deconcrete

Don’t miss vol II of The State on Speculative Geographies!!

Edited by Rahel Aima and Ahmad Makia; curated and published by Rami Farook.

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THE STATE is a print journal and sociohistorical forum based out of Dubai, U.A.E. It investigates South-South reorientations, problematised futurisms, transgressive cultural criticism, the space between print and audio-visual experiences and their transition to mediated online forms, and the sensuous architecture of this “printernet.”

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“1. Some places are built on swamps. You feel it most in the summer, when the air turns murky, rancid, darkly potent. And some places are fabricated out of thin air—from blood and sweat, and perfected ideologies. Dubai is among the latter, existing at the interstice between speculation and the geography of a dream. It’s a funny, beautiful, futuristic place to grow up in, where announcements become architecture within a matter of months. At the same time, it’s a difficult city to read. Even after several decades, its denizens can feel like they’re still waiting for it to make sense, become legible. When we left Dubai, we thought that our only relation had been to its people, and not to the city itself.

In our inaugural issue, we wondered whether cultural production could have terroir. We asked how you might speak a place, and also how you speak from a place, or non-place. When we returned to Dubai, however, we realised something else was at play. Perhaps cities and places had alterior lives, and could speak for themselves.

2. This time around, we selected 15 projects that interrogate the futures of place. Together, they present diverse interpretations of ‘speculative geography,’ realised across urban, rural and temporal fabrics. Topics range from psychogeographic meanderings through Kathmandu and the psychic topography of New York, to displacement and belonging in Accra and the Spanish Canary Islands. Others look to planned cities in Brazil and in a mysterious totalitarian state, Indonesian arts education, the cartographic sonics of mortgaged real estate, and placehacking London’s skyline. A third category considers virtual terrains, with pieces on the socially mediated red carpet, and the need for a new politics to go with our increasingly weird techy futures. And lastly, the purely speculative: a corpus of networked lighthouses in New Zealand, an Afghan agricultural belt-made-machine, a carnivalistic, biosynthetic robot zoo and what would have happened if the atomic bomb was dropped on Berlin.

3. In this volume, designed by Lejla Redja, we continued to experiment with design. How else might we be able to suggest a reverse skeuomorph, and implicate the screen on a page? Does navigating the bookform insist on mechanical gestures, like the page flip? Must the leaves be attached, glued, or stitched? Or can we extend the metaphor of tabbed browsing, and store data—characters and pixels—within the covers of a book? We thought about the accordion, the folder, Spaces, paint and paper swatches, the address bar, and the favicon in various states of unzip. The result is a printed constellation of places—those that are, or will be, or could have been.”

—The Editors

FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE:

Jansen Aui, Nick Roberts and Henry Stephens—Syndromes and a Sentry

Nick Axel—Metric | Space

Khairani Barokka—Indonesia’s Double Mountain

Greg Barton—Marja || Marja

M.F. Benigno—Dériving KTM

Frances Bodomo—The House at Haatso

DEMILIT—They Came to the Desert and were Consumed by a Flickering Fortress

Daniel Fernández Pascual—Displaced Soils

Bradley L. Garrett—Edgework: Getting Close, Getting Cut, Getting Out

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi—A New City for a New Man

Karen Gregory—Geography of Intimacy

Sarah Handelman—Faded Maps, Fleeting Histories

John Krauss—Let’s Map!

Justin Pickard—Chalice Flag, Hydroelectric Sublime

Adam Rothstein—New Politic

thank you to all who made it possible, and the exciting collaborations that were initiated there!

^ Performing Politics curators Eric Ellingsen and Álvaro Urbano, a fruitful moment. photo by deconcrete

^ Altruisme, 2011 by Iván Argote. via Galerie Perrotin Paris.

^ Iván Argote performing pitty in the underground at his S.O.S. blankets picnic. Photo by deconcrete

^ Petrit Halilaj as his dog leading us to the pavilion. photo by deconcrete

^ Petrit Halilaj’s chickens.

^ Cleopatra, 2011 by Petrit Halilaj. Chert Gallery Berlin.

^ Diving Through Europe, by Klara Hobza

^ Klara Hobza teaching us how to survive diving through Europe.

^ deconcrete failing to survive if diving through Europe. photo by Pär Hugo Kjellén.

