Stalker

(Group established 1995, based in Rome)

Stalker is a collective subject, formed by ten components, artists and architects, which engages research and actions over the territory, and with special attention to the marginal areas and empty urban areas which are in the process of being transformed.
Stalker has been active in Rome since 1995 and is characterised by a nomadic connotation, the new cartographer of today's territorial geographies, the explorer of the contemporary city.
Stalker is placed between the city planning and artistic strategies and it is known to have carried out a number of metropolitan explorations, passing on foot through the interstitial areas of Rome, Milan, Turin, Paris, Berlin and Miami, in order to develop a methodology for the analysis and project intervention on those areas of the urban territory which are constantly changing and which were defined 'Actual Territories' in the group manifesto of 1996.
A great exponent of the contemporary representation of space, Stalker participated in the Tirana Biennale (2001), at the VII th edition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2000), at the Manifesta 3 (Lubljiana 2000), and at the 'Mutations' (Bordeaux 2000).
Since May of 1999 Stalker is based at the ex-vet building of Campo Boario (the former slaughter house) together with the Kurd community, in order to experiment a new form of contemporary public space based on reception and hospitality. A territory were it is possible to verify the potential relations between artistic activity and civil solidarity.
The building which has been named 'Ararat' after the name of the Kurdish mountain that emerged from the Deluge, wishes to be a multiethnic centre, a hope for all exiled people and a public space that is a wealth for the entire city.
Through projects, competitions, exhibitions, workshops and various forms of mapping and recycling the territory, Stalker's aim is to investigate alternative possibilities to the traditional ways of urban intervention. One among the others: the 'abandonment' becomes a systematic practice and an operative methodology of the care and safeguard of the same sites.
Stalker is the author of 'Flying Carpets' to unite the shores of the Mediterranean, of air lifts, of refugee camps, of public vegetable gardens, of urban games and feasts. Each time Stalker puts into shape an architecture of movement according to the model of Constant's 'New Babylon'.
For an entire year - the year 2000 - Stalker's symbol has been a long accessible tubular tunnel of metal and sheet as a sign which is an alternative to the idea of border: a playful public space, or a communication channel, born from an alteration of the spiral of barbed wire known to all like a territorial defence or 'border'.