridos de diferentes tamaños. The stairs have small pieces of colorful mosaics in different sizes.

•Le coperte di un clochard sono rimaste sotto la tettoia. Se quella persona si aspetta di ritrovarle la sera, si può dire che quelle coperte siano la sua “casa”? The blankets of a homeless person remain under the canopy. If that person expects to find them there in the evening, can we say that those blankets are their “home”?

•Observo en el lateral de la escalera una mimosa que pronto florecerá en color amarillo. I see on the side of the staircase a mimosa that will soon bloom yellow.

•También un poco roto, los asientos de piedra están muy dejados. Also a bit broken, the stone seats are very neglected.

•Un espacio muy bonito donde no falta nada, solo falta gente. A very beautiful space where nothing is missing, only people.

•Ci sono molte foglie cadute e croccanti che fanno krrrr krrr krr. There are many fallen, crunchy leaves that go krrrr krrr krr.

•De más o menos 30 metros por lado, rodeado de árboles, acacias, un pino y un hermoso aroma (mimosa) que ya asoma su próxima floración. Un espacio para espectadores, ocupado por una persona sin casa que ha dejado sus pertenencias. Una parte del campo está con piedrillas escosas por el tiempo de uso, cuatro escalones para descanso. Podría estar mejor. About 30 meters per side, surrounded by trees, acacias, a pine tree, and a beautiful scent (mimosa) hinting at its upcoming bloom. A space for spectators, occupied by a homeless person who left their belongings. Part of the field is covered with scattered pebbles from use over time, four steps for resting. It could be better.

One of the first memories shared revolved around a sense of community in the past—not just about that past itself, but also about the fact that it no longer exists, accompanied by nostalgia for people who would bring life to the neighborhood. Encarna reflects on this, likely prompted by the observation that there were “no people” despite several participants being physically present in the space:

I remember when we were all youngsters, we used to come, for example, in the summer, when it was very hot, and it was wonderful here.

We would come, we would water all the gardens, we would turn the hose on each other, we would enjoy ourselves like crazy, and we had a great time. And I also remember, well, we used to go to carnival parties all dressed up, and we made paellas, grilled meat, lit fires. All the children were very young, very young, and we all had a great time.

All the families, we were all like a family. We were all families. The one because he was married to the son, the other because he was a friend of that one, the other because he was the brother of that one, and the other brother, the father, the son, and the other one, and the other one, and the other one in the daughter-in-law, the son-in-law.

And then all the babies came behind us. So we were like a family. But now all that is no longer there.

By coincidence (or perhaps not), Encarna had brought old photos taken in this space many years ago. She shows them to us and describes moments of community, shared meals… Is this, too, a way of reinscribing oneself into the space?

(…) This is also one who is no longer here. Here are these who are preparing to make the paella—my husband and another one.

Then there is this photo here, which is also the same. Here they are preparing what they have to do. And here is the paella.

They are preparing it to put it on the fire, and they are cleaning it. Well, here they have put the oil in, and here they are cleaning it.

And they’re already preparing the sofrito. The fried vegetables, the potatoes here, see? And here they are, look, you see?

And here the paella is finished, we haven’t eaten it yet. With the smoke that the rice is getting out of the place. And here we are already eating it. (…)

Encarna highlights that everything in the past was done by the community:

And then our men, as they were very hard workers and they were all very knowledgeable, so they set to work and with a lot of effort, a lot of chopping and a lot of this, they made these stairs. The men made the steps, they did everything, they laid the bricks. And the women, when we came, we laid the tiles, we laid the tiles here and there, and when each one of us came, we laid the stones and laid everything.

The men put the stairs, and then of course they threw them away and made new ones. And they put up the railing, I suppose. And the rest was the same.

We also had a man who was the blacksmith; he made the roof, and the men put it all together here. So the only thing that the town council has done here is on the courts and nothing else. Because everything was done by the men.

And now the men, depending on how the people are, if we go, everything falls down, and nobody is able to say, “Let’s put a little bit of plaster here…”

Isabel finishes Encarna’s thought:

“…because there are no women. Women had no more order. For example, the toilets were clean.”