^ Inteligencias Colectivas [Juan Chacón and Luis Galán] introducing a street plug for informal markets. photo by deconcrete

^ Upgrade diagrams by Inteligencias Colectivas 

^ The Dumpling Express, Something Fantastic‘s solar coffee for Performing Politics. photos by inteligencias colectivas.

^ Building Brazil!, Marc Angélil & Rainer Hehl + Something Fantastic. ETH Zürich / MAS Urban Design; Berlin: Ruby Press 2011.

^ Luz Broto getting ready for overnight at Tempelhof Airfield.

^ Luz Broto screening previous night action.

^ Luz Broto’s team jumping over the fence_night vision camera.

^ PLAN CAÑADA 2.0, 2011 by TXP. A bottom-up approach to urban regeneration in Madrid’s forgotten areas.

^ Activating self-governance in urban vacant lots, by TXP. Campo de la Cebada, Madrid.

^ by Philippe van Wolputte.

by Philippe van Wolputte.

^ Displaced Soils: a geopolitical paella. Cook-talk by deconcrete. photo by Eric Ellingsen.

^ Displaced Soils: a geopolitical paella. Cook-talk by deconcrete. photo by Eric Ellingsen.

^ Corrupt rice on its way. photo by Joanne Pouzenc.

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.

^ 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 18^th 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.

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.>

^ 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. 

La Sublevación (The Uprising) is a recently published cartographic visualization of the pro-Franco military coup in Spain 18^th 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]

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

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

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

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

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

[*my translation]

Thanks, Bea!

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

…When protests throw a light and escape control…

A project by Santiago Sierra and Julius von Bismarck (+ Fulgurator) as part of the NO, Global Tour during the Pope’s visit to Madrid, August 2011.

thanks, anastasia!

< Because words pass, then; because they pass away, metamorphose, become “passers” or vehicles of ideas along unforeseen channels not calculated in advance, the expression “passwords” seems to me to enable us to reapprehend things, both by crystallizing them and by situating them in an open, panoramic perspective. > [Jean Baudrillard, Passwords]

After the spread of cholera in 1854, John Snow decided to map the deaths around London’s Broad Street. The fact of linking the reported cases after the outbreak to the location of the dead’s houses proved that they had a strong link to a public drinking water pump. Those who had used that pump had a higher chance of contracting the disease. This primitive spatial analysis took to pieces the theory that cholera was connected to pestilent air rather than drinking waters infected by sewage. And as a matter of fact, it led to stop the practice of simply draining human wastewaters into the River Thames, which was to be drunk later by citizens.

Charting unnoticed relations reveal a hidden city visible. For Simon Elvins in his map Silent London, black dots represent the most peaceful spaces in the city according to government measurements, whereas noisy areas fade into blank voids, and vanish. He applies the same principle to his other version, similar to Braille codification in its form. Sound levels alter the two dimensional paper and silence is associated with higher dots. Our reading finger can only perceive the quietest areas in the city.

Snow dealt with deaths and Elvins with silence as passwords to access an encrypted city. But street limits can also be replaced by words. Layla Curtis deletes any spatial references in her London Index Drawing. Street names configure space and its density. Words overlap and stretch and it is still easy to identify the structure of the city. Automatically, one can imagine what sort of lane; street, bridge, square or mews one is travelling through with his eyes.

< The map, as a scaled replica of the entire city, presents a choice to its maker: not what to include, but rather, what to exclude. > [Simon Foxell]

3 London mappings compiled in FOXELL, S  2007, Mapping London – Making Sense of the City, Black Dog Publishing, London.

[1> Dr John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 1855_fragment via history of vaccines] [2,3> Simon Elvin_Silent London_fragments via arkinet][4> Layla Curtis_London Index Drawing 2007]

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Who are the philosophers and thinkers who gave you ideas? Was Foucault an inspiration for you? Or Deleuze?

Yona Friedman: I have had one very important intellectual guide: my dog. A dog spends its whole life improvising. Improvising in every situation.

With the following statement opens Yona Friedman his latest publication: Architecture with the People, by the People, for the People. [RODRÍGUEZ, MI (ed.) / OBRIST, HU / FRAMPTON, K / ORAZI, M (contributors), AA MUSAC - Actar, 2011]. It is a compilation of his most remarkable projects since the 1950s, such as the megastructural Ville Spatiale, a city with no real façade where Architecture and Urban Design become interior design within the infrastructure; and some of the most recent ones, like the brilliant Museum of the Afghan Civilisation, 2008. The idea of the hybridised Bridge-Town always being present, either if it spans over the English Channel or Shanghai’s Huang Pu River.

