deconcrete

Parliamentary Chambers, by Ana Filipovic, 2012, within Cultures of Assembly, Architecture + Critical Spatial Practice, Städelschule Frankfurt:

‘The word parliament derives from the French “parlement”—the act of speaking, the discussion. The chamber in which parliamentary assemblies meet is therefore a spatial setting for that very discussion. The comprehension of the nature of this discussion should hence inform the architectural design.

The spatial organization of formal assemblies has not substantially changed much from Athenian assembly to the modern concept of prime ministerial government that goes back to the Kingdom of Great Britain (1707–1800) and The Parliamentary System in Sweden (1721–1772) that coincided with each other. Classical democracy not only influenced the formation of later constitutions, it also created an architectural legacy which has dominated both the form and style of parliament buildings to the present day. [Sudjic, Deyan, “Architecture And Democracy”, Laurence King Publishing, 1992]

The most appropriate form remained to be hemicycle—semicircular, or horseshoe shaped, debating chamber (plenary chamber), where members sit to discuss and pass legislation.

The circular shape is one, which was primarily designed to encourage the politics of consensus among political parties rather than confrontation. The design is used in most European countries (and hence was adopted by the European Parliament) and the United States. The equality in its shape—the equal distance from the speaker, for example—is being used whenever democratic dialogue is anticipated. In contrast, the Westminster system, in which the government and opposition parties face each other on opposing sets of benches, points at an interesting potential: the exploration and exacerbation of spatial confrontation and conflict as a form of agonistic ground condition. This research questions the seemingly causal relationship between the spaces of parliamentary chambers and the system they represent.’

WE ARE OPENING next Tuesday THE COMPETITIVE HYPOTHESIS exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.

come along!!

The Competitive Hypothesis 
An exhibition examining the politics behind the architecture competition

Exhibition Opening: January 22, 2013, 7PM
Exhibition: January 22 – February 15, 2013

The Competitive Hypothesis is an exhibition examining the politics behind the architectural competition. The exhibition, presented in partnership with Think-Space, questions the current state, purpose and value of architecture competitions.

Through four curated spaces within the gallery, The Competitive Hypothesis,  presents major architectural competitions produced within the past few years, objects from competitions used to gain competitive advantages, dioramas of image fragments sourced from a selection of recent urban design renderings, and short texts and self portraits of some of the unknown minds of significant competition winners (ie. interns). The Competitive Hypothesis will highlight the double meanings inherent in the ‘competition’: on one hand referring to the competition as a procurement mechanism for projects, on the other referring to an ethos or disposition that permeates work practice. This exhibition turns to both of these possibilities in order to continue an investigation into architecture’s present condition.

Exhibition Credits

Curated by Adrian Lahoud

Curatorial Team

Ana Dana Beros, Kata Gaspar, Carmelo Rodríguez Cedillo, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Ross Exo Adams, Ivonne Santoyo Orozco, Davide Sacconi

Exhibition Design by Amanda Clarke and Adrian Lahoud

Graphic Design by Rafaela Drazic

About Think-Space

Think Space is a wide scale disciplinary intervention using a design competition, exhibition, unconference and publications as its material. More information: http://www.think-space.org

This exhibition is organized in partnership with the Zagreb Society of Architects and funded in part by Graham Foundation, Croatian Ministry of Culture and ACO Croatia. Additional support for Storefront for Art in Architecture’s exhibitions and programs are made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; by its Board of Directors, members and individuals.

Makes me feel terribly worried and scared about the current wave of ongoing privatisations of education, justice and national health system in Spain. The real estate bubble and consequent financial burst post-2007 are being ferociously used to approve ‘disaster capitalist’ measures favoring a minority of oligarchs, arguing that it is the only way of solving the crisis they generated.

Spain 2008: 16,118 demonstrations

Spain 2012: 36,232 demonstrations. [source> publico]

‘In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts…. New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas through our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998.’

A brilliant research piece by Joseph Grima and Markus Miessen, videography by Elian Stefa, on Kuwait’s Diwaniyah: four-sided spaces with perimeter seats for men’s meetings, discussions and informal assemblies, and the role they play in shaping debates on contemporary politics of the country.

