no-man land |
No-Man Land
Robert Smithson would make, in the end of the 60’s, diverse recognition expeditions through industrial regions in the outskirts of New York. The areas covered in these itineraries are characterized by suburban and industrial horizontal extension, without any urban centrality. A landscape in transition marked by monotony.
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A documentary narrative that reminds the voyage narratives, with its factual old monument descriptions, but inverting its picturesque sensibility. Smithson makes a tour through this landscape to portray it devastated by industrialization and urban growth. A world without past converted into a geologic conformation in collapse. A map of disagregration and oblivion. None of the monuments cited by Smithson are places its inhabitants would attribute any meaning. He does not make any reference to history or to the region old urban pattern. These eroded parking lots and polluted channels are voids in an urban mesh with no nexus. |
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A panorama dictated by architectural disaggregations and urban indifference. Where dominates the dynamism of the substance submit to the infinite metamorphoses, the landslides, disruptions, lacerations and involutions. The spatial instability of these areas, taken by debris, industrial trashes and continuous operations.
Eroded urban situations to such point that there only emptiness exists. The viaducts, expressways, parking lots and popular residential condominiums are the monuments of the contemporary devastated large urban extensions. These places seem full of holes, comparative with the traditional cities, more compact and solid. They are monumental gaps that keep the vestiges of abandoned futures, maps of an infinite disintegration. These places are no-places, an abyss, tearing the city, creating multiple and incomplete points of view. In this no-man-land all the contours disappear, the borders between places spread in an indifferent and infinite continuum. Broken landscapes right in the middle of the city, continuously dislocating our perception.
Reference:
R. Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, in N. Holt ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, NYU Press, NY, 1979.