dead spaces

Basketball fields, playgrounds, card games, karaoke, mini-market, laundry salon…

An endless list of informal activities, which happen among the graves of Manila’s North Cemetery; one of the best known examples of popular squats, world-wide known since last decade. A place where homeless citizens had invented themselves the job of guard-tombs in exchange of a dwelling. After even three generations of peaceful symbiosis with the deads’ visiting relatives, it seems that it is coming to an end. The local Government, among its goals for the regeneration of the South Cemetery in 2008 declared: “demolition of shanties illegally constructed, eviction of informal settlers, restoration of peace and order [...]. All is for the people of Manila.”

Meanwhile, England is running out of burial space along its scenic landscape cemeteries. Mendip Council is leading a pioneer re-use of empty graves, so that current landscape may be preserved. Their sustainable strategy allows the use of recyclable materials for coffins (cardboard, wicker, bamboo), formerly forbidden, and reduces the property period of the plot from 100 to 50 years.

This trend towards green-burials, is generating a new market niche for the Tokyo-based company Bull Life Co among others. Due to the increasing shortage of cemetery space in Japan, they are optimizing existing cemeteries, as well as turning redundant bankrupt-gone golf courses into new graveyards.

[pictures> izismile mendip]

[sources> npr bahag vice pruned japantoday manilagov]

Published on February 20, 2010 06:48.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

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spaces of terror

 

^ War Primer 2, Plate 23. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

 

< War Primer 2 is a limited edition book that physically inhabits the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable 1955 publication War Primer. The original is  a collection of Brecht’s newspaper clippings, each accompanied by a four-line poem that he called Photo-epigrams. It was the culmination of almost three decades of intermittent activity.  The title deliberately recalls the textbooks used to teach elementary school children how to read; Brecht’s book is a practical manual, demonstrating how to “read” or “translate” press photographs. Brecht was profoundly uneasy about the affirmative role played by the medium within the political economy of capitalism and referred to press photographs as hieroglyphics in need of decoding.

War Primer 2 is the belated sequel. While Brecht’s War Primer was concerned with images of the Second World War, War Primer 2 is concerned with the images of conflict generated by both sides of the so-called “War on Terror”.

“Don’t start with the good old things but the bad new ones” Brecht famously said, and in this spirit Broomberg and Chanarin [choppedliver] have gathered their material from the internet - compressed, uploaded, ripped, squeezed, reformatted, re-edited and often anonymous images - rather than sifting through newspapers with a pair of scissors.

Heiner Müller once said that to use Brecht without changing him is an act of betrayal. With War Primer 2 Broomberg and Chanarin have appropriated Brecht’s original, giving us their critique of images of contemporary conflict, which is simultaneously a betrayal and a homage.> [source text> MACK books]

^ War Primer 2, Plate 72. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

^ War Primer 2, Plate 6. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

^ War Primer 2, Plate 21. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

 

 

^  Saturday Come Slow, 2010. Filmed inside Cambridge University’s anechoic chamber (designed to create total silence) and featuring former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Ruhal Ahmed, this short by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a reflection on Ahmed’s experiences whilst in detention (particularly how he was interrogated using high-volume music) and about the use of human sound on the body. 

Published on February 4, 2012 17:29.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, invisible cities

communist replicas from the oldest Christian country

^ B/W: Photograph series of Armenian bus-stops in The Architecture of Waiting, 1997/2004 by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg.

Colour: Bus-stops in Burgos, Spain. Designed by H&deM, 2011. Photos by Ángel Ayala.

 

This week my hometown’s newspapers revealed that our recently built bus-stops designed by H&deM are indeed a direct replica of soviet ones erected in Armenia in 1970s. Apart from the banality of this interesting fact, together with the local anger caused by the high fees paid to the architects, I would like to make three small remarks to the excellent argumentation of the architects’ concept in their website:

< Instead of designing a Herzog & de Meuron bus shelter, we were inspired by the work of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg called “The Architectures of Waiting”. It is a series of photographs that she took in 1997 * of bus-stops in Armenia (the oldest Christian Country**). We have recreated some of these bus-stops in polished concrete and galvanized steel. Instead of being simply functional shelters, the beauty of these small structures is how they relate to the human body, and that they are sculptural and somewhat poetic social gathering places***. >

* There is no recognition to the soviet designer of the bus stops in the 1970s, but to the German photographer who took pictures of them in 1997. The inspiration is linked to the book where they were published. The image has completely erased the original architect: fewer problems with copyright in buildings. But it makes sense: if the ultimate author was the Soviet Union and it doesn’t exist anymore, there is total freedom to reuse the idea.

** It seems that the main reason for justifying their decision is that Armenia is the oldest Christian country in the world. Both Spain and Armenia appear to share tight religious connections, even if many Spaniards would have difficulties to locate Armenia accurately in a global map. This is a fantastic argument for copying a soviet bus-stop from the Armenian steppe and pasting it in the ‘Catholic’ Spanish steppe.

*** We copy Armenian bus-stops, even if they might look like ‘simply functional shelters’ (=boring). So H&deM upgrade them by declaring that, although they have almost 1:1 similar shape, they are nonetheless ‘poetic and gathering spaces relating to the human body’. Armenians alike, we are also Christians, so we need to believe it.

