A monograph in the making · MMXXVI
From utopia to topos: from no-place to a place. A study of Neverland, Michael Jackson, and the space of an extended self.
Carlotta Melegari
“I would never ever sell Neverland. Neverland is me… you know? It represents the totality of who I am. It really does. I love Neverland.”
Neverland does not represent Michael Jackson. It is Michael Jackson, rendered as space: an extended self that comes into being through the very act of its own manifestation.
§ The Place from Which One Looks
This study begins on a July night, before an archival fragment I was not looking for, with an intuition I did not yet know how to name and chose, even so, to follow. More than a year has passed since then, and that time does not sit at the margins of the work, because it measures the distance between the one who was looking without yet knowing and the one who writes now, having let a question become method, archive, structure, book.
What I came to recognize, by following, bears the name of a place. Neverland does not act in these pages as biographical backdrop, scenographic apparatus, or relic of a public life consumed by the gaze of others; it takes form as an extension of the self, as the space in which desire, trauma, denied childhood, symbolic power and architectural imagination gather into a concrete construction. To study it is to approach Michael Jackson where the work moves past the record, the stage and the filmed image, and becomes territory, threshold, dwelling, a fragile and contested kingdom.
While the house was still a home, still lived in, and well before it was violated, the same self that had rendered itself as space in Neverland, founding in the architecture of desire the realm of an unauthorized sovereignty, had already laid down a structure of another order: a trust, born of the gesture of one who, knowing his own exposure, prepares the shelter. There the same sovereignty extends from the body and from space to the name and to posterity, and fatherhood manifests itself in the securing of protection.
Michael Jackson's artistic stature comes before any defensive caution. His work asks for the serious, unhurried study granted to the great corpora of the twentieth century, because it crosses music, dance, cinema, fashion, performance, the culture industry, race, childhood, religion, celebrity and the public body with a force no biographical simplification can exhaust. This book is born of that evidence and carries it into a place, Neverland, where the work seems to become inhabitable and the subject seems to entrust to space what words could no longer hold.
I do not approach this object from a place of innocence. I thought myself absolved, and instead I had absorbed, without noticing, a toxic narrative that had sedimented for years in public discourse until it became almost indistinguishable from common sense. Today I refuse to remain involved unawares, and that refusal inaugurates the work. To write, here, is to enter into collision with one's own convictions, to let the archive wound them, correct them, make them more exact, and to accept that no genuine understanding comes without its share of loss.
One formation shapes what I am able to see, and I name it because it is an instrument, not a credential. I graduated with a thesis on the aesthetics of Zen, Estetica zen: vivere il vuoto, and from those years I keep a habit rather than a doctrine, attending to what a form withholds and trusting that emptiness can be built rather than merely suffered.
I renounce the reassuring formula of those who declare themselves without a position, because judgment belongs to understanding, and research, when it abdicates discernment, loses its task. The conviction that orients these pages remains firm and revisable, able to sustain a reading hypothesis and disciplined enough to expose itself to the revision of the sources. It moves within a perimeter that the public record, the judicial findings, and the distinction between established fact and discursive construction impose with rigor; everything that perimeter does not allow to be established enters the book as matter to be questioned, never as acquired truth.
Around this posture the book unfolds its lines of inquiry. The phenomenology of inhabited space reads Neverland as psyche rendered architecture; cultural studies interrogate the gaze that racializes a body before it even sees it; the anthropology of celebrity observes the artist's transformation into a public figure made available for consumption; media analysis follows the manufacture of the monster, the circulation of suspicion, the distance between what a case contains and what public discourse learns to repeat. The juridical question moves through these rooms like shared air, returning wherever the argument calls it, at work even in the chapters that seem farthest from the courtroom, because every gesture, every childhood, every relationship, every place Michael Jackson inhabited was later forced to measure itself against the grammar of suspicion.
To the reader I offer a path of reading. Neverland appears here as the place where an artistic life, a desire for repair, and a power without institutional authorization tried to make space for themselves in the world; and precisely because that attempt was loved, misunderstood, violated, ridiculed, sacralized and consumed, it asks today for a reading able to remain within complexity without mistaking it for comfortable ambiguity, and within the question without renouncing the responsibility of judgment.
§ Notebook
The notebook is the public face of the work in progress. An entry appears when a position has matured through the project's internal devices, and each entry carries its status, stamped on the page like a mark in a critical apparatus.
Two stamps are in use. In fieri · under review marks a position still being tested against the sources. Fixed marks a position the research now stands on. The rhythm of publication belongs to the research, and to no calendar.
Entries are gathered in twelve categories: eight rooms that follow the architecture of the book, and four tables of the workshop, where sources, theory, listening and method are worked in the open.
Asked why this project, and why me, who was never even a fan, I have no cause to produce, only an event: a few seconds of a 1997 Copenhagen performance, and the certainty, prior to every reason, that I had to go and see.
In the Fox special of April 2003, Jackson calls Neverland the totality of who he is. A reading of that sentence as the clearest source of the thesis, and of the tragic weight the years would give it.
§ The book
A scholarly monograph on Michael Jackson and Neverland, years in the making and openly so. This site accompanies its writing.
The spine of the book is a single year, 2003. In April, before any raid, an identity claim spoken on television. In November, the raid. In December, the declassification, when the place was spoken of as a house, no longer a home. The book reads that year not as a sequence of events but as the opening of a fracture that never closed: one that was never merely a matter of property.
The work proceeds alongside its subject, in constant dialogue with the judicial record and with the scholarly field of Jackson studies. Its progress can be followed in the notebook.
§ Library
The titles this research stands on, in one alphabetical run, with no sections and no ranks. The shelf grows as the work does.
A number of entries are still under source verification and will join the shelf once they clear. The working library is wider than what is shown: it also includes the clinical, psychobiographical and accusatory literature on Jackson, kept on this shelf for one reason: it is the hardest test the book's argument has to survive.
§ The author
Independent researcher and writer. She holds a degree in Literature, specializing in Art History, with a thesis on the aesthetics of Zen, and pursued postgraduate studies in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Milano-Bicocca. She is currently studying law at Sapienza University in Rome. She lives and works on the Asiago plateau, in northern Italy.
She directs a magazine on dwelling and on the culture of the plateau where she lives, and hosts Abitarsi, a podcast on the phenomenology of inhabited space.
Independence is both the cost of this research and what makes it possible. It answers to the sources, and to nothing else.
For editorial and press inquiries: contact@utopiatopos.com.
§ Video
A YouTube channel will accompany the research, with talks and readings in Italian, subtitled in English. It opens alongside the notebook.