interview with Gian Paolo Chiari
Interview with Gian Paolo Chiari
Museo Del Camminare - Founder
Introduction
For Chiari, walking transcends the physical act; it becomes a catalyst for itinerant engagement, a dance between the individual and the surrounding environment that weaves experiences, emotions, perceptions, sensations, and subsequent reactions into the fabric of his work.
With its serpentine alleys and water-kissed squares, Venice serves as the backdrop for Chiari's exploration. In this interview, he unveils the inception of the "Museo del Camminare", a unique institution headquartered not within traditional walls but in the streets and squares of Venice, the world's largest and oldest pedestrian city.
The conversation navigates through the genesis of the Museum, stemming from Chiari's realization that Venice, despite its status as the oldest pedestrian city, remained largely unexplored from the perspective of pedestrianism and the cultural, social, and artistic nuances it entails.
As Chiari discusses his various projects, from documenting street materials' intersections with rudimentary techniques to creating a pedestrian area inspired by Venice in London's Barbican, the profound impact of walking on urban development, social interactions, and health unfolds.
The interview also delves into the significance of "react" in the context of walking—an interaction between the individual and the environment that generates a mutual exchange, a resonance uniquely achievable through pedestrian exploration.
The dialogue touches upon Chiari's views on the importance of walking in contemporary society, addressing challenges posed by the privatization and commercialization of spaces.
The narrative weaves through the intricacies of the Museum's future, Chiari's reflections on the acceptance of active participation, and the paradoxical nature of societal exposure through social media vis-à-vis active engagement.
In Gian Paolo Chiari's vision, the Museum of Walking stands as a living testament to the profound impact of walking on the individual and the community, transcending geographical boundaries and cultural contexts. As we embark on this journey through the interview, we glimpse the vibrant tapestry of Venice and the broader cultural landscape shaped by the simple yet profound act of walking.
How was the Museum born? What was the inspiration that led you to create the Museum? Why did you choose to base a museum on “walking”?
In 2018, I reflected on the fact that Venice, the oldest pedestrian city in the world, has never been studied from the point of view of pedestrianism and even less from the artistic, social and cultural meaning of this "act", which is suggested to you, if not imposed, by its urban status.
I discussed it with academics from the IUAV (University Institute of Architecture of Venice). We found that the IUAV, established after the 2nd World War, never produced anything specific on walking; there is a study produced by urban planning students, which, however, only concerns logistics and transport.
Although solicited by me, the students themselves never addressed the specific topic.
I have many contacts and hypotheses, but I need to find more contributions from some authors belonging mostly to the academic world.
So, did the choice of walking as the main theme of the Museum originate from your being in Venice?
In reality, everything stems from the question, "Why not understand walking in the oldest pedestrian city in the world?".
Numerous projects have originated from here, some completed (found on the site), others in progress, and others to be scheduled.
My aim is to create an association that deals with walking from a cultural, social, artistic and political point of view, and the site is the first step, as a documentary, informative and contaminating component. It is a broader initiative that starts from Venice and potentially extends to the whole world.
In reference to photographic-based projects, I mention a project that documents, albeit with a rudimentary technique, the points of contact in the streets between asphalt and stone. Here, psychogeographical concepts emerge on boundaries not mapped urbanistically as well as on implications purely linked to the diversity of the two materials, of different generations, aesthetics and environmental impact. A testimony, even visual, of what the urban environment has had to undergo and suffer.
Tell me more about the concept of "walking", from your point of view and functional to the creation of the content.
The concept of walking has fueled my work in creating travel guides, particularly during my African experience. I realized how absurd the way of constructing canonical tourist guides is, essentially based on a defined and codified itinerary, a modal scheme in antithesis to those of drift and the freedom to wander.
For this reason, I stopped writing travel guides and started studying and researching.
Next year, I will host an exhibition of guides (in their own way unique in size in the world) at the Geography Museum of Padua.
What is the importance of "walking" in today's society? How can it affect the individual and the community? What are your perspectives on the importance of walking as a libertarian and liberating practice, especially considering the challenges of privatizing spaces and commercializing the movement?
I would like to answer you with a theme on which I worked and resulted in one of my books: “La Passeggiata Italiana. Una Storia Culturale”. (trad. "The Italian Walk. A Cultural Story.”)
It is a European phenomenon but not an Anglo-American one.