 

Published on February 4, 2012 16:41.
Filed under: ersatz

dismantling sites of power: the void remains

^ Split, Croatia: Roman Emperor Diocletian’s Palace and the densely populated city in 1912. [images via American Urban Architecture & wikimedia]

 

^ Berlin, Germany: the medieval monastery, the Baroque castle, the communist Palace of the Republic and the shopping mall replicating the Baroque Stadtschloss. [image via stadtentwicklung]

^ Mexico City, Mexico: the pre-Colombian Tenochtitlán pyramids overlay the Conquistadors’ cathedral and governmental palace. [image via skyscrapercity]

^ Córdoba, Spain: Roman temple – Visigoth church – Muslim Mosque (8th century) – Catholic Cathedral inserted inside the Mosque (13th &16th century). The minaret turned into a bell-tower.

< the mosque’s lamps were melted down to make new bells for the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 800 km to the north. This probably seemed only fair, since the lamps had themselves been made from Santiago’s original bells: when the Moors had conquered the city in 997 they had dragged the bells to Cordoba and melted them down into lamps. > [source: Bevan, R 2006. The destruction of memory - Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. Image via otraarquitecturaesposible]

Published on January 30, 2012 17:46.
Filed under: ersatz, forensic destruction

On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres

Astronomical, by Mishka Henner.

Map of the solar system in twelve 500-page volumes.

1,000,000 km = 1 page

Published on January 28, 2012 19:12.
Filed under: invisible cities

First Woman On The Moon


 

^ First Woman On The Moon, 1999 by Aleksandra Mir.

Published on January 26, 2012 15:33.
Filed under: ersatz, invisible cities

cacophonies

^ Ritardando a poco a poco, 2011 by Euan Macdonald. Part of Open-Tuning at the Hayward Project Space, London. Photo by deconcrete.

 

There is an accordion-folded music score standing inside a vitrine, yet not to be touched or performed by anybody. It seems to be composed of 50 pages at least. Melodic? Quite the opposite: noise literally translated into paper. Later I find out that a whole piano has been turned into noise; a machine into a piano; and a factory space in Shanghai into a machine. Paradoxically, the global demand on cheap instruments makes harsh dissonance to be used for reaching optimal quality standards. I move on to the dark room where the annoying noise comes from. And then I watch the video of the simulator running. A piano-like industrial device plays the actual piano. The machine tests the long-term endurance of the instrument by banging all keys almost simultaneously. It goes on and on and on for 5 minutes. The cacophony becomes eventually less annoying and the whole machinery suddenly stops. I go out, look at the music scores again. I imagine the whole space of production in China; pianos being shipped worldwide; everything compressed on the written scores. And I leave.

 

^ Excerpt from 9,000 pieces, 2010 by Euan Macdonald, commissioned by YBCA.

 

 

Published on January 24, 2012 22:34.
Filed under: hybrids

2 years deconcrete!

^^  21/01/2010 Deconcrete is born: 1st post about Franco dictator’s ship Azor fell into disuse as Motel Azor. Photo by deconcrete.

^ 20/01/2012: Fernando Sánchez Castillo_Síndrome de Guernica. Installation at Matadero Madrid. Azor ship transformed into pressed scrap as a demystification of symbols of power. Photo by Paco Gómez.

 

 

***2 YEARS AND OVER 380,000 HITS!!!

Thank you all!***

 

 

 

Published on January 22, 2012 16:45.
Filed under: forensic destruction

Architectural Dissidence

CELLTEXTS [Ines & Eyal Weizman, 2008] is an archive of texts, love letters, philosophical statements, letters to mothers, songs, treatises, political manifestos, and novels… written from incarcerated dissidents all around the world. The library uses the writer’s time spent in prison (1 day to 45 years) to organise an amalgam of published knowledge. This makes the cell be read as a space enhancing mental freedom:

 

< […] The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing. The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production. The individual’s impulse to survive through texts, through reclaiming her own voice against the imposition of others, creates an autarkic realm in which practices of dissidence, political and personal, could be reinstated. Commissioned and designed by and for the state, prison cells acquire a potential subversive content, becoming critical spatial apparatuses. Paradoxically, imprisonment emerges as an active practice of citizenship a mechanism of political opposition that call for a confrontation or intolerance with certain forms of government.

[…]

For many prisoners, the prison could offer a period of reflection, scholarship and education as well as a resonating chamber for political dissent. Regis Debray described the Prison as “the dissident’s second university”. Antonio Gramsci was forced to write in code to bypass the constraints of the prison and its censorship. Ezra Pound learns from the Chinese Encyclopedia which he smuggled into his Pisan cage. For Antonio Negri it was the routines of the prison that represented the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society. Auguste Blanqui formulated in the middle of the 19th century, a detailed guide for the armed uprising of the revolutionary multitudes which included sketches and street maps with exact details of barricades. Many writers are fascinated with insects and animals coming into their prison cells. […] >

[Excerpt from Ines & Eyal Weizman’s statement. Read full text]

 

In the same line, Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence Symposium [London, 15-17 Nov 2012] will examine new forms of critical spatial practice within political regimes.

