please, do touch

saturday afternoon in shanghai and it rains cats and dogs.

hundreds of people head to IKEA, but buying something is more an accident than the real aim. Nowadays, when home ownership in China is boosting, interior design malls are becoming the theme-parks for entertainment: heating, soft seats, free soda refill and dreams of a modern house. Apart from potential buyers, the upper floor with the showroom, is packed with teenager couples hanging out together or elderly chatting in small groups. small alleys in the city and their social function are then replaced by the alley-labyrinth marked by Swedish marketing.

Pictures are taken everywhere, from girls posing among loads of teddy bears or in shiny red kitchens, to men dreaming of an American-like office space. Others just photograph fully decorated living-rooms to gather ideas of how to distribute pictures in their own walls at home. Meanwhile, the lower floor, with shelves with simple items on display does not succeed that much. If upstairs is a terribly low procession through an arts and crafts contemporary museum, downstairs is a much emptier supermarket.

[All images at IKEA shanghai, china by deconcrete 2010]

Published on March 6, 2010 08:29.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

1 Comment »

  1. deconcrete - everyday urbanisms without architects' architectures says:
    December 27, 2010 at 20:00

    [...] another post, I already talked about Chinese citizens using Ikea Stores in Shanghai and Beijing as a leisure [...]

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1,012 years of European territorial shifts

 

[rather watch it mute!]   via LiveLeak

Published on May 16, 2012 12:24.
Filed under: mutant

occupy london 12May12: meet the 1%

 

^ Map of the spaces related to the 1% in central London, as part of Occupy London 12 May 2012 at St Paul’s 13:00. Read feature in the guardian

Published on May 11, 2012 16:27.
Filed under: protest & critical space

Building Without Content

^ Jesús Gil y Gil in his jacuzzi 1994. Corruption star of the housing bubble in 1990s-2000s Spain. EFE

 

 

Trade under inflated values generates economic bubbles. Prices constantly fluctuate and thus become impossible to predict. Like soap bubbles, it is just a matter of time until they burst. A bubble contains the maximum volume within the minimal surface, and the tension of the surface is directly proportional to an ideal stability.

Spanish real estate bubble generated a trend of what could be named as Building without Content. This idea brings Deleuze’s cancerous Body without Organs – associated with true freedom, unstable virtual potentials of the self, endless reproduction of the same pattern -, together with Agamben’s Man without Content or self-annihilation. Analogously, Building without Content (BwC) can be understood either as an object that has had enough from its own content; or as the action of building objects without any content. They are mega- or infra-structures designed to be functional only until the day of the opening, but not rationally planned to last in time. BwC are born dead before birth. Their content consists of speculating with restrictions, rather than aiming to efficiency, functionality, utility or needs. The paradigm of government towards development legitimizes BwC within mediocre economies: create new jobs, reach European standards, become a global reference… As Aguilera Klink defines it, it is the contraposition between the instrumental (aiming a specific use) with the ceremonial (the paraphernalia).

A new web has been launched revealing corruption scandals of architect Santiago Calatrava, and accused, as The Guardian titled it yesterday, for ‘bleeding Valencia dry’. The name of the site created by left party Esquerra Unida is a beautifully dirty pun: calatrava-te-la-clava. In it, we can find a list of disastrous Buildings Without Content, as well as irregularities with his contracts and bills towards public administration budgets.

Here are some other relevant resources on Spanish space of corruption. In Germany, when a politician has plagiarized bits of his PhD, he is obliged to resign. In Spain, when politicians are charged for embezzlement of public funds, they are reelected and can govern again. [Check the updated list of politicians charged with corruption included in the lists of candidates for past election]

Indignados: 12May occupy the streets! #12m15m

^ corruptódromo

^ País Corrupto

^ ladrillo a ladrillo

^ calatravatelaclava

^ PPleaks

^ Museo de los Horrores Urbanísticos

^ Corruption complex surrounding King’s son-in-law Urdangarín. El País/Corrupción Urbanística

Published on May 9, 2012 10:57.
Filed under: post-crisis, protest & critical space

15M-Occupy Madrid: public space award

15M protest camp in Madrid: public space award special category 2012

A large-scale demonstration by citizens demanding improvements in the democratic system by means of a temporary occupation of one of Madrid’s most representative squares.