< I chose this title as it paraphrases Lincoln’s definition of democracy, a definition that is just but seldom implemented. If I had to qualify my approach to architecture, I see it as “democratic” in the sense of Lincoln’s interpretation. Architecture has to be conceived with the people, materialised as much as possible by the people. The term “for the people” is evident. This does not mean that the architect has no role in the process: he can provide ideas, techniques, new aesthetics – which will get validated only with the people, by the people, for the people. By the way, architects are also people…belong to the people. > Yona Friedman.

One of his feasible utopias (Utopies réalisables) also featured in the book is Métropole Europe. Métropole Europe should become the “biggest non-city in the world”, a network of large cities connected to each other by systems of fast trains, (with moderate prices and high frequency of trains), which would enable a more fluid mobility of citizens, the social fabric would be restructured and new strategies would be considered in the labour market and cultural life. Is London a suburb of Paris? A simple political decision in the European sphere would allow to link the two Europes that operate at different speeds and were brought to light by the economic crisis of 2008: the Northern countries and what British economists began to call the P.I.G.S. (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain). For Friedman, every utopia can be feasible if we reach the necessary consensus. But at the same time, participation when taking decisions for the living environment, doesn’t mean for him that somebody handles the whole process: in architecture it’s impossible for the architect to do what the user wants. The only solution is to have a technique in which the user does what he wants and there are no middlemen.

The highlight of the book is without doubt the pictures of Yona’s home, depicting endless amounts of beautiful tiny everyday objects, the beauty of which simply relies on the accumulation of different textures: transparent, shiny, rusty, cheap plastic, glossy…  It is almost impossible to distinguish models, from objects, or inspirational drawings; perhaps all of them simply configure his whole life project. One has the feeling that his house would look totally different only a few weeks after the photos were taken. This approach to furnishing applied to his own on-going housing environment perfectly matches his vision of micro-sociological tactics for cities:

< Architecture would also introduce the “changeability” of the city, the possibility of continually rearranging the urban plan of the quarter without recourse to demolition. The mobility of the urban plan should, as far as possible, be like that of furniture. >

Another relevant topic featured in this publication is the approach to the concept of a museum. Yona Friedman regards the museum of a civilisation of the 21^st century as the city, understood as an ideal archive for the future accessible to everyone. In his multiple concepts for contemporary forms of museums, there is always a special call for simplicity, participation and circulation of viewers. The true prototype for a museum, for me, is simply a street, any street. […] We have to re-invent the street as museum; a collection of everyday objects in everyday use.

YONA FRIEDMAN, DEMOCRATIE. from BALKIS PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

[1-3> Yona's house, photographed by Michel Mallard Studio 2011][4> Ville Spatiale_Yona Friedman 1958-1962][5>Gangway bridges with exhibits of the Museum of Afghan Civilisation_Yona Friedman 2008][6>Continent-City Europe_Yona Friedman 1960+1994]

To watch more of his short drawing-movies, visit Yona’s website: http://vimeo.com/user5160788

Masking is one of the most complex and secretive, yet profoundly important, phenomena in Africa. […] Why, despite the changes that have taken place since the early 20^th century, does masking persist in such vibrant form in parts of Africa and its diaspora? What is it that motivates the communities and individuals still so committed to the practice, despite the threats posed by the combined, if antithetical, forces of secularization, fundamentalist Christianity and radical Islam? [Chika Okeke-Agulu]

In Maske photo essay (Chris Boot 2010), Phyllis Galembo provides a visual platform to enter everyday African life through the politics behind masquerades. There are many functions of masking nowadays: planting and harvesting (Chi Wara masks, Bamana people); juridical functions (Glewa masks, Dan people); boyhood initiation rites, memorials after their owners’ deaths (Lukwakongo masks, Lega people); fostering gender and social harmony (Yoruba people).

But they also function as a way of protest in contemporary culture. In some cases, masks have been used as a means of complaint against enriched citizens abusing of power, oppressed people sending the most terrifying masks to their homes. As Okeke-Agulu describes it: “masks as agents of law enforcement and coercion”. In patriarchal communities, female masqueraders take the chance to reveal against imposed hierarchies through their costumes.