Read full essay published in Zawia Magazine#00

images: video stills via The Winter School Middle East

‘The illusion that illegal construction brought a dispersion of power in the production of space dissolved, and it became obvious that the power just shifted into the hands of developers who merely used the illegal as their legitimate field.’ [DS]

Glotzt nicht so romantisch! (after B. Brecht’s statement Don’t stare so Romantically!) is Dubravka Sekulić’s brilliant research on Extralegal Space in Belgrade (Jan van Eyck Acadmie, 2012). A deep look into former Yugoslavia’s housing policies shaping the countless roof extensions that can be seen all over today. These built-in additions are a literal remnant of both socialist and neoliberal acts of informal negotiations for the addition of new floor area beyond the legal height limits. She takes the case of the so-called Russian Pavilions (post WWII) to take us into a trip through residential markets. Coming from 1960s strategy of co-ownership – to motivate people to invest personal funds in housing construction,- the practice of ‘wild building’ led to the invention of land and housing property as a veritable source of income. This even reached a point where even some people quickly built mock-ups of construction they were planning to build later, just to have them registered on the satellite image for future legalization.

If real estate and the right to housing in 1990s socialist Yugoslavia started a process of individual appropriation of collective commodities, the corruption of the 2000s evolved into a more elaborate turn of the exception into the norm. The analysis of the built form of a roof unveils the struggle of citizens in shifting a political mind-set from one extreme to the other. As Sekulić states, the attitude towards space changed from societal, though it was not entirely clear what this meant, over to more private, so from ‘ours’ to just ‘mine’. This reflects the schizophrenia of how real estate property as such was born out of informal economies to later raise the entire economic system of a nation in the making.

The triad developers-municipality-inhabitants composed a complex set of clever negotiations that detected any loopholes in legal frameworks and allowed them to manoeuvre in the blurry landscape of temporary permits and building legalization. They all fought everyday austerity with a pure sense of entrepreneurial greed to keep up with the Jones’. If a neighboring block could grow a few floors, so could mine. Extralegal Space in Belgrade teaches us a devastating lesson on market syndicalism through Belgrade’s architectural parasites.

My research on Real Estate Speculation along the Spanish coast ‘Displaced Soils: Capital as Circulation of Borders’ featured today at Domus

EXHIBITION
Friday 28th September till Sunday 14th October 2012

EXHIBITION EVENTS
Inventorying Distance
Saturday 29th September 1 – 5pm
Presentations and discussion addressing distance, design, and reversal after a year of researching architecture.
+
this is the centre of the earth….
Sunday 30th September 1 – 4pm
A day of games, risk, soil, bread, resort towns, water and ice, violence, force, law and outlaw, the weather, drugs and more drugs, monocultural blindness, and illegal lifeforms…

HOW TO GET THERE
Address
18 Harbour Exchange Square, Canary Wharf, London. E14 9GE

Similarly, UNESCO in collaboration with the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo (ICOMOS) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France have X-rayed and denoted an AOI approximately 100μ in width. It isolates the chemical composition of a paint chip sampled from a Buddhist mural- painting as part of the ‘Safeguarding the Bamiyan Site’ cultural heritage and preservation project.

In another register, ‘Area of Interest’ takes on more banal and generic connotations regarding tourism. Offering if up at the potential site of the Garden of Eden or the Alexandria of Central Asia. Inevitably the scientists that travel there become tourists themselves, casually documenting what has now been deemed ‘mankind’s cultural heritage’.

Areas of Interest, then, is a reenactment of a small step in the production of these scientific images. It offers a series of territories drawn across pastoral image connoting locales of potential excess. These excesses play into narratives of cultural heritage preservation and natural resource extraction wherein the Silk Road becomes a common thread rhetorically used throughout.

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^ Veronica-Veronica, 2012 by Corinne Quin. Framed passport photographs, postcards.

The name Veronica comes from Vera (true, truth) and icon (image), and connects back to the Veil of Veronica – a white textile onto which the ‘true image’ of Christ’s face is said to have been imprinted. Today, the passport photograph requires the citizen to perform a similar expressionless, neutral face against a white background as a true representation of their identity; and in order that it be read by biometric and facial recognition technology. These technologies reduce the face to a series of defining co-ordinates that can be read, matched, categorized and stored within national security systems.

