scholarly journals Napoli Explosion

Author(s):  
Mario Amura

      Napoli Explosionis the combinatorial synthesis of an emotional transition. A year dies flowing and vanishing into the new one. A reckless eye shuttles as fast as a blink from far away in the City of Naples with no human shape in sight. An invisible Humanity as a whole, a hundred thousand lights in their illusion of challenging the immense power of Nature, embodied by the still and silent menace of the Vesuvius Volcano. It seems like a war zone seen in the distance: the constellation of myriads of fireworks of the City seem an anti-aircraft fire against the imaginary menace of the passing of Time. On one side, a minuscule, invisible multitude of human beings obsessed and eaten up by Time celebrates its death and resurrection in the New Year’s Day fireworks mess. On the other side stands the Volcano, ironically waiting quietly in the shade for the moment to explode unannounced its fury: out of Time, guided by earth’s breath and beat, synchronized with the rhythm of Universe. The City surrounds it, lights-bombing it while motionless and mute: an enormous deep blue shadow of an overturned cone whose roots plunge into the chaos of fire and energy boiling in the earth bowels It seems to live out of Human Time.    The City of Naples explodes in the impermanent constellation of fireworks. The faraway eye, standing on the Faito Mountain just in front of the City, catches all its raging sense of vengeance against the deathly power of Vesuvius, as a sort of exhibition of euphoria in a state of trance, in the momentary victory over Death symbolized by the passage to a new year of Life. It’s an exorcism, a rite. New Year’s Day in Naples is something more than a simple celebration. It’s a state of mind: the city is notorious all over the world for its black market of illegal, dangerous fireworks, a hidden business which reveals all the iconoclastic fury of its inhabitants against Time and History. At midnight a kind of cyclic Potlatch begins, in which people get rid of everything belonging to the Past, throwing out of the windows furniture, objects, old stuff not worthy of surviving the Big Fire, aiming for the illusion of an eternal Present Time of everlasting Youth. Amura gives a human soul to what is lifeless: the city itself explodes, challenging Nature (Serafino Murri).      Napoli Explosion is a project started in 2006. From 2006 to 2015 the photos were shot solo by Amura. Since 2016, a "polyphonic" team was formed including Christian Arpaia, Claudia Ascione, Eleonora Grieco, Raffaele Losco, Marco Rambaldi, Marco Ricci, Armando Serrano, Maurizio Valsania. Original music by Louis Siciliano. (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Siciliano).Resumen      Explosión en Nápoles es la síntesis combinatoria de una transición emocional. Un año muere fluyendo y desvaneciéndose en uno nuevo. Un ojo temerario viaja tan rápido como un parpadeo desde la lejanía en la ciudad de Nápoles sin una forma humana a la vista. Una Humanidad invisible como un todo, cien mil luces en su ilusión de desafiar el inmenso poder de la naturaleza, personificado en la tranquila y silenciosa amenaza del volcán Vesubio.  Parece una escena de guerra en la distancia: la constelación de una miríada de fuegos artificiales de la Ciudad como si se tratara de un bombardeo antiaéreo contra la amenaza imaginaria que yace en el paso del tiempo. Por un lado, una minúscula multitud invisible de seres humanos obsesionados con, y devorados por, el Tiempo celebran su muerte y resurrección en el caos de los fuegos artificiales de Año Nuevo. Por otro lado, está el volcán, esperando silenciosamente en la sombra el momento en que su furia explote sin aviso: fuera del Tiempo, guiado por la respiración y latido de la tierra, sincronizado con el ritmo del universo. La Ciudad lo rodea, las luces lo iluminan mientras permanece quieto y mudo: una enorme sombra azul de un cono volcado cuyas raíces se sumergen en las entrañas de la tierra, en su caos de fuego y energía. Parece vivir fuera del Tiempo Humano.      La Ciudad de Nápoles explota en la constelación temporal de fuegos artificiales. El ojo lejano, situado en la montaña Faito justo frente a la ciudad, capta todo su iracundo sentido de venganza frente al poder mortal del Vesubio, como una especia de exhibición de euforia en un estado de trance, en la victoria momentánea sobre la Muerte simbolizada por el paso a un año nuevo de Vida. Es un exorcismo, un rito. El día de Año Nuevo en Nápoles es algo más que una simple celebración. Es un estado mental: la ciudad es conocida en todo el mundo por su mercado negro de fuegos artificiales peligrosos e ilegales, un negocio escondido que revela la furia iconoclasta de sus habitantes contra el Tiempo y la Historia. A medianoche una especie de Potlatch cíclico comienza, en el que la gente se deshace de todo lo que pertenece al pasado, lanzando por las ventanas muebles, objetos, cosas viejas que no merecen sobrevivir el Gran Fuego, con la ilusión de un Tiempo Presente eterno de Juventud interminable. Amura da un alma humana a lo que no tiene vida: la ciudad misma explota, desafiando a la Naturaleza (Serafino Murri).      Explosión en Nápoles es un proyecto que comenzó en 2006. De 2006 a 2015 sólo Amura tomó las fotos. Desde 2016, se formó un equipo “polifónico” incluyendo a Christian Arpaia, Claudia Ascione, Eleonora Grieco, Raffaele Losco, Marco Rambaldi, Marco Ricci, Armando Serrano, Maurizio Valsania. Música original de Louis Siciliano (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Siciliano).

