Of Oars and Fountains: The Peripatetic Dialectics of my Liguria project.

    

 This dialectic of Genoa and its peripheral surroundings still reigns in my thoughts. Partly because out of a kind of unease at a prolonged inactivity of mine in the past couple of years, and partly because I needed an external stimulus that would push me to work on something concrete that would introduce me into some kind of milieu, I decided to apply for a course to become an Environmental (Tour) Guide in Liguria. In short, training to lead escursions through the footpaths of Liguria, some of which have been transformed by anthropic interventions in major ways, other which have been less so. Natural Liguria as it were. Not something that is particularly central to this project and indeed I was rather relieved when I at first wasn't chosen. But then others dropped out of the course and I was asked if I still wanted to participate. I decided to do so. First impressions are, on the whole, positive. There is much that I do want to learn and there is much that I never expected I would learn (botanics, zoology) which, nevertheless, are curiously stimulating other areas of knowledge. In short, while I don't think many of these areas are essential to the project I want to write about, they do offer interesting perspectives. Then there are the areas which we haven't begun yet and which are very much more anthropic. Dry stone walls (an aspect of the environment of where I am living now) do have an interesting history and are fundamental when thinking about one of the figures who I want to write about, Dario Capellini, and his conception of the transformation of the coastal and hilly landscape of the Cinque Terre into a human and cultural landscape. Overall, I am hoping that it will offer many ideas and that, in any case, the geographical study of the territory will be give me a much greater context for this project. 

    While traveling to Genoa for the course, I manage to spend an hour to an hour and a half walking through the city. So far I have spent this short period of time to walk on different routes from Genoa Brignole station to Piazza Matteotti where the course is held. Walking through Genoa feels quite unlike walking through other cities because it offers so many changes of perspectives and although I had been to Genoa multiple times (probably hundreds of times), until a short period of time ago I had only walked in a fairly narrow section of the city. Mainly between the areas of the stations Genoa Brignole and Genoa Piazza Principe, along Via XX Settembre, Piazza De Ferrari, some of the carruggi below Via Garibaldi, the waterfront redesigned by Renzo Piano, Via Gramsci. In short, an extremely narrow slice of Genoa that I rarely stepped out of. After spending various months (maybe over a year) of intellectual preparation of a fairly haphazard nature, I am hoping that I'll have the chance to explore the city further in subsequent months, while studying another reality, the Liguria of the entroterra as well as the coastal area outside of Genoa and the main provincial capitals. More its natural world, its geological, botanic, zoologic aspects and its territory as such, as well as the many anthropic interventions in these, often sparsely inhabited, localities. A complicated juxtaposition of different worlds but somehow I am hoping that it may be an interesting journey. After all, even here there are, I hope, indications of the road ahead.

    This morning I opened my almost obsolete vkontakte page (a Russian version of Facebook if you like) and came across an article I had written for an Indian blog named Perspectives run by Titas Biswas. It took me back to the time I set out to Casarsa where I met up with Kirill Medvedev, Oleg Zhuravlev and Anna Moiseenko to visit the Centro Studi Pasolini in the town. We spent two days there (very memorable days for me) and visited the various localities associated with Pasolini in Casarsa della Delizia, the small village of Versuta nearby and the zone of San Giovanni. I remember standing by the church in Versuta where Pasolini had 'restored' old frescoes by rubbing onions over them. We saw the source, the fountain of Pasolini's poem in Friulan:Fontana di aga dal me paìs. / A no è aga pì fres-cia che tal me paìs./ Fontana di rustic amòur. Kirill Medvedev translated this and other poems from Pasolini's Friulan collections into Russian over the next year or so and eventually a volume (the first major volume of translations of Pasolini's Friulan poems to appear in any world language I believe) was published by Medvedev's own publishing house the Free Marxist Press.

