Collapse City. Architecture and Landscape Blasting

Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie “Zabriskie Point”, which ends with a series of explosions, is a shocking revelation of formlessness, denoted as a threshold, a passage to a state from which there is no turning back. The explosive matter consists of the house, whose organic architecture is purpose-built to resist the extreme conditions of the desert, as well as all of its contents. The house and the objects implode as if an internal force had suddenly erupted. The sequence ends with slow-motion images that push us further and further inside the explosion dispersing discovery revelation heavenwards. Splinters and fragments are lifted and move in slow-motion against the clear blue sky, forming a cloud of amorphous corpuscles which, as the camera zooms in, can only occasionally be recognised as everyday objects (lamps, tables, chairs, bags, glasses, fridge contents, a chicken, a torn bag of biscuits). It is a grainy amorphous cloud of varying texture. The stills freeze the position of the objects and their fragments in the void. It is like the angel in Walter Benjamin’s story: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage...” (Benjamin 1940 /2006, 487). Architecture, which imagined it could give a decisive form to human living, has imploded, and so has the city it tried to govern and build. Modernity comes to a halt on this threshold. If the storm of the future prevents us from reassembling fragments and wreckage then there is nothing we can do but map these new landscapes in order to find the degree zero of our actions.