 

 

<On 15 May 2011, with the Arab Spring as background, and in the context of serious economic crisis and growing disrepute of public institutions, protest marches called by the “¡Democracia Real Ya!” movement, which was united by the slogan, “We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers”, were organised in more than fifty Spanish cities. The demonstrations in Madrid, which ended up with disturbances and police charges, led to a small percentage of the demonstrators deciding spontaneously to continue the protest independently of the original organisers. Early in the morning they set up an improvised camp site in the Madrid square, known as Puerta del Sol.

[...]

The aim of the occupation of the Puerta de Sol was to demand thoroughgoing changes in the prevailing political and economic system. Corruption scandals, the rescue of banks with public money, cuts in social spending, the highest unemployment figures in the European Union, precariousness of employment, difficulties of access to decent housing, the reservations about the systems of parliamentary representation, Internet users’ rejection of intellectual property laws, and a long, heterogeneous list of other grievances which appeared during the protests ensured that the initially small camp would expand exponentially.

 

Withstanding intermittent disappearances, the occupation took over the whole square. It obeyed dynamic impulses which meant that it was constantly adapting to the demands of the moment. Sometimes it took on a the dense morphology of a kasbah, while on other occasions it swiftly folded in on itself to make space for big demonstrations.It consisted of ephemeral, lightweight constructions including tents from commercial brands suitable for spending the night in, and structures built on the spot with discarded materials that then acquired previously unsuspected functions. Ropes, cables, canvas, plastic and sticking tape were applied in ingenious constructions where logistical requirements, for example organising sanitary services, or organisational functions, found shelter. They were also used to put up, with surprising speed, large tents that protected the campers from sun and rain. The constructions also protected, effectively and decisively, spaces of public interest, for example thoroughfares, libraries and crèches. The tents of the occupation were secured with heavy objects, for example flagons full of water so as to avoid damaging the paving of the Puerta del Sol.

 

Denounced by some as illegal appropriation of urban space and suppressed in the national media, which only mentioned it under pressure from the social networks or the foreign press, the Puerta del Sol occupation disappeared a few weeks after its spontaneous appearance. Cleaning brigades organised by the campers left the pre-existing space as they had found it.The importance of this surprising evanescent city is still difficult to gauge. Its physical and yet dynamic condition situates it halfway between the robustness of urbs and the contingence ofcivitas. However, its legacy shows that the public space of European cities continues to be loaded with the political sense that has made it the scene of dissidence for many centuries. This sense has always questioned the premises of law and order currently in force in order to conquer the civil rights we presently enjoy. It would be rash to think that our democracies are not subject to it also.>

[text> David Bravo Bordas via public space]

Published on May 4, 2012 18:32.
Filed under: protest & critical space

our play, our party, our work

^ Oskar Schlemmer. Stelzenläufer 1927.

 

 

<Play becomes celebration; celebration becomes work; work becomes play. 

Our play should become work; our work, a celebration; and our celebration, play.

I regard this as the supreme excellence of the human tasks>

 

[‘our play, our party, our work’ was the title given by Johannes Itten to his lecture of 1919]

 

<Once established, the Bauhaus was held together as much by the social gatherings and festivities that masters and students organised collaboratively as by Gropius’s vision for a new art school. These celebrations served to promote contact between the school and the public, with attendance from locals and party-goers from further afield, making the school a lively cultural centre. Parties were also of central importance to Gropius’s educational vision and from the outset he stressed the significance of extracurricular entertainment with the ‘encouragement of friendly relations between masters and students outside of work’. Such festivities gave free rein to the masters and students to demonstrate their creativity and design invention, providing innumerable opportunities to conceive invitations, posters, costumes and decorations. An additional pedagogical aim of the festivities was the encouragement of play within teaching. Masters from Johannes Itten and Oskar Schlemmer to Paul Klee valued play as an essential ingredient of artistic creativity.

