In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979), inspired by the novel Roadside Picnic (1972) by the two dissident science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a “zone” is described – a place that an extraterrestrial civilization once occupied and later abandoned on Earth. Initially, an attempt is made to penetrate this area by force, but it is then fenced off, and once the extraterrestrials have departed, scientists and technicians continue to study it without making any progress. The area can now only be accessed with the help of “stalkers” (which in English means “pursuers” or “hunting guides”), individuals who know the ways and methods of entering it, and are typically sought out by traffickers and adventurers to acquire the materials left behind. Some “stalkers” have discovered a structure deep within the zone, where any human wish may potentially be fulfilled. The film narrates the story of a stalker hired to guide a writer who has lost his inspiration and a scientist who works with superhuman powers, in the hope of fulfilling their respective desires. However, their cynical skepticism prevents them from even entering the place that was the goal of their journey, and the stalker once again feels, with painful awareness, the inevitability of his condition and, by extension, that of mankind.
Tarkovsky seems here to anticipate a vision that would later become clearer and increasingly influential on our time, regarding the crisis of our civilization and its prevailing, dominant models. The two visitors represent, symbolically, the writer as the embodiment of art and the scientist as that of technology and science. Meanwhile, the stalker simultaneously embodies both the common individual alienated from society and the bearer, malgré soi, of a panicked sense of existence, yet capable of adhering to a spirituality that does not turn into religiosity and instead deflects towards a sort of positive magic.
Much of Tarkovsky’s cinema manifests as a continuous dialogue between personal loss, as destiny, and the search for salvation, not only individual but collective as well.
Alessandro Mencarelli, a criminal lawyer in Pistoia, in his work as a photographer, identifies “zones” that he mostly discovers during the daily practice of his professional activity, which then manifest in works, usually photographic series, in an iconic-narrative form.
In Nostalghia, which now integrates into a multimedia installation at Assab One (his photographs from the series of the same name, verbal text citations inscribed directly into the space, video fragments retrieved from the internet), the artist deepens his relationship with the Russian director, creating a work not so much commenting on Tarkovsky’s work as drawing from his poetic and idealistic dictates to create a new meaning, ultimately autonomous from its origin. Mencarelli not only looks at Tarkovsky’s films, particularly Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and Offret (1986) – with precise references to them – but also at his life (the video fragment of his father reading his poems) and his favorite readings (one of the texts cited is from the Tao Te Ching). Moreover, Mencarelli utilizes a model who was his client for the figure appearing in the photographic series carrying the same title, and the installation at Assab One is merely an extension of this, set in the Tuscan countryside where Mencarelli was born and raised, which he holds a pronounced – nostalgic? – familiarity with.
Finally, the Assab One space, where this work has temporarily found a home, was for forty years the headquarters of an important graphic company, GEA-Grafiche Editoriali Ambrosiane, located in the first outskirts of Milan, and has been an art space since 2002. Although it ceased its industrial activity, it has not erased the traces of its past nor its original architectural structure.
Echoes respond at a distance to compose a complexity of meanings.
First of all, an intentional absence of linearity. Nothing is immediately consequential to something else, in the recognition that the current world, in its richness before its miseries, eludes the direct translation of its signs into others with which to share a semblance of analogy. The indexes become mysterious, the paths arduous. Something is left unsaid and retains its secret. The languages multiply, offering only partial readings – here Italian, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, the last three unknown to the author of the work himself. Everything is where and as it should be, perhaps intelligible only in its ultimate meaning, but certainly not final. The “zone” is merely a passage.
Then there is the exchange, which produces conscious misunderstandings, which, instead of closing, broaden the meaning or only alter it in an incongruous manner. The title is Nostalghia, when the most direct reference is to Stalker. The Tuscan countryside, which is the setting for Mencarelli’s photographic series and was the backdrop for Bagno Vignoni where Tarkovsky filmed part of Nostalghia, does not hold the same value for both (as a present memory for one, and as the current inconsistency of a myth for the other). The director and protagonist of the film are Russians in Italy, as is the model for the figure appearing in Mencarelli’s photographic series of the same name, though by a different author, but here their parallelism ends. Except for the fact that death’s wing has embraced, touched, or merely brushed against them.
The building in Stalker, the one depicted in the photographic series, and the one hosting Assab One, are all abandoned industrial buildings, the first two in a state of neglect, the third transformed into an art space, the first two used as sets, and the third as an active place for meetings and exhibitions. Every exchange is a misunderstanding.
Eugenia, the translator and companion of the musicologist Andrei Gorchakov, the protagonist of Nostalghia, asks him: “How can we know each other?”, and he responds: “By abolishing the borders between states.” Now perhaps, beyond any utopian salvation, it is only a matter of recognizing the “zone,” the multiple “zones” that have appeared around the world in recent turbulent years, near and far, in the similar and the different. Through this recognition and in the hopeful belief of their traversability, once every fence is crossed, we might see three glasses move across a table by telekinesis, bodies levitate in an embrace, time move backward. But for this, will we dare set fire to our own house and witness, in the intimate and wild joy of the Moment and Life, its brilliant detonation?
Pier Luigi Tazzi
Capalle, early spring 2008
¹ Arseniy Tarkovsky, poet long persecuted by the Soviet regime even after Stalinism, who was close in youth to poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, both of whom were despised by Stalinism, the latter dying in a gulag at 47, and a polyglot translator, decorated hero, and war-wounded soldier in World War II, who, despite being only a few years older, outlived his son, whom he had abandoned for ten years and only reunited with at the end of the war when he was already a teenager.
² This is the foundational text of Taoism, traditionally attributed to Laozi, composed during the 6th century BC.
