B612

At the modern city.

At the modern city stars cannot be seen.

People from modern city usually lose the notion of being an inhabitant of the Milky Way. They denature themselves “bubbled” in a space-time full of asphalt and concrete and cars and lights everywhere everytime.

More than four thousand years ago, ayurveda doctors around India joined in a big meeting at the Himalayas to dissert about a new demographic fact: people migration to places called "villages".
Those experts, who know the most ancient medicine of the world based on the research for the essence and the in-out balance of human, were worried about stress that will generate in men and women leaving the forests and jungles to live in centres where the link with mother Nature is lost. So they predict one of the big diseases of humanity which affect nowadays lot of people in cities.
Villages became cities and cities became megalopolis where there’s no vestige of forests and fields over modern avenues were built…

... really?

Traffic circles and cromlechs.

Walking, ridding a bike, a moto, a car or in a bus over the city surface, little circular spaces surprise us. Its function is to regulate vehicles traffic at streets and roads crossing.
Those circles, not satisfied with this "banal" function, have developed the skin of ornamentation.
Sometimes with sculptures, monuments, fountains… and, in the last years, with gardens.

It became so beautiful, even to doubt of the efficacy of its primary function. How many crashes due to drivers fascinated on the beauty ecosystem created at the new circle built in the beginning of the street where they park near the office?

Some of those traffic circles seem oasis from an oriental tale. Gardens elaborated with influences of wabi sabi, the art of impermanence linked to zen philosophy. Gardens which invite to communion with the life essence, the fleeting nature of human existence joined to the experience of participation with cosmos.
Circular, as the cromlechs where people met to celebrate rituals of oneness with the sky, with the unknown, with Universe. Some circles have a central tree or column which reminds the pillars that connect earth and sky; symbols used on the building of holy places in lot of cultures of our planet.

Jorge Oteiza was near of this analogy between cromlechs and traffic circles talking about circle stone buildings on Euskadi.
“Once explained its little monumentality, silenced and receptive, where each-self connect with his own conscience, we cannot surprise of the abundance, on the region, of these holy signals for the behaviour and which worked as reliable semaphores (in our case, traffic circles) of social and politic life”.

Traffic circles! Spaces for the spiritual revolution

F. Lenoir explains the phenomenon of Sunday excursionists as a ritual of city inhabitants to recover the balance between his microcosm and the macrocosm, travelling to rural areas on weekends. Natural places where find the human proportion on the Universe.

The contact with Nature seems to be a basic necessity. Why relegate it’s satisfaction to no-labour days of the week?

Make the traffic circles a place opened to this activity!

…circles are near home and near the work centre, at five minutes from the children’s school and close by the supermarket…

Is it possible to live in a big city and save a metaphysic link with Nature?

Or… with other words: Is the city inhabitant conscious of where the sun grows and sets?

Bibliography
J.OTEIZA, Quosque Tandem…! Hordago, Zarautz, 1983.
M. ELIADE, Lo Sagrado y lo profano. Paidós, Barcelona, 1998.
A. JUNIPER, Wabi Sabi. Oniro, Barcelona, 2004.
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B612 . 4'00" (2007).
original idea: ioli valsells & mikel morlas
camera & edition: ioli valsells & mikel morlas
performers: blai mesa, patro silvente, renata srpcanska, david cobo, xavi roca, maura lerga, mariona roigé, david