97861 INTERIOR TEXTOS 001-318 ING_168X230 21/10/15 16:34 Página 72
according to Asger Jorn’s definition, as the science fiction of urbanism.” The science fiction of urbanism. That is an obvious explanation for the police officers who observe the Gypsies squatting Wittgenstein House. Rather than looking for anthropological clues, the futuristic narrative can help them figure out what is going on there. Many of the forms in which the house is occupied are in line with that futuristic aesthetic, even though their prejudices lead the police to see the Gypsies as anachronistic, primitive, and wretched in all respects. This is a classic trope in postmodern science fiction: in films such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, and other apocalyptic works, the nomadic peddler who drifts through the city is always based on the model of the Gypsy, the junkman, the scrap dealer, the roving lumpen. Much has been made of the fact that Ralph Rumney and the London Psychogeographical Association (of which he was apparently president and sole member) coincided in time with the new wave of British science fiction, with writers such as Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Michael Moorcock. Many academic studies, for instance, consider Ballard’s Concrete Island to be a psychogeographic guide. And Robert Silverberg’s The Star of the Gypsies—an American science fiction novel that is admittedly strongly influenced by these British writers—even takes all of the psychogeographic babble and presents it as an ethnography of its space Gypsies. Fredric Jameson argues that science fiction has the political capacity to meditate on, test, and imagine future utopias and dystopias. In his investigations he uses what he calls “cognitive mapping,” a term borrowed from geographer Kevin Lynch. He argues that the preeminence of science fiction as a genre has to do with space.3 Time is, quite literally, anachronistic. Space is what needs to be invented anew. This is not just about architecture and urbanism; it is a political matter. “During a stay in London in 1952–1953, Constant mainly devoted himself to exploring the city. His work became more austere and abstract. He occupied himself less with painting and to an increasing extent with spatial problems.” H. van Haaren offers this simple description in his 1966 monograph on the Dutch artist. Constant had traveled to London at the invitation of the Arts Council of Great Britain, whose governing body included Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, for example. Although Constant’s encounter with Rumney in London might have been merely anecdotal, they do appear to have known each other from the days of Cobra and tachisme. Rumney had lived in Paris and northern Italy for years, so their meeting in London was not entirely coincidental. Asger Jorn apparently introduced them. We do not know much about those London excursions, not even whether they were dérives. One of the few things we do know is that they visited the Gypsy caravans of Latimer Road, the area that inspired Ballard’s Concrete Island. A mix of primitivism and futurism infused Constant’s work during this period, a shift from the temporality of painting to the spatiality of architecture. Think of 72