In a town of only twenty-seven thousand people these edifices stand out starkly, as unmissable clues to local politicians’ habit of making impressive but ill-advised claims about what public works they could see to completion in order to secure funds from the regional government. Starting large-scale construction work has been a vote winner and a way of creating jobs. It was also claimed to combat the recruiting power of the Mafia.
The landscape that has resulted from all these promises is surreal and has a melancholic appeal for those attracted to the idea that decay and inertia will always overtake the hubris of modernity. A collective of artists based in Milan, New York, and Berlin, called Alterazioni Video, devised the idea of the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion in Giarre, delighting in what, in a photo essay on Giarre, they call its “sheer scale, territorial extent and architectural oddness.” They define incompletion as the “partial execution of a project followed by continual modifications that generate new spurts of activity,” a process that produces “purposeless sites” that “dominate the landscape like triumphal arches.” Alterazioni Video collaborator and local community activist Claudia D’Aita, who once staged a mock polo match at the Athletics and Polo Stadium, explained to a BBC journalist that all of Giarre’s unfinished edifices should be seen as “a kind of open-air museum.” It’s a refrain picked up by Alterazioni Video, which announced in its photo essay that these “glaring blemishes on the civic horizon” should be “transformed into a tourist destination, giving new value and meaning to the monuments of a perpetual present.”
Alterazioni Video produced a map and guidebook to help visitors find their way around the various key sites of incompletion. I’d not heard of anyone using the guide in earnest, so I went to Giarre in July 2013 to see what it would be like to be a tourist of unfinished Sicily. It was, unsurprisingly, an odd experience, and I occasionally found it difficult to tell the complete and incomplete town apart. Just across the road from Chico Mendes Park, a half-built and fenced-off “children’s city” that is a central stopping point on Alterazioni Video’s self-guided tour, is another abandoned area, an elaborate 1980s roundabout that is now a wasteland of grasses, graffiti, and wild fig trees as well as a huge stash of brown glass bottles. It is adorned with a broken central fountain, a rusting orb shaped like Sputnik, a ring of dried-up smaller water features, and a weed-infested sculpture of the nineteenth-century cleric Don Bosco instructing street children. As I stood next to Chico Mendes Park, this large traffic island felt unfinished, but it is more likely to have simply not been maintained. Neglect and incompletion merge in Giarre, creating an extensive and continuous landscape of abandonment.
In its “Sicilian Incompletion Manifesto” Alterazioni Video argues that Giarre is the “epicenter” of a phenomenon that has “radiated out from Sicily to the rest of the peninsula, creating an Unfinished Italy.” Yet the way the incomplete parts of town mesh with the ordinary landscape reminded me that I didn’t need to come to Italy to find the remnants of once heroic architectural visions. Standing in the shadow of the high concrete terraces and walkways of the Athletics and Polo Stadium, on a playing field covered in the ash and cinder thrown up by Mount Etna, I was reminded of my hometown of Newcastle, which has its own network of unfinished concrete walkways and a stub end of a motorway, both discards from 1960s plans to bulldoze the city and rebuild it as the “Brasilia of the North.”
Giarre offers the extreme form of a condition found in most cities, making it a parable of urban planning. It is the epicenter not of merely an Italian but a global phenomenon of accreted unfinished visions. It is also a good place to think about how we live with the layering and churning of the city. Being surrounded by the sawed-off ends of the utopian plans of once powerful people can be liberating, as it subverts the professional’s claim on the city; the architects, politicians, and planners all stand defeated, incapable of molding place to their will. Yet if this is a victory, it is a hollow one, for we are all left picking our way through the pieces. A more profound consequence is that we disconnect ourselves from place: provisional and incomplete hometowns inspire provisional and incomplete loyalty. In tumbling together half-realized projects at an ever greater speed, the city of incompletion disrupts the possibility of people building up a relationship of care, knowledge, and trust with the place they live in.
The artists who guided me around the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion are attempting to find a new and challenging way to reconnect people with place by embracing this sense of disconnect and tumult. It is a paradoxical project, both subversive and conservative, mocking the failure of effective governance in Sicily while suggesting that vaguely futuristic ruins can be the basis for a novel type of geographical allegiance. “The sum of these relics of never-attained futures,” they write, “is so vast that it can be considered as a true architectural and visual style, representing Italy and the age in which they were produced.” Incompletion comes to represent “the speculative munificence of Sicilians and all other Italians” and, even more grandly, the invention of authentically modern “places for spiritual habitation and contemplation” that are also “places of existential awareness, embodiments of the human soul.”
The idea of rebranding the modern ruins of Giarre as the Archaeological Park of Sicilian Incompletion is an attempt to reclaim the contemporary landscape, to allow us to find within its spectacular bleakness both beauty and drama. While the aesthetic of ruins that this argument relies upon looks beguiling as a set of black-and-white photos, on the ground it soon gets wearisome. After I visited a few of the chosen remnants they all started to look the same and I gave up. I’d learned that being a tourist of incompletion has diminishing returns, but I’d also been reminded that cities of incompletion are places that I have spent a lot of time either traveling through or returning back home to.