Published on January 22, 2012 15:54.
Filed under: protest & critical space

The Political Equator

The Political Equator_text and video by estudio Teddy Cruz.

 

< The Political Equator was conceptualized by Teddy Cruz in 2005. Considering the Tijuana-San Diego border as a point of departure, The Political Equator traces an imaginary line along the US–Mexico border and extends it directly across a world atlas, forming a corridor of global conflict between the 30 and 36 degrees North Parallel. Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US–Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow from North African flow into Europe; the Israeli-Palestinian border that divides the Middle East, along with the embattled frontiers of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad or free Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as the Pearl River Delta has rapidly ascended to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai and the paradigmatic transformations of the Chinese metropolis also characterized by urbanities of labor and surveillance.

The political equator also resonates with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for The Pentagon’s New Map, in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” “regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.”

But while this renewed global border is a working diagram, emblematic of hemispheric divisions between wealth and poverty, intersecting a necklace of some of the most contested checkpoints in the world, it is ultimately not a ‘flat line’ but an operative critical threshold that bends, fragments and stretches in order to reveal other sites of conflict worldwide where invisible trans-hemispheric sociopolitical, economic and environmental dynamics are manifested at regional and local scales. The Political Equator is the point of entry into many of these radical localities, distributed across the continents, arguing that some of the most relevant projects forwarding socio-economic inclusion and artistic experimentation will not emerge from sites of abundance but from sites of scarcity, in the midst of the conflict between geopolitical borders, natural resources and marginal communities. >

Published on January 18, 2012 23:39.
Filed under: relational

linking America

^ Map by Bill Rankin, 2005, 2006.

 

After discovering RadicalCartography online archive through StudioMagazine, I felt really anxious by looking at this map on the urban mass transit systems in North America. There are no borders, no seashore, no mountains. It’s all about connections. Or rather missed connections, since one cannot avoid wondering why discontinuous lines do not touch each other and allow people commute from Ciudad de México straight to Ottawa. Or from San Diego to LA. As Alexis Bhagat and Lize Mogel state, radical cartography defines the practice of mapmaking that subverts conventional notions in order to actively promote social change. The extension of the rhizomes of every city reveals on one hand hidden connections to the hinterland, but the other, the unserviced gaps between those urban regions that are excluded from the network.

Geographical distances are clearly replaced by duration of commuting journeys. And space is superseded by time.

 

 

Published on January 17, 2012 23:28.
Filed under: nomads

the third eye

^^ Sun Mirror in Viganella via distrettolaghi

^ Neil Harbisson’s third eye. Photo by Albert Jodar/ElPais

 

NH: I usually wear C – E – G (do – mi – sol) outfits, which is a happy combination.

JJM: And what would you wear to a funeral?

NH: A funeral? Blue, lilac and orange: C – E flat – F sharp (do – mi ♭ - fa#)

[…]

NH: Since I listen to the colours of food, I only order well-tuned dishes. I can arrange a plate of vegetables that sounds like my favourite song.

JJM: Can you eat your favourite song?

NH: Totally. Salads contain almost every note. However, it is very hard to find C (do) in edibles, since blue food is basically non-existent.

JJM: You are a bit funny, aren’t you?

[Excerpt from the interview to Neil Harbisson by Juan José Millás, published in El Pais 15/01/2012. My translation]

—

Neil Harbisson introduces himself as the first cyborg ever legally recognized by any Government (2004). He was born colour-blind; so he can only see in black and white (Achromatopsia disorder).

An electronic device implanted in his neck allows him to translate colours into sounds. The camera that hangs from his forehead 24/7 was accepted as part of his British passport photo. By that very fact, the camera became congenital and not prosthetic to his body anymore. Thanks to it, light frequencies are captured and translated into sound frequencies by the chip, which in turn sends them to his brain. He literally listens to colours with his electronic eye.

A standard eye perceives light, tone and saturation. Harbisson’s organic eyes perceive light, but tone is converted into sound, and saturation into volume through his third eye.

 

NH: When I’m done with painting [my apartment], it will become a ‘sonochromatic’ home. I’m not going to decorate it in order to look nice, but to sound nice. In the mezzanine, there will only be black and white, since these colours don’t sound and in the sleeping area you mustn’t listen to anything. It is also very important that the ceiling doesn’t sound.


^ Harbisson’s sonochromatic music scale.

 

Viganella is an Italian village that also got a third eye. Located in a deep gorge in the Alps, it used to spend almost three months in complete shadow during the severe winter. In 2006, a 40-m2 mirror was installed 500m uphill, in order to reflect sunlight down into the village main square six hours a day. The fact that is about 1 km away results in a lit surface of 16 by 16 metres for inhabitants to enjoy.

Harbisson alike, cities can also be able to go over congenital deficiencies through prosthetic add-ons.

 

thanks, max!

