Suspended City

Michele Nastasi (Milan, 1980) is a photographer of architecture and cities. His pictures have been published in international magazines and books (Starchitecture: Scenes, Actors and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities; Turin: Allemandi, 2011, with Davide Ponzini; Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography; London: Phaidon, 2014, ed. Elias Redstone) and have been shown in Italy and abroad (Suspended City: L’ Aquila after the Earthquake of 2009, Wolk Gallery, MIT, Cambridge, 2013). He has taught Photography of Architecture at Milan Polytechnic. Since 2007 he has been a member of the editorial staff of the magazine Lotus international.

Maddalena d’Alfonso (Milan, 1972) is an architect and researcher, with a focus on interdisciplinary theoretical and visual analysis of contemporary architecture, art and the urban landscape. She has written essays and curated exhibitions in Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Switzerland and the United States. She has promoted research on the city and urban imagery for the Fundação Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, the Fondazione de Chirico in Rome, the MIT Museum in Cambridge (MA), the Milan Triennale and Milan Polytechnic. She teaches at the Milan Polytechnic and lectures at various international universities.

Michele Nastasi suspended city: L'Aquila after the earthquake

edited by Maddalena d'Alfonso

ACTAR

Michele Nastasi Suspended City: L’Aquila after the Earthquake All rights reserved © of the edition, Actar Publishers, 2015 ISBN 9781940291673 Distribution: Actar D, Inc. 355 Lexington Ave. 8th Fl. NY, NY 10017 USA T. +1 212 966 2207 F. +1 212 966 2214 www.actar-d.com eurosales@actar-d.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington DC, USA Editor: Maddalena d'Alfonso Texts: Giorgio Agamben (page 9), Maddalena d’Alfonso (pages 96–100, 107–17), Michele Nastasi (pages 101–05, 119–26) Photographs: Michele Nastasi Design and medical illustrations: Alessandro C. Busseni Translation: Clarice Zdanski, Cristopher Huw Evans Copyediting: Barclay Gail Swerling Post production and photographic prints: Mario Govino Print: Grafiche Aurora s.r.l., Italy

The first group of photographs presented in this volume was the product of research carried out in 2010 for the magazine Lotus international and was published in issue no. 144 under the title "Framework Town." My special thanks go to Pierluigi Nicolin and Nina Bassoli. © of the texts, their authors © of the photographs, Michele Nastasi, courtesy Archivio Editoriale Lotus © of the medical illustrations, Alessandro C. Busseni © of the drawings, their authors The plans for the safety measures have been provided by the office of the Vice-Commissioner appointed to safeguard the cultural heritage during the reconstruction of L’Aquila, engineer Luciano Marchetti.

Many thanks to engineer Fabio Giallonardo for providing the original drawings for Palazzo Rivera from which the illustrations published on pages 38, 87 and 88 were taken. Thanks also go to Studio Croci & Associati for the original drawing of the basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio published on page 127. The drawings on pages 22, 30, 36, 54, 60, 72, 79, 86–87, and 88–89 are reinterpretations of some schemes taken from specialist publications on techniques for temporary works drawn up for use in L’Aquila, and in particular from the STOP (Schede Tecniche Opere Provvisionali © CNVVF) manual for safety measures compiled by the Fire Department, accessible at the website www.vigilfuoco.it.

The analogies between photographs, technical drawings and medical illustrations are the fruit of free association and not to be regarded as indications of procedure.

The author and the editor would like to express their gratitude to: The Vice-Commissioner appointed to safeguard the cultural heritage during the reconstruction of L’Aquila, engineer Luciano Marchetti, the Emergency and Reconstruction Department of the Municipality of L’Aquila, the The National Fire Corps and Sergio Ciarrocca for the support given during the shooting.

The Central Director for the Emergency and Technical Assistance and Vice-Commissioner in charge of securing the buildings engineer Sergio Basti and the office of the Vice-Commissioner appointed to safeguard the cultural heritage for their accounts and explanations of the temporary works.

The head of the Hemodynamics Institute at the Humanitas Clinic Dr. Patrizia Presbitero and the head of the Orthopedic Operating Unit of the Hip and Prosthetics Institute at the Humanitas Clinic Dr. Guido Grappiolo for their clarifications of the analogy between temporary works and surgery.