The walk is an unstudied but extraordinary phenomenon that would be worth studying in-depth to give rise to street photography projects.
The walk is not functional for a specific objective (such as shopping) but for social interaction and immersion in the environment.
As you can see from the site, my research starts from but certainly continues beyond Venice.
For example, in defining a plan for creating a pedestrian area in the Barbican, the Chief Planner of London (Peter Wynne Rees) studied Venice to pursue what he called "a utopian dream".
"No two forces have had more effect on the London skyline than the Luftwaffe and Peter Rees,”
architect Ken Shuttleworth, who, together with Rees, helped shape the Gherkin.
https://www.standard.co.uk/business/business-news/peter-rees-the-man-who-reshaped-the-square-mile-9204713.html (accessed on 24/09/2023)
In Barbican, you can see aerial walkways inspired by Venice's bridges. They separate the pedestrian from the car road, just as Venetian bridges separate the pedestrian from the navigable canal.
This is also the clear statement or wish that the movement of goods should be separated from that of people.
The model of spaces, not places where the individual can move on foot, is also the model that is proposed today as the only salvation from the American model of the compact city and the fusion between concrete and the individual.
I would also like to refer to another contribution in the museum, which talks about Arcosanti, an experiment in a "compact" pedestrian city in the Arizona desert by the architect Pietro Soleri.
Also, in this project, we see traces of a Venetian pedestrian city inspired by an anthropocentric conception of the world and is in total antithesis to the urban development of the cities of many nations, not least the United States.
The compact model conceives urban development, promotes social interactions, and brings us back to the practice of the so-called "walk".
During the walk, we develop themes of social interaction, health (the incidence of osteoporosis in the inhabitants of the historic centre of Venice is much lower than the national average), safety, and the re-appropriation of public spaces.
If I list the following words: "see," "imagine," "fight," "resonate," "perceive," and "react," which do you think are most similar to the context of "walking" in your area of study and research?
No doubt: react.
The practice of walking generates a mutual reaction between the individual and the environment, a mutual exchange. It's not just one step after another but an interaction with the environment with a level of openness and involvement that you can only achieve as a pedestrian.
I am also a passionate cyclist (writer's note: referring to David Byrne): cycling is very "cinematic" and is like the scrolling of a camera on a trolley. The views are fantastic, but the level of immersion and relationship with the surrounding environment induced by walking creates resonance, as you said.
In this regard, being Venetian means being in Venice, where every step has meaning.
Unfortunately, the purpose of going from one point to another, the itinerary, which is preordained, has less meaning in the individual's overall experience.
Unfortunately, even in Venice, there are pre-arranged itineraries that are almost imposed by reasons of a purely commercial nature ("guiding" tourists to pass in front of shop windows), which is antithetical to the concepts of walking and drifting.
Walking is a practice that produces rights.
Walking, not following a guide or being led…..
Correct. In much of England, the network of paths south of London (i.e. Brighton) is called Bridle Paths or Bridleways (protected by Common Law), where the binary logic of private-public does not exist. They must be a common value. The layout of the paths is preserved by the continuous act of walking on them and confirming the itinerary through walking.
What also comes to mind is what Debord stated regarding the attempt to make the environment spectacular and the opposite desire, through drift, to de-spectacularise one's walking as a libertarian and liberating practice. The desire to create a spectacle originated in the 1600s and gave rise to pleonasms, such as the English one of "sightseeing".
Everything happens and is done through images and to exhibit images.
The itinerary serves to "order" and create relationships between one point and another in a positivist and hierarchical logic, often linked to places of power, even symbolically. For example, in two well-known guides to Venice, the itineraries start either from the Doge's Palace, the ancient centre of Venetian political power, or from the Basilica of San Pietro di Castello, the centre of religious power.
As you can see, we continue to talk about places from which to start and where to go, and we don't talk about space within which to move.
The guide should not be an instruction manual on what to see; it should be characterized by the author's personal experience and his experience.
Is it for these reasons that you chose certain authors for the Museum? In this regard, which authors, connected to, or interpreters of photography do you see as most similar to the Museum's contents and themes (without forgetting that you have dedicated a space to Sophie Calle)? Do you believe that the so-called “Street Photography” is similar to the museum's themes and that its interpreters should be contemplated in its contents?
Given that Rumney was also, in his own way, a psychogeographic photographer, without going into detail with names and authors, I can, however, affirm that the photographic current with which we consider ourselves most similar and which I see as strongly linked to the practice of walking is street photography.