^ Viganella in the shadows. Photo by EPA/EMMEVI/DPA via stern

^ Sun Mirror at Viganella via bbc

 

Published on January 15, 2012 22:13.
Filed under: hybrids

Drafting Defeat: 10th Century Roadmaps, 21st Century Disasters

^ [images & text by Slavs and Tatars. Drafting Defeat: 10th Century Roadmaps, 21st Century Disasters, 2007.

Maps of The Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Syria, The Persian Gulf, The Caspian Sea and Iraq by Abu Ishaq Ibrahim Ibn Muhammad Al-Farsi al-Istakhri aka Abu’l Qasim Ubaid’Allah Ibn Khordadbeh aka Al Farsi aka Istakhri.]

 

< We have always had an aesthetic weakness for the merciless and brutal banality of bureaucracy. Little did we know that such a weakness would extend to the bureaucrats themselves. The following are reproductions of 10th-century maps by Al-Istakhri (aka Ibn Khordadbeh or Al Farsi) found in a 1933 Soviet edition of Nasser Khosrow’s Safarnameh, or Book of Travels. Both Istakhri and Khosrow were Persian bureaucrats whose legacy was a paper trail of the very antithesis of administration: a regime of curiosity that attempted to describe and map out the Middle East as a coherent geographic and cultural region. Khosrow, an 11th-century Persian poet and philosopher, had led an uneventful life as a tax collector in present day Turkemenistan when one night, in his sleep, a voice told him to leave behind his life of worldly pleasures. Khosrow dropped his avowed weakness for the medieval Merlot and began immediately to plan a seven-year trip through the Caucases and the Caspian to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. Khosrow was, to some extent, the millenary Muslim equivalent of a 21st-century born-again Christian. Except where the former asked questions, the latter offers only solutions. Where the former travelled extensively, the other is unlikely to have a passport.

 

Academia, the publisher of Safarnameh, was itself an unorthodox outfit in the Soviet landscape of the early 20th century with a reputation for smart, unexpected titles on relatively limited runs. These maps were drafted during a period when Islamic geography rekindled an interest in Roman and Greek scholarship abandoned by the Christian West. Early draftsmen including Istakhri contributed to An Atlas of Islam, with a visible bias for the Farsi-speaking peoples in the Middle East, where a boundless taste for geometric shapes and symmetry belongs today more to the world of fantasy than fact. Later cartographers such as Al-Idrisi went on to craft intricate maps on improbably luxurious materials (e.g. a 400-pound tablet of silver) with even more improbable names (such as The Gardens of Humanity and the Amusement of the Soul) that would serve for centuries to follow. When Christopher Columbus studied these maps, before setting out to sea, we wonder: did it occur to him that his future would be no less unpredictable than our past? >

Published on January 12, 2012 18:10.
Filed under: nomads

Abu Ghraib prison: the production of spatial evidence

Standard Operating Procedure

[by Errol Morris, UK 2008]

A documentary on the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Published on January 10, 2012 19:26.
Filed under: invisible cities

‘Unvoice’: paying tribute to the voids

The Silence Project [& sons, 2011] is a compilation of gaps that refill a new meaning. Suddenly, the most referential lyrics are removed from iconic songs that everybody has in mind to be simply reduced to their negative breaks, the anti-song. During these uncomfortable visual silences, the performer needs to force a smile, invent a gesture, anticipate a facial expression or intensify a feeling previously expressed in her last sentence. The melody is deconstructed, decontextualized, and so are the dancing movements and the audience clapping. A mix of anxiety and eager to know what we have missed invades us. We are presented with multiple preludes and epilogues that use voids to build a new entity. But we can only guess the actual content through the sweat, breath, wrinkles or opening of the mouths.

the silence project #2 Dolly Parton from & sons on Vimeo.

the silence project #1 Raphael from & sons on Vimeo.

the silence project #4 Olivia Newton John from & sons on Vimeo.

Published on December 27, 2011 13:48.
Filed under: homo ludens, invisible cities

Blank Spots on the Map

Talk by Trevor Paglen on the Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. 11/02/2009

thanks, blake!

Published on December 22, 2011 01:37.
Filed under: invisible cities

retroprojective roundabouts

‘The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’. [T.S. Eliot]

^ Roundabout Vancouver. 1914

< What would a metropolis in the Pacific Northwest look like if urban planners at the turn of the 20th century recognized and exploited the spatial potential of existing old growth trees rather than their perceived resource potential? Employing techniques of photomontage and urban mapping Goodweather takes us on an anachronistic detour that decouples empirical fact from historical memory. While in the present city of Vancouver, the centre space of roundabouts is given over to various sanctioned treatments—community gardens, a monumental rock, and so on—in this “retroprojective” proposal an alternative vision of the not-so-distant past is offered, one wherein forward-thinking city planners leave an old growth tree at the centre of each future roundabout. With this simple gesture we can envisage an entirely different city, one in which the massive trees are no longer a rarity but instead fundamentally define and shape our movement through the urban fabric of Vancouver. While the singular presence of each tree is in itself remarkable, their collective existence is a legacy comparable in size and density to that of Stanley Park, Vancouver’s beloved urban green-space. With this action on the civic imagination the city becomes a forest, and the forest a city. > 

