Alexander Schellow

utopologies: Via Casilina, Rome

Animations, drawings, texts, 2013

utopologies is a documentation of walks along the Via Casilina in Rome. A particular focus is on those urban zones where spatial frameworks were created from the outside (as administrative acts, for example) in order to block on-going processes, making spaces ‘untouchable’ by establishing parks, sites of monuments or ‘empty’ squares. These micro-contexts provoke their own spatial practices by the users, and these in turn allow reflections on what specific, diverse notions of ‘informality’ might mean precisely by observing their counterparts materialising in the urban as ‘re-formalisations’. After spending time on site, the visual material is created in the studio through the practice of reconstructive drawing from visual recollection, with complex, spotted structures providing access to an unconscious nexus of memory. With this method, drawing is neither a medium of reproduction nor representation, but rather the trace as well as the process of remembering. Thus, by using one’s own perception as a potential point of departure, concrete spatial and temporal references of bodily and perceptive experiences can be examined and figuratively ‘documented’.