<Among the Ibibio and Efik people, all-male societies such as Ekpo and Ekpe still preside over social, legal, economic and political disputes, and this practice functions openly alongside the modern legal system.> [P.Galembo]

Built with local materials, performers camouflage with their surrounding constructions and vegetation. Costumes and houses, plants and stones, all mingle with each other: Woven plant fibre materials (sisal, cotton), painted wood, resinous materials (beeswax and tar), twigs, bushes, leaves, lizard excrement (white colour), boiled acacia seed pods (black), iron-rich hematite stone (red), grass, vines, feathers, fur, sugar syrup mixed with coal dust, roots, branches… Materials might be ever lasting or ephemeral. African expats in the US even send actual animal heads preserved by taxidermy back to Sierra Leone, whereas Burkina Faso masks are supposed to fall apart during every ceremony.

Urban space is profoundly altered during masquerades. In Eastern Nigeria Uzo-Iyi, no social event, market or funeral can be held during the festival. In Zambia, there is a spatial dislocation during boyhood initiation rituals; it is by leaving the settlement boundary during some months into the surrounding forest, that a new life calendar is set by the fact of returning to their settlement wearing Makishi masks. Boys leave the city to come back as real men. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, when talking about juridical identity and masks: <Persona originally means mask and it is through the mask that the individual acquires a role and a social identity.>

Masks also serve as a display of current issues. New technologies are applied on the motives of the masks, some including airplanes, helicopters or Hondas. Other masks in Benin, for example, provide moral lessons, ranging from “you can’t buy wisdom at the market” to prevention from AIDS.

African masks are wild and shapeless, and they reveal a whole society behind their powerful aesthetic appeal. In words of Okeke-Agulu, contemporary masking inhabits a space in which faith in new religions combines with residual beliefs in indigenous metaphysics to produce ontological uncertainties; this mixture of foreign and inherited cultural traditions is responsible for the complex, dramatic, rich and extreme social and cultural life in Africa and its diaspora today.

[all images> Maske by Phyllis Galembo, via Stephen Kasher Gallery, Tang Museum, DUST]

Whistled languages are a direct result of surrounding environment. Complementary to their spoken versions, they help humans communicate in the distance overcoming natural barriers without travelling: steep topography, cliffs or dense forests. Landscape-related professions that deal with constant loneliness, such as shepherds, hunters or fishermen, profit from this system to warn the others from dangers, emergencies, wolf attacks or enemy invasions.

There are whistled communication methods in every main family of languages (listen): French Pyrenees, Turkey, Mexico, Greek islands, Amazon forests, North Vietnam Hmong peoples, or desert zones in West Africa. One of them is the Silbo Gomero in Spanish Canary Islands, reported in historical records since 15^th century and inscribed on the list of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

Since Pre-Hispanic times, whistling was an efficient and economic response to communicating two distant hills without building a bridge. The way in which the message is sent out does not require any vibration from the vocal cords. Having a narrower bandwidth than human voice, whistled sounds manage to travel further (1-5 km) and become less affected by background noise than shouting. It is possible to whistle every oral language, once the system of reduction of vowels and consonants is established. The phonetic characteristics of the spoken language are simply reproduced by a different method. Instead of A-E-I-O-U, there are only two vowels: a high-pitched (for both E and I) and a grave one (for A, O and U). Some authors have proposed that there are four though. All consonants are reduced to two high-pitched and two grave tones.

In La Gomera Island, locals used to speak and whistle Guanche, but with the arrival of Spanish conquistadores, it evolved into whistled Spanish.  (Hear a sample conversation with subtitles). The Silbo Gomero is not any code, but an articulated structure that can reproduce any given spoken language. The vocabulary is basically reduced to everyday activities, being much more restricted than its spoken equivalent. Nowadays, it is mainly used to announce weddings and funerals, although it has been implanted in secondary school for islanders.

<It is not a language created for the intimate. It is for the public. It must be said out loud and can be heard by all.>

[more info> highly recommendable post-doc research on whistled languages by Julien Meyer]

The Mediterranean Sea is not a sea; it is Southern Europe’s border wall.

The Maghreb is literally any territory west from Egypt; Cairo functioned as the georeference for a Greenwich-like system in the Arab world.

