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Vesper. Rivista di architettura, arti e teoria | Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory

URL: https://www.iuav.it/en/node/956
Call For Paper Type: Regular
H2 Index: 0
Submission Date: 2026-03-01
Notification Date: 2026-03-10
Final Version Date: 2026-05-20

Humanities, Literature & Arts (General) Philosophy Architecture Culture

There used to be an old term – ostranenie or estrangement. It is often printed with one ‘n’ even though the phrase originates from the word strannyi (strange). The term came into usage in 1916 spelled in that particular way. Often the term is mispronounced or mixed with the word otstranenie, which means moving the world aside. Ostranenie is the sensation of surprise felt toward the world, a perception of the world with a strained sensitivity. The term can be established only by including the notion of ‘the world’ in its meaning. This term simultaneously assumes the existence of a so-called content, supposing that content is the delayed, close examination of the world.

V.B. Šklovskij, Bowstring. On the Dissimilarity of the Similar

It can happen on the freeway, in a city that we don’t know, or even on the way home. It is a frustrating, embarrassing, and at the same time ridiculous experience. We are put in a position of being displaced, misplaced. It shows an ambiguous, vaguely defined, confused relationship with the environment in which we get lost. We suddenly find ourselves without sense of direction, without reference points. We are ‘here’, but ‘here’ doesn’t correspond to a ‘where’ we know or would like to be. An old Hungarian joke tells of two Alpine climbers who get lost in the mountains. One of them takes a map from his bag and consults it. After a while he says to the other climber,

‘I found it, we’re on that mountain over there’.

F. La Cecla, Getting Lost and the Localized Mind

In 2019, the International Art Exhibition of Venice, directed by Ralph Rugoff, was titled May You Live in Interesting Times. The phrase has an uncertain origin and is likely the result of a misunderstanding that renders it ambiguous, as it may also be interpreted as a wish for living in dark, challenging, and uncertain times. Faced with the complexity of reality, the exhibition invited us to broaden our perspective. The wish came true. If, in the Fifties of the 20th century, the Internationale Situationniste pioneered the use of détournement to rewrite the modes, codes, and boundaries of art, today misappropriation, hijacking, diversion, deviation, and misdirection of meanings and things are actions easily traced in both concrete and virtual reality. In the summer of 2023 in New York, the orange sky and the unbreathable air caused by smoke from the Québec wildfires shifted the perceptual regime, producing a collective estrangement from the everyday environment. In the spring of 2025 in Germany, erroneous road closure reports on Google Maps rendered real space illegible, generating an induced mass drift.

So, if the time we inhabit is disorienting even in its smallest details, if inhospitable houses and uncertain lands proliferate, if the surreal is the form of the real, how are we to traverse it?

Michel Serres, in Pantopie: de Hermès à Petite Poucette (2014), outlines a philosophical approach that spans all places, disciplines, and forms of knowledge, refusing to confine itself to a single domain. He affirms the concept of the ‘all-place’, which unites science, culture, nature, and the history of knowledge, while taking into account the infinite expanse of the virtual network. In essence, in Pantopie, Serres invites us not to remain still, but to continually navigate the entire landscape of human and technological knowledge.

The ‘not feeling at home’, the lack of connection to space and also to one’s own time and its events, brings together concrete experiences, such as the impossibility of returning to one’s homeland, and mental conditions, as Freud describes in 1919 in Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny in English translations): ‘Unheimlich is clearly the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, vertraut, and it seems obvious that something should be frightening precisely because it is unknown and unfamiliar. But of course the converse is not true: not everything new and unfamiliar is frightening. All one can say is that what is novel may well prove frightening and uncanny; some things that are novel are indeed frightening, but by no means all. Something must be added to the novel and the unfamiliar if it is to become uncanny’. For Heidegger, in Being and Time (1927), ‘from an existential-ontological point of view, the “not-at-home” must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon’. For Franco Rella, in Immagini e testimonianza dall’esilio (2019), the Freudian Unheimliche ‘is, to use a Platonic term, atopia: the intermediate place between the site, the topos in which we are protected by our knowledge, and the place where everything is other, beginning with the pathos in the face of human transience. The philosopher should ideally produce transitions between these two dimensions. By re-inscribing philosophy within given knowledge, by extinguishing all anxiety about travelling in this intermediate territory, once this exile and this expatriation into atopia have ceased, we risk losing the very meaning of philosophy’.