Urbanisation ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-154
Author(s):  
Filip De Boeck ◽  
Sammy Baloji

Urban living constantly attempts to ‘suture’ the city, finding ways to stitch gains and losses, or pasts and futures together in the moment of the ‘urban now’. De Boeck’s reflection on the complexities of the postcolonial urban world in the Central African locale is shaped around the visual archive that he built up over the past years with photographer Sammy Baloji. This article addresses the possibilities of such a combination of ethnography and photography to de-centre and reframe urban theory and build an alternative urban archive to explore in novel ways what this ‘suturing’, this living and living together, might mean in Central Africa’s urban worlds today.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 125-132
Author(s):  
Svetlana G. MALYSHEVA ◽  
Elena V. SHLIENKOVA

The architectural and planning features of wooden fortresses of the city of Samara, built next to each other with a time interval of 120 years, are considered. The origins of one of the unique spatial characteristics of Samara, a special historical code of development of its territory, are analyzed, when at each new stage of development in the city a new center was formed with a consistent movement higher and higher along the watershed from the arrow of the Volga and Samara rivers. The emergence of this spatial expansion is justifi ed by the construction of a second wooden fortress as a new urban center, but not in the place of the burnt fi rst fortress, but in the neighboring territory after 200 m. Since at the moment both fortresses have not survived, with the exception of basement fragments , the authors analyze the possibilities of a new reading of the “memory of the place” and the restoration of the cultural and genetic code of the city that was lost in due time. The article proposes an algorithm for the development and subsequent comprehensive implementation of the historical and cultural strategy of urban development, based on the creation of unique models of public spaces that can connect the past and the present in a new spatial paradigm. The concept of an interactive platform is considered with the aim of promoting a sociocultural project and drawing public att ention to the problem of the irretrievable loss of the historical and cultural heritage.


Author(s):  
Natalia Chwaja

„It was all there already, from the beginning” – Microcosms by Claudio Magris as a Triestineauto/bio/geographyAbstractThe aim of my article is to study the relation between the subject and the city, focusing on thecase of an autobiographic essayistic novel by a contemporary Italian writer Claudio Magris.The space of Trieste, author’s native city, plays a multiple role in the Microcosms narration.On one hand, it works as a “mnemotechnical pretext” for the protagonist’s sentimentaljourney into the past, both individual and collective. On the other hand, the city space canbe seen as an active factor, shaping the hero’s “triestine” state of mind and reflecting itself inthe novel’s poetics. In my analysis, I refer to some essential categories of geopoetics (“auto/bio/geography” by Elżbieta Rybicka, Tadeusz Sławek’s and Stefan Symotiuk’s interpretationsof genius loci), as well as to Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre, which I consider one of the mostimportant Microcosms’ intertexts.Keywords: Claudio Magris, Trieste, city, auto/bio/geography, space, genius loci