The Sahara Desert was traditionally perceived as a vast sea; the Maghreb was referred to as an island surrounded by Mediterranean, Atlantic and Sahara “waters”.

Tuareg former free territories belong to five different countries today.

Western Sahrawi are deprived from their nomadic life in the desert by a 2,000 km long artificial wall of sand, dug out from their very same desert.

Ancient nomad trans-Sahara trade tracks are the new highways for work migrants.

Tangier-Med is a key mega-port for global mobility of goods. It lies just opposite Bel Younech informal camp, where migrants wait for a chance to cross over to the global consumption dream.

How much I love my family is measured according to how much money I send them.

Migrant boats have to be built clandestinely in the desert and brought to the coast at the moment of launching them into the sea.

A prison in Italy is better than freedom at home.

Chinese migrants struggling to survive in Cairo have taken over the role of traditional door-to-door female vendors, the Dallala.

The poorest and driest region in Almeria, Southern Spain, has been turned into one of the most fertile and wealthiest, thanks to the labour of irregular Maghreb migrants.

Doctors and engineers are bricklayers and fruit pickers.

The Maghreb Connection is a compilation of essays and research projects that assemble everyday reality in this part of Northern Africa. Edited by Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes, The Maghreb Connection charts counter-geography through various contributions, apart from their own: Armin Linke, Yto Barrada and Hala Elkoussey among others. As the editors define the term: counter-geography is where the subversive, informal and irregular practices of space take place, the ones that happen despite state forces and supranational regulations.

The desert acts as a sort of waiting room for millions of desperate souls awaiting the chance to be crossed over the border to an idealized world. This post-colonial migration movement relies upon an extensive network of alliances to reach their final goal. Ali Bensaâd outlines also the fact of being unconditionally mobile people. This is the common feature to all this floating population in African coasts, who wants to venture into the other side: The individuals with the most resources in terms of opennesss to the outside are the most susceptible to becoming mobile. They are entrepreneurs in a way, in our era where the “entrepreneur” is promoted as the social ideal-type. Every migrant leaves everything behind: belongings, family and life.

European sealed borders delimit an area of free mobility after Schengen Agreement; but at the same time, they enhance the desire to start a real exodus and be inside them.  Either if it is the Strait of Gibraltar, Canary Islands’ or Lampedusa’s waters, a never-ending flow of irregular boats keep on trying to touch European ground. The Maghreb works as the departure point to bridge the gap between two continents. Florian Schneider points out that (i)n the nineteenth century, people had no problems crossing borders, while goods and products were taxed. Now it is the opposite: goods and money are supposed to flow freely, while people face more and more obstacles.

The Maghreb Connection throws a light into the kind of ambitions that move humans to start such a journey to Europe, as well as the mechanisms and strategies that make it feasible. We usually only hear in the media of the ones who are caught in their attempt and those who perish. However, the successful are already victorious somewhere at the other side of the Maghreb, where another hard journey begins for them.

[1,2,3> Biemann, U. / Holmes, B. (eds.): The Maghreb Connection – Movements of Life Across North Africa. Actar 2006]

[4> Informal Migrant Camp Bel Younech, Morocco_Eduardo del Campo 2009] [5> La Canoa by El Roto]

In constrained urban agglomerations buildings experience a tense fight for available volume of occupation. In order to exploit maximum financial floor area ratios, constructions manage to occupy as much air as possible. In the 1920s, Hugh Ferriss already visualized the 1916 Zoning Law for Manhattan by shaping invisible theoretical envelopes into fulfilled architectural volumes. His drawings represented literal translations of urban policies.

Except for counted examples releasing cities from architecture in form of representative privately-owned public spaces, air usually matters. Legislators provide paternalistic frameworks to prevent citizens from an overly built environment. As a result, streets become victims of diagonal views, sunlight and hygienic ventilation.

Every building must be legal, but according to Yasutaka Yoshimura’s research, some can also become Super Legal. This condition is a direct result from frenetic megalopolises, looking how to supersede restrictive regulations. Super Legal Buildings 超合法建築図鑑 (建築文化シナジー). 彰国社 2006 is a compilation of strange mechanisms making architecture forms in Tokyo literally follow law and building codes. Organic setbacks, twists, perforations, distortions and extreme angles appear when air is squeezed to its most. Restrictions act as invitations for new inventions.

[images> courtesy Yasutaka Yoshimura]