^ Dieter Roth, installation.

Any attempt to put together all-embracing knowledge will always fail. Whether it is about launching a capsule to outer space collecting the history/culture/technology of humanity or an encyclopaedia itself. They will always lack the component of spontaneity so inherent in human behaviour that is impossible to archive or register. However, in any compilation of knowledge, we can always extract and read those attempts as approximations to reality or future realities.

The 55^th Venice Art Biennale 2013, The Encyclopedic Palace, is one of those attempts to launch a reading of humanity and condense it into a variety of modes of life. Anthropological in its conception, this edition curated by Massimiliano Gioni and his team (Helga Just Christoffersen, Natalie Bell, Roberta Tenconi, Annabelle Selldorf, Ian Sullivan and Chris Wiley) seems to successfully blur the ‘art label’ across different disciplines and practices, creating new visual encounters in imagination between ‘professional artists and amateurs, outsiders and insiders’. This reflects on our current mode of accessing information in a hyper-linked world, through which we follow endless threads of data guided by all powerful google searches.

^ In this regard, my top selection of discoveries providing a relevant spatial component starts with Silver Lion-awarded Camille Henrot and her piece Grosse Fatigue (2013). In her video, we dive into a variety of museums archives, entangled with Wikipedia and youtube interfaces that reflect upon daily routines of existence and eager to know at a single click. The brilliantly developed soundtrack reflects a repetitive mode of ‘street-preaching’ that brings us into quasi-religious belief.

^ On Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park photographic series (1971-79), taken with infrared film and a modified flash, we are exposed to a world of voyeurism at night. Hidden behind trees and bushes, the illicit eroticism of couples having sexual encounters in Tokyo, teleports us into the realm of fantasy. Back to a time of a severe clash between traditional understandings of social relationships and unprecedented economic transformations, we take part of a moment of radical change in Japanese history. The park reveals itself as a spatial product of accelerated capitalism.

^ In Viviane Sassen’s photographic work (2005-2012), we also enter into an introverted scene. The images compose static and over-aestheticized human landscapes from Ghana, Tanzania, Zambia or Uganda. Beyond the political clichés of a Dutch photographer working in Africa, where she grew up, we are confronted in her series with human bodies that carefully interact with the everyday spatial elements surrounding them. They configure a biopolitical statement reflecting upon the current state of social affairs and feature highly aesthetic bodies that are deprived of basic civil rights.

^ Following these local ethnographies, the photographic work of Nigerian J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere dating back to the 1960s shows the extremely elaborate constructions of hairstyles, that served as ornamentation either to indicate social position or to connect national and personal autonomy.

^ The work of Vietnamese Danh Vo contrasts with these typological imaginaries created during centuries of colonial and post-colonial history. He imported a catholic church from Vietnam into Venice: structural elements and decorative motifs. The fact of bringing the material rests of an unwanted building back to the cradle of Catholicism embodies the suffering of invaded peoples through the architecture of imperial domination. The shades of the extremely worn-out velvet fabrics displayed in Venice still reveal the presence of religious symbols that used to hang on them.

^ The unique draft for The Shaft of Ascension (1939) imagined by engineer Achilles G. Rizzoli consists of a ‘projected major unit in which Euthanasia is available to those desiring and meriting a pleasant, painless bon voyage from this land.’ Very much in line with Urbonas’ Euthanasia Roller-Coaster, this Art Deco-inspired skyscraper anticipated the desire of designing structures for accomplishing death and the empowerment to decide on human life through a building body.

^ Death encounters nature in the construction of historical Chinese tombs. Kan Xuan’s video documentation of the 207 existing imperial mounds depict landmarks in anodyne landscapes that could either be perceived as hills covered in wild vegetation or human-made monuments encapsulating burials. Under the name Millet Mounds (2012), Xuan establishes a link to the visual resemblance with harvest-time grain piles of such archaeological structures.

^ Physical interaction with memorials is also documented in Harun Farocki’s Transmission (2007). His video illustrates ways in which the living touch, kiss or prostrate, in front of these holy objects around the world. These material connections to communicate with the disappeared in wars or any other violent acts construct the spatial link between two different times.

Concerning the National Pavilions, and regardless of the eternal dilemma on their actual logic in a contemporary world of global modes of production, my selection starts with The Atlas of the Empire hosted by the Italo-Latin American Institute. Not precisely because of the final product of the installation, but rather the attempt of an alternative cartography of Latin America as an emerging territorial order today.

