By LUCIA LEITAO*

Author's prologue to the newly released book

Ivan Bojko was living in a small Ukrainian village, his homeland, when, in 1942, he was taken by the Nazis to a forced labor camp in Germany, where he remained for three years. After the end of World War II, geopolitical circumstances prevented him from returning to Ukraine, and so, in 1948, Ivan arrived in Brazil, where he would live the rest of his long life.

Almost seven decades after that date, Iván Bojko had his story revealed to the world in a documentary of the same name.[I] Based on his diaries, the film records the return of the central character of this story to his homeland 66 years after having been expelled from it.

Touching and sensitive, the film deals with loss, ruptures, nostalgia and reunion, which makes it a beautiful testimony to fundamental human experiences. Beyond its artistic quality, however, what makes me mention it here is one scene in particular, briefly narrated below. Unable to recognize his own city after so many decades of distance, during which he only visited it in dreams, Iván is taken by his family to the neighborhood where his parents' house, the house of his childhood, is located.

– Do you see your house?, they ask him.
– Which one?, asks Iván.
– This one, show her a sister.

Visibly disturbed by the experience of rediscovering this spatial reference, Iván Bojko goes to the entrance of the house, kneels down and kisses the door threshold.

In fictional art, a similar story had already indicated the strength of the relationship established between human beings and the space they inhabit, especially the built space where they live their childhood. The Return to Bountiful,[ii] The film that won Geraldine Page the Oscar for best actress in 1986 shows the existential despair of Carrie Watts, the film's central character, when faced with the desire to return to live in her hometown. Sick, elderly, knowing that life is ending for her, forced to live with her son and a daughter-in-law who cannot stand her, Carrie, without financial resources and with little autonomy to make her own decisions, uses all the tricks she can think of to return to Bountiful.

During her journey to see her hometown again, Carrie discovers from conversations with people she meets on the road that Bountiful has literally disappeared into the dust of time. The last person who lived there, a childhood friend, died the day before her journey began. Even in the face of this devastating news, Carrie does not give up on this encounter with the house and town of her childhood. She needs to see, enter, and feel again the comforting experience of being at home, the house of her early years, even if it is nothing more than a ruin.

In literature, in a very well-known poem – Confidence of the Itabirano –, whose title indicates precisely the importance of the city of origin in the poet's subjectivity, Carlos Drummond de Andrade writes as follows:

I lived in Itabira for a few years.
I was mainly born in Itabira.
That's why I'm sad, proud: made of iron.
Ninety percent iron on the sidewalks.
Eighty percent iron in souls.
And this alienation from what in life is porosity and communication.

The desire to love, which paralyzes my work, comes from Itabira, from its
white nights, without women and without horizons.
And the habit of suffering, which amuses me so much, is a sweet Itabirano heritage.

From Itabira I brought various gifts that I now offer you:
this Saint Benedict by the old saint maker Alfredo Duval;
this iron stone, future steel of Brazil;
this tapir skin, spread out on the sofa in the living room;
this pride, this bowed head…

I had gold, I had cattle, I had farms.
Today I am a civil servant
Itabira is just a photograph on the wall.
But how it hurts.

Still in literature, in a text that lies between fiction and reality, as is typical of narrated memories, José Saramago relates an existential circumstance that is completely surprising — both due to the facts reported and the time in which these facts took place.

Born in a small and poor Portuguese village, Azinhaga, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1998) says that early in his life, when he was approximately two years old, his parents took him to live in Lisbon. The family was looking for better living conditions, as can be read in The little memories.

Throughout the text, José Saramago writes: “It was from here, when I was not yet two years old, that my parents, migrants driven by necessity, took me to Lisbon, to other ways of feeling, thinking and living, as if being born where I was born had been the consequence of a mistake of chance, of a casual distraction of destiny, which was still in its hands to correct”.

It wasn't like that. Without anyone noticing, the child had already spread tendrils and roots; the fragile seed that I was at the time had had time to step on the clay of the ground with its tiny, unsteady feet, to receive from it, indelibly, the original mark of the earth.