1996 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-13
Author(s):  
John Macarthur

‘Urbanism’ has become a familar posture among architects, so familiar that it has recently become a target for ridicule. The actual developments of cities today make the neo-Sitte-esque contextualism of the 1970s look even more Utopian than the International Style. There are many and varied socio-economic and political determinants in many differing situations which might explain the hopes of the past and their distance from the realities of the present. However, much of the problem with urbanism is not to do with actual urban conditions or the success or failure of particular projects, but rather with how the concept of urbanism was framed in the architectural profession and academy. It ought still to be possible to develop a few operative concepts and a way of having a shared discourse on the architectural aspects of city sites. But at the moment we are caught between vast rhetorical claims for such work as ‘theory’; and a new naturalism that sees the city as generic global and beyond architecture. These notes are intended as a provocation both to the institutionalisation of urbanism and to the idea that it has become passé.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Aditi Vahia

In the ‘Foreword’ to his collection Uhuru Street, Vassanji observes that ‘Uhuru’ means ‘independence’. The Kichwele Street of Dar es Salaam – later renamed as Uhuru street nurtures the spirit of independence irrespective of the continual changes that the street experienced from the sheltered innocence of colonial rule in the 1950s to the shattered world of the 1980s. This collection of short stories – as many of Vassanji’s works is characterized by “a complex ethno-cultural identity” that incorporates multiple countries (Kenya, Tanzania, India, Canada, U.S.A.), religions (crucially, the syncretic bhakti tradition he was raised in), languages (Gujarati, English, Swahili, Hindi). , The stories in Uhuru Street explore political and social change in the city of Dar es Salaam in the East African country of Tanganyika. They follow a historical arc which begins in the years leading up to independence (in 1961) and concludes in the decade or so. This paper analyzes the microcosm of an immigrant world as portrayed by Vassanji in his Uhuru Street through its eccentric characters giving us a portrait of a place and a people losing their innocence. The stories come together as a story of generations new and old, the former searching for a new identity, the latter, fiercely holding onto the past. We share with these people the moment of moving on, of leaving the place where we have roots, knowing that things will never be the same.


Author(s):  
Andrea Oldani

One of the most predictable implications of photography consists of the ability to fix some images returning them in a variable timeframe for the observation. In all the major world cities, it is common to incur in some book where recent photos are compared to old ones searching the same point of view in order to make the comparison more accurate and stimulate the critical ability of the observer. An exercise that sometimes stimulates a sort of regret for the past, pointing out a diffused excess of nostalgia for times gone by. Nevertheless, the reality and meaning of modern city images are not always so prosaic. What happens when photographs are evocative of a reality that is completely lost in the collective imaginary even though it still exists and functions, despite being forgotten and buried in the depths of the city? This is the case of very few pictures capable of telling the story of a city, Milan, and its only “real” river, the Olona, whose waters, humiliated and rejected, continue to flow in total amnesia. It is a different story when photography does not have the role of nourishing nostalgia, but the power to make visible and explain the variation of a presence and its progressive obliteration. Some pictures testify to the passage from the bucolic amenity of the river and its banks in a pre-urban context to a muscular urban infrastructure. A rigid channelized river, shown with confidence, is trying to keep its presence, until the moment of its inevitable decline and disappearance. It is in these images that the possibility of reconsidering the Olona as a part of the new project for the city lies.


