Dwell The Threshold is my PhD thesis in Urban Studies. It should have become a book that tells how there is a space between different entities, a potential place where a transformative meeting of the starting identities can happen. The hybridization gives rise to a third identity.
This place I call threshold, an indecisive name which outlines are blurred.
Programmatically it is an open work, more a look at the world than a project that asks to be closed.
It is a hymn to contamination, hybridization, mixing, presence, physicality – all that nowadays has been questioned by the pandemic.
I apply these principles in all aspects of my life. They are almost a manifesto, a memorandum for me. In this way, I approach the different spheres of life and face the world. I carry out my current research project, “Sex & the City”, on gender urbanism.
The thesis came to me after many years of working with Stalker. It is a group of artists, photographers, geographers, architects, anthropologists who have made walking in the margins – the current territories – the practice of knowledge of space and relationships.
Later, the encounter with Gilles Clément and his “third landscape as a refuge for the biodiversity of the living” has enriched the project.
The publication remained unfinished in my archives. I show this work in the video that is the only public trace of that stretch of the journey.
The moment has passed – I have not published the book.
A lot of things have happened since 2015. The world has progressively closed. There were the terrorist attacks in Paris, Bolsonaro became president of Brazil and Trump of the United States. Finally, the pandemic has vertically accelerated the processes already underway, making “social distancing” the antidote to the world’s contamination. Other than hybridization and mixing! Isolation! Therefore, talking about the opening of the space today is very different from doing it five years ago.
It does not mean that it is not a current topic, quite the contrary! Perhaps it is even more urgent today than years ago when an opening was almost a given condition and not a goal to fight. If I propose it today, it would be necessary to adapt and update the gaze to all that happened. The frame should be revised, but the profound message remains valid and unchanged.
Over the years, some pieces of the thesis have taken a somewhat different shape and have been fertilizer for other works and other publications.”