Stalker Walk Stalker
Collective Walk with Stalker / Osservatorio Nomade
Tallinn–Maardu–Jägala, 30–31 October, 2015
Coordinators: Peter Lang (Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm), Frances Hsu (Aalto University, Helsinki), Maroš Krivý (Estonian Academy of Art, Tallinn), Nicholas Boyarsky (Oxford Brookes School of Architecture, UK),
Stalker Rome / Osservatorio Nomade: Francesco Careri, Aldo Innocenzi, Lorenzo Romito, Pia Livia Di Tardo & Giulia Fiocca.
Stockholm / Malmö: Matthew Ashton, Marta Gil, Juanma González, Dick Hedlund Leire Mesa, Henrique Pavão, Marianne Skaarup & Sofie Tolf.
Students of Architecture from: The Estonian Art Academy, Tallinn, Aalto University, Helsinki, Oxford Brookes University, UK
As well as Jason Coleman (Oxford Brookes) & Alessandro Floris (Photographer)
In October of 1995, a small band of Romans, artists, architects, and others with great knowledge of the sprawling Italian capital embarked on a trip around Rome, walking only the areas in abandonment. Struck by the similarity to the film Stalker, a reporter, as legend has it, mentioned that their trip circling the Italian capital reminded him of the 1979 Tarkovsky film, “Stalker.” From then on the collective assumed this name, walking cities in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Americas, while returning time and again back to Rome.
Stalker proposes experimental strategies for intervention founded on exploratory spatial practices, using playful, convivial, and interactive tactics that relate to an environment, its inhabitants and their local culture. Such practices and methods are conceived to catalyze and develop evolutionary and self-organizing processes through the social and environmental fabric specifically in the areas where through abandonment or impoverishment basic necessities are lacking. The traces of these interventions constitute a sensible mapping on the complexity and dynamics of the territory, realized through the collective contribution of individuals from different backgrounds and disciplines, who together investigate, document, and participate in transformations taking place on the ground.
Twenty years after Stalker’s historic walk around Rome, “Stalker Walk Stalker” traces Tarkovsky’s historic scenes shot in Tallinn and in the surrounding countryside. The walk is the first of a series of Topo-mythic walks conducted by members of the original Roman group through the Baltic region. Not just a homage to the filmmaker, but more like visitation: an introspective, spiritual immersion into a world, “outside the contemporary.”
