描述
The eleventh issue of «Vesper», entitled Miserabilia, aims to focus on spaces and spectres of misery in imagination and reality. Two assumptions underlie it: the removal of the space of existence of misery in the concrete and immaterial context of the West in favour of «measurable conditions of poverty», and the presence of buildings in cities as evidence of a past in which poverty was a «matter» of governance and planning.
Misery in Western societies is today unthinkable and unrepresentable, unspeakable and invisible, exiled to a historical, geographical, cultural elsewhere. Yet, in the past, misery took majestic forms in Italy, for instance, from the Great Schools of Venice to the almshouses for the poor. Monuments gave way to the anonymous architecture of service centres or temporary structures responding to emergency situations. If the monumentality of misery expressed an aesthetics, the architecture of poverty rejects it in the name of functionality: today the space of misery is emptied of phenomenology, evidence, quality, quantity, scale, extension, discourse.
Misery is therefore a question of space and spatiality, in the reality and in the collective consciousness. Where misery is not represented or representable, it does not disappear at all: in anonymity it rather ends up being internalized, expressed at the most in blaming and indebtedness, even in the criminalization of poverty, which is counterbalanced by the moral immiseration of affluent neighbourhoods, increasingly isolated and closed to the rest of the city. The result is an urban space in a permanent state of crisis, where the spectre of impending poverty everywhere ends up legitimizing an art of governing emergency and precariousness. Only the «boundless», discarded, forgotten space persists as an environment in which misery can settle, set up camp, recognize itself.