I have asked a series of different women named Veronica to take a self-portrait passport picture: a modern day Veronica-Veronica, or Veronica’s ‘true image’. The project questions the idea of true representation; reflecting on the performance of neutrality, the power of the face as blank façade, and the architecture of the identity image.

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^ The Outlawed Earth, 2012 by Hannah Meszaros-Martin. Video, Copies, Wood.

I ask El Nave, how do you recognize it? His eyes get big, like it was too obvious. You can see it! But this is too obvious. There must be something wrong here. This is the infamous illicit coca plant! Part of a new clan of clandestine plant-life, hiding in the dark jungle with their clandestine harvesters! How can the plant be so obvious that you can plainly see it with your naked eye?

It’s yellow. -yellow? Yes yellow, the leaf is bright yellow so it stands out against the typical dark green tropical foliage which surrounds it… -Have you heard of Boliviana Negra? The glyphosate resistant coca species? Of course, they are everywhere! Red, white, green, and blue varieties too.

But in the big wide world of data collection, coca being obviously coca is still not enough to locate it – even if it is bright yellow.

Let us remember now the geo-strategic location of Pakistan and its Chinese naval base in Gwadar at the mouth of Strait of Hormuz. However China has not limited itself to this strategic choke point. It has undertaken a high-profile expansion and improvement of its navy as a way to safeguard its maritime interest in Indian Ocean by helping countries develop ports along the oil shipping routes.

The archival material is collected through extensive research and developed giving it a conceptual shape. The video tells a story of two cities of Pakistan (Faisalabad and Gwadar) tightly packed into a single statement it shows the society on the verge of nervous breakdown. It takes in a broad sweep the social and political context in which these cities are born and fabricated to become an engine for modern living. In recent years, inefficient supply of resources or incompetent governance is escalating violent conflicts in these cities. The video highlights the disturbance and reaction of social masses.

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^ Glacier, 2012 by Irmelin Joelson. Neon/chalk.

Glacier can, grammatically, be read as a verb with a vocabulary based on action, state and occurrence. It produces an action-based grammar, which mess up the rules of how to form sentences, since it has collected a dictionary, an archive of happenings, in deep time. But what if the free narration ebbs out and the archive is reduced to a list-machine, an inventory of a potential disaster area; where all words and concepts have become single objects, fragments that depict a world of obsessive listing, ordering, accumulating fragments and organizing them into files? Where lots of things seems to happen, and yet nothing seems to change.

During the exhibition a glacial inventory is written down with chalk. The chalk on blackboard allows for new things to be added and some things to be lost. The contours of the neon mountain range with the glacier, is redrawn from a climbing map over the Eastern Himalayas, found at the Central Asian Museum in Srinagar, Kashmir. Traced, and retraced many times throughout the year it has so functioned as a road map, a hardback embossing motif, a height curve, and now, for just a little while, it has again transformed and turned into a contour – a sign – a “new one” – νέον - a neon.

This work cracks open a space in between the Glacier-landscape-sign, and the thousands of combinations of “things” in the inventory that can’t be ranked, but only listed and sometimes utilized as “facts”. In between the glacial water – a solvent seldom pure that always reach for new substances – and neon, the monatomic noble gas; highly volatile since it forms no compounds to fix it to solids, Glacier takes shape. In a space where we can only apprehend what is lesser. What is lesser than all these thousands of potential combinations: another form.

Neon produced in collaboration with Neon and Signmakers, London.

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^ Oblique Rain, 2012 by Alan Yates. Mixed Media on Paper.

The Lake District is formed from the crushed remains of a chain of volcanic islands; the Borrowdale volcanic series are probably the most studied geology on the planet but it is the hydrology that makes it special. It is the wettest place in England and in the nineteenth century became a water supplier to the emerging cotton industry to the city of Manchester. Its sublime landscape became the home to the English romantics including political theorist John Ruskin and home to the poet Wordsworth who were strongly opposed to the construction of Thirlmere Reservoir and the working conditions of the common man.

