The dream city, as is fitting for such places, was located on an island. It was separated from the city center by a train station, in the shadow of two postmodern towers already outdated long before their completion, whose arched gables and antiqued columns might have appeared in the film of Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead as a monumental warning against aesthetic corruption. Aesthetic, artistic, ecological, social and political corruption pose, however, take a different guise nowadays, with a whole new arsenal of weapons we will attempt to analyze here. But first…

The ground of the island (Isola) was still contaminated with the chemicals left behind by the Brown-Boveri company. It had been forgotten and neglected for decades. Nevertheless (or precisely because of this), an urban paradise emerged, which no one could have ever dreamed of: it had an arcade, as in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project; it was a place of the Multitude, such as Negri & Hardt themselves could have never pictured more beautifully. It was inhabited by differences, contradictions even, in a density that would have made Georg Simmel, Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist International do a reunification dance of happiness. And at the sides of this grubby palace of dreams and devaluated practices there were two parks that turned the abandoned and then revitalized Factory “Stecca degli Artigiani” into a magnificent castle, though it was a castle without a master or lords, instead animated and used by motorcycle mechanics, artists, craftspeople and a sans-papiers[1] from Africa; by self-organized action groups, organizations for the handicapped, Marxists and hedonist adolescents, a self-organized organic food shop, a movie theater, exhibitions, clandestine pleasures and public celebrations, a gray market, sunbathing on the roof and by the people living around it.

It could have gone on like this, since Milan deserved and needed a place just like this one. But the outlook was dark from the beginning. The rulers interested in the demolition of this situation were pushing the scales ruthlessly to one side with their assembled weight; they had the wherewithal, they owned the properties, they controlled most of the media, the law was – as always – on their side, and the administrative and political power was in the reactionary hands of Forza Italia and Lega Nord. The strategic counterweight the users of the Stecca could bring to the faceoff was a broad, deep network in the district, and their inventive talent, inspired by art.

The argument of art had special weight, because Isola Art Center – planned and provisionally organized in the Stecca for years – not only did great work, but also filled a gap for the entire city, namely the longing for an exhibition space for contemporary art outside of the commercial galleries, established museums and foundations. In Germany, for example – and Italian artists know this – every small town has a Kunstverein, basically an independent exhibition space. In the Art Metropolis of Milan this does not exist. But the practice of Isola Art Center went even further than such examples of exhibition spaces: it was a place where ideas developed, where an uninvited art of interference with urban structures, self-organized and collective, could find resonance, be picked up and developed further.

The artists, cooperating with the residents, managed to make the spot the talk of the town. They organized alternative plans to the demolition programs of the investors and turned the land surrounding their occupied space into parks provided with sculptures (no hippiecrap, by the way, but sharp, cutting-edge work).

Together the community created a social and ecological resource for the district, planted illegally immigrated palm trees, organized productions of desires and planning workshops with children and adults, founded “out” (the Office for Urban Transformation), sang songs by Adriano Celentano to the decision-making city officials (in a choir in the zone council) – and so they shifted the weight and public opinion  more and more in their direction.

The strategy of the bastards

But the rulers were not dumb, and if they could not convince the islanders to go along with their contemptuous plans, at least they could try to divide the neighborhood: divide et impera was already, over 2000 years ago, a household word in this part of the world.

The attack was launched exactly in the field that the Isola residents had successfully dominated till then: the field of critical, socially committed, politically interfering art.

The key role in this plot was played by the architect Stefano Boeri, who made a name for himself as a critical artist through his work with the group Multiplicity (their most popular work, the video installation “Solid Sea”, seems in retrospect like a target-group project cleverly designed for the politically correct art scene, using the content of the social movements without having any real connections to them. At first Boeri pretended to be a supporter of the “Stecca degli Artigiani”, and spoke at a panel saying that the situation in the Stecca was absolutely worth preserving and that he would fight for it. But Boeri’s words were not worth a penny. Only a few months later, he provided a contradictory Master Plan by order of the international developer Hines and the city council of Milan, and sold the result to the public as a compromise. Then he was rewarded with a big piece of the cake: the architect was commissioned to plan and design two highrise buildings on the area of the former parks. Of course Boeri, like his predecessors, called for complete demolition of the Stecca, putting the buildings in the two parks and, as a token concession to the occupiers, suggesting a spectacular Art Center[2] that he would design himself.

