by Giacomo Borella
In this part of the seminar focused on the relationship between Colin Ward and Italy, which as we know was intense and enduring, I would like to start from one of the people that engaged with the most conviction and continuity in the diffusion of his work in our country: Goffredo Fofi, a master and dear friend not only of mine but of several people in this room. The term go-between – which in Italian we can only translate with terms that have a vaguely bureaucratic and commercial flavour, more similar to mediator, intermediary and so on – which Ward employed to define the figure of Walter Segal, the Swiss-British architect who was his friend and whom he admired, applies very well to Ward himself and to Goffredo too. A Go-between in the sense of someone who brings diverse people, experiences, books and research into relation with one another, in a circle, in contact, someone who makes himself a channel, a bridge, an intersection of a net… Ward introduced his book Influences: Voices of creative dissent, a personal tribute to the figures of activists, thinkers, professionals and scholars towards whom he believed he was most indebted, with these words: “I want to lure you into the discovery of the people who have influenced me for the most obvious of reasons: I want to share my pleasure. It would be gratifying to me if a managed to introduce you to a bunch of sympathetic people you might not have come across and would enjoy reading. This is why, when I look around my own bookshelves, I often can’t actually find the works that I want to quote. I must have thrust them into other people hands in the hope that this particular influence would rub off on them”. So Goffredo did the same with many of us, thrusting Colin Ward’s books into our hands when, in the Nineties, Eleuthera began to translate them more systematically. Not enough known abroad, Goffredo has been one of the most active go-betweens in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century and in the first quarter of this one. The always mobile and constantly changing network of which he was at the same time knot and weaver connected Elsa Morante and Nino D’Angelo, Vonnegut and Bonhoeffer, Totò, Glauber Rocha and Alice Rohrwacher, the Waldensians, the Situationists and the movements of the Sixties and Seventies, Salvemini and Gobetti, dissenting Catholics and – of course – the more serious of the anarchist currents. In the Sixties, even if his English was not exactly fluent, he used to read with admiration the review Anarchy, which Colin Ward put together on the kitchen table of his London home, weaving a network that in turn was vast and composite, cosmopolitan and local, cheerfully and freely transgressing the canons of anarchist orthodoxy. In December ’69 he was at the graveside of the anarchist railway worker Pino Pinelli on the day of his funeral, retaining a genuine love for his noble figure from then for his entire life. Many years later, only two years ago, although he was weak and weary, he took one of the last trains of his life to come up for the funeral of Pino’s widow, Licia. “I couldn’t not come”, he told us in the desolate car park in via Corelli, where the funeral was held. Between the Eighties and the Nineties, Goffredo began to lend his support to the work of Eleuthera and Centro Studi Libertari (and from then on he would never stop), more or less in the same period when they were intensifying their relationship with Ward. Those who knew Goffredo know that his way of working proceeded in waves, and those were the years of his rediscovery of anarchist thought: in the ten or fifteen following years he published, mainly in his Piccola Biblioteca Morale (Little Moral Library) series, but not exclusively, texts by Ward, Kropotkin, Berneri, Malatesta, etc… I remember that in that period Goffredo – who loved to mess around with clichés – defined himself as an “anarcho–social democrat”. We could say that at the centre of this rediscovery there was his encounter with the figure, and then also with the actual person, of Colin Ward. He certainly felt a feeling of “class brotherhood” towards him. Ward was a son of a working-class family from the suburbs of London’s East End; his father, a Labour supporter, became a teacher attending night school. Goffredo’s father, a socialist, had a bicycle repair shop in Gubbio until the family emigrated to the Paris banlieu where he became a crane operator. Ward left school at fourteen and began to work, while Goffredo had a diploma as a primary school teacher. Anyway, the horizon toward they would always turn would be that of powerless common people. Two more things that they certainly had in common were they were both factotums and organisers of quite homemade magazines, and the fact of not having a driving licence, so they were both great walkers and tireless users of public transport. But I think that a common bent for a certain pleasure-loving and convivial frugality also played a role in their mutual affection: even not many years ago Harriet, Colin’s wife, sending her greetings by email asked me to send “lots of love to Goffredo”, adding that “I believe that it was him who introduced us to mozzarella made with buffalo milk! (Now we can get it here, but it is very expensive, so I usually buy the cow’s milk variety)”. In the famous Italian tour of January-February 1997, that brought Colin Ward to Milan, Rome, Naples, Turin and Venice for a series of meetings and conferences, Goffredo, Colin and Harriet could spend time together and get to know each other better. During the question-and-answer session after one of these meetings in Rome, probably held at the Fondazione Lisli e Lelio Basso, Goffredo was profoundly struck by Ward’s reply to somebody in the audience who was asking him a definition of his idea of anarchism: “Anarchism is a form of creative despair”, he stated. Almost every friend or reader of Goffredo must have come across this quote sooner or later, because it became one of his favourites, resurfacing quite often in his accounts and reasoning, even decades later. Asymmetrically, it’s really very strange that Colin Ward never wrote down – not a single time, as far as I know – anything remotely similar to this memorable definition. The very man who, apologising for the fact that he repeated himself quite often, used