Swiss Dilemma I
Francs are the real problem: cows are not a problem at all.
At eleven am we were still there, in the hinterland, scratching our heads while thinking about where to withdrawal some cash and what kind of food we should buy… when you leave for Basel you must steel (reflex to get ready for an unpleasant event). “One coffee please” oh… “Yessir! Cheque or Credit card?” eh!? Good thing that the blue “Foggian” blood mother it’s a priceless jewel: two “one kg” homemade bread loaf, parmesan and salami already in bag and one baking tray of a “pasta al forno” with a specific weight based on cheese and ham… carbohydrates have a secondary role in mama’s “pasta al forno”. And if it’s really true that (as Hunter S. Thompson says about the quatity of drugs to bring on a trip to Las Vegas) «If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right», then for a trip to Swiss, more than drugs, you should care about everything else… about what you need to survive.
And without even realizing it, after two weeks of “go?” “don’t go?” “you come?” “I can’t..”, Feninhu, Melkior, the “alfa” Male (aka Paulista) and Malanna woke up in the middle of one of the biggest traffic jam in the history of Switzerland: Rho→ Basel about seven hours. Between thousands of blasphemy and rude words sent to the sky, the crew is risking the mutiny after the first hour and a half (especially when they met a fake queue in the beginning of San Gotterdo). “We are chevalier laying up for our super-personal mission, we carefree gispies of the 2013”…so much so that we reach the goal… the dreamlike taste of a spacetime like Port Land attracts everyone, even the most exhausted. No way… that illness we commonly called “skateboard” bring us to cross the limits of what the most called “horse sense”, projecting our being toward something bigger and incomprehensible… something really “free”.
“YOU… WHAT are… Youuu?”: it is the voice of the “Alice in wonderland” ‘s caterpillar that you should immagine when somebody tell you about Port Land… an asphalt esplanade placed near the Basel’s port-zone that has become, with the collective work and with the participation of “Beautiful people”, a space where the free expression (singular and collective) shows itself in one of the most beautiful spacetime forms in Europe. A city area close to the boarder between Switzerland, France and Germany (?), has been occupied by circus bandwagons in which are hidden music rooms, designed shacks for mojitos and beers, photographic exhibition inserted in other wagon and open air art laboratories. A place dense of different stories that, for several years will have the possibility to exist and generate ideas, innovation, creation and so much “be OK”. And there were no malice in the soul of our “board tamers” when they said: “Why we don’t have a place like this..”. Unfortunately for everybody the answer to this thought will not be solved in a mere comparison between the economic disparity between “us” and “them”: it’s not enough to liquidate the problem with a whichever reference to the swiss economy, founded on cow’s milk, chocolate and global recycling of dirty money. This explanation doesn’t stand… it doesn’t stand if you compare it with the strength of the “culture cultivation” of which Port Land is a great expression… “minchia raga!” (“oh guys! Shit!”)… we slept inside a photographic exhibition not in a garbage can! This is Port Land: a place that sweat and imbue reverential respect form each and every pore… And so it happened that while you are writing you feel the urge to add something to your personal knowledge and while researching you find that one of the most denigrated european countries, the rich “neutral” (nobody knows exactly why this term have been negatively connoted) State par excellence that flourish over the other countries’ shoulders… that green Nation is the mother of one of the first constitution in Europe (1848) and maybe is the only one in the world to be founded on “direct democracy”. As if that were not enough Switzerland has been the refugee nation for thousand of the revolutionary people that helped to change the world during the 19th century. It’s difficult to exclude that there is a cause-and-effect ratio between this discover of 1am and the reality of Port Land. Is in here that the “swiss dilemma” is founded: francs or cows? But we shouldn’t roam so much…
It is not to comprehend the swiss sociopolitical frame that we left in direction of this “realized utopia”…we left to go skate and to make “bordello” (noise and mess) with people that “spacca il culo ai livelli” (gnarly people). And that’s what we’ve done. After two bottle of red italian wine, so many beers and some “pines”, we found ourselves in a meanwhile of hits, punch and slaps between the transitions of the park. It appeared like we fell down in a giant humid vagina in which we found a crazy dream… an ecstasy so violent that “you should add about the rain… and that when it stopped there was a party inside the bowl, with eccentric dressed people going wild and dance with the sound of the miserable speaker they carried with them… and it is at that point that the real spirit of DIY gained the upper hand over any prejudice that could ever bear… but Port Land isn’t for sure the place of prejudice: we are in a free neutral ground”… And so between a chorus of feminine voices and a casual toast, between loud chatters and so many sincere laughter, we lived an experience that for sure express what “skateboarding” is… beyond extreme gnarly tricks, beyond videos and pictures, beyond brands and contests and official federations. Sometimes it is good to reiterate that this “piece of wood whit four wheels under” (at least for some of us) it’s not just an empty toy, an hobby, a discipline or something useful to make money: it’s a medium of cultural production, of radical sharing, of ourselves evolution and, sometimes, it is a lifeline that fill your life with greatness.
Port Land transitions say all this… each and every time you ride themo. Port Land is the concrete expression of skateboarder’s creativity and in the same time is the display of the bigness that the meaning of “skatepark” could be. Against the boredom of the “all the same” structure built “in series” buy the skatepark’s companies of a large part of the world (Italy is no exception), Oli Buergin, Rohan Anderson and the whole Port Land’s crew oppose new ideas, transitions “cazzutissime” (strong, gnarly, crazy, ecc), improbable spines and trap humps used to select the park’s “newcomers”. For less than skate there each and every day you can’t ride loosely, not even one second. When you enter the vortex you can’t choose: or you tame your board and the transitions or you crash down. Nevertheless when you are inside… concentrated and with your own brain inside your feet, everything goes fluidly and those hostile concrete wrinkles produced a “flow”.. a “mantra”.. one of the best, fascinating and elaborate Miles Davis’ improvisation. So we gained the sacrosanct “bread” of the skateboarder: animalistic screams of each and every heehaw of Melkior wheels, reverential respectful slaps for the “alpha” Male, boards ground-hitting for Feninhu’s tricks and… people that rush thoughtful when the Malanna bash himself completely drunk into the concrete ground of Port Land. Our valiant gipsy-chevalier have obtained, with the voluntary slaughter of themselves, the respect (we hope) of those mad-good people of over there. If we consider the wonderful night we spent, it was for sure worth.
Swiss dilemma II
(Blatta will translate the second part “on demand”, because he’s lazy and tired)