Picnic sul ciglio della strada

In the novel Picnic sul ciglio della strada Strugackij brothers imagined an impassable, high-risk zone in the heart of a small Eastern Soviet town. The Zone was generated by alien stationing on the planet Earth. Moving away from Earth, the non-human creatures left behind an arsenal of extraordinary technologies and mysterious objects, abandoned like the remnants of a picnic. The Zone is an unfamiliar place that bends the linearity of time and space, and expert guides are needed to penetrate the swampy ruins and disused industrial warehouses. From the image of the Zone, Russian filmmaker Tarkóvsky wrote the screenplay for his famous film StalkerAt the center of a complex labyrinth of traps he positioned the Room of Wishes, a dreamlike space made of dunes and steam, where the deep desires of anyone brave enough to enter it are realized.
What is in the Room of Wishes? How do I orient myself in an unfamiliar place? What practices allow me to get lost? For four months, DOM- curated a research workshop together with the students of ASINTAS' Italian school for migrants, immersing themselves in these questions and sharing a relational infrastructure, an en plein air set where they imagine picnics for the world being born. The public is invited to traverse this space, to stretch out, eat and rest. To inhabit a map of pathways where we share stories, socialize practices and knowledge, activate our extraordinary technologies. To oppose to the sad passions of the present, our desiring bodies.