Opera Publica and Micro-Territorial Extimacy in Latin America
New York, USA [2015]
Type: Book essay
Status: Published
Author: Claudio Vekstein
Title: Opera Publica and Micro-Territorial Extimacy in Latin America
Book Title: Total Latin American Architecture. Libretto of Modern Reflections & Contemporary Work
Publisher: Actar Publishers, New York, USA
Year: 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940291-47-5
1. Morpho-political construction
Opera Publica is originally the Latin name used for public works in the ancient Rome, the construction or urban engineering projects and infrastructure carried out by the State in the name/on behalf of the community, which can no longer provide their own works for itself due to a shift of territorial scale and political scope of the interventions. To these works belong generically the civic or recreational space, the basic communitarian equipment of health, education or justice services, as well as the collective urban habitat and territorial infrastructure of lands, roads, dams or canals. While in a heterogeneous complex of increasing urbanity and social emergency, Opera Publica builds today in Latin America, localized technical and social armatures for sustained political understanding through adaptive design tools to drive public interest challenges and socio-political demands towards the natural and built collective construction.
Within this shift, it is necessary to study the transferring process of technical responsibilities from the community to state, and how this operates passing it along with the imaginary and symbolic universe associated with the construction of everyone’s works. The technical labor promotes on one hand the obsequencial resolution of problems following a lined, internal, autonomous logic, an evolutionary development to the case of advanced and experimental attempts, tending to the progressive domain of the disciplinary materials. On the other hand, the public practice demands from the collaborative, heteronomous and participatory efforts and brings into the equation the inexorable relationship to life: the further articulation between the domain of the disciplinary materials and the relationship to life is what we use to call craft or “oficio”, where Opera Publica acts as “the art of” the public project.
The first purpose is revisiting and colliding together the internal development of the architectural, urban and environmental design disciplines and their immanent procedures of the project transcending them along the external decisional logic and mechanisms of immediate political action and vital implementation of the great ideas to serve the common good. Opera Publica serves then as a strategic, organizational endeavor functioning on the multiple scales of the greater territorial project, from architectural to urban design, from ecological landscape to environmental and infrastructural planning. It provides tactical and political sustenance for the public space in the city, conjugating public policy and formal idiosyncrasy while contributing to the coexistence of our communities and the advance of the collective urban habitat.
This public coalition propels responsible civic engagement and effective action on initiatives of environmental and social impact, articulating new opportunities for future sustainable development of communities, cities and territories, with the disciplinary confidence thus forming new, useful and thoughtful knowledge for transformative realization. This reciprocated transformation of the physical and social work pertaining to the territory with the research and reflective practice of the project acts as an integrative function of the public service responsibility. Through this integration, it is possible to reconstitute the morphological-architectural with the ecological-environmental, the economical and political with the social and cultural, the territorial landscape with the urban, and to potentiate the cultured vision with the local and vernacular imagery.
It is compulsory to respond in a transformative, certain and versatile manner with the properly attuned disciplinary tools to the dynamic emerging challenges, engendering precise and specific solutions for the collective enhancement of the habitat, as well as ensuring the inclusivity of public space, to actively intervening in ordering the urban sprawl, the equitable regional planning, the management of the environmental control and the consolidation of the social community bond. Along the established principles and newer interactive research procedures applied to the project, these initiatives device and merge indirect models of collective collaboration, facilitation, exchange, negotiation or a more direct participatory inclusion.
Focusing on specifically tailoring the project knowledge to secure the particular interest and character of the community’s micro-intimate territoriality, its spatial manifestation and public demonstration, Public Operators can undertake complex collaborations, through public, nongovernmental, community, municipal or political organizations along with developing entities and private/public funding and financing to meet and transcend specific needs throughout the territory. These complicated enterprises of morpho-aesthetical and highly political involvedness, along the vital interaction between social actors and interactive/participatory decision-making processes and mechanisms, demand a new and adapted project operatory. This tool manages the micro internal conflicts extending into future problems or ongoing resolutions over time. Through the project’s clued-up mechanics, Opera Publica expands the self-sufficient discourse to the concrete and comprehensive, far-reaching opportunities and benefits for a real sense of accessibility and spatial coexistence of all citizens of the community.
2. Micro-territorial articulation
Opera Publica shoulders the territorial perspective from the social geo-semantics, meaning the sum of a sense to a place which definition is validated by a community: the territory as a socio-ecological system assembling society and the environment it inhabits. Activating the territory both in their vertical relationships (between society and the physical environment and their characteristics, economic organization, political, demographic, physical and built environment affecting society, etc) and horizontal relationships (between the various and diverse micro-territories that comprise it), Opera Publica reaches the proximity principle needed to develop design refinement, specificity and fine-grained vicinity. It facilitates exhaustive, intimate depiction preventing the fine detail been smoothed over, averaged out and replaced with a lower-resolution coarse-grained model due to abstract, systematic or political purposes.
The sociological difficulty for depicting the inhabitants of popular neighborhoods, arising from the existence of a multiplicity of particular situations, as well as the typical planning overlook has often considered territories or neighborhood areas as a uniform whole. Therefore, notions such as exclusion, inclusion, integration etc. could result fallacious or useless for the purposes of thorough knowledge and resulting operational strategies, since it subsumes the diversity of situations and trajectories of populations leveling their environmental conditions and struggles. Opera Publica enters the situation with expectations of finding multiple idiosyncrasies and consequently deploying simultaneous actions on multidirectional developments, making possible to reveal different forms of micro-intimate segregation, letting emerge and activate focused, hyper-articulating tactics.