^ The first appearance of the Republic of Kosovo in Venice brings Petrit Halilaj’s exquisite installation of a bird/human-scale nest under the name I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is (2013). As viewers, we are part of the spectacle through which his canaries might be looking at us. We can sometimes hear them singing inside this primitive conception of a shelter. We can also wonder whom the enigmatically hanging clothes belong. Reflecting upon the contemporary political condition of Kosovar society, Halilaj’s earthy structure introduces us into his intimate world of relationships with his mother.

^ Romania’s critique to the Euro-centrism of the Venice Biennale as such consists of An Immaterial Retrospective that re-enacts certain pieces of the history of this international exhibition. Performance in its spatial essence, it leaves the whole pavilion empty to display an anti-grandiose memorial to art history through the viewer’s imagination.

^ Elegantly minimal, the Dutch brought Mark Manders, author of Self-Portrait as a Building (1986). His Venetian Room with Broken Sentence, an extremely delicate installation about the archaeology of his present, includes sometimes-visible sometimes-invisible objects, showing ‘things that don’t necessarily need to be seen’.

Maldives Pavilion, curated by Arab-European art collective Chamber of Public Secrets, participates for the first time, under the title Disappearance as Work in Progress – Approaches to Ecological Romanticism.  It is a surprising encounter that features a group show dealing with the understandings of nature/culture and the possibility of the archipelago sinking under water in the future.

^ Spain’s contribution with always engaging Lara Almárcegui’s work and her conception of urbis visualizes the construction materials required to build the pavilion itself in 1922: the exact amounts of stone, glass, sand, bricks…  composed by rubble from other demolition sites. Reflecting on current cycles of the useful and the useless within the generation of value, she brilliantly confronts the nature of the pavilion with other demolished structures. This connects to her other video on display A Guide to Sacca San Mattia, the Abandoned Island of Murano, which documents artificial landfills out of waste and debris located in the Venetian lagoon.

^ Kamikaze Loggia configures the Georgian Pavilion. Rather than the fictitious re-enactment of their research, the absolute success of it is to bring to Venice the issue of informal housing extensions in Tbilisi. This subversive practice, very common in post-Soviet urban peripheries, creates living space suspended in the most unexpected forms.

^ The most striking duo this year, the Lithuanian-Cyprus Pavilion Oo, goes into forms of organisation rather than organisation of forms. One of its successes is to camouflage inside an atypical Venetian palazzo, the sports palace: a brutalist concrete structure anchored in the core of the city. Brilliantly curated by Raimundas Malašauskas, one cannot distinguish between the curated and the actual user of the building: subtle performances on the staircase, LED devices leaning against the wall or gymnasts training behind the glass walls. The meticulously choreographed space presents itself as an endless orchestration of movements.

[all images above by deconcrete 2013]

^ Costa Ballena, Cádiz. 2003-2012 via Nación Rotonda

Nación Rotonda (Nation of Roundabouts) is an extremely valuable visualization tool to travel back in time to natural landscapes before the housing boom in Spain. Simply by overlaying satellite imagery of the same site with a lapse of 4, 10 or 15 years, one can detect any sort of speculative urbanization modes. It is not about displaying before and after, but a transition in the shaping of the landscape. The images put together two states of transformation in a brilliant format that allows seeing interrupted highways and unfinished roads. The demarcation line between the urban and the rural is made explicitly visible through the visualization tool, through which the viewer is required to displace that dividing line from left to right or right to left on the screen.

^ Ávila south. 2007-2010 via Nación Rotonda

^ Els Arenals del Sol, Alicante. 2002-2012 via Nación Rotonda

^ William Morris green wallpapers. Google images search

Andrew Meharg has thoroughly researched about the terrific ‘killer wallpapers’. Conceived and produced by icon of pre-modern design William Morris within his Arts & Crafts movement (1860s-1910s), these wallpapers were largely used during the Victorian era in ballrooms and homes of accommodated British families. After his microscopic analysis of bits of original fragments, he concluded that the green pigment was based on arsenic. It was applied either to interiors or textiles with serious concerns for human health in living space. Walls would slowly release the poison into the air. Dyed clothing would transmit the poison straight into the sweaty body skin. The humidity in the air provoked by human activity in the room intensified enormously the effects of arsenic-based greens and their toxic fumes. Damp ambiences turned the pigment particles volatile.

