Reliefs of an unbuilt city
Francesca Comisso
The Situationists are not alone in thinking of mobile and temporary settings. Mobility is the paradigm underlying the criticism of Rationalism functionalism that developed during the Sixties and Seventies. A case in point if the manifesto written by Yona Friedman, Architecture Mobile (1958). In 1956, Ionel Schein created autonomous habitation units that could be transported by truck, the Mobile Hostel Cabins. Capsule-houses, cell-houses, caravan-houses or cardboard houses to be burnt after use, as proposed by the French architect Guy Rottier, the habitat became an organism focused on “impermanence.” Applied to the modernist grid module, mobility confused its orientation to the point where the clear topographical stance was overturned. It is on the axis leading from the grid to the labyrinth that criticism of architectural purism developed. The labyrinth, to use a definition by Mario Perniola “is the mirror of cognitive error making.” In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, read the title of a celebrated film by Guy Debord. It is Debord again who guides us around Jorn’s house: “What is painted and what is sculpted, the stairs never uniform with the differences in level of the ground, the trees, the added elements, a cistern, a vine, the most diverse kinds of waste material always welcome, thrown down in perfect disorder, compose one of the most complicated landscapes that may be traversed in a fraction of a hectare and also, at the end of the day, one of the most well integrated.” A complex environment then; one that retains all the disorienting effects and little hidden surprises of the labyrinth. The insertion of a ceramic tile carrying a street number within the various textures of a path is the fruit of a derive of the signs and routes referring to the urban maps of Jorn and Debord. In the Jorn house at Albissola, ceramics are always used in the form of fragments and cast-offs dressing pre-existing architecture with a new skin. This practice has a precise linguistic and theoretical correlation in détournement, defined as “The integration of present or past artistic productions into a higher construction of an environment.” This was the tool with which the Situationists escaped the avant-gardist rhetoric of the “new”, examples are the “imperfect” plates — seconds — set in the stucco of the walls as medallions and surrounded by other decorative elements. On the walls of Jorn’s house we frequently find pairings and contaminations between painted elements and inserted objects or materials, between the avant-garde and the kitsch (the mural painting incorporates the ironic and détournement insertion of the statuette of a sailor boy — still today in production at the San Giorgio factory where Jorn created his greatest ceramic works — in the domestic niche reserved for a votive image). To return to the archaeological metaphor adopted by Debord, the examples mentioned are discontinuous frame that make of this house a complex text, rich in digressions, stratifications of meaning and citations. We have a range of formal references to the CoBra iconography, the depositing on the walls of “found” materials (shells, pebbles, pieces of pottery) as was the case with the Palais du facteur Cheval, while marking the garden paths we see the use of materials that recall Gaudi and his extraordinary architecture, but also elements that reference the history of the local area. Jorn was an attentive scholar of popular culture and traditions and was also interested in those of Albissola. Through the fragment, Jorn reconstructed a kind of tribute to the genius loci, placing together ceramics created in the old Savona style, plates from the nineteenth century tradition made using the sponge technique and objects of more modern conception. In the interview conducted in 1986, Gambetta recounts that “I brought cast-off faulty insulators from the factory. We used them as columns, supports…” The use of these objects had a precedent: within the Futurist ambit of the ‘20s, the architect Piero Portaluppi used electrical insulators as columns for the ceramics factory at Laveno. This is a significant example because, in those years, the electrical insulator was an object that carried a wealth of aesthetic and dynamic values deriving from its mechanical-industrial nature and its dynamic, plastic form. Once again it is Debord who reveals the role of “play” — another key Situationist term — in the Jorn house. The French author underlines how the collaboration of Umberto Gambetta in the construction of the house brings an element close to the idea of “collective play”, understood as the permanent experimentation with playful innovation and thus fundamental to the construction of situations. The signatures of Gambetta and Jorn on the side of the chimney ratify that multi-handed method of working theorized and practiced by Jorn.
In conclusion, we feel that it is important to consider the destiny that Jorn desired for this house after his death and that of Gambetta. Jorn conceived of a museum house, where the memory of its history and that of those who had passed through it would be available to future generations, and of a place destined to operate as a residence for artists form above all the northern countries. Jorn made two requests regarding the future of this habitative project: one autobiographical and one “experiential,” a house as a setting for relationships and episodes. Requests that can be found in many contemporary artistic “habitative” projects. We hope that this place may return to being the hospitable and accommodating setting it was passionately designed to be.
Excerpt from the Proceedings of the “Local ceramic traditions and globalisation of contemporary art” conference, 19/20 October 2002, Fortezza del Priamàr, Savona.