A condition of crisis that must be witnessed and also addressed as a workspace for rewriting the relationships at play and the tools used to narrate and spatialise them. Elisa Attanasio dedicates her book, Forme dello spaesamento nella letteratura italiana (1965-1978) (2025), to the literature of the Seventies of the 20th century that responded to the historical fractures of the period. Authors such as Ortese, Morante, Calvino, Morselli, and Celati ‘take disorientation as a generative condition, as an experience to be traversed rather than corrected’. It is an opportunity to reflect on inside and outside, to rethink genealogies and familiarities, to construct other languages or modes of affirmation, to inhabit by passing through the mirror.

A text by Celati, entitled Verso la foce. Reportage per un amico fotografo, accompanies the photographs of Ghirri, Barbieri, Guidi, and many others in Viaggio in Italia, a book published in 1984 and reprinted in facsimile in 2024. The text and the images convey a new sensitivity and, at the same time, alter the perception of the real country. They focus on off-kilter, ‘strange’ yet unexceptional situations, inscribed in the time and space of the present, such as the ‘exceptionally’ illuminated façade of an anonymous and isolated house, or a stately column ‘embraced’ by a sheet metal panel.

Walls of metal mesh and wood define the second shell of the house that Frank Gehry purchased in Santa Monica: the domestic and the conventional must coexist here with an unexpected second nature, a precarious cage that envelops the existing building and injects an uncanny Pop twist into an otherwise serene context. In the same year, 1978, Rem Koolhaas, with his book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, amid amusement parks and synthetic carpets, rewrites the history of the American city. Reviving Salvador Dalí’s paranoid-critical method, he attempts an alternative path, or even a fusion, in response to the increasingly evident drift between rational mechanisms and spontaneous phenomena.

In 1966, Luca Ronconi staged Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling in the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino; the text intentionally confuses the theatre and the asylum. Fellini’s last film, La voce della luna (1990), offers a narrative with deliberately incomprehensible traits, or rather one based on codes, presences, and environments belonging to a sphere poised between the everyday and the dreamlike, between the conformist and the marginalised.

In Fondamenta degli Incurabili (Watermark) (1989), Joseph Brodsky offers an account of his own drifting through the city of Venice, presenting literal images of reality and figures anchored to what exists and to the present, yet which precisely ‘don’t make sense’, such as the non-existent Fondamenta degli Incurabili or ‘the smell of freezing seaweed’. These are images produced by an exile who deliberately confuses his own memories with the surrounding context, cocktails of distant atmospheres intertwined with frames of the present. Together, they generate an endless play of mirrors that reads Venice itself as a muddy, projecting memory. In 2025, the artist Tolia Astakhishvili, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, installed To Love and Devour at the Fiorucci Foundation in Venice. The work stages a hand-to-hand confrontation with the Venetian palazzo which, as the title suggests, is stripped bare through traces of a corrosive form of domestic archaeology.

In 2014, the artist Olafur Eliasson, in the wake of Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977), constructed a shapeless landscape made of earth inside the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, in the work Riverbed. The dazzling, rational white walls and luminous ceilings of the exhibition space thus find themselves compelled to host what is most alien to them: a place that cannot be defined as such because it is unknown, incomprehensible, not preordained but prehistoric. We therefore witness the return of a new folklore, a further blend of space and earth, no longer orchestrated by the traditions of the domestic picturesque but by their misreading. As Mario Perniola clarified in the fourth issue of “Agaragar” in 1972, ‘détournement is the means by which revolutionary theory is made current and immediate. It is the opposite of citation: while in citation a theoretical truth formulated in the past claims to judge the present, in détournement, it is the present that assumes the role of the sole judge of past affirmations’.

In 2022, Tatiana Trouvé presented the exhibition Le grand atlas de la disorientation at the Centre Pompidou, proposing interweaving between drawing and sculpture, and three-dimensional spaces imagined to affirm places to (re)inhabit, somewhere between the known and the hoped for. In 2025, the same artist presented the exhibition The Strange Life of Things at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, in which – as specified in the presentation text – ‘Images and objects appear and reappear in different spaces and scenarios, flowing from two to three dimensions and vice versa. Moving back and forth between a pre-human past, a troubled present and a speculative future’.

The photograph of a series of small houses in a place obliterated by an earthquake situates a disoriented and disorienting domestic landscape in the present; only a few minimal details anchor the scene to its potential détournement. In 1974, Raimund Abraham entered the imaginary of the house by denying its very principle of construction. House Without Rooms is an architecture that does not seek to exist, but rather to host, making room for the new ideas necessary to inhabit the present.

Détournement thus moves from disorientation, but along a path that does not lead to the domestication of space, nor to returning dwelling to the ‘own’ and the ‘familiar’, thereby exorcising disorientation itself. In this interesting time, it is the country, the home, the familiar, and the self that await rethinking and redesigning, in order to give substance to the pantopia Serres writes about, to traverse without having to stay, return, or ‘re-familiarise’.

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