Encarna does not hold out hope for the space’s future. In fact, she resists thinking about it altogether. There is an active tension between her desire to share the past and her reluctance to fall into nostalgia or face the pain of envisioning a future she cannot see. Encarna remarks:

Well, in 20 years’ time, I really don’t know if it’ll make it.

Because this is abandoned. Because right now, there are no young people here. And the minimum number of people that they have right now, who are the Miguelines, Miguelín and Jordi, who are already 50, 60, 65 years old, well, there are very few younger people.

In other words, when these people are older, there is no replacement. And there is no sense of belonging either.

Because if they are not so careful, there are no people who care, there is no youth coming up from below as we used to. Because we used to go to petanque with the children, Isabel, and we looked like gypsies.

Isabel corrects her:

“We looked like what we were, people, people, people!”

Encarna refuses to imagine a future for this place. When pressed to think about it, she underscores:

“It’s a different life,” and “Since it’s not going to be, I can’t imagine.”

Zuli, however, takes a seat in the chair of imagination. She begins to recall her past, reimagining it in the present and bringing it alive for all of us in the space. Activated by Encarna and Isabel’s community stories, she shares her memories of life in Venezuela, describing the community she helped build there:

For a long time, I stayed away from a lot of things, just thinking about working, giving my children a very good education. And when we got to the last place where we lived, there started to be problems, and I didn’t know that I could do a lot of things and bring people together to achieve effective things in our community. We were a formation, a big urbanisation, we were more or less 30,000 inhabitants, and we started to have robberies and thefts, so we closed off our surroundings, like someone says we are going to close off a block—I don’t know how they are separated here, but over there they are blocks.

And we closed, we put up gates, we closed the area, and children started to see children on bicycles, on roller skates, to walk, the older ones to walk. We cleaned the square that was covered in leaves, we replanted trees, we went out to water in times when there was no drought, because in Venezuela, there are six months of rain, six months without rain. In other words, there are not four seasons. And well, until I came here.

She continues describing vibrant celebrations, community, and shared meals:

I sang. I sang there too. And well, everything was a celebration. And now we had a tremendous carnival party, where the whole urbanisation and people from the neighbourhood went to the carnival parties, which, the last time it was held, we made it last for three days.

That is to say, we had a queen’s parade, a costume parade, we had people, authorities with a jury. They came from the urbanisation, there were about three companies that gave dance classes, and that day they danced for free—they did a demonstration. It was also a way for people to enrol, to enrol their children. There was a modelling academy, and we used to showcase all that.

Unfortunately, after Zuli shares her experience, including the challenges of leaving Venezuela for economic and work-related reasons, the elderly participants feel the need to leave. The energy in the room dims, and after 50 minutes, the activity comes to an end. I had hoped to continue with the younger participants, but it was clear the flow had shifted with the departure of the older women.

Reflecting on the experiment, despite moments of frustration when instructions seemed to be disregarded, it provided rich material for thought. The concept of community became central to the stories shared. Clearly, the site we engaged with, combined with Encarna’s evocative recollections of communal life, brought this theme to the fore—especially the perceived loss of community, a world that no longer exists, and a sense of belonging absent among today’s youth.

Perhaps the world truly has changed. The young participants in this activity, hailing from Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Italy, are evidence of this shift. We no longer cultivate roots in one place but in many. But how, then, is community built? What is the new sense of belonging for the younger generation? These questions linger as the experiment concludes.

Recording from the petanca field, bottom right corner. I immediately notice the sign that says respect the plants and on this side you notice much more this wall on which ivy grows and buildings behind where there are lights that look like lights in a hospital. and street lamps that have whiter and warmer lights.

