There is a saying from the pioneer days of the American West: ‘barbed wire
gave us control of the land, and windmills made the land habitable’. Today,
the importance of the former material to the development of the West is
commemorated at the Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, Texas: the largest barbed
wire museum in the world. In addition to its vast collection of historic
barbed wire (samples of which are available in the museum shop), the museum
is home to the Barbed Wire Monument, two huge balls of solid barbed wire,
weighing over 370 pounds each, placed on top of two Kansas limestone rock
posts over 125 years old. Since its invention as a deterrent to straying
livestock in the second half of the nineteenth century, barbed wire has
become the ubiquitous proto-border, a vicious indicator of property,
exclusion and imprisonment.
Located on the border between Italy and Slovenia an outsize coil spirals
through the landscape. The curators of the Devil’s Rope Museum would
certainly be impressed by its size, but not, perhaps, by its lack of barbs.
In many ways its open form is the antithesis of the two tangles of wire that
adorn the Museum. Transborderline (2000) is one of Stalker’s best-known
projects, having appeared at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000 and
Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana. By elevating the wire coil to monumental status,
the Italian collective has attempted to invert much of what its barbed form
represents. Instead of stating difference (between one side and another) and
providing a reason for not crossing that divide, the tube-like structure
invites you to explore the space in-between. What lies here is possibility,
choice, the very thing that barbed wire, by snagging flesh and enforcing
fixity, excludes. Stalker describe Transborderline as a concept that became
an object; located at a point on the border that lacks fencing, maps or
other markers (but is popular with immigrants who wish to avoid the
formalities of normal border controls), it is both ironic and revealing that
the border appears more conceptual than Transborderline itself.
Stalker was founded by a group of architecture students during an occupation
of Rome University in 1990. That they describe that occupation as ‘an
opportunity to get to know a lot of people’ provides a key to the
architectural thinking behind much of their subsequent work. At the same
time, Stalker (the name refers to Andrei Tarkowsky’s cult film) is a loose
and open collective that consistently shies away from any conventional
description as ‘architectural’: members and collaborators have included
artists, art historians, theoreticians, an astro-physicist, a geologist and
a dentist. The first Stalker project, a five-day dérive through the city of
Rome, mapped the territory in which they would operate.
Yet to say that this project resulted in a map is to say nothing at all, for
in essence this was a map of the unmapped and the unmappable. That the
dérive should be such an apparently self-negating exercise is hardly
surprising given its origins in the work of one of the most richly
self-destructive avant-garde groups of the last century, the Situationist
International (the various protagonists of which are obvious and important
influences on Stalker’s work). Guy Debord, the chief theorist of the
movement, describes the dérive as a passage through the ‘ambiences’ of a
city, a search for and awareness of its ‘psychogeography’. It is an
encounter with effect, with strange attractors and with the often
unpredictable collision of various urban processes. In many respects it is
the search for a narrative of the city.
On their voyage around Rome, Stalker encountered one quite bizarre example
of this at a former parachute factory. The factory was, for reasons of
security, very literally unmappable during the Second World War. In the
years following 1945 this state of non-existence was never reversed, a
situation that developers, eager to avoid normal planning regulations,
sought to exploit when they began construction of a shopping mall on the
site. However, halfway through the construction process they hit an
underground river that flooded the site, creating a new lake. It is in this
lake that migrating birds that had long avoided Rome now come to rest. Such
stories, and the apparently random processes that they reveal, are also
unmappable, unpredictable and consequently, many people would say,
unarchitectural.
Stalker member Lorenzo Romito describes how his architectural education in
Rome promoted the belief in the city as one in which everything
architectural had happened, where ruins enjoyed an afterlife as tourist
attractions and the complete history of architecture was on view. In Malcom
Lowry’s short story Elephant and Colosseum, the author recounts a similar
experience when the central character, attempting to cross the road to the
Colosseum, is faced with the thunder and confusion of Rome’s traffic. When
he looks in his guidebook, he finds that what he had thought of as one of
the most striking manifestations of modern Rome was, in fact, ‘scarcely a
symptom of the age in which he lived’; in the second century, the guidebook
tells him, traffic was so heavy that deliveries had to be made at night.
Faced with a static situation in which past and future (and with them all
potential for dynamic change) appeared frozen in a bewildering, suffocating,
and eternal present, Stalker set out to find gaps or ‘voids’ in the totality
of the city, to find a dynamic architectural anti-matter.
The Campo Boario in Rome has been the experimental testing ground for much
of Stalker’s recent work. Since its abandonment in 1975, this former
slaughterhouse has attracted a curious mixture of gypsies and illegal
immigrants, gradually becoming a repository for everything and everyone that
did not fit into what the local authorities liked to think of as the city.
Isolated and forgotten, these groups had evolved an unregulated model of
community living, complete with market place and barber shop, and in the
process had evolved a social equivalent to the sites encountered by Stalker
on their dérive through Rome.