[text & images> Roundabout Vancouver by Goodweather Collective] [Cabinet Magazine#43] [WE:Vancouver]

^ Roundabout Vancouver. 1920s

^ Roundabout Vancouver. 1930s

^ Roundabout Vancouver. 2010

^ Roundabout Vancouver. Residual distributed / condensed forest

Published on December 19, 2011 14:08.
Filed under: hybrids

witchcraft and hysteria

< Häxan is a documentary about the history of witchcraft, told in a variety of styles, from illustrated slideshow to dramatised events of alleged real-life events, right up to the early twentieth century (when the film was made, in 1922). Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary film uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. >

A highly recommendable promenade through psychiatric fictional space…

Published on December 13, 2011 02:30.
Filed under: mutant

bacterial landscapes

Bacteria as Space-Time Machines

Microbes and bacteria don’t understand political man-made borders. They just expand and react freely; they are sovereigns of their surroundings. They deterritorialize human topographic order to delimit their own dominion. And they always leave some sort of trace behind them. Trace evidence is left behind when different objects come into contact with one another revealing a past narrative, like fingerprints indicate a hand that was once in contact with a surface, or a warm seat in the tube, which reveals that somebody was seating there before us.

Once the cap of a Boletus Erythropus mushroom is nicked and the cell walls are broken, oxygen alters its colour from brownish-orange to a range of iridescent tones. Walking amongst these psychedelic fungi in a forest could produce fantastic blue-black footsteps, as their colour transfers onto the shoes, which tread upon them. Colours and shape distortions that appear on them provide some sort of forensic evidence. A dynamic landscape narrative starts also on us after watching these traces. Landscape sensitive properties are nonetheless preserved in spite of continuous deformations.

This process of tracking back a series of events in space deals with re-enacting and re-mapping. In this sense, it could be also considered a Deleuzian reterritorialization process, where Euclidean coordinates turn into a set of dynamic parameters. Microbiological mutations can be perceived as space-time machines as well. After watching them, our brain takes us to a different time and place through a set of topological relations. How humid an environment was that turned bacteria samples into a pale tone? Or were they rather affected by loads of dust floating in the air?

Hidden layers of reality become automatically visible for us. The essence of different places is registered and captured during a certain time lapse.  Aren’t these on-going maps almost more real than reality?

In observing microbes mutations, space is both represented and built anew in a constant negotiation of different agents; as Martina Löw puts it when referring to the relational production of space, which she understands by Spacing: the situating of social goods and people and/or the positioning of primarily symbolic markings in order to render ensembles of goods and people recognisable as such constitute space. Goods and people are connected to form spaces through processes of perception, memory and fantasy; we want to imagine what has really happened, why there is a round-shaped stain on the floor in front of us…

Building space can be considered as an architectural act, but not in the most classic perspective as the Vitruvian Triad has monopolised over centuries. The real fundaments of constructing space have actually never been Firmitas, Utilitas and Venustas (firmness, utility and beauty). As Miguel Paredes states, built space must actually be unstable, dysfunctional and ugly, changeable and blurry.

daniel fernández pascual (text contribution, 2011)

—

With the work DOMINIONS, Julian Charrière and Andreas Greiner captured a series of landscapes through bacteria (installation at Program Berlin, 2011. Curated by Carson Chan). Each box was exposed to a different ambience in remote places of Germany and Switzerland; then, displayed at a height proportional to the altitude of each site.

[all images> Dominions by Julian Charrière and Andreas Greiner. Installation at Program Berlin 2011. Curated by Carson Chan]

 

Published on December 13, 2011 02:07.
Filed under: mutant

Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies

< [...] a greying Mediterranean that stretches toward the horizon, above which heavy nimbus clouds appear ready to burst open in a mid-day shower. To the right of the screen, a volcanic mass juts from beneath the ocean’s surface, revealing a small island shaped much like a pumice stone – a tourist’s hideaway, perhaps, or a monastic sanctuary. The landscape, tinted in becalming pastels and high-definition aquamarine, suggests a placid environment on the verge of great turmoil. If Warnell’s mise-en-scène seems to bear a striking likeness to the fabled island shots in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), it is likely not coincidence.  For much as the paradigmatic Italian art film used littoral space as a semiological and architectonic conduit for traversing the boundaries of the Étranges and the Étrangers, Outlandish’s camera eye translates the swirling atmospheres of the ocean into a fluid subject, a foreign skin, an interzone of sorts in which to theorize the body and its relation to the ‘outside’ unknown. [...] >

read full article by Erik Morse [frieze]

 

‘Outlandish are the bodies: they are made of the outside, of the extraneitas that forms the outsider’s outsidiness…’ 
The first line of Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘libretto’ for Outlandish

 

Phillip Warnell. Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies. 35 mm film, 20 min, 2009. [in collaboration with Jean-Luc Nancy]

[image> videostill via CPH:DOX 2011]

Published on December 9, 2011 15:25.
Filed under: hybrids

cartographies of an uprising

La Sublevación (The Uprising) is a recently published cartographic visualization of the pro-Franco military coup in Spain 18th July 1936. Its author Víctor Hurtado maps the improvisation and deliberation with which both sides, fascist and republican, combatted. The role of dense narrow streets or wide avenues was decisive on the fate of the uprising that day: placing of the barricades, spacing and timing of shoot-outs. But also the physical and political distances between key institutions like Republican Governments or Military Headquarters and barracks (Gobierno Militar, Cuartel de Artillería…). With Hurtado’s maps, one realizes the complexity of the whole apparatus surrounding the event,of anything that had in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings. [G. Agamben’s definition]. The relational network of power structures is automatically revealed, making possible to understand the dynamics of Spanish cities at the time: which buildings had been playing the main role in everyday politics, where power decisions were actually taken, where to seek refuge under state of exception, who to negotiate with in critical moments and who to defeat first to gain control over population.