The Bauhaus parties moved from the imaginative improvisations and the rhythm of the seasons during Weimar, with the Lantern Festival in the spring and the Kite Festival in the autumn, to spectacular and monumental stage productions in Dessau. These large public parties were elaborately prepared around themes, such as the White Party (1926), in which everyone was instructed to appear in a costume ‘dotted, chequered and striped’, or The Beard Nose Heart Party arranged by the Bauhaus band. The highpoint of celebrations was in 1929 with the resplendent Metal Party. The school was given glittering look and guests came attired in metallic objects from tin foil to frying pans and danced to the sound of bells. They entered the building by sliding down a large chute that deposited them in the first of several rooms decorated with silver spherical balls and reflecting walls faced with white metal>

 

[source text: Barbican Art Gallery, 2012. Bauhaus: Art as Life. Koenig Books]

^ Bauhaus Stage Workshop 1928.

^ Oskar Schlemmer. Das Triadische Ballet 1924.

^ Oskar Schlemmer. Das Triadische Ballet 1924. 

^ Bauhaus Stage Workshop 1928.

^ Andor Weininger. Mechanical Stage Revue 1926.

^ Oskar Schlemmer. Das Triadische Ballet 1924. Installation at Barbican Exhibition.

^ Walter Gropius. Drawing by Stefan Sebök. Total theatre 1926-27.

^ Hinnerk Scheper. Colour-coded orientation plan for the Bauhaus Building 1926.

^ László Moholy-Nagy. Kinetic constructive system 1922-1928.

^ Puppets for the Oskar Schlemmer Stage Workshop 1923.

^ Oskar Schlemmer. Metal Party 1929.

^ Nonsense Soldier. Costume for the Metal Party 1929.

^ Attributed to Irene or Herbert Bayer. Costume for the Neue Sachlichkeit Party 1926.

 

images from the Bauhaus: Art as Life exhibition at Barbican centre, London. Co-curated by Catherine Ince and Lydia Yee. 3 May – 12 August 2012.

Published on May 3, 2012 15:53.
Filed under: homo ludens, relational

privatisations in/for progress

‘Europas neue DDR’ (the new GDR in Europe) was the name that German Stern magazine used to refer in 2011 to the wave of privatisations and asset sales going on in Greece, comparing it to post-1989 panorama. Among the ones that the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF) is managing, we can find land development, real estate operations, infrastructure and corporations: lotteries, Postbank, Thessaloniki water company, Hellenic Motorways, Public Gas, Hellenic Telecommunications OTE, Piraeus and Thessaloniki ports…

As part of these desperate economic initiatives to raise 50 billion euros by 2015, the Ellinikon Airport site in the periphery of Athens, shut and abandoned in 2001, is currently undergoing a brutal top-down process of redevelopment. Eero Saarinen accomplished the terminal building in 1969. It still survives in a mixture of agonizing temporary use for commercial fairs and utter emptiness with wild flora reclaiming the landing tracks. The recent plans for a highend new city larger in size than Monaco, with marina, helipads and golf course, is regarded once again as the only alternative for ‘sustainability’. Rumours speculate that investment may come from Qatar or Chinese stakeholders. Is a new Las Vegas potentially being born?

I only doubt that circulation of capital within the same hands manages to exit the enclosed circuit of corruption, be it publicly or privately owned.

 

 

[all images> Ellinikon ghost airport by Saarinen 1969_Athens_Photos by deconcrete2012]

Published on May 1, 2012 15:18.
Filed under: post-crisis

cupolas of decision making

 

Misused Originals, image and essay by Spatial Forces, featured in Studio Magazine#02

 

Published on April 20, 2012 14:24.
Filed under: ersatz

Turbo Sculpture

 

Turbo Sculpture, 2010 by Aleksandra Domanovic.

