PAROLE

A12 with Udo Noll, Peter Scupelli

parole is a dynamic dictionary of the contemporary city, or at least this was the intention when it was launched in June 2000 in occasion of the 7th International Exhibition of Architecture at the Biennale in Venice, Italy.

Since then parole has become a vast, loose, heterogeneous website, probably less easily defined with such a stringent term as “dictionary”. Currently about 900 words, related to the transformation of the urban landscape, are organised in a hypermedia database, along with more than 1000 links to & from the Internet. Images, texts, quotations, comments, fragments of text, links to external websites, videos, sounds, webcams are some of the scattered elements which constitute its fragmented mosaic.

parole acts as an open platform for information, discussion, archive, gathering of data, it is a place where much of the material included is directly provided by its users. As in a type of “Borgesian” dream it establishes a permanently fluid and unstable mapping of the actual urban condition throughout the world, looking at the variations and alterations in language and in the discourse of several different disciplines. Neologisms, slang terms, theories, utopic projects, nicknames attributed to specific sites, urbanism, architecture, anthropology, contemporary art are some of the multiple material included in parole.As its nature is permanently unstable and deprived of any hierarchy, parole is subject to shifts and alterations towards directions which are actually unpredictable.

In occasion of its different presentations within localised conditions, such as a museum or a gallery space, we have tried to accomplish a certain degree of interaction with the context, in order to allow the project to present a direct vision of the condition of the contemporary city in its permanent state of change.
places & spaces

* Biennale Venice, 7th International Exhibition of Architecture, 06/2000
* Solitude au Musée: Musee d’Art Moderne, St.Etienne, 09/2000
* Solitude au Musée: Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 09/2000
* cITy, ZKM Karlsruhe, 11/2000
* ISEA 2000, Paris, 12/2000
* Inside the Archive – Politics & Poetics of collecting, Amsterdam, 01/2001
* P.S.1, New York, 05/2001
* 5th graz biennial on media and architecture, 11/2001
* Future Visioni, Potenza, 5/2002