In the novel Roadside Picnic, the Strugackij brothers imagined an impassable, high-risk zone in the heart of a small Eastern Soviet town. The Zone was generated by an 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 remains of a picnic. The Zone is an unfamiliar place that bends the linearity of time and space, and expert guides are needed to navigate its swampy ruins and disused industrial warehouses. From the image of the Zone, Russian filmmaker Tarkóvsky wrote the screenplay for his famous film Stalker. At the centre of a complex labyrinth of traps he placed the Room of Desires, a dreamlike space made of dunes and vapours, in which the deepest desires of anyone brave enough to enter it are realised.
What is in the Room of Desires? How does one orient oneself in an unknown place? What practices allow me to lose myself? For four months, DOM- curated a research workshop together with the pupils of the Italian school for migrants of Asinitas, immersing themselves in these questions and sharing a relational infrastructure, an en plein air set where picnics for the world that is born can be imagined. The public is invited to cross this space, to stretch out, eat and rest. To inhabit a map of paths where we can share stories, socialise practices and knowledge, activate our extraordinary technologies. To oppose to the sad passions of the present, our desiring bodies.