As Hurtado puts it in this meticulous atlas, the success of the fascist uprising was in many cities just a matter of small details, even a few hours.

V. Hurtado, 2011. La Sublevación. Edicions Dau: Barcelona.

^ V. Hurtado. Barcelona: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. Cádiz: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. Sevilla: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. San Sebastián: Fascist Uprising 1936

[all images by Victor Hurtado via C. Geli 09/12/2011. 18-J: cartografía de una sublevación. elpais]

Published on December 9, 2011 14:28.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, invisible cities

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar

TED Talk by Taryn Simon

Published on December 5, 2011 17:59.
Filed under: invisible cities

A Paris Made to Be Destroyed

Before Radar was invented warfare tactics could rely on visual tricks and trompe-l’oeil as a means of passive defence. The half-accomplished project of a Sham Paris outside Paris (Faux Paris, 1918) was a fake city to be largely exposed and to attract the most attention from German bomber planes flying above at night. Sham Saint-Denis, sham Aubervilliers, sham Gare de l’Est, and sham Champs-Élysées…

< The powers that were in Paris at the end of World War I tried to […] create a Sham Paris located on the outskirts of the real city – it was to be doomed, offered with confusing lights and displays that would disorient German aviators into bombing and destroying it rather than the real city. […] There were to be sham streets lined with electric lights, sham rail stations, sham industry, open to a sham population waiting to be bombed by real Germans. It is a perverse city, filled with the waiting-to-be-murdered in a civilian target. […] Sham Paris is a city of created murders to save the innocent. > 

Manipulating aerial views is a tool that has lately been empowered by Google Earth. In 2006, ecological activists denounced regional authorities in the Spanish Canary Islands for providing Google with out-dated photographs. Hence, irregular urban developments destroying the coastline could be hidden from the public eye.

Contrary to Sham Paris that built a new territory to be destroyed, the tactic in the Canary Islands was to build a new image of a sham coast in order not to be destroyed.

[text & images from the Illustrated London News, 6/11/1920 via Ptak Science Books]

thanks tito!

Published on December 2, 2011 14:20.
Filed under: forensic destruction, invisible cities

decay

 

< The sculpture La Fisiología del Gusto [The Physiology of Taste] by Adán Vallecillo presents the contradiction between the stainless steel tray, from the world of gourmet cooking, and its content of hundreds of corroded teeth. This macabre recipient alludes to the foreign medical teams that have arrived at the indigenous communities in the poorest regions of Honduras, extracting the decayed teeth of the inhabitants. Vallecillo exposes the waste and precarious living situation of these groups, while shedding light on the accumulation of this extraction, and the need for a remedial politics. Physiology – the science that studies the organs, including the functions of taste – operates in this work as a critical metaphor to identify the socially approved and the rejected. The tray with the teeth therefore provokes in the viewer a physiological and social distaste, generating a moment of awareness and recognition of the violence involved in these politics of extraction. >  [text> Venice Biennale 2011]

[1> Adán Vallecillo_La Fisiología del Gusto [The Physiology of Taste], 2010. Carious teeth and stainless steel tray, 3 x 44 x 25 cm. via vvork] [2> Adán Vallecillo's installation representing Honduras at the Venice Biennale 2011 by daniel fernández pascual]

Published on November 30, 2011 16:21.
Filed under: forensic destruction

the door

 

There is a circular hole in the wall, about 30-40 cm diameter and perforated at 1 metre above the ground. A man enters through the hole in the wall and a man (apparently the same individual) exits again through the same hole. His mate is standing right next to the hole and seems to be waiting for him. Yesterday I came across these pictures again. The enigmatic hole is the entrance to a room. It is a door that keeps you fit, elastic and flexible, if you want to discover what there is at the other side of the wall. Its dimension relies on the utmost reduction of a bending human body. And the erotic experience of penetrating it is intimately connected both to the materiality of the hole and the earthen texture of the wall. It is an intuitive understanding of a house as the shelter of a woman’s uterus. It requires thinking where to place first a leg, an arm, then a hand and a foot. But even if it looks like a perforation, as if material had been removed out of the massive surface, the hole was indeed already there before the wall was built all around it. It is incredibly mysterious when our iconic idea of a rectangular door mutates and becomes something else that defines a new type of threshold.

