"How is intimacy produced in urban space?
In what ways can art activate forms of proximity capable of permeating the private and the public, the domestic and the everyday, within shared dimensions? How might these practices extend beyond inhabited and functional places, towards spaces that elude the norm and the project?"
from Verso il margine (Towards the Margin), Lucia Fontanelli and Olivia Teglia, in the self-produced catalogue of the installation Untamed Archive*, within the exhibition* Rifugi (Refuges), Pastificio Cerere, Rome
The Untamed Archive project gives physical form to these questions and to the experiences that followed from them, gathering fragmented memories and traces of relationships - between people and wild space - that came into being across the editions of the festival of performative practices EXITEXIT at the Prati di Caprara in Bologna, curated by the eponymous curatorial duo of Lucia Fontanelli and Olivia Teglia. Untamed Archive presents itself as a participatory archive in continuous growth and morphological mutation, realised by Micol Gelsi, a collaborator of the duo, and by the community that nourishes it by uploading its own documents. It becomes a digital and performative object, gathering and externalising in ever-shifting forms the collective memories that are continually being accumulated. The archive is born of a twofold intention: to disseminate the history and activities of the urban woodland – including the mapping of its paths, which enables a renewed orientation within it – and to foster reflection on the imaginary of the wild in relation to urban space.
(Here is the map of the paths and their names, inspired by the historical and naturalistic value of the site: https://rigenerazionenospeculazione.wordpress.com/2020/06/21/inaugurazione-dei-sentieri-nel-bosco-dei-prati-di-caprara/)
The project connects to the editions of the EXITEXIT festival held at the Prati di Caprara in Bologna, beginning in 2022, when the curators decided to expand their reflection on the intimacy of relationships from domestic spaces outward. In doing so, they experimented with marginal and unorganised spaces for performative practices, to observe how the emotional and political potential bound up in such spaces might influence interpersonal relationships. The space for artistic practice thus shifts to the margins of the city – beyond the network of porticoes, outside Porta San Felice – where the Prati di Caprara are situated.
The Prati di Caprara is today a former state military area: once a site for nineteenth-century horse racing, it later served as a zone for military exercises, parades, and equestrian competitions for officers, before becoming an airfield for the Army's aircraft and airships. Over recent decades, and particularly following the decommissioning of the barracks, it has undergone a significant process of naturalisation. In the eastern section, virtually all military buildings have been demolished, and a spontaneous urban woodland has grown up in their place; in the western section, military buildings and a substantial green area remain, with mature trees and meadow zones – as described by the Rigenerazione No Speculazione committee, established in 2017, which works to preserve the area and promote it as a heritage site of biodiversity and community value.
The area's ecological evolution over decades of unrestricted development has transformed it into an urban woodland – or, to adopt an expression from Gilles Clément and his Manifesto of the Third Landscape, a "fragment of undecided land within the planetary garden," and as such "not a heritage asset, but a common space for the future." To protect the site from the threat of concreting over, the committee has undertaken public awareness campaigns and, through protest mobilisations and the promotion of studies and research into the woodland's ecological value, is campaigning for a radical revision of the urban planning provisions affecting the area. Despite the acknowledged existence of an urban woodland of high ecological worth, the Prati di Caprara continues to face a genuine risk of development.
So as not to lose the traces of these experiences, the idea of archiving took shape, and Untamed Archive was born – meaning, literally, an archive of the wild, the untamed, the undisciplined. As Micol Gelsi recounts, the pairing with the word archive is significant: it derives etymologically from the Greek arché, understood both as the physical principle of origin and as a term denoting order and control.
