Bivouac shelters date back to Napoleon Wars, referring to a guard on night watch duty, inside any kind of improvised shelter.
Charlie Hailey in Camps, his guide to 21st-century space, refers to two examples of vertical camping working as single shelters: suspended tents used in long-last mountaineering and children tree hammocks for summer camps. These hybrids of hammocks and tents make “tree camping and cliff camping reorient the grounding of camp’s spaces, to harness, poetically and technically, the tensile nature of tent camping.” [HAILEY, C.: Camps. The MIT Press 2009]
[image1> Wall camp at the Arctic Circle via victoria.blogware] [image2> children tree camp in barres, France from Charlie Hailey's Camps]
Published on July 16, 2010 09:41.
Filed under: hybrids, nomads
<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.>
^^ 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
^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.’
^ 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.
^ 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
^ 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]
^ Ritardando a poco a poco, 2011 by Euan Macdonald. Part of Open-Tuningat 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
^^ 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.
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.
< 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
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
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 (Achromatopsiadisorder).
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
Maps ofThe 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
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 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. >
< 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
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
< [...] 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. [...] >
‘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
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]
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]
< 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]
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
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.
INFO :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: Based in London and Berlin, Daniel Fernández Pascual holds a M.Arch [Madrid ETSAM]; M.Sc.Urban Design [TU Berlin]; and M.Arch [Shanghai Tongji]. He has collaborated with studios in Berlin, NewYork, Madrid, London and Shanghai; and his work has been published and awarded in international media. His postgraduate CajaMadrid Fellowship (2009-2011) focused on relational space & informal strategies of city development. Currently, he is a LaCaixa fellow and is conducting a research project on the Spanish Real Estate Crisis at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London. :::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: wishes, contributions & critiques to: daniel [at] deconcrete [dot] org
[...] As short as great article on Deconcrete entitled Suspended Bivouac Shelters… [...]
RSS feed for comments on this post. / TrackBack URI