Being in Place vs. Being out of Place.
A tale of two experiences: what to expect when you take a walk through history.

History is finicky. Normally one avoids combining radically different kinds of historical narratives together, especially when there is obviously little in common among them. Nonetheless, I always welcome the potential for random associations. I took a recent walk along the ancient Roman aqueduct on Via del Mandrione in Rome and then, just days later on a perfunctory trip to Stockholm, I visited the historic 19th century open-air Nordic “folk” park Skansen. These two places constitute two entirely different realities, from distinct epochs, offering deeply contrasting sensations. Yet why pass up an opportunity to flirt with history? There are definitely a few curiously odd contrasts to mull over on closer inspection.
Viewed up-close, the Via del Mandrione, made famous by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Accatone, is breathtaking in its monumentality, yet appears humbling in its impoverished demeanour. Skansen, “the world’s oldest open air museum” assembled in the late 19th century to exhibit a variety of Nordic housing types and local habitats, is nostalgically romantic, if you close your eyes to the costumed re-enactments, the fenced-in wildlife and torqued portrayal of Scandi culture.
Both sites exude historical value: the Via del Mandrione begins outside Rome’s center, and extends southward from the artsy neighbourhood of Pigneto. Via del Mandrione is crisscrossed by a number of main railroad lines. Significantly, the ancient aqueducts Claudio and Felice converge on this route, intersecting over Porta Furba. Water continues to flow somehow within the Roman era waterworks (the story is complicated, over the many centuries there have been siege related demolitions, reconstructions, and refurbishments ). The Claudio aqueduct channels all the way to Porta Maggiore, the immense archaeological traffic circle next to the popular San Lorenzo district. Walking along this route, you notice that the arcaded infrastructure was once embedded with all kinds of sheds and temporary barracks that were built and occupied by the inhabitants of San Lorenzo and whose homes were destroyed under the Allied bombing in 1943. Most all of these substructures have been since removed, but there are plentiful signs of domesticity that can be spotted along the way.

Skansen is a whole other kettle of fish. Despite its historic settings, its almost wild natural demeanour, and its careful attention to historic detail, there is very little that is truly organic making up this immense park rising out of the famed Djurgården in Stockholm. Perhaps, because it was founded back in 1891 by the charismatic Swede Artur Hazelius (1833-1901) Skansen could very well be considered old enough to be a standalone historic landmark. Born out of the 19th century “anthropological-zoological” exhibition movement begun by the German Carl Hagenbeck, Skansen does have many original and convincing attributes. The historian Cathrine Baglo goes as far as to argue that Skansen is not directly related to the exotified colonial exhibitions that were put on display around the same time in France. The observation, according to Baglo, acknowledges that the Sámi people who were housed in these first display habitats, were paid to maintain their public lifestyle, along with farmers and peasants from the other parts of Sweden (that included a dominated Norway at the time). It’s not the most convincing argument, the Sámi people’s repressed identity and manipulated history in Sweden carries far too much ideological weight for Skansen to escape more serious criticism. This is surely fodder for another newsletter.

However, in contemplating the sense of place and placelessness, Skansen has become its own special reserve, where that which was transported from outside this outdoor folk park has become over time critical to making up its core “historical” identity, or what we would now refer to as the Skansen “brand.” Yet this collection of vernacular houses, assembled farmsteads, mini towns and villages, estates, summer cottages, Sámi settlements and their meticulously associated landscaped habitats never quite makes one think one is in Sweden, merely that one is in a Scandì style reenactment, a sort of living Nordic diorama. There is a difference between what can be considered organic places of memory— that can turn out to be deeply personal experiences, and, by contrast, orchestrated assemblies of verifiable “primary source artefacts” that are by definition denatured—removed from their original places and contexts.
Hence the traces of habitations that are grafted into the walls of the Claudio aqueduct along the Via del Mandrione are far more deeply signified than a 200 year old transposed wooden storage shed might be, precisely because the imported shed can offer no true sense of “placeness” other than to appear “out of place.” At some point, of course, the 200 year old shed will acquire a sense of belonging within the artifactual universe in which it can now be found, but for all purposes Skansen is acting more as a parallel Scandinavian universe.

The very character of Via del Mandrione, on the other hand, as a degraded monument that is simultaneously functioning and falling apart, astonishing in its shear presence and sublime in its callous neglect, gives this superstructure in Rome a tremendous sense of historical presence. Recalling the groundbreaking documentary film by Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (1985), its greatest impact on me was the way Lanzmann unrelentingly sought to re-live and re-visit the experience of the holocaust— not to reenact it. In one of the most iconic scenes from the over 10 hour film, Lanzmann unceremoniously invites an aged man who had driven the locomotives to the death-camps in Treblinka to board one of the same locomotives and recount his experiences along the route. The way this scene unfolds is like nothing else I have ever seen on film.

I get the impression, while I walk Via del Mandrione, passing alongside the giant aqueduct overgrown with plants and marked by kitchen tiles and half buried door saddles, that I am really here, I am inside this place.
The avant-garde filmmaker Chris Maker, left this dedication for the English version of his 1983 film Sans Soleil, citing a quote from T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday:”