Video Essay 18:29 min

via We Find Wildness

Published on April 19, 2012 20:26.
Filed under: post-crisis, propaganda

Unfinished Modernisations_Between Utopia & Pragmatism

Architecture and Urban Planning in Former Yugoslavia and its Successor States 

 

<Unfinished Modernisations is a collaborative, long-term research platform on architecture and urban planning.  […] The project is aimed at fostering interdisciplinary research on the production of built environment in its social, political and cultural contexts. It encompasses the countries that succeeded former Yugoslavia, spanning the period from the inception of the socialist state until today.  The topic of the 14 researches is the way in which divergent concepts of modernization conditioned architecture, territorial transformations, and urban phenomena.  The project seeks to detect effective, resilient, and socially responsible models of architecture and urban planning in socialist Yugoslavia and its successor states. Special attention is going to be paid to critical re-reading of modernization processes and contextualization of local architectural and urban planning concepts within the framework of international evolution of architectural discourse. While largely unexplored and lacking appropriate interpretation, many of the models created in the region were original and experimental and may be used as inspiration for a progressive current practice both inside and beyond the regional borders. The project also seeks to reconstruct an important segment of the shared history of Central and South-Eastern Europe and to strengthen cross-cultural respect and understanding through trans-national collaboration and mobility.

[…]

Unfinished Modernisations – Between Utopia and Pragmatism will analyse and compare the production of built environment in two opposed economic and political systems: those of socialist Yugoslavia and the market-based democracies that emerged out of its collapse. The region is especially conducive to such comparative analysis because its successor states share the same heritage of a common socialist project of modernisation, but are at the same time highly divergent in terms of their social and economic development. The project will identify and interpret how the spatial politics of the two systems conditioned architectural and urban solutions and their social, ecological, and cultural impact.  It will simultaneously pay attention to unique concepts and products and to general processes and phenomena. We seek to identify the sustainable models of urban development and the possibilities of encouraging progressive architectural practises.> 

 

[text source: Unfinished Modernisations. Photo by Wolfgang Thaler]

Published on April 18, 2012 00:10.
Filed under: post-crisis, urban research

Waste Not

^ Waste Not (wu jin qu yong), by Song Dong. Installation at The Curve, Barbican Centre, London, until 12 June 2012. All images by deconcrete2012.

 

 

<Comprising over 10,000 items collected by Song Dong’s mother over five decades – ranging from a section of the house to metal pots and plastic bowls to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes and toys – the installation is a tribute to his mother, as well as a meditation on family life during the Cultural Revolution. The activity of saving and reusing objects of all kinds is in keeping with the Communist adage wu jin qu yong – ‘waste not’ – a prerequisite for survival during periods of social and political turmoil.

[…]

During the early post-War Communist years in China, being frugal was the only way for a family to survive. Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan, saved everything, including items we might view as rubbish or junk – for instance, old pieces of used soap and empty toothpaste tubes – for possible future use. Even when things improved a fear of shortage was ever present, leading to a life of thrift. Following Song Dong’s father’s death in 2002, she sank into deep depression. As Song Dong says, I understand her need to fill the space with those daily life objects more as a need to fill the emptiness after my father’s death. The artist wanted to make her happy and for her to find renewed purpose in life, to bring her out of the depths of grief, so he proposed that she work with him to make her possessions a work of art.  In exhibiting her life, her things, and her philosophy: It gave my mother a space to put her memories and history in order. Song Dong’s mother died suddenly in 2009, but did install the first showing of Waste Not in 2005 in Beijing.>

 

Published on April 10, 2012 17:30.
Filed under: post-crisis

Dust over the Canary Islands

^ Offshore oil and gas drilling concessions on the West African Coast. Adapted from Offshore Magazine, 2011.

 

Air becomes rarefied in Spanish Canary Islands, opposite the African coast. It is not only the sand particles from the Sahara Desert flying over Spanish territory in form of dust storms (Calima). As many other on-going speculative developments, the construction of a new harbour in Granadilla, Tenerife, has been generating political controversy for several years. Politicians argue that its completion urges for the future development of the island, because the existing harbour has become too small and it is physically impossible to extend. The paradoxical reality proves not only that the harbour is only at 35% of its capacity, but also that the same politicians are even asking the EU for funding its “impossible” extension (Aguilera Klink). How can Brussels cope with both issues at the same time? Another smart trick has been to get rid of environmental opposition before launching the project. The marine prairies (sebadales) existing in the area that were to be destroyed were simply thrown out of the national list of endangered natural species. Even the recent appearance of two specimens of native beetles (forgotten to become unprotected) does not seem to stop the project.

 

^ Cymodocea Nodosa. New unprotected species.

