William Guerrieri

Abstract

In the early 1990s, William Guerrieri had already committed himself to a review of the geography of places that define public life in contemporary post-industrial and post-Fordist society. In Ambienti pubblici (1991–96), Guerrieri represents waiting rooms of health centres, public offices and corridors: in the main, deserted, anonymous and impersonal. They are topoi that tell their story only with difficulty. They are characterized by a lack of specificity and are not circumstantial. These aseptic places, wiped clean ofhuman presence, are points of transit, devoid of all historical memory and belong to the category of nowheres as thought of and defined by the anthropologist Marc Augé.¹ The postmodem (or surmodem), nowhere posited by Augé, is not only represented by airports, railway and space stations, huge shopping malls and cable networks for virtual communication but can be envisioned especially as the topos of the transient; it can never be identified and recognized as a definite and defined place but it composes and recomposes itself continually though the modular component structures which defme its architecture.