Outside the Giardini della Biennale, October 2010 Photo: Jane da Mosto
The Situationist International (SI) was a political and artistic movement founded in Italy, in the village of Cosio d’Arroscia, in 1957 and formally dissolved in 1974 by its chief architect, French writer and filmmaker Guy Debord. Part of the continued appeal of the SI is the very amorphous nature of its game, its shadowy, subtle practice lending an aura of the cult. Debord himself was active in refuting all attempted definitions of the SI and indeed insisted that there was no such thing as a ‘Situationist’ per se. Likewise his pleasure in excommunicating members from the group due to ideological error makes clear that even its original adherents were apparently unaware of its true intentions. Perhaps we could posit Debord’s relation to radical-culture as akin to Jacques Lacan’s relation to psychoanalysis, one of antagonism and ludic subterfuge, the constant denial of any assigned role. Thus just as Lacan told his followers, “You may call yourselves Lacanian, but for myself I am a Freudian,” so Debord might insist that though he was the founder of the SI he was very far from being a ‘Situationist’. Maybe it’s enough that you know yourself to be a ‘Lacanian’ or ‘Situ’ without requiring authorisation from anyone else. And more importantly you can find yourself a fully-fledged follower of the SI without ever having heard of them or their work, a paradoxical principle suggesting secret recruits are always the most effective. Such Situationists malgré-eux or sans le savoir can eventually come to discover, with amusement or relief, their relation to the movement or continue entirely oblivious of this lifelong relationship to a secret allegiance. And it is here that I would like to suggest just such an unconscious pact, entirely clandestine symbiosis, between some of the work currently being done around the Venetian Lagoon and something of the spirit of the Situationist International. Most overtly, the notion of ‘Psychogeography’, a term devised by Debord along with Ralph Rumney (an English artist who was amongst the original founders of the SI), would seem to apply. There have been varied attempts at a definition of this term, most clearly Debord’s own pronouncement that it consists of “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Whilst the emphasis of the SI was upon the built city, that was always predicated upon an awareness of the previous natural world that had been subsumed but not entirely conquered in this process. As favoured ‘psychogeographical’ terms such as ‘drift’ and ‘undertow’, ‘constant currents’ and ‘vortexes’ suggest, the entire exercise is perhaps an attempt to rediscover and reawaken
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Blue Sunsets and Grey Lagoons — on the Improbable Passage of the Situationist International through the Venice Lagoon Adrian Dannatt
There are legends in Celtic countries of drowned cities … When I lived in Venice there was concern that the city was slowly sinking into the lagoon and indeed, in 1966, it seemed as if this had happened when the Aqua Alta invaded my home and I had to swim underwater to open the front door and then evacuate my family to the apartment of neighbours who lived above. This event may account for my interest in the Celtic legends and the fact that I link them to the strange saga of my fotoromanza about the psychogeography of Venice. Ralph Rumney, Aqua Alta, Silverbridge, Paris 2002
Blue Sunsets and Grey Lagoons
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