The lower the territorial observation scale, the greater the difference between social, cultural behaviors and finer the grain of spatial, environmental conditions inhabiting the area. Focusing the inquiry shifts the tools from statistical facts to revealing very rich sociological mechanisms of public interaction, diverse ways of living within communities, mixed inhabitation patterns and self-organization strategies, spatial and material appropriation and vast local imaginary, turning generic public opinion measuring polls into vital public interest action programs. The proximity enables mapping the micro-territories through describing their specific characters and identities along their ongoing processes, transforming quantitative and ciphered/stochastic fields into qualitative, embodied cosmoses. These micro-procedural and ethno-methodological differential progressions inform and shape the project’s innermost materials and engrained techniques, nurturing hyper-articulation and challenging typification.
The micro-territorial perspective provides a shift in observational and operational position, a new theoretical point of sight and action, linking the exposed and public with the most intimate minutiae and intricacies; it does trespass through private zones into the innermost without necessarily carrying a “subjective camera”, since the same bare object still remains “out there” while uncovered. Micro-territoriality turns the public object intimate, revealing the existence of multiple, intense societal inner performances, giving visibility to distinct collective flows that are not necessarily outward protagonists of their respective quarters because they do not restrict their actions to institutionalized participatory spaces.
3. Intimate-extimacy architecture
The public/intimate breach turns into a bridge; it is not reducible to a dialectical synthesis since they do not act as opposites but work as a continuous description (differing from the conventional public/private antagonism). Slavoj Žižek describes Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece as an opportunity for bridging the parallax gap through “the staging of an architectural antagonism: is Norman not split between the two houses, the modern horizontal motel and the vertical Gothic mother’s house, forever running between the two, never finding a proper place of his own? In this sense, the unheimlich character of the film’s end means that, in his full identification with the mother, he finally found his heim, his home. In modernist works like Psycho, this split is still visible, while the main goal of today’s postmodern architecture is to obfuscate it. (…) Directly combining the old mother’s house and the flat modern motel into a new hybrid entity, there would have been no need for Norman to kill his victims, since he would have been relieved of the unbearable tension that compels him to run between the two places”.[1]
Opera Publica realizes this dramatic traversing of the public/intimate breach, as a critical short circuiting between the two apparently distant aspects, where the closeness, intimate convolution of the “opera” joins the “public” openness, finally revealing the Real -the primordial object, the mysterious something of an ordinary object, where the sublime dimension shines through it. “One of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: (…) which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. (…) Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way. (…) the point is, rather, to make him or her aware of another -disturbing- side of something he or she knew all the time”.[2]
Extimacy, the term coined by Jacques Lacan extimité[3] from the term intimité (a superlative of the Latin positive adjective intra or within, its comparative interior or deeper than, and superlative intimus or deeper of all, innermost) in the same manner is not the contrary of intimacy, it problematizes the apparent oppositions between inner and outer, between container and content. As Jacques-Alain Miller proposes: “it is necessary in order to escape the common ravings about a psychism supposedly located in a bipartition between interior and exterior. (…) The exterior is present in the interior. The most interior – this is how the dictionary defines “intimate” (l’intime) – has, in the analytic experience, a quality of exteriority. (…) This is why Lacan invented the term extimité. It should be observed that the term “interior” is a comparative that comes to us from Latin and of which intimus is the superlative. There, there is an effort on the part of the language to reach the deepest point in the interior”.[4]
At the inner-outer surpassed deadlock, internal and external architectural worlds have no more consequential meaning for the micro-territorial extimacy of Opera Publica, revealing its public intimacy. Loosing their contrast they become reversible: the extime refers now to the innermost, the intimate, which is found on the outside -as the culture determining the subject, referring to a topology that vacillates between interior and exterior. Architectural extimacy being very intimate and familiar becomes radically strange; her being intimate turns into the most distant and unlocalized, the familiar unknown. The extimacy marks the traumatic passage for the subject from the plenitude of the Real to the de-centered universe of the Symbolic; for Lacan, the inner-center of the subject is out, it is ex-centric. The subject remains nostalgic for what has been lost and seeks reunification; a subject who is an object outside of itself. The Other is “something strange to me, although it is in my heart.”
Opera Publica and its architecture undertake the shock of the Other in the intense, overwhelming Real with a bare Latin American self (“magical realism”, “the marvelous real”, and so on). It does not seek a new sterile modern synthesis nor an idiosyncratic architectural local dialect, but growing its own twinkled short-circuiting construction, as a hyper-articulate expression of micro-territories, inside-out reveries entwining structures, stories, landscapes, and people.
[1] Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Architectural Parallax – Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle at http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=218
[2] Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Short Circuits. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
[3] Lacan, Jacques. 1986. Le seminaire, Livre VII: L’éthique de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, chap. VI
[4] Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2008. Extimity. Universalism versus globalization. Text established by Elisabeth Doisneau and translated by Françoise Massardier-Kenney, in The Symptom 9, www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=36