Spazi Sospesi: nuove forme di socialItà nel giardino segreto dI St. Dunstan

With this proposal, I aim to address the question of forms of urban re-semanticization aimed at specific urban spaces, where, in the absence of speed and rhythm (Barthes 1976), a form of escape and escape, both individual and collective, is sought. As Pollan (1991) defines it, I refer to specific spaces perceived as places of elsewhere, re-pertinentized as refuges or institutionally already given or reacquired, as marginal places, green spaces, hidden or barely visible gardens where a different regime of meaning and temporality prevails. It is from what happens in these spaces that I propose to semiotically analyze the theme of silence, articulated as a form of suspension from urban movement, in which, for this reason, new meanings, feelings, and values ​​are sought. I will focus in particular on some of the modalities and logics at work in the dynamics of urban flight, which can be applied to both individual and collective experiences in which subjects rediscover a new dimension, suspended from all mobility and practical valorization. Starting from a semiotic and ethnosemiotic study, the aim will be to highlight the conditions and diverse deployments of a silence pertinent in multiple forms, such as those related to sacred or profane repose, within a particular urban space immersed in one of the most central areas of the city of London: the garden of St. Dunstan's Church, of which only the ruins remain today, having been destroyed during the Second World War. I thus intend to investigate the ways in which the identity of what was once a historical monument, now an urban garden, in which the sacred and the natural (Marrone 2012), is re-enunciated as a microcosm, a euphoric place, suspended from urban noise (Turri 2004); Thus, although surrounded by the tallest skyscrapers in London, it is a spatiality suspended in a temporal immobility, given by a tangible past of which traces still emerge and a lived present, whose characteristics of invisibility and naturalness seem to have their own effectiveness by triggering in each subject a positive passionate process, linked to new proxemics and renewed affective values, both individual and collective (see Denis, Pontille 2022).