    Here, here I feel that the link, the connection could be found. A connection tying so many disparate things together. Through Pasolini, through Medvedev, through this moment standing in front of a fountain and a church in Versuta where Pasolini had set up his Academiuta di lenga furlana. Since at this moment a fountain in the tiny hamlet of Versuta could seem to speak to something universal. Some kind of border between the urban and the rural fell apart, or at least I could sense how this border could fall apart, be transcended, or deconstructed. It was not necessarily clear then but in the process of thinking about this I have a sense of how one could move towards reconstituting a certain method of conceiving spaces. Another great moment of clarity came to me through the reading of Oxana Timofeeva's book Rodina which has been translated as How to Love a Motherland. A book that I read immediately read upon its publication (I remember ordering a copy and picking it up at a cafe given that few copies were distributed at first). It offered a reflection on the word Родина (Motherland) that seemed to me very original and which felt a real antidote to the sickly and sickening 'patriotism' which Stas Markelov had denounced before his murder in a central Moscow street in January 2009. The political and personal centre holds together through reconstituting the imposition of a Motherland into something much more related to lived experience in Timofeeva. As well as in Pasolini and in Medvedev's reworking of Pasolini (along with several of Denis Pilash's translations of Pasolini's Friulan poems into Rusyn which were also published in Medvedev's volume). In a sense, too, I want to aim for a porous project which will aim to contextualise reflections from other territories (Lunigiana, Versilia, the Apuan Alps) refuting the need to impose any strict borders on what aims to be a project that will develop as spontaneously as possible.

    Walking through Genoa several days ago I spotted a statue that I had never noticed before. To be fair, I had not been to the Foce area of Genoa (where it was located) for maybe two decades. I remember walking there once to sit down at a bar and write a postcard that I never sent. Probably in 2001 just before the events of the G8. Another time I had been in that area was with my parents and aunt when I was a teenager (16 or 17 perhaps or maybe a year or two older). My father exasperated by the fact that I would spend too much time in the bookstores when we visited Genoa tried to avoid Piazza Annunziata (where Genoa's Feltrinelli bookshop was then located). In order to avoid it, we set off on an improntu alternative route through Genoa which included the Foce district. Thinking about that time the other day I laughed at the idea that it was my dad who had introduced me to psychogeography in Genoa in his attempt to avoid indulging my bibliomania.

    [A propos of psychogeography, several months ago I came across a wonderful volume by Leo Lippolis entitled La Città Livida : Una controstoria psicogeografica di Genova (1892-2022) [The Livid City: A Psychogeographic Counterhistory of Genoa (1892-2022)]. After months of reading a variety of popular books on Genoa found online and in the bancarelle and book markets, I happened on to a volume which brought so much into a volume whose path I wished to follow myself. I will need to write one or more posts on Lippolis' work (I am looking forward to read his other work soon) but there was one snippet of information that has stayed with me. Perhaps the 'inventor' of psychogeography, Ivan Chtcheglov (of, if one reads various wikipedia pages, either Russian or Ukrainian origin) was highly influenced by his journey to Genoa several years before the publication of his Formulary for a New Urbanism. And in many ways Genoa is an ideal city for psychogeography.]

    Anyway, to return to my tale before I digressed, walking in the Foce area of Genoa I came across the statue of the Navigator by Antonio Morera of 1938/9 (see the first photo) is very curiously a strange kind of 'twin statue' to the famous Soviet statue by Ivan Shadr named Girl With An Oar (one of the subjects of a film produced by Cine Fantom's Andrey Silvestrov and which I had the joy of translating subtitles for - its title was Срай which I rendered into English as Paradise Soiled.) A delightful film (or series of small films) which also taught me much about the idea of peripheral spaces (a source maybe of my semi-abandoned Elektrichkaland project). Morera's and Shadr's statues obviously have very different trajectories, the date of Morera's statue would suggest it being imitative of Shadr's if at all he knew of the Shadr statue. One can debate endlessly about the totally different parental imprint of the statues. Nevertheless, I was delighted to find a statue with a human figure holding an oar in two such different localities. The last time that I was in the Foce I had simply ignored it. It took two decades travelling east to 'admire' it. And sometimes it takes years, too, to rediscover a city which one once had ignored its multitudinous sides. Genoa, too, is a city of a thousand colours.