camminando | Walking as Healing: Beach Walks in Ostia and Garbatella

My healing walks in Rome continue, as strategy to cope with stress, which has now arrived to extremely high levels. One of my stressors du jour are dealing with a delayed and not well done renovation of my late parents apartment in Rome, which will become my home: I am currently sleeping on the bedroom floor surrounded by boxes and covered by dust. The other stressor is the recurrent problem of progress with my doctoral research, dealing with egos and dysfunctionality: the latest is the  exceptional rejection of approving funding for my presentation at the Symmetry conference in Vienna.
I keep repeating in a mantra-like fashion Nietzsche's popular statement "That which does not kill us makes us stronger". My steps take to the A metro and then to the train to Ostia Stella Polare.

Returning to the city, I got off at San Paolo fuori le mura (IV century AD) the basilica erected in the burial place of San Paolo. The sun starts setting behind the pines at north-west side of the basilica.

My following wanderings encounter Garbatella, the former working class neighborhood which presents harmonious urban planning, inspired by the garden city movement. Wikipedia says:

Garbatella is a quarter belonging to the Municipio XI of the commune of Rome, in the Ostiense district. Its population counts nearly 45,000.It was founded in the late 1920s on an estate bearing the same name lying on a hill adjacent to the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. The older section of the area is divided into project units (Italian: lotto), each of them made of several buildings grouped together around a common yards: this design was borrowed from the Garden city movement. This kind of architectural agglomeration in Rococo style, consists of a common garden area which serves as an informal meeting point for all the families that live in the lotto.

My walk ends by the Garbatella metro station, with views of the Roman industrial archeology: the Gasometro framing the setting sun.

 

The sun is setting framed by the Gasometro

Manhattan Style | Day 3

Some highlights from yesterday:

• Wasted time with 311.
• No reply from coop board
• Building super acted very annoyed when I tried to communicate my frustration for the incapacitating noise asking kindly for his suggestion.

Today torture du jour: drilling noise.

Welcome to the Upper West Side!

It could be a pretty tree-lined street...

Manhattan Style 2 | 311, Dysfunctionality & Maps

This post is the sequel of the story of Manhattan Style #1.
Yesterday, after the banging and pounding noise incapacitated me from performing any work, I called 311. I did not have much hope about their problem solving capabilities but felt like there was no other course of action. I spent almost one frustrating hour with the 311 operator, initially describing the same simple situation several times. Finally the next step: I had to provide the address, which could not be found by the operator. I mentioned several times that the address was easily found in Google Maps, mapquest, Bing; yet she could not find it.
A few hours after ending this frustrating useless reach for help I received an email from 311 that my action request was closed. No solution to my problems but an addition to the great mysteries of the universe:
Why a major city self defined "service" line does not use maps available to any of us common mortals?
Another question: how much of our tax money is allocated to fund their GIS map system which is not even able, to locate an address easily find in any common map system?

thoughts | dysfunctionality, public art agency and culture production

"Dysfunctional is the talent du jour" was the comment of a friend of mine to my list of professional frustrations.

I cannot complain in these times of cosmic disorder, considering what is going on the planet: earthquakes, tsunamis, wars, tornadoes, floods...But still there is so much which could be accomplished just with some logical reasoning and respect/consideration of others, which could truly improved the quality of life.

Being involved in cultural production for several years (often working on it over 10 hour a day, without being able to make a living) I have been involved in too many episodes of dysfunctionality, mainly coming from academia or so called "public art" agencies.

I am mentioning only the most recent episode, regarding for the Big Screen, a supposedly public display of video works. The web site encourages to submit work related to the month specific themes; for April the topics list included cheese, jazz, and diversity, not including poetry ---in fact, April is National Poetry Month. We queried about our interest in submitting our visually poetry project and we encouraged to do so. We submitted stills, and links to the low resolution video. We are asked to mail or drop off the high resolution video. With the understanding that the video was selected for broadcasting —the submitted material was more than sufficient to make a selection— I dropped off the full resolution video work at the Big Screen office. A week later after asking for broadcast schedule we receive a quick reply "Unfortunately we will not be showing your work at this time" with no explanation of the reasons. The other reply after my inquiry of the reasons for the work rejection was "we need to see 100% of a video before it is selected, this only makes sense as we are a public video screen and have to make sure that the videos being shown are appropriate."

Besides being upset for waste of time caused by this submission I am also concerned (and this is not my first experience in regard) of how public space for art Public Art is administered and managed. How are the curators/administrator selected? Making decision about public space comes with responsibility: a justification for rejecting work which has been highly priced is due.

However luckily we live in a time where the largest public art space of the world is available:
View and judge yourself how Venice of the Mind was appropriate for public viewing!