i. prologue
Le décollage du ZYX24 is a Jacques-Henri Lartigue photography taken in Rouzat, France, in 1911. The ZYX24 was part of a small planes prototypes sequence created by the French inventor Zissou. After 23 models and 23 attempts practically failed, Zissou achieved to lift his feet from the ground and fly. Is this small and ephemeral moment that Lartigue captures with his lens. But a moment that is as ephemeral as crucial. Two thousand years after the flying images of Plato over the earth, Lartigue and Zissou remakes this same evidence: image and fly are one and the same thing and never ceased to be separated...
ii. Image an flight
In that morning at Rouzat, forgotten in the audacity and charge of his own invention, is written, still so fragile one of the opening events of Modernity itself. In this awake into the wind, going in a ride with the ZYX24, Lartigue and Zissou were quietly building the impossible. Zissou opens up the sky (and the space) to the physical experience of man and Lartigue opens up the veiled depth of the image (and of time itself). That is, the consummation of the space voyage via the epistemological leap of flight and the time voyage via the instantaneous control of the image (the world duplication) [i]. Space and time will be definitely others. Irreversibly conquered sky and image, will never be the same. And both match here in its extreme opening to man, bursting (into) the modernity and opening definitely the twentieth century.
But they also reassure us and remake, as well, the very poetical foundation of the image: the flight. Image and flight are both the reconstruction of a poetical and utopical representation of the world. But it’s not about seeing reality from some other point of view, nor seeing the perhaps impossible unity of the world (as far and distant the Earth, as surmountable). Instead, is to see the inaccessible side of the Earth, which means, to see the other side of the other, to see himself as it looks [ii].
Image is, above all, an indiscreet flight through the reality, but it will only be an image, if it has this ability of taking off and glide out through the world, offering to man the possibility of another sight, of another reinterpretation of the world. Let us not confuse, the image will only be an image if, in fact, has the ability of cast man in the world, of opening new fissures through the space for a new vision and comprehension of the reality that engages man. All the rest will be projections, ilusional frames and thick veils launched against reality. But the scene reflection, that moment where Zissou foo ts jump lastly in direction to time and space, recorded in Lartigue’s camera remind us, still, this philosophical inevitability: to fly in direction to the world is, also, to fly in direction to ourselves. Setting out for a (re)cognition of the world it’s to setting out for a (re)cognition of ourselves. The photography doesn’t show just the unbearable lightness of the plane, it shows man itself. Man's unbearable lightness in search of his own epistemological flight. The continuous quest of his place in the world. This is the philosophical possibility of the ZYX24.
iii. Décollage
Italo Calvino says that literature will only survive when proposing itself to disproportionate objectives, “works that no one else dares to imagine” [iii] . But shouldn’t also be this the objective of architecture? Proposing itself not as a closed and specialized discipline, but building up over a “plural and multifaceted vision of the world” [iv]. Proposing itself to the poetical fabrication of images, vital images as the ones that were before produced by the antique Greeks. As writes and defines wisely Bragança de Miranda, now two thousand and four hundred years after the first descriptions of the Earth seeing from above, by Plato, now that we see already the Earth from the hatchways of the orbital stations: "(…) just do not do worse than the old poets, the ones that marvel the physis with images of the impossible, but vital ones: of the flight, of immortality, of miracles. As Rothko said, «the purpose of art in general is to create new values to bring humanity face to face with a new event, a new wonder»" [v]
In the poetical vitruvian continuity of the body in the world and of the word fecundating the stone, this is the poetical possibility of architecture: provoke hypothesis (flights) and machinate desires (images). And so, we just have to make as this small plane, the ZYX24, captured by the Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s lens, almost one hundred years ago: burst the barriers of space and time (of flight and of image), try and rehearsal new ways of suspending ourselves over the reality, to create new values to bring mankind face to face with a new event.
References
[i] “(...) Al poblar este mundo ya abarrotado con su duplicado de imágenes, la fotografía nos persuade de que el mundo es más accesible de lo que en verdade es”. Susan Sontag, cit. in Juhani Pallasmaa, Los Ojos De La Piel, GG, Barcelona,2006
[ii] As it writes the german philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, “the eyes are the organic prototype of philosphy. Its enigma consists that not only they can see, as they can see themselves seeing”. Peter Sloterdijk, Crítica da Razão Cínica, Siruela, Madrid, 2003. Free translation.
[iii] Italo CALVINO, Seis propostas para o próximo milénio, Lisboa, Teorema, 2006.
[iv] Idem.
[v] José Bragança de MIRANDA, «Geografias – Imaginário e controlo da Terra» in José Bragança dee MIRANDA, Eduardo Prado COELHO (Ed.), Espaços. Revista de Comunicações e linguagens, Lisboa, Relógio de Água, 2005.