Dead places are places apart: they have the power to disrupt the way we think about place. Even when tightly controlled, the absence of people means there is something wild, something ungoverned, about them. From dead cities it is but a small step to those places that have somehow escaped the normal uses of territory and seem to be living by a new and original set of rules.
Camp Zeist
52° 06′ 35″ N, 5° 17′ 47″ E
Spaces of exception are places where normal rules do not apply. Often they are created to allow states or communities to follow their own course without interference and beyond the ken of the outside world. Sometimes such places escape the rule of government, but they have also been used by governments who wish to undertake activities that would normally be forbidden, such as “extraordinary rendition” (see “Bright Light,” [>]). However, spaces of exception are not only about the breakdown of ethical conduct; they have provided unique opportunities for entrepreneurs and social ideologues and experimenters who want to create a more perfect community. Spaces of exception challenge our notions of sovereignty and ownership, but they also force us to realize how flexible these two ideas can be, a point that is driven home by the story of Camp Zeist.
My interest in the Dutch military facility known as Camp Zeist started in 1999 when it came under Scottish law. It remained Scottish until 2002, at which point it became Dutch once again.
Camp Zeist changed legal nationality in 1999, from Dutch to Scottish, in order to allow a trial to take place both in Scotland and outside Scotland. The trial was for the two Libyan men who were suspected of bombing Pan Am flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie in Scotland on December 22, 1988. After fragments of evidence had been pieced together from the crash site, on November 13, 1991, a Scottish sheriff issued arrest warrants for Abdelbaset al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah. A UN Security Council resolution demanded that the accused stand trial before “the appropriate United Kingdom or United States court.”
The Libyan leadership doubted that the men would get a fair trial in either country, so early hopes for speedy extradition were soon quashed. Over the next decade a compromise was a
rrived at: Libya would agree to extradite the two men on the condition that the trial take place on neutral territory. The Libyans first suggested The Hague but eventually agreed to allow the trial to proceed in the more secure and purpose-built facilities that could be offered at Camp Zeist.
The idea of giving a specific plot of land to another country for a specific purpose might not appear novel. Most of the well-known examples, however, are not quite what they seem. Visitors to war graves dedicated to the foreign dead in Belgium and France sometimes get the impression that they are actually entering Britain, the United States, or Canada, for example. But that isn’t the case. Such graveyards are owned and looked after by these nations, but they do not have sovereignty over them. The same is true of the plot under the John F. Kennedy memorial at Runnymede, England, which was “given” to the United States in 1964. Owning a place, or having control over it, is different from making it an integral part of a nation, although drawing a line between the two can be a real headache. Foreign embassies are a classic conundrum. The fact that host states are obliged not to violate embassies’ grounds and that diplomats are immune from local prosecution makes them ambiguous places. They remain the sovereign territory of the country they are in, yet they are granted such a raft of concessions that they can resemble enclaves of foreign states. A parallel set of concessions covers many foreign military bases. Guantánamo Bay in Cuba remains part of the Cuban nation, but the United States has a perpetual lease and full jurisdiction over the territory.
Giving up territory to another nation isn’t something countries do lightly, and when it happens it is either forced on them or takes place for a defined period of time. Most of the examples that fall into the latter category concern the demarcation not of national but of international zones, and the function of these is often very specific. For example, when Princess Margriet of the Netherlands was about to be born at the Ottawa Civic Hospital in 1943, the Canadian government decided to make the maternity unit international territory, thus allowing her to claim Dutch citizenship through her parents. The “green zones” that harbor and protect military and diplomatic missions in war areas, such as Baghdad’s ten-square-kilometer international zone, provide a better-known and more sobering instance.
None of these examples is quite like Camp Zeist, a portion of the Netherlands that for three years became a legal enclave where Scottish law applied. The formal agreement between Britain and the Dutch that set up the trial, signed in September 1998, goes into great detail about the exact range of the court’s jurisdiction. It makes it clear that Camp Zeist is being “hosted” by the Netherlands but also that the premises and will of the Scottish court are inviolable. It even sets down who is expected to dispose of the site’s garbage and how that is to be paid for and lists all the taxes the Scottish court is exempt from, including “excise duty included in the price of alcoholic beverages, tobacco products and hydrocarbons.”
One thousand Scottish police officers were brought in to protect the L-shaped site, which is a little over half a mile long. A Scottish courtroom and prison had to be constructed, as well as a press center, and the court also hosted a vast array of legal advisers. One of the key players was the legal adviser to the US Department of State, David Andrews, who is candid about the fact that the plan to use the Netherlands was worked out between the United States and Britain many months before it was mentioned to the Dutch. “We hoped the Dutch would agree,” he recalls in an article for an academic law journal, “but due to concerns over leaks, we felt we could not approach them until we had the entire program between the US and the UK worked out.” As it turned out, what Andrews had feared would be the “trickiest and certainly the most crucial part of our initiative: getting the Dutch to agree” was a pushover. As long as everyone was clear that this was a onetime event, the Dutch were happy to play their part in resolving an intractable international crisis. Andrews notes dryly that he had to spend “considerable time” not with Dutch politicians but convincing the band of the Royal Dutch Air Force to temporarily abandon an important part of the site.
