Cagliari, Italy
Mission Title: Landscape Telling - Rick Moody at Festarch
Mission By: Andrew Berardini, Jacopo Fontana
Mission Finished on Date: 01-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Attend Moody's speech. Show details of the venue, then interview him.
- Ask Moody about the relationship between language and territory. Does he think a landscape's – or cityscape's – spirit can live on in words and transmit itself to someone who hasn't been in the actual place? Is there a fundamental fictionality one has to stand by with any narrated territory or can an emotional, literal place actually exist?
- Ask Moody about “planetary tourism”, the festival's theme, and what does he think about it. How does the English language affect the low
- cost geography space and its grammars?
TRAVEL BAG
How accurately can language depict and transmit a geography?
Although he might not like it, Rick Moody has been compared to Chekhov of the suburbs John Cheever and renowned for his skilled depiction of the American city outskirts. His famous 1994 novel The Ice Storm, which also inspired a movie by Ang Lee, has been saluted as a lucid, yet emotional look into the American family life of the early seventies. Moody doesn't like to be labeled as a suburb chronicler, even though his fiction is based on reality and pop culture, but he'd rather see his work as language-made art, trying to use words to express a person's conscience and feelings as much as they can.
Rick Moody's presence at the Festarch architecture festival at the Ex Manifatture Tabacchi in Cagliari is most probably due to his suburban rep rather than to his linguistic virtues. During his segment in the many lectures held by a vast spectrum of world famous figures in creativity – Hans Ulrich Obrist, Oliviero Toscani and Vito Acconci between the others – he's probably going to teach us a thing or two about the way writing can summon a place's emotional energy through a mix of abstraction and vivid language.