Thanks also go to: Raffaele Azzarelli, Silvia Bencivelli, Lorenzo and Elena Bencivelli, Giovanni Bradanini, Sonia Calzoni, Gianluca Cavazza, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Valentina Di Francesco, Laura Geronazzo, Mario Govino, Barnaby and Lucia Gunning, Marco Introini, Giovanni Papotto, Gaia Piccarolo, Francesco Repishti, Giancarlo Rossi, Valentina Valensin, Gary Van Zante.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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SeCURITY CITY Giorgio Agamben

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SUSPENDED CITY Michele Nastasi, PHOTOGRAPHS Alessandro C. Busseni, ILLUSTRATIONS

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NoteS TO THE PHOTOGRAPHS

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THE Closed city Maddalena D'Alfonso

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destinY AND prognosiS Michele Nastasi

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Timeline

This book does not set out to document the tragedy of the earthquake, but is a photographer and an architect’s view of a living city.

Here the story of L’Aquila appears as a paradigm of the present, but the images to which it gives rise question the future of European and Western urban culture.

SECURITY CITY Giorgio Agamben

As happens with every photographer faithful to the original calling of his trade, Nastasi’s pictures of L’Aquila are the vehicle for a political prophecy.

This prophecy concerns the paradigm of the city as it is imagined or dreamed, more or less consciously, by the ruling powers of the post-industrial and post-democratic societies in which we live. This authority is no longer the sovereign state of the ancien régime nor the “disciplinary state” described

by Michel Foucault. Nor is it, as some would claim, a state in which the rule of law holds. Instead we might call it, to borrow a term already used by political commentators in the United States, a security state. A system in which, according to the message that is drummed into us everywhere and at every moment, ‘reasons of security’ have taken the place, as arcanum of power, of the “reason of state.”

Foucault showed that when security appeared for the first time as a paradigm of government in Quesnay and the Physiocrats, the aim was not to prevent natural disasters and insurrections, but to let them happen and then to intervene, once they had occurred, in such a way as to gain advantage from them. The main problem faced by governments of the time was famine, which they sought to prevent by setting up public granaries and banning the export of the cereals. On the contrary, given that prevention had proved counterproductive, Quesnay proposed letting famines happen and intervening at

the opportune moment to liberalize trade. Thus catastrophe was transformed, at least for some, into economic gain. It is in terms of this model that we should understand security as the current paradigm of government, both in international politics, as American policy after 9/11 clearly shows, and in domestic politics, in accordance with the neoliberal principle that crisis can be used as a means of capital accumulation.

In the case of L’Aquila too, nothing was done to prevent the catastrophe but, once the earthquake had happened, an attempt was made to create the kind of city of which the security state dreams. Nastasi’s photographs, at once incomparable and appalling, show us a city that, as on the title page of Hobbes’s Leviathan, has been emptied of its inhabitants. Instead of the life that animated its streets and squares, everywhere gates, cages, by-passes, scaffolding and fences that do not evoke, however, works of restoration, but seem to want to fix the state of emergency as a paradigm of government with no time limit. Something similar had been staged temporarily in Genoa in July of 2001, when a police officer declared candidly that the government did not want the police to maintain order, but to manage disorder. The disaster carefully prolonged and preserved, the emergency turned into normality, the city as a place where it is impossible to live: this is the lucid, implacable message that Nastasi’s lens conveys in such a masterful way.

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The closed city maddalena d'alfonso

Introduction Buildings like torn bodies stitched together again; soft, immobile forms behind constrictive cutouts; gashes like wounded eyes and mouths; faces more than façades that need attention and care while still showing their Baroque pride and richness; the streets of the city closed as they are: decorous and smooth. They lie there in pain, with the measured breath of recovering patients.

It is neither useful nor constructive to think of the blame for this, nor to put everyone—no one excluded—on trial. However, I feel that the open streets in L’Aquila can lead us to the heart of the European city, to reconnect our thoughts on the “primitive” sense of being a community of citizens. Even in the most basic African organizations, the hut around which the family units gather is what holds food, abundance, the possibility of choosing daily meals—in short, security about tomorrow.