Sadly, the outcome is known: parts of the action groups let the politicians wrap them around their fingers, the police pushed drug dealers into the quarter and launched a cleansing campaign against the Stecca, and the remaining resistance was not strong enough to prevent the ensemble from being torn down.

Participation as camouflage of exclusion

Now gentrification, the only urban development model of prosperous cities around the globe, has the Isola in its clutches. Nevertheless, Isola Art Center has not given up; it has simply moved its activities out into the neighborhood, finding new connections and multiplying its efforts.

In 2009 I had the good fortune of being invited by Bert Theis to one of the exhibitions of the Center, and I was able to put a painting onto the shutters of its central kiosk. The “mural” deals with the “build ideology”[3] of the new investors’ architecture and reads the coffee grounds of these urban everyday landscapes. Their language – of this I am convinced – reveals a lot about contemporary Italy and even more about the changing front lines of the future of neoliberal urban development.

As I walk through the streets, I notice two new types of green: on the one hand it is in the litter bins that have recently been decorated with pretty pictures of nature which, I assume, are supposed to suggest that the rubbish thrown into them will be somehow recycled, and hence magically removed from the pollution process and turned into raw materials. Astoundingly these new dumpster covers are very similar to the advertising wallpaper of the “Green Island” projects of the eco-orientated curator of aMAZElab, which occasionally accepts money from the “Distretto Urbano di Commercio Isola” and collaborates, in this context, with the Foundation of real estate investor Catella.

The second type of green I run into has a more threatening nature. It is the color of the camouflage of the jeeps and military uniforms of the soldiers that have recently begun to patrol the streets, together with the police. The patrolling of cities by military forces is a measure only taken in democratic countries when, due to an acute state of emergency, democratic laws are suspended. Or during an attempted putsch.

The permanent presence of the military sets a general mood that makes everything appear in an even more threatening light.

On the hoardings around the building site of the developer Hines we find a different kind of camouflage: the investors have had children paint designs for a playground, during an educational participation project. Now there are photographs of these models built by the children, blown up to the size of billboards to decorate 500 meters of hoardings. The usual steel-glass investor architecture is proceeding behind the touching children’s art, which prevents passers-by from being able to observe the building process of towering blocks, like Boeri’s “Bosco Verticale” (Vertical Forest), two skyscrapers decorated with trees in the style of the Dutch architecture of the mid-nineties. The architect claims that his tower, hidden in its vertical forest, produces even more green space than ever existed before in the parks that have disappeared. Rarely has blind faith in one’s own architectural omnipotence been more clearly visible than in this project, in which the health of the plants can only be ensured by a great supply of fresh water.

Maybe the computer-generated pictures of the ecological houses were only a propaganda trick, in any case, to keep environmentalist pressures at a distance for a while. As in hardly any other building, the Bosco Verticale is showing the start of the “green” gentrification, escorted by “greenwashing”.

In all these cases participation works as camouflage, art as a tool of deception and nature as a Trojan horse. The people of Paris found a fitting phrase for this type of capitalistic beautification back in the middle of the nineteenth century: they saw the stylish building operations, the glorious Boulevards of Baron Haussmann for what they truly were, as embellissement stratégique – strategic embellishment.

But where an image is constructed, an image can be destroyed. Let’s stop being nice. Let’s get to work.

Christoph Schaefer

Translated by Sabrina Twele

1. An undocumented immigrant.
2. Here the author refers to the renderings designed by Boeri Studio representing the “Community Center” and the “Art Incubator” where the name “Art Center” compares in big letters.

3. Bert Theis introduced the concept of “build ideology” (gebaute Ideologie) at the symposium Die Kunst des urbanen Handelns, (Rotor Graz, March 2011), and during  a conversation over breakfast on his balcony, in another moment, to define the “Bosco Verticale” by Stefano Boeri.