Boris Pahor’s Urban Miniature: Conducting the City as an Open-Ended Score

Abstract

Against the background of an introductory note on Boris Pahor’s writings, this contribution focuses on one particular example of his work. It is an urban miniature that blurs the boundaries between literary, musical, and architectural writing—and from mutually antagonistic positions it converges towards some measure of coherence. Pahor explores the urban space by conceiving it as an open-ended musical score, but combining poetry, music, film, and architecture to pave the way for a new kind of investigation of the urban space. Removed from centralized and object-defined urbanism, the action and context-related city is experienced differently, as a space of possibility, as if it were itself a creative process amounting to a performance. That viewpoint corresponds to a shift from the ontological “what” to the performance of “how”, and demands acknowledgement of the city’s state of constant change, shaped by its users’ agency.

Keywords

• boris pahor
• trieste
• urban miniature
• film
• music
• performance
• architecture