At that moment, and under those circumstances, José Saramago continues: “Only I knew, without being aware that I knew, that in the illegible pages of destiny and in the blind meanders of chance it had been written that I would still have to return to Azinhaga to finish being born. Throughout my childhood […] that poor, rustic village, with its noisy border of green waters, with its low houses surrounded by the silvery grey of the olive groves […] was the cradle where my gestation was completed, the pouch where the little marsupial retreated to make of its person, for better or perhaps for worse, what only by itself, silent, secret, solitary, could have been done” (Little memories).

Beyond art, a letter written by Freud in the final decade of his life points in the same direction as these existential experiences, mentioned above, between people and their places of origin — to the manifestation of something that apparently shows itself as one and the same phenomenon. In other words, to the psychospatial nature of a relationship that links the subject to the space that architectural work brings into being, as it is expected to show.

On October 25, 1931, during a ceremony marking a series of honors paid to Freud by the city of Freiberg, now Příbor, Anna, his daughter and representative at the festive event, read the letter that her father had sent to the mayor in gratitude for the honor paid to him by the land where he was born.

In this letter, Freud states that he left Freiberg when he was three years old. Since then, he had returned to the city only once, during his adolescence, for a short vacation. Despite this short time of contact with the city, Freud states that indelible impressions of his hometown survived in him. Thus, Freud writes surprisingly: “Of one thing I can be certain: deep down inside me still lives the happy boy from Freiberg, the first child of a young mother who received her first inextinguishable impressions from this air and this soil” (Letter to the Mayor of the City of Příbor).

In fact, it is surprising, especially to the reader accustomed to Freudian writing, whose work is distinguished by constructing an epistemology of uncertainty, the emphasis given to an affirmation ― of one thing I can be certain ― regarding the persistence, in his psychic structure, of indelible memories originating from the built environment where he lived his first years of life.

Indeed, it is intriguing to think that someone so little fond of certainties, someone who developed his theory based on the “status granted to error”, someone, in short, who made the world of scholars that “error and truth are part of the same psychic field”, as Sergio Paulo Rouanet notes, allowed himself to write, at the end of his life, such an affirmative text about feelings and memories, elements that are almost always fleeting, often illusory, and difficult to grasp (Epistemology of uncertainty, 1985).

Another point worth noting, also in this letter, is precisely the element that is the target of so much assertiveness. The certainty that Freud shares with the reader, that which made him feel confident enough to make this record, concerns an experience that associates the city — the built environment — and the constitution of subjectivity.

This time, it is striking that the experience that allowed him to feel safe, among so many others marked by uncertainty, was precisely an experience with a city, a human phenomenon that was absolutely not within the focus of his intellectual interests.

What does Freud point to? How, why and under what psychic artifice would the built environment – ​​especially the space of origin – produce indelible impressions? Would the built space, architecture, consequently, be the disciplinary field from which this text is elaborated, a relevant element in the constitution of subjectivity? Could it be that, paraphrasing Vladimir Safatle, “is it possible to recognize, in the spaces of origin, the spatial genesis of subjectivity?”

Returning to literature, Thomas Bernhard, ratifying what Freud said, describes this same spatial experience, but presents another side of this affect, equally inextinguishable. In his words: “this deadly soil that I bring with me by birth is my land, I am more at home in this (lethal) city and in this (lethal) region than others are; even if today I walk through the city thinking that it has nothing to do with me because I don’t want to have anything to do with it, because for a long time I haven’t wanted to have anything to do with it, everything that I carry within me (and in me) comes from it, in such a way that I and the city have an eternal, indissoluble, albeit horrific, relationship. Yes, because everything that I carry within me is in fact associated with the city and its landscape, it goes back to both; it doesn’t matter what I think or do, my awareness of this fact only intensifies more and more, and one day it will be so great that this, the awareness of this, will kill me. Everything that I carry within me is at the mercy of this city that is my origin” (Source).

What ties the subject to the space that architecture materializes? And what is the nature of the bond that enables this event? This is the key question. that guides the essay The space of first things: architecture, culture and psychoanalysis.

* Lucia Leitão is a full professor at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE).

Reference

Lucia Leitao. The space of first things: architecture, culture and psychoanalysis. New York, New York, 2024. [https://shre.ink/MMw0]

Notes

[I] Ivan, directed by Guto Pasko, Brazil, 2014.

[ii] The trip to Bountiful, 1985, written by Horton Foote, is based on his television play presented on NBC, in March 1953. Directed by Peter Masterson, the film received ten Oscar nominations, winning in the categories of best actress and best screenplay.

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