PETER LANG - STALKER: GROUND WORK
ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE IN EXPANDED FIELD
It might appear obvious that Stalker Walk Stalker calls into question the doppelganger effect, where things or beings enter a double state of existence, becoming mirrored, reversed, or cloned. The Roman group Stalker came to Tallinn to re-open a condition that lay deep within a mystical territory, known as the Zone, a place that Andrej Tarkovsky depicted as the mysterious extra-temporal and extra-spatial landscape in his 1979 film Stalker. Hence this oddity, Stalker in the footsteps of Stalker. Stalker’s visit to Estonia was timed to coincide with the group’s 20th anniversary Crossing of Actual Territories, a walk that had originally encircled Rome, revealing for the first time the full extent of the abandoned landscapes that surrounded the Italian capital. This project is presented with an overview of the Stalker groups work, 1995-2015.
The talk will be held on Monday, 20th of June, 2016, from 8.00 p.m. at the National Art Gallery (NDG), Konstitucijos av. 22, Vilnius.
Entrance is free of charge.
Peter Lang is professor in Architectural Theory and History at the Royal Institute of Art, in the Department of Architecture, Stockholm (Kungl. Konsthögskolans-KKH), where he conducts post-graduate research courses in architecture, design and multi media communications.Lang holds a Bachelor in Architecture from Syracuse University and earned a PhD in Italian history and urbanism at New York University in 2000. He is a Fulbright recipient in Italian studies. Lang works on the history and theory of post-war Italian architecture and design, with a focus on sixties Italian experimental design, media and environments. He has been a member of the Rome based urban arts research group Stalker since 1997.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous science fiction art film which was shot in Estonia, then under Soviet control, brings up a broad range of issues on territory and alienation. In the film director depicts the mysterious extra-temporal and extra-spatial landscape of fiercely protected post-apocalyptic wasteland known as The Zone. Here the the quest for a mythical place known only as The Room unfolds when illegal guide (Aleksandr Kajdanovsky) leads a writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn) and a scientist (Nikolay Grinko) into the heart of the devastation.
