An Experimental Blog

        

        I am starting another blog as my own personal circumstances have changed and so have the projects I intend to work on. If before 2022 I was mainly based in Russia and had been intending to embrak on a large project on Russian elektrichkaland (namely, the places reached by local trains outside of the big cities) and more specifically the zone from Moscow to Petushki, then I am now based in Liguria, Italy. And the focus of my attention is this region and contiguous regions partly associated with it (Lunigiana, Versilia) as well as a fascination with the island of Sicily which I intend to visit and explore for an extended period (hopefully next year). And yet the Ligurian project has a lot of common threads with the Moscow-Petushki project. A preoccupation with place, peripheral locations, the idea of local knowledge (kraevedenie as they call it in Russian), the question of what makes up a landscape, symbols of place. Many of the texts that informed the Moscow-Petushki project also inform that of the Ligurian one.   

        The Ligurian project aims to concentrate on a political and cultural goal for a tentative work which I intend at one point to publish in book form with the provisional title of The Red Riviera. It will recount the insurrectionary, utopian and dissident side of Ligurian history (and possibly the history of Lunigiana, Versilia and the Apuan Alps). Indeed, my elektrichkaland project of Moscow-Petushki was tending towards a similar focus when it was cut off by a decision to leave Russia in the aftermath of Putin's (Russia's) bloody onslaught on Ukraine. And yet there is still a fascination with other aspects: of the physical landscape, of peripheral locations, of foreign interactions with this landscape. And yes there is also a strong urge for a psychogeographical interaction with this place. 

        In any case at present this is undoubtedly an experimental blog since there is a real cognizance of the errant (wandering, straying, itinerant) nature of what I am interested in. It is never completely fixed and 2022 taught me that circumstances may violently uproot plans. And yet new plans may have roots in the old ones. 



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The Red Riviera Idea

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