Below there is another door of Korongo houses that also fascinates me: the oversized threshold, shaped as a human-size keyhole. One discovers its meaningfulness after knowing that it lets villagers access the room while carrying two large jars with drinking water hanging from a stick over their shoulders.

George Rodger captured in his photographs the everyday lives of the Nuba people in Sudan in late 1940s, their houses, their wrestling combats with sharp-edge bracelets, and their aesthetic scars that adorn their bodies.

[photos by George Rodger in Village of the Nubas. Phaidon 1999]

 

Published on November 29, 2011 08:59.
Filed under: non-pedigreed

40°25’39.58″ N 93°33’28.70″ E

In the middle of nowhere they date back to the early 2000s. But these lines are still very well preserved. They measure around 70 feet wide (21,3 metres). Oblique lines configuring two main gigantic structural grids that cover around 1 square mile each, made to be seen from above. One of them is framed in a rectangular shape. For the other one, they might have realized that it was not necessary any frame. Instead, they drastically increased its Albedo (light reflectivity coefficient) through a highly reflective mineral composition. This fact together with the alignment of both mega-structures with seasonal alluvial flows lead to different speculations on their actual function, either related to war, power or natural resources (issues which surprisingly tend to be linked altogether):

(a) Calibrate optics for Chinese satellites or even weapons.

(b) Geo-engineering attempts to guide or redirect the unpredictable alluvial fans caused by water flow through the desert.

(c) Assist in mining exploration guidance by discovering the flow patterns of alluvial gold, silver, platinum or other metal/mineral deposits. Which for me appears to be the most plausible hypothesis.

The decay of the lines is not simply due to natural abandonment but a way to be easily monitored from above. Are we assisting to a gold rush in the Gobi Desert? The region of nearby Altay Mountain (“the place producing gold”) has over 138 ores located in the same area. Vehicle tracks and tailings reveal the trace of intensive mining operations. If that were the case, it would be all about humans modifying a landscape to observe how it changes; watching the metamorphosis of the metamorphosis.

Looking forward to what the alteration of the image of the territory eventually unearths.

Thanks, laura!

[speculations & images via quora]

Published on November 23, 2011 01:23.
Filed under: mutant

Pornotopia: Architecture & Sexuality

 

The same images of naked women that the military had approved and openly distributed among soldiers during WWII – as a way to keep their souls more stable through masturbatory practices – were automatically stigmatised after the end of the war, for being utterly illicit pornography. The nation urgently demanded stable heterosexual couples producing kids for the future. The suburban house with garden, car and electric appliances became the American dream. But Hugh Hefner decided to shake the deep roots of society in 1950s when he founded a Disneyland for adults: the Playboy empire. Philosopher Beatriz Preciado, in her sharp analysis Pornotopia: Architecture and Sexuality in “Playboy” during the Cold War (only Spanish and Italian editions available), makes a necessary reading of the implicit domesticity of this new paradigm of modernity.

< Playboy was not merely a magazine featuring girls with or without bikini, but a vast media-oriented architectural project, which aimed to supersede the heterosexual dwelling as the nucleus of consumption and reproduction by new spaces orientated towards the production of capital and pleasure. […] In the same way that enlightened society thought of the individual prison cell as a means of healing criminal souls, Playboy envisioned the bachelor’s mansion as the way to construct the modern man. […] Inspired by pioneering sexual utopias conceived by Sade and Ledoux, this complex worked as the first multimedia brothel in history; a modern pornotopia erected from mass media and the architecture of the spectacle. It is a laboratory to study the mutations from Cold War to hot Capitalism, through sex, drugs and information as means of production, and where architecture plays the role of a stage on which male identity is performed. >*

As queer theoretician Preciado reveals, woman’s role – of an “imprisoned” housewife dominating the domestic realm – was something that Playboy magazine would try to end up with. It was not in favour of female rights at all, since the role of many suburban housewives as exploited sex workers did not differ much from the bunnies legally hired by Playboy. Quite on the contrary, it was all about the male recovering the sphere of the house that he had lost. The new masculine character should be sovereign of his bachelor urban refuge, where he would enjoy licentiousness while preparing exquisite cocktails. Modern architecture and design was used as a weapon to free 1950s American bachelors from their Victorian moral-led lifestyles. The aim was not to walk towards a more feminized man at home, but towards a more masculinized domesticity as a contemporary way of inhabiting space.

Preciado (interviewed by Ibrahim B.) sustains that even today the models of producing subjectivity invented by Playboy influence our everyday life: our contemporary ways of meeting people and producing pleasure are prosthetic, mediatized and psychotropic. However free we are, we are still trapped in a virtual world of laptops, as well as Hefner was in his round hyper-connected bed. Our sex relationships are determined by pharmacological technologies (the morning-after pill, Viagra…) and surveillance (we fall in love via SMS, we record and document our meetings, we broadcast and share them via Youtube or Facebook…). Hence, she concludes, our way to love directly inherits the pornotopia of Playboy, being absolutely kitsch and telecommunicative.

Preciado, B., 2010. Pornotopía: Arquitectura y sexualidad en “Playboy” durante la Guerra fría. Barcelona: Anagrama.

[*my translation]

Thanks, Bea!