1997 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 51-81

Memoria rerum gestorum(literally, ‘memory of deeds’) is yet another way of saying ‘history’, in the sense both of ‘collective memory, tradition’ and of ‘history-writing.’ Memory and time are important concepts in all three of the major historians whom we are treating, but perhaps most for Livy, whose history must have consumed all of his working life and, when intact, spanned the period from the sack of Troy through to the writer’s own day. He signals the importance of time from the start of his preface, which was published together with the first unit of his history:Facturusne operae pretium sim si a primordio urbis res populi Romani perscripserim nec satis scio nec, si sciam, dicere ausim . . . utcumque erit, iuuabit tamen rerum gestarum memoriae principis terrarum populi pro uirili parte et ipsum consuluisse(Praef.1, 3, ‘Whether I will do something worthwhile if I write a detailed record of the deeds of the Roman people from the origin of the city I do not really know nor, if I knew, would I dare to say so . . . However that may be, it will nevertheless please me to have taken thought, to the best of my ability, for the history of the greatest nation in the world’). The tenses of the sentences quoted (facturus. . .sim, erit, iuuabit) put Livy’s own potential literary achievement and resulting profit firmly in the future: this preface looks ahead, towards the moment of publication and beyond, to the reaction readers will have to his book. Yet the force of the past is felt here, as well: it is memory (memoria rerum gestarum) with which Livy concerns himself, and that concern is imagined as having already happened (the perfect infinitiveconsuluisse): the preface is written as if from the simultaneous vantage points of one looking ahead and of one looking back on a task already completed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-71
Author(s):  
Iza Kavedzija

In this article I explore ideas of the good and meaningful life in older age, based on ethnographic research with older Japanese in the city of Osaka. Some of my interlocutors and friends in the field spoke about the approaching end of their life. When speaking about the time remaining, many expressed their sense that the future ‘will somehow turn out [all right]’ (nantonaku). This statement of quiet hope acknowledged change and encapsulated a desire to support others; it also shifted emphasis away from the future. This is not to say that the experience was for my interlocutors primarily marked by an orientation towards the past: by reminiscing and recollection. Inhabiting the moment was equally important. While reminiscing and narrating past events clearly relate to meaning-making, then, what is the role of dwelling in the moment for maintaining a meaningful existence? I will argue that dwelling in the moment allows for the cultivation of an attitude of gratitude, which lends meaning to a life. This attitude of gratitude binds together both reflection on the past and attention to the present moment in its fullness. It also, I suggest, opens up space for a particular kind of hope, grounded in the moment. Thus, the sense of the good and meaningful life that my older friends conveyed encapsulates an attitude of gratitude as a way of inhabiting the present, rather than dwelling in the past or leaping towards the future. 


1970 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Borowicz

The proximity of the late archaic Greek philosophical breakthrough and postmodernity relies on the analogy of a media and intellectual revolution that takes place in both periods. Greek culture of the 6th and early 5th century BCE gradually moves from orality to literacy, from performativity and affection towards an intellectual view of the world and reflective being, from a world that is shared with non-human beings to the world of human monody. Modernity, however, seems to reverse these trends. Nevertheless, we do not go into the past but reach a higher level of archaicity. From this point of view, postmodernity becomes postarchaicity; this is a chance that in the moment of historical contiguity, vivisection of our culture will reveal still active common places, allowing us to explore images before the metaphysical era. The starting point of the analysis is the question“What is the image?” posed by Maurice Blanchot and his extremely insightful answer to this question.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (60) ◽  
pp. 94-111
Author(s):  
Ronald Harris-Diez

Luciano Kulczewski was a professional who played a key and distinctive role in the first half of the 20th century, a period considered as crucial for the development of Chilean architecture, since it is the moment that brought the advent of modernity to the country. One of the most eloquent illustrations in this regard is the corpus, that collects more than a dozen housing complexes aimed for the middle and the working classes. Today, we recognize in these solutions not just the fact that they are in sync with the web of social, political, cultural, and economic processes that characterized the beginnings of the past century in Chile, but that they also have, among their most notable merits, having been conceived in terms of what we would understand today by “inclusion”. This article seeks to investigate these parameters, which range from urban proposals - that approached the city in "inclusive" terms - inasmuch as they did not push for these housing proposals to be in the metropolitan peripheries - to more particular issues, such as the stylistic management of homes as a tool to serve identity causes, in order to achieve the integration of the user with their environment.


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