03: UNCERTAINTY (ARCHITECTURE)

Laureano Debat, journalist [Argentina]

[Translation (subtitles): Marilena de Chiara]

Transcription:

“Sebald’s characters are used to be individuals beyond cliché. Creatures with vague identities, who permanently doubt what they see and what they think. His novel Austerlitz, is precisely a novel of uncertainty, and he uses the architectural metaphor in order to develop this procedure. Yet, in Austerlitz, uncertainty as character, instead of leading him to silence, leads Sebald precisely to the opposite, to devouring that city he inhabits. To obsessively explore it looking for meanings in building and streets. The same happens to Julius, protagonist of Teju Cole’s Open City, or to Félix, one of the characters of La Experienca Dramática by Sergio Chejfec. The three characters obsessively walk along cities to which they do not belong and urban architecture, in all cases, instead of locate them, acts exactly as the starting point of their corresponding disorientation. The three are uncertain characters, with vague identities, created by three writers who converted uncertainty in their aesthetic and ethical proposal.