"We might say it is an archive of the wild and, at the same time, a wild archive. We would like the project to embody both these spirits from a formal standpoint too – for its untamed character to remain a vital driving force." – Micol Gelsi
Untamed refers, therefore, first to the content of the archive – the wild, in the urban sense of the Prati di Caprara – but also to its methodology: an archive that is disordered, non-hierarchical, interwoven, and egalitarian. Untamed becomes a generative principle for an archive that is multiform and accessible, whose rules, if they prove necessary, will be developed over the course of its existence and through internal self-regulation, by those who take part in it – keeping alive, in the collection and analysis of traces and in the tending of what is discarded, the principles of listening, sharing, and physical and virtual exchange. By conceiving an archive-object that is collective and openly accessible, the project lends weight both to the militant practice of defending the urban woodland undertaken by the Rigenerazione No Speculazione committee – which seeks to re-signify the abandoned space and protect it against anti-community uses – and to those who choose to traverse that place through participatory artistic practices of listening, walking, and mapping, which lead to a rediscovery of the potential of the wild as an unregulated space, naturally layered and interwoven with new forms of plant and animal life that have found a home within the city.
Untamed Archive speaks of the union between a committee defending an urban woodland and a research inquiry into the possibilities of relationships within a rewilded space, through artistic practices. It gathers testimonies of experiences that have taken place in the marginal, imaginatively charged terrain of the Prati di Caprara; it holds these within a digital archive to which anyone may contribute by uploading their own material; and it reworks their communicative form under new guises.
In the morphological genesis that Untamed Archive is currently undergoing, several phases succeed one another, marked by a constant permeability and porosity in its existence across real and virtual space – and thus as a hyper-object, one that may be expressed both offline and online. An archive that is not self-contained but expansive, through connections, dynamic terminals, and possible digital interfaces, following the principles of hacker pedagogy and digital literacy.
The first phase of data collection is divided into concrete and digital actions: some documents are produced and/or collected through direct contact with the site (during occupations and activities in the urban woodland); others are uploaded to a Discord server, chosen for its accessibility and traceability. In practical terms, the approach to the virtual has involved teaching people how to upload content to the platform:
"Sitting side by side while downloading the app and showing how to upload content – I'm inclined to say this was not unlike our first visit to the Prati, when the members of the committee guided us along the paths, pointing out the access routes so we would not get lost during the crossing." – Micol Gelsi
In the process of gathering material – primarily photographic and video – a database of memories has been constituted, from which two distinct types of output or restitution of the archive have been developed: a permanent online platform, and temporary installations, workshops, and exhibitions. This approach applies the idea that the archive takes on multiple meanings, functioning simultaneously as process, relational network, and generative device – becoming living, mutable matter. Bearing in mind that whoever holds memory also holds the power of its narration and its communicative possibilities, it becomes essential for those managing the archive to foreground their affective relationship with the collected material, and to assume responsibility for how that which is preserved is cared for – for the preciousness entrusted by the people involved – to maintain transparency and honesty in the act of restitution.
The archive as a living element has taken the form of an installation in real space, activated as a performative act incorporating the variables of live manipulation of videos and photographs within the database – using open-source tools such as TouchDesigner – alongside music, played or mixed. Around the installation, a space takes shape in which relationships are woven within the ephemeral community of those who did not take part in the experiences at the Prati, or who, having done so, encounter the traversals anew through the distance of time and artistic reworking.
What emerges is a community that gathers around the video – a renewed technological hearth for the telling and re-mediation of stories born from encounters in the Prati. Around an archive that is no longer a static object but acquires a dynamic dimension, multiplying its possible outputs and its identitary and spatial dimensions, it becomes an active object, a living device, intent on creating – through its shifting interfaces – participatory processes and new relational dynamics. Departing from the safeguarding and setting-in-motion of micro-memories, personal and collective – fragments of affections and personal recollections, differentiated and particular observations that become symbols – pathways of reconceptualisation of the wild take shape, alongside collective participation in the management of memory and in the forms of its re-presentation.
"The aim is to create a beta archive – accessible and inclusive – that challenges the traditional concept of documentary memory to foster new counter-narratives: a rhizomatic creative experiment that mirrors the unpredictability of the wild as a generative principle, identifying within the process of construction a space of possibility and an inquiry into the relationship between conservation and transformation." – Micol Gelsi
(https://thearchiveoftheuntamed.xyz/? link per l’archivio online permanente di Untamed Archive)