Nowadays people are talking a lot about the common good, but without grasping the key to the problem. Common good is a sacred concept, parallel to that of the Right to the City.

Both concern a problem of belonging and recall a regulatory and legal whole of specific protective measures in the name of mutual recognition. The question, de facto, includes the relationship that is woven together today between city and country and between production (agricultural and industrial) and consumption (direct and indirect). Hence, assuming

responsibility for the common good and law presupposes an analysis of the interweaving of relationships in which the interplay between the parts functions according to the praxis of the anagnorisis of classical theater. In order to resolve the issue, the lost or forgotten identity of the characters must be found, thus resolving the obscure and even lost reasons of life.

In the expression “Right to the City,” the existence that presupposes and feeds it is absent: man, as if he were an implicit subject or its immobile engine. When talking about “common good,” something has been lost: the understanding of the biological dependence between man who attempts to make a resource available and the availability of the resource itself. Ultimately, the verb “live in” and the noun “architecture” are missing. The action substance of man. The primeval understanding that place is the measure between man and space; that architecture sets the proportion between man and the city, that the city builds the perspective between man and the land and that the street determines the size of man in relation to the relief and the territory. Thus the reasons which divide goods from rights are obscure and ought to be shared because natural and appropriate. In the desire to plan and build, the relationship between availability and care has been forgotten—the only historical antidote to the uselessness of action and the only way for the collectivity to take part in the future.

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Therefore, starting with the matter of the city of L’Aquila, a few reflections: what today concerns us is no longer a whole of rights and duties, but rather a complex set of relations between having rights and taking care of things. Remember that, above all in the country, taxes corresponded to work hours of community service. What did it mean if not traveling around the territory, getting to know it, having fresh water sources, trees and underbrush, roads, the quality of the land and soil in mind? The answer is as simple as it is disarming: protect it and maintain it.

Today, L’Aquila asks a deeper question on the urgent theme of contextual political responsibility. The city in splints looks at the mountains and observes the sky, and with noble disdain waits. In the face of such haughtiness and pride, it reminds us: men and women are the ones who made this place.

Where are they now—those who took shelter in its walls and lived inside its homes? Where are those who promised the city continuous care in the name of advantages that it brought them? Where are those who lived in the shadow of the income its granular density corresponded to?

These questions concern all men from every land, who all live under the same sky. They concern the sense of urban policy in general, because L’Aquila is a city like any other.

And we know that L’Aquila, which for centuries was ruined by unexpected earthquakes, has always arisen, coming back to life through the care that men dedicated to it and to the laborious time that they took to rebuild it. Individuals and groups of men who through a workload managed to give to the city the merit of how much was mutually promised: wealth in exchange for well-being, the very reason for which men still continue to live in the cities today.

However, in the technological and virtual era in which we live, it seems that the bond between man and space is dissolving. It seems that rights are no longer measured in terms 108

of duty and that they are not being transformed into care, but rather into transaction. It seems that it is a question of the administration of material property with specific specialized techniques that pulverize wholes, and that in L’Aquila have reduced the problem of living in the city and the territory to the question of conserving heritage and property. Dramatic rich inheritance for whom and for what?

In the following pages we will confront the L’Aquila question in a broad sense, starting with its image. It is right to think that, through its image, reasons and civil questions and political perspectives can be more freely identified.

THE CLOSED CITY: AN ANALYSIS IN NINE POINTS 1. The City Removed To reflect upon the reconstruction of L’Aquila devastated by an earthquake and abandoned by human beings means, first of all, to get over that sort of collective removal that shameless overexposition by the media has inoculated in the body of Italian society, even in the souls of the most attentive, sensitive people. The urgency caused by the danger justified deploying extraordinary forces that encouraged a cloudy coagulation of private interests spread by lobbies, political parties, political coalitions, economic interests, even religious factions with status privileges. Today private interests are not just personal, but instead correspond to interests of groups who use a series of practical principles—often ways of doing things handled through primary relationships like the family, friendships, favoritism, personal relations—to arrange for economic gain as well as enhanced prestige (prestige through public power)—of the single components. Is this not the true point of conflict of interest? But this is even