^ Pimelia Canariensis. (Protected species). Two specimens found at the new harbour site.

 

Bill Clinton visited the area in July 2005, invited by the ruling politicians who were eager to push their real estate plans. Clinton even proclaimed in his speech that this new harbour in Tenerife would be very important to solve poverty in Africa. It’s not bad for a statement, Bill. I wonder how citizens had not realised before of the huge potential of this harbour. The true is that social aid could well begin by solving the poor quality of “democracy” in Spain. However, the actual problem is that Granadilla harbour could certainly solve the poverty…of investments. Who is actually generating and sustaining poverty in Africa? According to lawyer José Manuel Rivero, in Clinton’s mind, and in that of his accompanying team of high-profile American investors to Canary Islands, was the potential of using AFRICOM (United States Africa Command) as an instrument to promote within Nato and public opinion the fallacy of humanitarian aid, security and stability for the African continent. This would consist of a sort of 21st century Marshall Plan, using the Spanish archipelago as operations-base. However, among the real interests of AFRICOM would be protecting American investments on the West African coast, above all from the thrilling pace of exploitation of African energetic resources by Chinese companies. As if evil China would be faster in taking away what corresponds to the US! A complex entanglement of US military, USAID and the CIA provides an idyllic tool for negotiating economic extractions and concessions in favour of American corporations.

Amongst all the masquerades of today’s innocent tourist resorts, the Canary Islands could become a strategic spot for the infrastructure that such a military apparatus would require for better control over African resources. What seemed another very local issue of political and real estate corruption in Tenerife may unfold the logics of global wars, where speculation trespasses continental borders.

Thanks, Federico!

^ Canary islands are part of the emblem of AFRICOM, for their physical belonging to the African continent, while being legally recognized as an ultra-peripheral region of the EU under Spanish sovereignty.

^ Sahara Desert flying over Spanish Canary Islands (Calima sand storm). Earth Observatory NASA.

^ Calima in Tenerife. deconcrete2012

 

Promise of AFRICOM from US Army Africa

Published on April 2, 2012 23:34.
Filed under: invisible cities, urban research

Waiting to Die

^ Cartography of of the migrant boat tragedy within NATO maritime surveillance areas (early Spring 2011). Source: Charles Heller, Lorenzo Pezzani and SITU Studio, Forensic Architecture (ERC) via the guardian.

 

A group of 72 sub-Saharan men, women (some pregnant) and children boarded a small inflatable rubber dinghy to scape from Gaddafi’s Libya. They departed from Tripoli on 26 March 2011. Smugglers had been organising migrants to Lampedusa for a theoretical 18-hours trip. After one day, panic rose amongst migrants for running out of fuel and water. They contacted a priest in Rome (Father Zerai) with their satellite phone, who contacted Italian Maritime Rescue and Co-ordination Centre, informing about the situation. He provided the number of the phone to locate them with precision via GPS. A helicopter came and lowered down water bottles and biscuits with a rope from above. Other fishing boats and Nato military vessels were in the area without assisting them. The boat drifted away until it reached back Libyan coast 16 days after their departure with only 11 people on board.

 

This research is part of Forensic Oceanography, an investigation into the conditions which have caused the death of more than 1500 persons (estimate by UNHCR) in the Central Mediterranean in the Spring of 2011.

 

Read further:

Migrants left to die after catalogue of failures

Nato ‘failed to aid’ Lybian migrant boat

Published on March 31, 2012 13:00.
Filed under: nomads, protest & critical space, urban research

This Is For Promotional Use Only

STUDIO_magazine #2 ORIGINAL is OUT NOW! Featuring spatialforces, dpr-barcelona, socks-studio, WAI Architecture Think Tank, eme3 and our contribution This is For Promotional Use Only among others.

Published on March 26, 2012 16:43.
Filed under: BOOKS/news

They Rule

 

<’They Rule’ aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 1000 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. […] A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy, they are proud to rule, yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye.>

Theyrule.net was launched in 2001 by Josh On.

Published on March 25, 2012 19:15.
Filed under: invisible cities

governance within reach

 

^ Remains of the Hejaz Railway in Saudi Arabia, Von Medina an die jordanische Grenze, photographed by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, 2002-2003.

