Peter Lang, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University, visited the The Hague, The Netherlands June 6, 2007 to talk about his work as a member of Rome-based hybrid collective Stalker/ON. The group engages in actions within the landscape with particular attention to the areas around a city’s margins and forgotten urban space.
Stalker/ON is named after “Stalker,” a 1979 film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. “ON” stands for “Osservatorio Nomade,” which is Italian for “Nomadic Observatory.”
Since 1995, Stalker’s research has focused on the study and realization of peripheral territories and the marginal communities that have settled them. The group has been invited to exhibit its research at the Venice Biennale, the KW in Berlin, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In Fall 2004 the CapcMusée d’art contemporain in Bordeaux, France hosted the group’s first major retrospective. Stalker has worked extensively in Italy, throughout the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, Spain, France, Germany and the United States.
“Representing the work of Stalker requires, from the beginning, a particular recognition of what constitutes the group’s open laboratory environment, describing the process that the group has come to employ within these contexts,” said Lang. “Stalker is a highly multidisciplinary, conceptual art and architecture collective, and outside a core number of original members, the group is flexible in its individual components and inter-relationships.”
To learn more about Stalker/ON, visit their “Laboratory of City Art” website at http://www.stalkerlab.it/. Note, the website is in Italian.
Lang studied architecture at Syracuse University, earned a Ph.D. in history and urbanism from New York University and studied in Italy on a Fulbright Scholarship. He is the author of various articles and essays and the editor of the anthologies “Mortal City” (1995) and “Suburban Discipline” (1997), published by Princeton Architectural Press and Storefront for Art and Architecture.
