Inconscio urbano

Résumé

As Italo Calvino suggests in Le città invisibili, cities are akin to dreams insofar as they conceal a desire or a fear. If, then, a Deutung (interpretation) of the dream is possible, one may likewise assume a Deutung of the city, through which fragments of its submerged or repressed histories intermittently surface. The narrative of the city that thereby comes into being is constitutively provisional, ceaselessly reconfigured by the irruption of materials that had hitherto remained silent or unarticulated. In this sense, the transformation of the city’s narrative entails a corresponding transformation of its spatiality, insofar as the interminable labor of Deutung gives rise to processes of transgression that unsettle established boundaries and generate ever-renewed modalities of crossing and passage. Figures of such transgressive practices may be discerned, in the ancient world, in the gesture of Antigone; in the modern, in the figure of the artist-flâneur; and, in the contemporary, in the work of Alberto Anhaus, Colonitation. Sea Invasion.