One of Stalker’s first architectural acts in the Campo Boario was to draw a
chalk circle on the ground. The chalk circle was replaced by tables and
chairs, and the tables and chairs provided the setting for a feast. On the
one hand, this is perhaps one of Stalker’s most conventional architectural
acts – a project that moves from plan, through construction, to inhabitation
– on the other hand, it contains within it the seeds of a radical act. The
action brought together the various communities from around the site. It set
in motion a ‘getting to know people’ process. It took people and community
as a starting point and sought to direct and focus their will.
That will has produced one of Stalker’s most beautiful works, the Tappeto
volante (flying carpet), 2000-1. The project was born out of a commission to
produce a representation of Palermo’s Cappella Palatina for a travelling
exhibition entitled Islam in Italy. The Cappella was constructed in the
twelfth century and is significant because it fuses Romanesque, Byzantine
and Arabian styles. The latter can be seen in one of the most beautiful
elements of the Cappella, the honeycombed decoration on the wooden roof of
the central nave. This work, in the Islamic style with muqarnas
(stalactite-like decoration) and Kufic inscriptions, was the work of Fatimid
craftsmen, and over the centuries it has at times been something of an
embarrassing inclusion in this most Christian of places.
Rather than conclude the work in what is now the traditional idiom of
architectural representation – a three-dimensional computer model – Stalker
opted to undertake a re-interpretation of the original chapel in the form of
41,000 lengths of copper-tipped rope suspended in the air (think of it as
Stalker’s alternative to the Barbed Wire Superbundle). The design was
essentially simple, the construction somewhat labour intensive. Working in
collaboration with the Kurdish and Senegalese immigrants of the Campo Boario,
Stalker did use a computer model to divide the famous wooden ceiling into
approximately 1,700 sections, which were, in turn, divided into twenty-four
cords of varying lengths. The resulting design was then printed at actual
size to provide a template against which the ropes could be measured. After
two months of cutting rope, bending copper and hanging the finished
sections, the collective had re-created the space of the chapel ceiling. As
importantly, they had gone beyond an aesthetic appreciation of that space to
produce a work that incorporated a human and tectonic narrative, and a
fuller, more contemporary understanding of ‘Islam in Italy’.
The Tappeto looks like those beds of pins that retain the imprint of objects
pressed against them, and like those toys it retains a memory – the obvious
impression of a ceiling in Palermo, but also the story of two groups of
immigrants, separated by over eight centuries, enriching a foreign culture.
Where their twelfth-century predecessors produced a structure in wood, the
Kurds of the Campo Boario have transformed that work into a carpet, into
something portable that reflects our new, mobile age. It is already on a
voyage around the Mediterranean, travelling to Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt
before meeting its ancestor in Palermo. The Tappeto is a reminder that
history is something that people take with them, and does not reside solely
in the fixed ruins of a city like Rome or the guidebooks that describe them.
It is a reminder that architecture, like people, does not have to remain
fixed and static, but can be flexible, dynamic and open to change.
Buried about one-sixth of the way into the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’
S,M,L,XL (a book about scale that, in form, is consistently massive) is a
story about the Berlin Wall. The author recalls a field trip, undertaken
while a student in the early seventies, to document the Wall as
architecture. Having experienced an equal measure of attraction and
repulsion to a structure that was in parts clearly planned and in parts
improvised, one of the conclusions Koolhaas reaches is that its
‘significance as a “wall” – as an object – was marginal; its impact was
utterly independent of its appearance. Apparently the lightest of objects
could be coupled with the heaviest of meanings through brute force,
willpower.’ The lesson of the Wall – architectural form can be rendered
meaningless by political will, that the ‘weight’ of architecture is not
directly related to its physical mass – is one that Stalker have taken on
board. Recent world events seem to have proved the truth of it beyond any
reasonable doubt.
In addition to being the location of the Devil’s Rope Museum, McLean, Texas
is also home to the McLean Prisoner of War Camp (a Texas Historical Marker,
telling the brief history of the camp, has been erected on a parking area).
The camp saw active service during the Second World War, which cost McLean
the lives of nineteen young men on battlefields around the world and ‘twelve
young women who married camp guards and moved away’. It is said that Germans
who attempted to escape appeared glad to be recaptured because ‘on the bare
plains of Texas there was nowhere to go’. The first act of Stalker’s dérive
was to cross over a wall, a symbolic escape from conventional architectural
notions of division and boundary. Having shed such notions, Lorenzo Romito
argues, one faces architecture in a primal state, where everything becomes a
tool. However idealistic, chaotic and utopian much of their work may be, in
the plains around Rome Stalker have found somewhere to go. They may not be
so interested in controlling the land, but they have certainly seen the
importance of making it habitable and now, more than ever, that is something
of which we should not lose sight.
Mark Rappolt is the architecture editor for contemporary