The hydrological cycle is subjected to the laws of dynamics that makes the Earth unique as the only livable planet in the universe, technological solutions such as the building of dams drive economic change but have also caused immense ecological damage. The role of technology and culture have played a central role in the relationship between people and territories and long been an issue in the realm of bio-power and its set of components that constitute an assemblage. Its very nature gives us the Heideggarian problem of ‘enframing’ and the problematics of scale and metrics which turn ‘tipping point’s into the concept of reflexive modernity.

The very nature of the assemblage is both political and aesthetic, mapping the event it is possible to think about the relationship between the object and the subject, processes of individuation. Technical solutions produce a-political space and crisis heterotopias where outside solutions are imposed as contractual space to expand the resource pool. ‘Oblique Rain’ is a unique project that sets out a new manifesto using the metaphysical poetry of Fernando Pessoa in determining the separation of natural systems unfolding and the task of the translator in determining representational images of contemporary art that question ‘Ecological Aesthetics’. Rather I seek out topological invariants and the bifurcation process and image dispositifs of ‘Art + Techne’.‘Oblique Rain’ navigates an ‘eco- praxes’ that encompasses the social interstice of art practices and liminality of resource use that builds ecosystem support systems in mitigating the effects of climate change whilst allowing natural events to determine new forms of art and architecture.

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^ Transaction To Democracy: Marketing The Spanish Coast 1975-2012, 2012 by Daniel Fernández Pascual. 14 postcards, corner fixers, chair.

Seven postcards from 1970s that my mum received from friends vacationing at the Spanish coast during the transition from dictator Franco to the current parliamentary monarchy. There never was a point of radical discontinuity between both political systems. I went to the same coastal places and bought the image of today. The coast tries to negate urban planning mistakes from the past by deleting them from present souvenirs.

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^ Episode One, 2012 by Samir Harb. Comics.

Al- Mukataa, a patch of land that has been exhausted by periods of political epochs tells the history of a long lasting period of transformation, now the head quarters of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the west bank. It is located on the historical fault lines between successive political epochs. Through an archaeological reading of the material transformation of the site of the Mukataa one could trace the political complexity spatial tectonics through the events that have taken place in the course of six decades. Parallel to this event, the economical and political assertions of the PA’s form of government have not been characterized clearly, the project became a form of transformation of the ground without obvious value towards where it is leading the population− a form of ambiguity has become the practice of governing.

But this machine of power has been installed and assembled the material accumulations of the past and the utopian grids of the future. One should ask in this case, what are the material transformations that have been brought about as a result of the political events? What is the image that was constructed in such a process? The Mukataa compound could be the body that may unfold such questions and help us to understand the broader narrative of the on-going political transformation.

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^ Post Pavilion, 2012 by Heejung Kim. Film, images, Archive book.

Over the last century, a large number of mega exhibitions such as expo, fair, biennale and festival have been held with architecture all over the world. Mega exhibitions are inevitably related to economy, social, cultural condition within the nation-state. Especially, these events are identified by a very limited condition of time and space. All in events is temporarily existed just as happening. The most featuring trend in mega events driven architecture allow architecturally frame an event or share idea of architecture in the event as public place in limited condition of time and space. From that point, architecture in events is not just about meaning of structure framing event architecturally but also valuable beyond the physical existence.

“Temporary architecture can act as a trigger for memory, opening up new interpretations of context, place and the past as well as pointing towards the future.”

The main feature that captures my attention in an architecture and mega exhibition is because they only exist in a short period of time with limited space. In particular, I am most fascinated with ‘pavilion’, as it is a temporary structure as permanent affection in an urban area.

By understanding the story of three pavilions in event and event driven architecture, this project will focus on two interesting points. The first one is that architecture in the condition of event which has circumscribed time and place. In this respect, how the context of the event has effected on architecture is so permanent. The second point relates to the memory as continuing happening and temporary moment without physical things from events.

This project attempt to investigate how the roles of architecture have changed over the last century in the context of the event and how architecture can create the impact or impression that endures continuity with memory from different type of cognition of architecture in each event in different era, even after the event.