^ William Morris Wallpaper via popular science

^ Arsenic green ink to print arsenic green textiles, 1848. via popular science

^ Arsenic-based clothing, 1850s via Dyeing to be fashionable

^ Cave Home_Broken Manual 2008, by Alec Soth via spaceframed

In this hyper-connected world of control technologies, the desire of hiding is still very human. Either as a result of social exclusion, marginal lifestyles, anti-mainstream behaviors, political statements, existential meditations, religious beliefs, economic difficulties or utopian experiments, it is always interesting to look at the shelters that house such aspirations of disconnection from the network society.

The mysterious case of that middle-aged Japanese woman who was living in the cupboard of a random person’s home for several months without him noticing perfectly fits in one of these life experiences. Even if the media do not agree on the actual length of the period she spent sneaking in and out of the cupboard, together with the dubiously believable choreography on the viral video and its different versions (probably fakes), it is stunning to see such waste spaces converted into dwelling environments.

The film Somewhere To Disappear featuring photographer Alec Soth’s visual approach to shelters from this world provides a brilliant journey into otherness and the way we create the boundary between normality and Foucauldian abnormality :

^ Stills from Somewhere To Disappear, a film by Laure Flammarion and Arnaud Uyttenhove with Alec Soth, 2010. 57 min.

^ Reconstructed map of sunken Dunwich, UK, by David Sear et al.

The sunken medieval town of Dunwich has been recently surveyed in the report Dunwich, Suffolk:Mapping and assessing the inundated by David Sear (UoS), Andy Murdock (GDI), Tim LeBas (NOC), Paul Baggaley (WA) and Gemma Gubbins (GDI).

The town collapsed in the 1400s due to storms that battered the coastline and flooded it with silt. DIDSON-DH acoustic imaging technology has allowed tracking the ruins of the buildings on the seabed with the help of divers. The reconstruction of the shoreline through the stone blocks provides information about the settlement itself, but also about the climatic, topographic and social features of the time.

^ Dunwich coast today via Wired

^ Yorkshire’s coastal erosion 2012_Image by Neil A White via The Guardian

 


^ Red Road Housing demolition. Glasgow, 5 May 2013

^ Lasswade Road Housing demolition. Edinburgh, 25 October 2009

^ High Marnham Power Station demolition. Retford, Nottinghamshire, 15 July 2012

Fantastic article by Jan Loerakker at Failed Architecture on the role of architectural metaphors in the media.

as well as ‘Architects Talking Architecture‘.

^ Black Mirror series 2 episode 2: White Bear (UK, 2013). Director: Carl Tibbetts. Writer: Charlie Brooker.

An absolutely brilliant trip to hyper-mediatized space:

“Victoria wakes with a head-ache and bandaged wrists,pills spilled on the floor. A strange sign is flickering on the television but she can remember nothing. Outside she meets Jem, a young woman who explains that the signal on the television set comes from the White Bear transmitter. It has turned most of the population into voyeurs who do nothing but watch and sometimes film as a deadly elite known as the hunters kill those unaffected by the signal,such as Jem and Victoria. Escaping from a hunter they reach the White Bear transmitter,which they intend to destroy. However the White Bear set-up is not what it first appears and nor is Victoria.” [text> imdb]

watch White Bear

thanks, nerea!

^ In Ictu Oculi, by Greta Alfaro 2009. Single channel video (HDV, 16:9, colour, sound). Duration: 10’35

“From its title (meaning “in the blink of an eye”) onwards, Greta Alfaro’s In Ictu Oculi is concerned with the viewer’s experience of time: the eye is yours. The work’s title, which alludes to the brevity of human existence, is shared with a number of vanitas paintings from the seventeenth century, and, like them, Alfaro’s video treats the stuff that surrounds us as coded references to our own demise. A dinner table, laden with plates of food and wine bottles, its chairs waiting to be occupied, stands in a scrubby, semi-mountainous landscape, a breeze flickering its tablecloth. The table’s placement, in the centre of the frame (the shot is still), makes unmistakeable allusion to painted conventions – the Last Supper, the Supper at Emmaus. And yet the occupants, when they arrive, transform the table’s Biblical and epicurean suggestions into something nightmarish and deathly. The stilled moment of the painted meal becomes subject to cinematic time: movement is change. Vultures descend, from nowhere, their bulk and scrabble bringing instability to the implied order of the scene. Yet the meal’s duration, and its strange quietness (aside from the flapping of wings and chink of claw on plate) lend it a human quality: this might be the soundtrack to a medieval banquet. The birds here, like Hitchcock’s, act out repressed human desires (to gorge oneself): they’re us, with the mask off.”