In this regard, I agree with your statements of photography as a tool for documenting and describing impressions, details, spaces, and people just as writing or drawing can be, perhaps drawing attention to those psychogeographical boundaries that are not part of mapping but of emotional perceptions and instinctive impressions.
Ralph Rumney's research on the psychogeographic mapping of the Venice project was the first project of the Museum. I literally went crazy to reconstruct his drifts, recover the images and connect Rumney's map to the real places of Venice.
Rumney, a situationist from the very beginning, had the will, no one knows how conscious, to overturn society's positivist and preordained logic to introduce the alternative methodology of drift.
Rumney rigorously avoids tourist routes and consciously dedicates himself to secondary places in a deliberate effort to oppose pre-established power and its logic of pre-ordained itineraries.
Debord declared this effort a failure, but I believe the real reason is marginal. In reality, it produced, from the point of view of content, important results.
The study on Rumney is linked to my work on travel guides and the desire to understand what is behind the institutional guides. The critical potential of his methodology could be an important source of inspiration, being one of the most powerful forms of refusal/proposal in antithesis to the traditional one of the travel guide that goes from the era of grand tours to that of Lonely Planet.
Others, in Venice, despite the logic of drift, did not oppose the so-called pre-established order but used other techniques, such as Sophie Calle.
As has been said, with Sophie Calle, it is not clear where the person ends and the artist begins.
Yes, her way of applying the drift, following a stranger through the streets of Venice, is decidedly personal, almost innate, and has no analogy with Rumney's project.
“Suite Venitienne” is the work we are talking about, but it is also interesting to remember the other Venetian initiative by Sophie Calle, who, by getting hired as a hotel maid, enters the guest rooms and photographically represents the traces of their stay. After extensive research, I think I have managed to identify the hotel that hosted this Calle experience.
Suite Venitienne is one of her most successful works, where the artist is truly herself, and as you said, the person coincides with the artist.
The fact that she is defined as a flaneuse does not convince me, just as the relevance of the flaneur does not convince me.
We have experiences of equally symbolic value in the walk. I understand that it was a phenomenon linked to a way of being and thinking, to dandyism. Still, there is no need to continually return to 19th century Paris and Baudelaire and box yourself into this cliché as soon as you start walking!
I'm reminded of Henry James, who said of Venice, "....the more you linger on a bench, the more you enjoy it".
I also want to mention Bernard Rudofsky, an architect and urban planner who has produced decidedly significant photographic works.
How do you see the future of the museum?
If I look back, from 2018 until today, I have found widespread attendance but little acceptance to actively participate and contribute to the content. This is quite paradoxical in an era where everyone loves social media; they continually expose themselves and publish everything they do.
I also thought that having called this initiative "Museum" has "inhibited" participation and led to the perception of something institutional, while this initiative has the characteristics of a community of people with the same interest and non-profit.
We had also considered offering free guided tours, but the first attempt was devastated by COVID-19. Now we would like to take up the initiative again and propose it to migrant reception centres, although I think it is complicated to clarify the non-beneficial nature and purpose of this proposal to those who expect you not to take them walking, but, for example, at the restaurant!
The Museum website also deserves reflection: since we are self-financed, I was forced to reduce costs and assembled the site from already used pieces.
I like the site, with this simple, canonical, almost hierarchical structure, and the purpose is clear to me...
I understand, and thank you for your appreciation. However, we contradict everything Rumney worked for and all the claims of walking, wandering, and drifting without any preordained pattern.
If, for example, we think of a photographic exhibition and we want to remain consistent with what was stated previously (Debord teaches), the images should not have a predefined order either.
Even deliberately choosing not to follow an itinerary or proposing a point of view contained in a photo may not be psychogeographic…..
Yes, no matter how hard we try, we can't escape it!
Bibliography
1 1. Chiari, Gian Paolo. “La Passeggiata Italiana. Una Storia Culturale”, per il Museo del Camminare, Venezia, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
2. Careri, Francesco. “Walkscapes”, Einaudi, 2006
3. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive”, Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)
4. Web site “Museo del Camminare” http://www.museodelcamminare.org/
5. Calle, Sophie. “Suite Vénitienne”, Siglio, N. Y., 2015
6. Byrne, David. “Bicycle Diaries”. Faber & Faber, London, Kindle ed.