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^ Redacted Redaction, 2012 by Corinne Quin. Interactive installation: desk space, printed transparencies, archive gloves.

Redaction is a black screen that enables classified information to appear in public, clothed in darkness. It is a necessary player/negotiator in processes of political transparency where the State gesture of making things public comes with the need to keep some parts private, concealed and protected. These slightly odd, dark linear opacities give shape to the secret and furnish absent material with a heavy presence.

The US. Senate’s 2004 ‘Report on the U.S intelligence community’s prewar intelligence assessments on Iraq’ is one such public document, which details the investigation into the somewhat uncertain pre-war intelligence on which the 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified. Large swathes of text were redacted by the CIA before its public release.

“Redacted-redaction” is a transparent version of this report in which all visible text has been removed in order to view the redaction only. It is a view through rather than on the surface, revealing a dark, murky architecture of the classified. You are invited to sit at the desk, put on the white gloves and take a look inside.

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^ (((((GeoPoLiTiCaL BaNaNa-WHaRF CoCKTaiLS))))), 2012 by Daniel Fernández Pascual. Performance: Preparation of cocktails with rum and bananas linked to flows of speculative capital between Canary Wharf and the Canary Islands throughout modern history.

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^ Lèse-Majesté, 2012 by Daniel Fernández Pascual. Site-specific. British flag upside down (ca. 1940s) – 2,70×1,60 m; pole and life-ring (existing).

British flag upside down (ca. 1940s) – 2,70×1,60 m; pole and life-ring (existing) – 2012 Lèse-Majesté (‘injured majesty’) used to be a crime against the sovereign power or the state. A flag from a British battleship – ca. 1940s – hangs upside down, attached to an already existing life-ring pole. While the flag appears symmetric, the white lines above and below the diagonal red are different widths. Placing the flag upside down is considered lèse-majesté, but it also used to be flown upside down as a distress signal.

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^ From Static Dynamics To The Probability of Risk, 2012 by Daniel Fernández Pascual. Paper print, waterproof map pouch, rope, brick.

According to Spanish geologist Losada, the concept of the Spanish Law of the Coast should rather demarcate the shoreline according to areas of probability of flood risk and not to a static boundary. The reference to draw those ‘risk isolines’ or ‘iso- risk maps’ should be the column of water and speed at a certain point within a statistical analysis of a variety of scenarios. The installation consists of a floating map of the European Union, where the entire shoreline has been deleted; and a rope measuring the exact depth of the water at the quay where the exhibition space is located.

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^ Untitled, 2012 by Chris Molinski. Photograph.

Image from public event for dOCUMENTA (13) which Chris curated, organised. Six MARA colleagues were invited to present and discuss their work as part of the public programme of events in Kassel, Germany, July 2012.

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^ Living the Edge, 2012 by Helene Kazan. Frame from stop motion animation generated from archive photograph of flood in London 1989.

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^ New Towns during Spanish Enlightenment. 18th century. Adapted from Oliveras Samitier

The spatial void is not only uncertain, but a constant menace to the established order. During Spanish Enlightenment in the 18th century, agrarian settlements were founded along the Royal Road linking the Court in Madrid with the city of Cádiz (an strategic trading site for America) as a protection against frequent bandits. Two empty and vast territories were colonised through new towns built from scratch in Northern Andalusia: the area of Sierra Morena (with its central nucleus of La Carolina) and the empty fields of Córdoba (depending on La Carlota). The sovereign power at the time provided safety for travellers and merchants through new architectural prototypes. But they also tried to defy, not unproductive labour, but the risk of unproductive land-ownership.

Prussian Colonnel J.G. von Thürriegel offered the Spanish Government 6,000 pioneers from Germany to settle down in certain areas of South America and Puerto Rico. They were sent to Spain instead. The so-called ‘Recolonisation of Sierra Morena’, directed by enlightened thinker Pablo de Olavide, criticized the inefficient economy of passive landlords and provided each peasant family coming from Prussia with a lot. The economic context of unproductivity brought along higher prices and demand for agricultural land. However, his initiative had to do with efficiency of national food resources, rather than improving the rights of the peasantry.