The most difficult challenge was the legal and logistical ramifications of creating Scottish territory abroad. The Scottish judges had to be given power not only over the trial but over the court and camp premises. Moreover, Andrews realized that “it would not be practical to absent a group of Scottish citizens from Scotland for the better part of a year.” So this was to be a unique type of trial, one without a jury but with a panel of judges. This unusual arrangement required new British legislation, which was rushed through Parliament as an Order in Council, a legislative loophole that allows changes in the law without a vote in the House of Commons.
Another, more local challenge was the road that ran from a nearby aircraft museum to its repair shop, which would cross what was to become Scottish territory. The solution was to build a pair of gates that could be opened to allow museum workers through while cutting off the road to Camp Zeist personnel, and vice versa. The gates worked well, although occasionally people found themselves trapped between them. Richard Bailey, a Scottish court spokesman, was one. “I got caught inside, between the gates once,” he told a visiting journalist. “And I did think, ‘Where am I?’ But mostly I thought, ‘When the hell’s the gate going to open?’”
On April 5, 1999, the two accused Libyans were flown to the Netherlands and driven straight to a Dutch extradition hearing. After being formally extradited, they were taken to Camp Zeist, where they were arrested by Scottish police. The charge of murdering 270 people was read to them, and they were remanded in custody within the camp. Eventually, after one appeal, Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in a Scottish jail in 2002, until he was released on compassionate grounds in 2007. The other man was cleared. Camp Zeist itself returned to the Netherlands and was converted into an immigration detention center.
The UK and US governments regard Camp Zeist as a great success. It put the suspects in the dock and resolved a political headache for a number of states, and it is held up by some enthusiasts as a model for bringing difficult international cases to trial. Turning a piece of one country into the legal territory of another for a brief period of time has been shown not only to be feasible but to speed up justice. But many who did so much to set up this little bit of Scotland in the Netherlands are more doubtful that this kind of experiment could or should happen again. After considering the huge costs and endless legal complexities involved, David Andrews concludes that “the third country trial is not a model that we ought to consider lightly, if ever.”
Geneva Freeport
46° 11′ 18″ N, 6° 07′ 38″ E
Hidden from view, in the dark, there is something growing: storage places, air-conditioned vaults filling up with an expanding volume of valuable things. This is the antithesis of our throwaway society. For, at the same moment that consumerism coughs up great rivers of shoddy gizmos to be mashed up and drained away, it also brings forth increasing quantities of beautiful and rare objects: paintings, cars, wine bottles, sculptures; items that have to be dusted, photographed, and catalogued, to be prized and kept forever. Where once such valuables could be crammed into the houses of the elite, today their possessions are so plentiful that this is no longer an option. The relationship between the rich and their objects of infatuation has also changed. Now they buy them as investments, as an essential component of any serious wealth portfolio.
The Geneva Freeport is a massive, high-spec warehouse of treasure. From the outside it is a nondescript white concrete block surrounded by gray roads and gray parking lots, but it may be the most valuable building on the planet. The total worth of just the art in the freeport has been estimated at $100 billion. Alongside the artworks there are vaults and floors of other rarities, such as three million bottles of wine, decks of expensive cars, even a chamber full of cigars. The vaults are populated by a small army of conservators and inventory takers, but it’s a lonely job, often requiring that these experts be shut up inside a safe room
for most of the day. One art specialist, Simon Studer, recalls being locked in one chamber that contained thousands of drawings, paintings, and sculptures by Pablo Picasso: “I was checking sizes, condition, looking for a signature and making sure the art was properly measured,” he told the New York Times. He eventually worked out that the knocking sound from next door came from another inmate who was counting gold bars: “You have no idea what is next door and then you happen to be there when they open a door and, poof, you see.”
Freeports are places where goods can be imported and exported free of customs duties or other taxes. They are a medieval invention that have long been useful in easing the flow of trade and were never meant to be sites for hoarding valuables. In 1888 the Grand Council of Geneva voted to establish the freeport. At the time it tended to stock prosaic items and hold them for short periods. But Switzerland’s unique regard for the privacy of foreigners wishing to use its tax-free facilities soon began to attract a niche clientele. By the end of the twentieth century the Geneva Freeport had established itself as the world’s central repository for a new kind of global investment system based on the buying and selling of objects of high value. Since works can be sold and bought within the freeport without transaction taxes of any sort, it effectively operates as a trading hall. Old Masters are transferred between owners without ever having to be lifted from their racks.
Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies Page 11
