deconcrete

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. >

When estate-subsidized housing, urban sprawl and formal public space fail to provide an adequate civic life, can citizens develop their own models? Israel Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2010 deepens in historical Kibbutz settlements from mid 20th century, a model to be updated.

The Kibbutz mode of settlement, which entails a way of life voluntarily rooted in equality, mutual support, and sharing, presents an inherently unique architectural challenge, encompassing economic egalitarism, collective ownership, and all-inclusive education and health services. [...] Reformist and utopian plans promoting such social ideals had remained mostly on paper. The vision of the Kibbutz, however, was translated and realized through spatial organization, incorporating contemporary experiences and processes of change. [...] Egalitarianism and equality thus materialize in planning through a sharing of space and a communalization of functions of production and consumption, agriculture, industry, culture, education, health, etc. In effect, the Kibbutz is one space, undivided by differential tenure, free of private parcels and fences, host to all of life’s multiple dimensions, and owned cooperatively by Kibbutz members. Open public common space is the main arena of kibbutz life (a large central lawn with the public facitlities, the dining hall, and the culture house situated around it like a forum or agora).

The last 3 years have seen a marded return of population to the Kibbutz, a rethinking of its architectural values, and a reenvisioning of models of solidarity, mutual assistance, and assurance.

This wonderful exhibition proclaims: “Architecture as an active partner in the shaping of a society and in contributing to the quality of human relationships within it.”

However, this utopian humanism and good intentions terribly contrast with the current Mare Magnum that Léopold Lambert describes in the isolation still existing in his Palestinian Archipielago model. I wish the Kibbutz spirit could spread out a little bit in the area.

[image1>dining hall floor-washing machine - unidentified kibbutz 1960s] [image2>general diagrammatic plan for a kibbutz for 250 families by samuel bickels 1940s] [image3> dinning hall at kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek 1953] [images1-3> from the Israel Pavilion brochure] [image4> Palestinian Archipielago by Julien Bousac via boiteaoutils]