Spanish New Towns were a hybrid form between the Roman and the American Grid urban patterns. Usually located along main roads, they adopted a linear layout. A ‘compact-disperse’ model was frequently chosen for Sierra Morena, consisting of a nuclear compact town for services and its satellite clusters with no more than 30 disperse houses each. The knowledge of military engineers, in charge of planning industries, forts and new settlements, was combined with architecture studies of monumental buildings. In terms of city layout, doctors even played an important role, advising military engineers on healthy and hygienic living spaces.

In 1766 Thürriegel sent the first groups of German settlers to Spain. After walking and riding from Germany to Andalusia, they discovered that the dreamt land was much drier, more searing, infertile and desolated as ever expected. Each family would receive a lot, two cows, five sheep, five goats, five hens, one cock, one pig, tools and tax exemptions; they should build their own houses and help to build common public buildings (prison, church, town hall, mill and bakery). They were meant to become self-sufficient settlers out of farming and artisans’ activity; and on a second phase, olive trees, little orchards and small manufacturing workshops for female labour were introduced. However, new dwellers had to stay in barracks for the first couple of years; nearly half of them passed away due to new diseases and harsh climate conditions. Peasants could under no circumstances return to Prussia, since the deal signed between Thürriegel and Olavide obliged them to stay at least for 10 years, under prison penalties. A natural selection process made the strongest survive.

As part of this recolonisation process of empty territories during the 18^th century, the Nation also planned the first peripheral industrial settlements to relieve urban congestion, new harbour towns to rationalise the shoreline, and royal hedonistic sites to entertain the sovereign. (see map above)

Sources:

ABELLÁN GARCÍA, A & OLIVERA POLL, A 1987. Consecuencias geográficas de las nuevas poblaciones del siglo XVIII. Madrid: Anales de Geografía de la UCM, núm 7.

AVILÉS, M & SENA, G 1991. Nuevas poblaciones en la España Moderna. Madrid: UNED.

BONET CORREA, A 1978. Las plazas octogonales españolas del siglo XVIII, Morfología y ciudad. Barcelona.

CASTILLA SOTO, J 1992. Espacio, tiempo y forma. Madrid: UNED.

DELGADO BARRADO, JM 2001. La génesis del proyecto repoblador de Sierra Morena. Jaén: Boletín del Inst. de Estudios Giennenses.

GARCÍA MELERO, JE 1998. Arte español de la Ilustración y del siglo XIX: en torno a la imagen del pasado. Madrid: Encuentro.

OLIVERAS SAMITIER, J 1998. Nuevas poblaciones en la España de la Ilustración. Barcelona: Arquia/Fundación Caja de Arquitectos.

^ Assault of the Diligence. Goya, 1793

My top six harmonious interventions at 13th Venice Biennale deal with noise, somewhere between the random and the unwanted, what we don’t want to hear and what we don’t want to see: the noise of those under power, the noise of those in power, the noise of the powerless; the noise of a building, the noise of the inhabitants of a building, the noise of the politically incorrect.

^ With Unmediated Democracy Demands Unmediated Space, Croatian National Participation [Igor Bezinović, Hrvoslava Brkušić, Boris Cvjetanović, Siniša Labrović and Pulska grupa] proposes a post-capitalist manifesto to really hear each other and create new ways of operating resources. By looking at civil struggles, student protests going on since 2009, the so-called “Forum for Space” and their concept of KOMUNAL, they proclaim:

We imagine city as a collective space which belongs to all those who live in it an who have the right to find there conditions for their political, social, economic and ecological fulfilment at the same time assuming duties and solidarity. This concept of the city is blocked by capitalist dialectic based on public and private ownership. From these two poles, State and Market emerge as the only two subjects. We want to escape this dialectic, not to focus on the “third subject”, but on a group of collective subjectivities and the common they produce. We understand common as non-material value produced through differences, communication and social interaction. Only if these common values manage to escape being captured by the capitalist public-private dialectic they keep their non-material value open and they have the potential to become productive, to become means of production.

We understand KOMUNAL as the land where common value, once it is transformed from non-material to use value cannot be exploited and turned into exchange value. Therefore, this common territory exists outside current forms of city exploitation based on property and land speculation. It bases its general values in the field of access, use, activity or care.

