Get Lost: A Qanat Park for Palermo
Sectional detail through true and misnavigated paths
Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth is, amongst other things, a portrait of the collapse of
navigational paradigms and their attendant technologies. As the party explore deeper into the Earth’s cavernous
interior, their instruments and their magnetic and thermal orientation strategies fail: North appears
everywhere, the centre of the Earth is mysteriously cooler. Hopelessly lost, and dying of thirst, they strike
through a rockface in an attempt to reach an underground river. Only then do they realise that the water gushing
through at their feet, like all liquids, knows the way down. Namba’s proposal to restore the eleventh-century
Arab underground water channels (qanats) of Palermo as a space of public misnavigation engineers the collapse of
orientation in order to explore the pleasures of getting lost and the expansion of psychic space this brings.