[1>Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion_1960 via Ibrahim B.] [2-4>The Playboy Town House designed by R. Donald Jaye; renderings by Humen Tan_published in May 1962 Playboy issue via HighStreetMarket]

 

 

 

 

Published on November 18, 2011 18:42.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, homo ludens

terrorist-marked places

Three weeks ago Basque-separatist ETA terrorist organization declared the definitive cessation of its armed activity after 43 years of existence.

But the crime scenes where they perpetrated their assassinations still remain marked, as journalists Guillermo Abril and Álvaro Corcuera compile today in a very recommendable article in El Pais (Lugares Marcados). The article is not going through the whole history of ETA terrorist organization. Neither is the whole list of attacks included, nor the 829 victims of its terror. But it does show a series of 40 spaces where the terrorist organization left its trace in landscape.

Eduardo Nave has photographed some years later the crime scenes at the same hour and date as the assassinations occurred.

< These empty places make one think of the tragic moment when they were filled with death. > [Helena Taberna]

^ Murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco_Lasarte-Oria (Guipuzkoa)_16:50_12/07/1997

^ Murder of Estanislao Galíndez_Armurrio (Álava)_08:45_26/06/1985

^ Murder of Manuel Broseta_Valencia_10:15_15/01/1992

^ Murder of Carlos Arguimberri_N-634 Km.40_11:30_05/07/1975

Published on November 13, 2011 11:27.
Filed under: forensic destruction

open-source bulb

As magic as easy to install, and as many as you want. Similar to a 55W bulb, but without any electricity costs. It is elemental physics that takes care of refracting sunlight in 360º. A skylight suddenly appears in the ceiling. How is it that nobody had come up with the idea before?

The Solar Bottle Bulb (A Liter of Light_Isang Litrong Liwanag) consists of nothing else than a plastic bottle filled with water (and some drops of bleach to keep the liquid purified for up to 5 years). Developed in 2011 by MIT students and implemented by MyShelter Foundation for precarious housing in Manila, it provides a DIY ecological alternative for electric lighting. The users guide constitutes an open-source architectural manual, which allows the Solar Bottle Bulb to be replicated ad infinitum. It relies on local waste materials and basic skills as a new efficient tool for slum upgrading.

< According to statistics from the National Electrification Commission in 2009, 3 million households still remain powerless outside Metro Manila. And even in the metro, families still continue to live in darkness. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) has reported that a large number of fire-related incidents involve faulty electrical connections. Informal settlements are high-risk areas, since the BFP does not conduct fire hazard inspections in these communities. >

[images> via laformación & Isang Litrong Liwanag]

 

 

Published on November 9, 2011 00:38.
Filed under: non-pedigreed

starlings say the winter is here

With hungry predators hovering nearby, the little birds must converge, flocking together, in an attempt to confuse the sparrowhawks, buzzards and peregrine falcons. [...] Each starling tracks seven other birds – irrespective of distance – which produces the group’s aerial ballet.

[all images> "Murmurations" of starlings at Gretna, Anglo-Scottish border_November 2011 via dailymail]

Published on November 5, 2011 17:30.
Filed under: dérive, nomads

against air

After a talk by Nabil Ahmed on Environmental Emergency and Political-Natural Assemblages, I was struck by the impressive structures developed as cyclone shelters in Bangladesh. The fact of being a very low and flat land together with having the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghn Rivers delta increase the threat of flooding. Catastrophes have been happening every now and then. The most severe of the deadly storms occurred in November 1970 (Bhola Cyclone), taking up to 500,000 lives.

The triangular shape of the whole Bay of Bengal funnels tropical storms towards the shoreline (around 64 knots, 74 miles/hour). And this same triangular shape is the one that some cyclone shelters need to acquire in order to face strong winds coming from the coast with their pointed convex façade. They consist of tough, but aerodynamic structures at the same time.

The cost of building one windbreaker in Bangladesh rounds £45,000 [Oxfam]. The shelter is usually built on concrete pillars (letting waves go through underneath in case of tidal surges), windows have no glass and are covered with bars and metal shutters, stairs are located at the back of the building (the concave side in triangular constructions) with railings to help people hold or climb. Upstairs, there is a room for men and another one for women and children.

When not used as emergency shelters, these spaces provide public space for community centres, schools, marriage ceremonies, vaccination hospitals, or informal trials for local issues. However, beyond these specific functions, wind shelters may also act as powerful weapons of governing a territory on a broader level, either if built by international humanitarian funds or estate authorities. Along the lines with Alex de Waal’s concept of Philanthropic Imperialism, emergencies are the opportunity for the extension of political power and coercive administration, albeit with the greater good as the goal. [Whose Emergency Is It Anyway? Dreams, Tragedies and Traumas in the Humanitarian Encounter]

[1>Cyclone Shelter in Noakhali_Bangaldesh via fredhoogervorst] [2> by IFRC] [3-5> Cyclone shelters in Bangladesh_interiors via archnet]  [6> Cyclones Tracking over Bangladesh during the 20th century via islandnet]

Published on October 30, 2011 15:35.
Filed under: hybrids