Roulotte:07

Following the two previous special issues (# 05, # 06) Roulotte returns to its usual ways, with barely a route planned other than the attentive readiness to stop wherever interesting projects are sighted. Perhaps the reference made to portable architecture and self-construction offered by a77 may even be interpreted as a way of explaining this return to the unpredictability of the road. However, as happens in all experiments, once consummated we then suffer the temptation of interpreting the discontinuity of events as if they were fragments of a single story. This is how we have now decided to provide a common thread which passes through most of the projects in Roloutte 07: the memory.

In recent years contemporary culture has been used in projects of anamnesis in a clearly visible way. The reason for this turn of events is complex in character, but may be summed up in two ideas. First there is an obvious lack of instruments by which to consider the future after modern illusions about it were shattered; it seems there is no utopian horizon possible in this vacuum without feeding on past stories which nowadays may be brought up to date. Conversely, the magnitude of contemporary hedonism has placed us within a rigorous dictatorship of the present where, together with the effervescent proliferation of situations, grows proportionally with the feeling of rampant banality – that of dispensable biographies– which can only be corrected by fearless archaeology.

(April 2010)