2020: A space odissey

ABSTRACT

The narrative of the journey has reconfirmed itself as a fundamental tool for narrating spaces, gaining new forms during the global pandemic. In a parallel between cinema, architecture and literature, the essay approaches some forms of travel through five paragraphs, making a scalar journey that from the unknown extraterrestrial magnifies the city and the territory, and then focuses on the domestic space. Between these heterogeneous cases, it emerges a common point, namely the dual nature of real or fictitious, introverted or extroverted, which characterizes the narrative of a contradictory coexistence of opposites. Thus, understood as a recording of a place, the journey could not be just a trajectory that crosses territories, but a non-linear path characterized by flashbacks and fast-forwards. The destination seems often absent or uncertain, resembling the indefinite and unknown situation of the current scenario of the global pandemic of the Covid-19. The state of emergency has suspended and altered the city's narratives, subverting the narrative of urban and domestic space and witnessing a radical mutation of the known relations, scales and dimensions. Surrounded by a collective pandemic narrative, we now live introspective and individual journeys. If the conditions for the fruition of space are now compromised, the desire to travel to new unknown worlds continue, precisely through the narratives, stories of territories that have not been known physically. © In_Bo 2020.