2020: A Space Odissey

Abstract

The journey is re-confirmed as a fundamental tool for narrating the space and recently for acquiring new forms in the light of the global pandemic. In a parallel between cinema, architecture and literature, the essay explores five ways of exploring, making a scalar climax that from the unknown extraterrestrial reaches the city and the territory, to finally focus on the domestic space. From the connection of heterogeneous examples it emerges a common point, namely the double nature of real or fictitious, introverted or extroverted, which characterizes the narratives of a contradictory coexistence of opposites. The journey, understood as a recording of a place, is not only the journey (or the narration) a trajectory that crosses territories, but a non-linear course composed of advancements and retrocessions, openings of gaze. The journey destination is sometimes absent or uncertain, recalling in particular the situation of indefiniteness and uncertainty of the current scenario induced by the global pandemic of Covid-19. The state of emergency has suspended and altered the narratives of the city, subverting the way of telling and enjoying space, changing relationships, scales and dimensions. Thus inserted in a collective pandemic narrative, we live introspective and individual journeys. If the conditions of use of space are now constrained, the desire for exploration (through) towards new unknown worlds continues precisely in the form of narration, tales of territories that could not be known physically.