_on narratives and stalker

...Stalker was founded by a group of architecture students during an occupation of Rome University in 1990. That they describe that occupation as ‘an opportunity to get to know a lot of people’ provides a key to the architectural thinking behind much of their subsequent work. At the same time, Stalker (the name refers to Andrei Tarkowsky’s cult film) is a loose and open collective that consistently shies away from any conventional description as ‘architectural’: members and collaborators have included artists, art historians, theoreticians, an astro-physicist, a geologist and a dentist. The first Stalker project, a five-day dérive through the city of Rome, mapped the territory in which they would operate.

Yet to say that this project resulted in a map is to say nothing at all, for in essence this was a map of the unmapped and the unmappable. That the dérive should be such an apparently self-negating exercise is hardly surprising given its origins in the work of one of the most richly self-destructive avant-garde groups of the last century, the Situationist International (the various protagonists of which are obvious and important influences on Stalker’s work). Guy Debord, the chief theorist of the movement, describes the dérive as a passage through the ‘ambiences’ of a city, a search for and awareness of its ‘psychogeography’. It is an encounter with effect, with strange attractors and with the often unpredictable collision of various urban processes. In many respects it is the search for a narrative of the city. ...



(Rappolt, Mark, ARCHITECTURE: STALKER: BARBED WIRE AND WINDMILLS)