Word KOMUNAL was traditionally used for natural resources, which were managed by self-organized users. This kind of space managing is more and more frequent in the abandoned spaces in the city where different autonomous zones are emerging. Although these zones exist today on the social margins we consider them potential places for appearance of new utopias and collective imagination. Let us try then to imagine a different way of operating spatial resources, distributing surplus value and creating our own institutions.

^ Image of a City in late Capitalism. Red Plan Pula by Pulska grupa. Croatian Pavilion.

^ The Kingdom of Bahrain’s participation, as brilliant as in 2010, presents how the image of the country is broadcasted internationally for political and economic purposes, thus creating an imaginary vision of a territory. With In Your Living Room – On TV Landscapes And The Urban Imaginary, Bahrain’s contemporary history is revisited through relevant events for the international community, such as exposing the new Mina Salman Port to the world through the arrival of Queen Elizabeth in 1979 by ship. We are reminded how the spontaneous appearance of un-iconic landscapes in international media offer an intentionally biased portrait for economic powers.

^ Awarded the Golden Lion for the Best Project of the Common Ground Exhibition, Torre David / Gran Horizonte, is Urban-Think Tank’s proposal to present the informal community in an abandoned and unfinished office tower in Caracas, Venezuela. As they refer to it, this ruin-turned-home they encourage contemporary architects and planners to look at these examples for further collaboration with informal actors. For the Biennale, Torre David is presented as a [highly recommendable!] Venezuelan arepa restaurant surrounded by raw brick walls hanging photographs by Iwan Baan, creating a genuinely social space rather than a didactic exhibition space. This installation has become controversial in the Venezuelan architectural community. Many are dismayed that the nation’s architectural accomplishments are “represented” by a never-completed and “ruined” work; others argue that the exhibit condones the Venezuelan government’s tacit and explicit support of illegal seizure and occupation of property. It’s nonetheless remarkable how Western countries acknowledge and award the social potential of squatting in developing societies, while Occupy London-New York-Madrid were not even mentioned in the same Architecture show.

^ Making The Walls Quake As If They Were Dilating With The Secret Knowledge Of Great Powers. Katarzyna Krakowiak’s piece in the Polish Pavilion, curated by Michał Libera and awarded a Special Mention by the Jury, uses this beautiful title to state how Architecture is built of sound: It is what makes the diffusion of sound possible – absorbing, filtering, and transferring it, amplifying some of its components at the expense of others. Enclosed spaces are room tones, while niches are specific echoes. The ventilation and heating systems are a quiet yet constant noise, whereas windows and walls are the filtered sounds of street bustle, the buzzing of cicadas, or neighbor’s living rooms.

The pavilion is used as a resonator to amplify a sort of soundtrack of the cracks. The exhibition is grounded with an exquisite publication assembling texts on Sounds in/through/of Architecture: reverberation – eavesdropping – vibration.

^ In 100, a table fills the centre of the scene; we cannot but walk around it. But the main stage is not in the middle of the room. It is on the narrow aisle left between this gigantic table and the walls. Visitors to the Serbian Pavilion decisions to smash, bang, tap or clap against the table surface with certain force put each actor right on the spot. Speakers amplify these onomatopoeic gestures and turn them extremely audible for everyone in the room, catching attention from the rest. As Igor Marić describes it: Are we alone against everyone or alone with everyone? […] The interior becomes an exterior, we are not surrounded by empty walls but by architecture with either in between, emptiness and fullness, the definitiveness of the placed object becomes a diversity of perception. Movements make the space pulsate, sound fill the silence, we touch the surface, we look at each other and hear each other. Does it separate or join us?

^ Finally, the controversial Pigeon Safari project, orchestrated by Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck, consists of around 60 Venetian grey pigeons coloured with food dye in red, blue, purple and green tones and released again in the city. Colour is harmless and wears off after 6 weeks. The initiative has increased current discussions on the issue of pigeons damaging architectural heritage with their acidic droppings, especially in Venice, as well as the methods through which city councils are getting rid of hundreds of them.

[all images> deconcrete2012]

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.

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]

^ 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 21^st 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

^ 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

^ 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.