And the wall has an enclosed space where there were and are probably toilets and graffiti on these walls. I think of a kiosk, a kiosk that sells piadinas, especially kiosks that used to sell piadinas during my sister's horse races, where they used to take us to these places with lots of plants, there were always kiosks where piadinas came, I remember the smell of horses and these people going from one side to the other waiting for it to be their turn to make the horses jump in these fields and how much I hated going to these places because I felt like I was wasting my time and I didn't like it at all but we used to go there to support my sister during her races I see one tree in particular that is more bare than the others. There is a light reflecting off its trunk and in general there is a lot of shine.

The light from the street lamps reflects a lot on the damp leaves. And even from here you can see the stand very well. And you can hear the rain a lot, it has started to rain harder.

Cars are also passing by, there's a white car I can see here at the side which is stationary and I don't know what it's waiting for.

Fragmented walk.

Form : Participatory memory walk.

Who : 5-6 Participants who can stay after gymnastics on Thursday after 11.

Where : In the outdoor space of Montbau

Aim and Hypothesis: the aim of this experiment is to verify people's memory connection to the phisicality of the neighbourhood, to see what kind of stories arise to then at a later stage confronting them with other dominant narratives and events. It is also a way of confronting different ways of eliciting memory, and verifying the way that memories and stories arise and different versions of the stories between the people participating. It is also a way of gathering material for later development of the artistic process.

In this experiment I will ask 5/6 elderly people of the gymnastics group of Montbau to guide me through the public space of the neighbourhood. I will ask them to bring me to the place that they value most relevant for the history of the neighbourhood, and there I will ask them to tell me why they brought us there. If people don't feel like walking long distances because they are tired or weak, there will be the possibility of talking about the space without going there. When in the place, we can sit, and people can share other memories related to the place, and other memories that come up when thinking about the place or about other memories shared.

Pictures from the experiment - the neighbourhood of Montbau

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Fragments from the Oxford Handbook of Oral History that resonated with that phase of the project

Oral historians need to know how and why memories of certain experiences are consolidated in long-term memory while others are not. Here psychology and neuroscience combine with good effect. The short answer is that an experience is much more likely to be remembered if it is perceived to be significant (worth remembering) and is therefore articulated into a memorializing form, most typically a story. Valerie Yow explains, drawing upon Schacter’s work on encoding and consolidation, that “the recording of a memory from the beginning preserves a partial record because we cannot take in every detail in a scene and therefore take in only what seems significant to us.” Or, as Donald Ritchie succinctly concludes, “People remember what they think is important.” From the start, then, the creation of memory is, necessarily, a partial and subjective process.

But what is really important is that memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings.

Remembering is not like playing back a tape or looking at a picture; it is more like telling a story. The consistency and accuracy of memories is therefore an achievement, not a mechanical production.

Alessandro Portelli

Play the video while reading reflections to mix physicality with memory...

This is a collective poem that I recollected from all the poems and sharing after the Polytopography performative encounter

Upper right or left corner I'm not sure, you can hear enough noises as you can probably hear from the recording and now I'm realising that I'm seeing things that I've already seen from another perspective I'm seeing a kind of gate that stands behind the metal barricade that I saw from the other corner and in the distance behind some foliage, behind some lights, which is the thing that grabs my attention the most and makes me think of a restaurant, a home restaurant, a country restaurant, the kind that has lights outside, in the open, so despite the cold I think of summer, of a convivial moment. And at the same time my mind immediately goes to the suburbs, suburbs in the north of Italy, to large buildings. A suburb that could be Milan, although I have no particular memories there.

Or maybe I am making something up. I feel that I have actually passed through one of these places, but now I cannot remember why. or for what.

I also see a microwave. It's probably not working because it's outdoors and it's rained a lot on it. I don't feel so sure.

And maybe this light from the ampoule reminds me of the time a guy punched me in the street for no reason, but no particular emotion is running through me right now.

Masters in Performing Public Space

A picture from the experiment - the garden built by the retired firefighter

Me doing gymnastics with the ladies

Difference between ethnographic research and oral history interviews

Performing memory
Corporeality, Visuality and Mobility after 1968

Edited by
Luisa Passerini and Dieter Reinisch

Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory

Edited by
Colin Counsell and Roberta Mock

The Oxford Handbook of Oral History