 
Designed by German engineer Heinrich Meissner, the Hejaz Railway was built under the Ottoman Empire 1900-1908; a 1,300 km-long line linking Damascus with Medina (originally thought to connect Constantinople with the holy city of Mecca in 120 hours). It was meant to shorten distances for both population as well as soldiers, in order to strengthen authority within Arab provinces of the Empire. This strategy of controlling a vast territory through transport infrastructure goes very much in line with what Scott proposes as the Art of Not being Governed: remaining stateless by seeking refuge in remote regions beyond authority reach. Nonetheless, bedouin tribes in rebellion against Ottoman rule – supported by the legendary Lawrence of Arabia – torn out the railway tracks of the Hejaz Railway in 1916-17. What remains in the middle of nowhere are these abandoned railroad stations, where no train stops any longer. They consist of standardized pieces of architecture, made out of two L-shaped volumes and a few window openings. The lines can vaguely be distinguished today on the gravel surface of the desert.

Published on March 17, 2012 14:46.
Filed under: forensic destruction, invisible cities

Mapping an Empire

^ Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. Image included in Börner’s Atlas of Science, via scimaps

 

Mapping and land surveying were the physical outcome of colonial practices during Renaissance and Enlightenment, where invented lines demarcating a territory materialized the old obsession of fixing, enlarging and protecting borders. As Foucault put it when analysing Machiavelli’s Prince in Security, Territory, Population (1978), Machiavelli’s problem was not power of a sovereign being legitimate or not, but precisely how to ensure the sovereign’s power. Drawing the first cartographic representation of an uncharted land was very much linked in colonial times to claiming rights of sovereignty over the place. The stunning and meticulous Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India from the 18th century developed by Col. Lambton and Sir George Everest among others proofed a very efficient tool of control. In Mapping an Empire: the geographical construction of British India 1765-1843, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain employed modern scientific survey techniques not only to create and define the spatial image of its Indian empire but also to legitimate its colonialist activities as triumphs of liberal, rational science bringing ‘civilization’ to irrational, mystical, and despotic Indians. The reshaping of cartographic technologies in Europe into their modern form, including the adoption of the technique of triangulation (known at the time as ‘trigonometrical survey’) at the beginning of the nineteenth century, played a key role in the use of the GTS as an instrument of British cartographic control over India.

Foucault added that sovereignty and governance of a territory have progressively evolved towards the allowance of circulation of value to take place, rather than a fixation of the borders. However, I would argue that we might be assisting to a contemporary redefinition of territorial boundaries, in order to keep on with such circulations of capital. The increasing re-colonization that almost every nation is carrying out of their commons (nature reserves, or underground and water resources) is reshaping the role of sovereignty within those national boundaries.

Published on March 12, 2012 23:03.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, urban research

Political Noise: Radio as Spatial Practice

^ Brazil Electromagnetic spectrum division

 

by Paulo Tavares:

<In the last five years, police forces have shut down approximately 7,000 illegal radios throughout the Brazilian territory, almost double the number of radio frequency concessions given by the national government in the same period. In 2008 alone, out of approximately 19,000 claims for concessions, only 2,800 were licensed and around 1,200 illegal broadcastings were cut off air. This video shows excerpts of a radio deactivation mock-up made to be braodcast by the largest media corporation in Brasil (Globo). By portraying radio-practitioners as criminals, media trusts aim to hold power over the definition of what is technically and legally legitimate in relation to broadcasting.> [Read full essay]

 

Published on March 9, 2012 12:25.
Filed under: invisible cities, urban research

the house without living room

^ Original building plans of Osama’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Graphics via bbc news.