to say candidly that his job as an “anarchism propagandist” – as he ironically defined it – led him to keep drawers full of quotations, of himself or others, photocopied and cut out, ready to be pasted and incorporated into the text he had to prepare. Who knows why he never again used or explored that beautiful oxymoronic intuition. We might think that it came up in that hall of Fondazione Basso in a sort of unrepeatable epiphany, impossible to extract from that specific context, or maybe more prosaically that Goffredo’s imagination had taken the upper hand… However it went, since then the phrase “Anarchism is a form of creative despair” remained for Goffredo the defining figure of Colin Ward. Goffredo didn’t have much sympathy for a certain facile and ingenuous vein sometimes present in anarchist environments, and when he happened to find himself in contact with it, he replied, laying it on a bit thick (as he undoubtedly liked to do) recalling the words of Herman Melville about the “innate depravity of the humankind”, which, in his view, we inevitably had to face. History, according to his friend Elsa Morante, is “a scandal that has lasted ten thousand years” and every approach that wouldn’t consider this tragic backdrop for him wasn’t worth considering seriously. So he was enthusiastic about Ward’s definition because it started from precisely this awareness of a tragic backdrop, but at the same time refused to be entirely annihilated by it, proposing a strategy of survival founded on inventiveness, despite everything. And indeed, in the light of this definition, one could better grasp Colin Ward’s attentive and sympathetic gaze on people muddling through and making do – common people, the powerless, children – and his commitment to investigate and reconstruct their tactics and the inventiveness of their tricks.
In the remaining part of my talk, I think I should take the title of this session on Italian inhabited landscapes and sociable cities a little more literally. I would like to do so recalling an attitude that I consider one of the most precious of his way of facing the human habitat, that is his preference for the observation of concrete, situated, lived spaces, for examining specific places with great attention and respect in their minute physical dimension. It is a gaze that defies generic approaches, disembodied utopian models, that continually returns to address real spaces from daily life and often knows how to discover textures and interweavings that are invisible at first sight. I invite you to continue to follow Colin, at least for some steps, in those two Roman days of ’97, when, after the meetings, he asked to be accompanied around the city and Goffredo entrusted him to a small group of his very young friends. These extremely inexperienced guides, instead of taking him to visit the Pantheon and piazza Navona, perhaps because they were impressed by reading his books about marginal urban areas or for convenience (as they lived near there) took him for a stroll around the semi-peripheric neighbourhood of Torpignattara and its surroundings, in the south-eastern part of the city, the kind of places where even today, thirty years later, hardly any tourist has set foot. My dear friend Marco Carsetti, who was leading the motley crew and was twenty-two at the time, told me a bit about how things went. Walking the length and breadth of Torpignattara – where in those very years the long-established presence of Italian migrants was joined by Asian and North African immigration that would later become massive – they reached a kind of enclave, situated beside the tracks of the old Casilina railway station: it was the small neighbourhood of La Certosa, one of the many Roman borgate (settlements) of illegal origins that had been incorporated into the city. The story goes that Colin Ward was enchanted by these streets of La Certosa and was enthusiastic. He felt at home, despite the pronounced exoticism that these places must have had through his British eyes. Looking through my computer archives I have found a few photographs I took some fifteen years ago in the streets of this small borgata. The landscapes made of haphazard and makeshift architecture, built at the beginning of the last century by immigrants from Veneto and Calabria, and then modified and transformed little by little until recent times, bring the traces of the art of making-do, of tactics and tricks of people that had to and knew how to organise themselves individually or together. There are always small gardens, orange or persimmon trees, little towers, loggias, winding staircases and pergolas. Of course, many Wardian topoi come to our minds. Arcadia for All, the title of the book written with Dennis Hardy, which reconstructs the microhistory of the plotlands’ makeshift landscapes on the south-east coast of England in the first half of the last century, seems an appropriate comment also for this small borgata and its rustic village atmosphere rooted within the metropolis. “Perhaps a pale image of how utopians envisaged Arcadia but, arguably, for many people the best that was available at the time”, wrote Ward. Another Wardian topos that comes to mind is the one of the “fine grain city”, made of differences, variations, deviations and surprises, expressed on a small scale and articulated in modest dimensions. Here the contrast stands out between the variety and inventiveness of this fine grain city and the opacity of the so-called “planned” city, serial and speculative, that surrounds the first. This calls to mind the fertile contradiction that runs through the whole of Ward’s work, between him being a supporter of urban planning, in which he found origins and topics deeply intertwined with the very origins of anarchist movements, and at the same time him being a strenuous defender of squatting and illegal construction for necessity, self-organisation and building improvisation. In his urban ideal, these two antithetical elements may be both necessary and constitute themselves as the counterweight one to the other. As Michel de Certeau wrote in the last page of his book L’invention du quotidien: “to eliminate the unexpected or to remove it from the calculation as an illegitimate accident which subverts rationality, means to impede a living and “mythical” practice of the city”.