Dispatches from the Venetian Front

Abstract

Tallinn, Estonia, and Venice, Italy, while travelling to a conference. It is a grim scenario to contemplate. Ten geographers, shoehorned into a Lada or perhaps an even tinier Moskvitch, swallowed up as they traversed a landscape of shifting fissures demarcating the frontier where at least two worlds are still in the process of renegotiating how to collide. Nor was this the only unsettling time–space rupture marking the Fondazioni ENI Enrico Mattei’s International Conference on Postmodern Geographical Praxis. In my own case, despite having arrived in Venice for the first time in my life at the conference’s start, it was my third time in Venice that week. A few days prior to the conference, I had departed from one of a pair of Piazza San Marcos in Las Vegas, Nevada, where tourists hunched over their espressos beneath gothic arcades and enjoyed overpriced gondola rides along an indoor serpentine Grand Canal. Further, this Venice in Vegas is just up the block from Paris. Thus, given that my flight to the conference was routed through Charles de Gaulle Airport, I was twice in one week treated to a quick stopover amongst mansard roofs and the Eiffel Tower. And on the day of my departure to the conference, en route to Los Angeles International Airport, I stopped off at another Venice (this one on LA’s coast) and enjoyed my own espresso beneath a gothic arcade as throngs of tourists roller-skated to and fro beside a network of canals. Such spatialized conflations of the concrete and the image made flesh, of compressed space and telescoped time, and of mysterious disappearances were to prove no less pervasive for the conference’s larger political context. Belated