 

<The Pentagon refused to release any official photographs that would credibly establish the al Qaeda chief as having been among those killed in the attack. […] In the society of the spectacle should we be surprised that the two most widely circulated images surrounding Operation Neptune’s Spear are pictures of people watching TV.> [Iain Boal in his essay Heads in a Box, Photoworks Magazine Nov-April 2011/12]

These pictures that Boal refers to consisted of: Obama’s team faces clustered around a screen in the White House (we cannot see what they watch), and Osama watching himself on a domestic TV monitor while sitting alone in his Abbottabad compound (we can see what he watches). Apart from that, two other relevant images widely circulated through the Internet, both low-res and high-res hybrids. First, a blurry image of a bed on top of a rug covered in blood inside Osama’s Pakistani residential complex after the US military attack. In our current hyper-technified age, low-quality footage recorded with some sort of mobile device still proofs more authentic than professional imagery. And second, a fake photocomposition of Osama’s corpse. The world was eager to find material proof of the event, but the intelligentsia decided that we should rather believe it.

Last week, the demolition of the site was accomplished, and with it, all remaining evidence of Osama’s presence disappeared. The process of tearing down his hideout physically exposed its interior to the world for some minutes before vanishing forever.

^ Obama’s team watching news. Released by the White House, 1 May 2011. Image via dailymail

^ Osama watching TV in his Abbottabad compound. Image via dailymail

^ Osama’s Abbottabad compound after US military attack. Still from abc news.

^ Photocomposite of Osama’s corpse. Image via indiavision.

^ Demolishing Osama Bin Laden’s compound. AFP. Image via deccanchronicle.

 

Published on March 7, 2012 12:13.
Filed under: forensic destruction

the discontinuity of asbestos

 

Give off / Give out, video, 3’30″. Video & Text by Philippe Van Wolputte, 2011

 

<”Give off / Give out” documents an intervention in Jakarta Januari 5th 2011, dealing with the problems of fine dust after the demolition of buildings. Indonesia is the second biggest importer of asbestos which is extremely dangerous when inhaled. In the video you see a small team trying to prevent the fine dust, which carries asbestos in it, of spreading through the air by watering the site. This intervention gets repeated in different parts of the city.>

Published on March 5, 2012 20:55.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, forensic destruction

sweet beets cannot survive without political protection

^ Monument of Sugar, 2007 by Van Brummelen & De Haan. 304 sugar blocks installed at Argos, Brussels.

 

<Following the discovery that a large amount of European sugar ends up outside of Europe, we embarked on a research trip to investigate the European subsidized sugar trade. We travelled to Nigeria to purchase European excess sugar cheaply and to ship it back home. To elude the European trade barrier for sugar imports we made use of a minimal artistic intervention and transformed the sugar in situ into a monument. In this way we could submit our import application under the Uniform Commercial Code Law 9703, which applies to all monuments and original artworks regardless of the material in which they are produced. The material result of this research, two groups of sugar modules, is shown together with a film essay, which charts our travels and investigations into the sugar trade. Slowly running titles narrate the obstacles we faced to find out more about the sugar trade as well as the difficulties we encountered in the production of the monument. These running titles are intersected by documentary footage exploring, in long slow takes, hidden production landscapes of global trade, like crop fields, sugar refineries, flow-bands, harbors, and the different sites where we performed our drifting studio practice.>

 

 

Published on February 26, 2012 11:24.
Filed under: nomads, urban research

The Clear-Blurry Line

Deconcrete for The Funambulist:

<Our friend from Deconcrete, Daniel Fernández Pascual wrote this week’s guest writer essay in which he questions the idea of sovereignty on territories that remain legally blurry. Indeed, the paradigm of the two-dimensional map cannot be enough anymore to describe lands (sky, underground, space, other planets etc.) whose sovereignty had never necessitated to be discussed in another way than theoretically in the past. Our era opens a new paradigm in which the legal action of a State on a territory will be defined through the complexity of space and its multiple layers.>

read full essay

thanks, Léopold!

Published on February 22, 2012 12:39.
Filed under: mutant, urban research

volume rendered slope

film by Jacob Sutton [2012]

Published on February 18, 2012 14:59.
Filed under: homo ludens

map without map

^^ Communist World, 2011 by Theo Deutinger & Catarina Dantas [Mark#30]. <Communism is still alive. Although capitalism won a victory when the Berlin Wall went down, communism is triumphing as nation states continue to bail out banks in the wake of the recent economic crisis. Global capitalism is hugely unorganized and has no interest in a comprehensive plan for the future of the world – and, if it did, it would not know how to go about achieving such a goal. Global communism, on the other hand, has a clear idea about the organization of the world but does not know how to maintain competition, preserve individual freedom and generate public enthusiasm. Each of these ideologies falls short of its potential. This seems to leave only two possibilities: the two must merge or must face extinction. Either way, the consequence will be an era without ideology.>

vs.

^ McWorld, 2006 by OMA/AMO, Theo Deutinger & Bea Ramo. Brand New Food [2006] re-edited AMO-map. <Out of all Fast food chains in the World, McDonalds is not only its synonym but also by far the largest, most successful and most criticised. McDonalds was founded 15th may 1940 in San Bernardino, California by Ray Kroc. Today McDonald’s operates over 31,000 restaurants in more than 119 countries on six continents, employing more than 1.5 million people. Every day McDonald’s serves more than 47 million customers around the world. Though its principle is to serve its clients all over the world with the same menu, some exceptions are made for dishes that are based on local specialties for which there is a great demand, and which can be integrated into the company’s product line. In predominantly Muslim countries like Malaysia, pork is not served due to Muslim dietary laws and is replaced by beef. In India, the fact that Hinduism forbids the eating of beef, and Islam forbids pork, prompted McDonald’s initially to use lamb instead; it later switched to chicken.>

^ Avoid the Center, 2008 by Theo Deutinger & Theresia Kohlmayr [Mark#15]. <The investigation into the relationship between the size of a country and its prosperity shows that extreme dimensions are an advantage. By reorganizing the countries of the world according to their physical size, an interesting phenomenon emerges that shows prosperity at the edges and meagerness in the middle of the scale. The segment of the super-sized countries is dominated by Canada, USA and Australia with the vastly developing BRIC-Countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) joining in while the zone of XXS-States is dominated by countries like Luxembourg as world’s richest country and tax-havens like the Cayman Islands. Seen in this light the European Union established itself as a perfect androgynous state that, at its will, is able to bridge this gap and appear wherever it is most suitable. Its member states can either appear as toothless dwarfs or, if the members are working together, the European Union can appear as important player amidst of world’s largest and powerful countries.>

 

 

 

Published on February 17, 2012 12:40.
Filed under: urban research

fortress Europe

^^ ‘Encampments’ in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea (waiting areas for admission or deportation of migrants). By Migreurop, 2009.

vs.

^ Irregular Migrant routes, by ICMPD.

Published on February 16, 2012 17:21.
Filed under: invisible cities, nomads

spaces of desire

^ Barcelona Dark Rooms, 2007 by Pol Esteve Castello & Marc Navarro Fornós. Courtesy: the authors.

 

This plan atlas compiles 15 typologies of dark rooms in Barcelona for anonymous male sexual encounters, where fantasy and real pleasure operate in constant negotiation. Researched by Pol Esteve Castello & Marc Navarro Fornós (2007), the plans of these barely furnished homes include structural elements with semantic relevance for collective ecstasy. The audacity of revealing the otherwise invisible plans, for outsiders as well as for insiders, plays with the irony of an intentional desecration. Darkness is mapped here through the exact location of light spots and TV monitors screening porn movies. The intricate partitions (panels, columns, corners…) and elaborate width of each opening (aisles, thresholds, glory holes…) are the basic elements defining these labyrinthine liminal spaces of desire. Holmes, O’Byrne & Gastaldo (Setting the space for sex, 2007) define them as refusing ‘to function in and be part of what Deleuze (1992) calls “societies of control”. Public gay sex spaces, such as parks, alleys, restrooms, rest stops, adult theatres, video arcades, bookstores, bars and gay bathhouses are often thought of as being filthy and residing outside “the social”. However, it is the public nature of the location and its on-site sexual possibilities inextricably linked with risk that intensifies the power and pleasure of the erotic encounter (Leap, 1999). […] Desire is not an “absence” (a lack of something), but a force that makes us move (Colebrook, 2002) […] To paraphrase Bataille, gay bathhouses are necessary “architectures of excess” that permit desire to free itself from the constraints of everyday life.’

 

Published on February 11, 2012 14:39.
Filed under: homo ludens, invisible cities, urban research

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