Text by Ben Street via Saatchi Gallery

^ The cell room in each 4 Phases of Agema’s prison model. Images by Jonas Staal.

‘Closed Architecture’ is the 2004 Master’s degree thesis in Interior Design of right-wing Dutch politician Fleur Agema. Based on her sketches, concepts and descriptions, visual artist Jonas Staal 3D-rendered her visions for a phased prison model in the Netherlands.

Agema’s space for reintegration of prisoners into society aimed to toughen current forms of detention to an extreme. Her model consisted of four disciplinary phases: The Bunker – The Wait – The Habituation – The Light. The inmate would upgrade depending on his behaviour, thus obtaining more daylight, space and typically consumerist commodities in his living area. As penalty for misbehaviour within her prison model, the inmate would revisit previous stages, backwards towards a ‘dungeon’ condition.

Through his Foucauldian visualizations, Staal brilliantly unmasks the ideal of citizens and society behind Agema’s political agenda in real life. He manages to show how an early architectural mind evolves into a populist understanding and construction of guilt and punishment.

^ The buildings in each 4 Phases of Agema’s prison model. Images by Jonas Staal

Thanks, Luli!

^ Margaret Thatcher in the kitchen at 10 Downing Street. Above: ca. 1979. Below: 1989

Yesterday there were two fantastic articles on The Guardian about Thatcher. One about death etiquette with public (not private) figures and another about the possibility of privatising her funeral as a tribute to her legacy. As brilliantly narrated on CHAVS – The demonization of the working class, the whole dismantlement of the welfare state and social housing is something for which the world will remember her administration, amongst other issues. Unfortunately, the British privatisation model is ‘enlightening’ today south-European countries as a remedy to the crisis.

Today several sets of images of the kitchen at Downing Street residence are virally circulating. They compare the interior design of Margaret’s and Samantha’s kitchen in a fake domestic atmosphere. This iconography seems to be the means of representation for carefully staged ideal housewives. More or less spartan, the kitchen is still used as heteronormative propaganda for certain values in order to connect with wider ‘middle classes’. Apparently, this is the place where a powerful woman is expected to publicly inhabit if she wants to communicate closely with her citizens and transmit a feeling of ‘normal’ life. But who needs to believe still in this Ikea-catalogue plastic happiness? I wish Prime Ministers and/or spouses were a bit more Ikea-disobedients and were also photographed while a night out with Berlin’s mayor at Berghain: sweaty and vulgar.

^ James and Samantha Cameron in their West London apartment, 2010 via The Telegraph

^ Samantha Cameron and Michelle Obama sitting at 11 Downing Street semi-open kitchen. Image released by the White House 2011 via bbc news

Source of plans and images below: Montague H. Cox & G. Topham Forrest (eds). Survey of London: volume 14. London, 1931. via British-History

^ Main Kitchen for the Downing Street residence

^ 11 Downing Street. Ground, First and Second Floor plan. 1846

^ Ground floor 10 Downing Street with 1781 alterations. Note that the drawing is South-oriented

^ 10, 11 & 12 Downing Street. Ground Floor plan. ca. 1931

^ 10, 11 & 12 Downing Street. First Floor plan. ca. 1931

^ 10, 11 & 12 Downing Street. Second Floor plan. ca. 1931

^ Elevation and section Downing Street. ca. 1931

^ Elevation and section Downing Street. ca. 1931

^ Empire II, as featured in Dubai-based Brusselssprout Curatorial Magazine #2 [Fall 2010]

‘Empire II is the continuation of Empire.

On Saturday 25 July 1964 (46 years ago) Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas filmed the movie Empire.

Empire is a silent, black and white film that lacks a traditional narrative or characters. The passage from daylight to darkness becomes the film’s narrative, while the protagonist is the iconic building that was (and is again) the tallest in New York City. Non-events such as a blinking light at the top of a neighboring building mark the passage of time.

It was filmed from 8:06 p.m. to 2:42 a.m. from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building, from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation.’

Empire II is the continuation of the Andy Warhol work: creation of non-media as media, film as non-film. The film was shot on July 27th, 2010 by Andre Orione, David Payton and Lohra Ydna and presents Burj Khalifa (aka Burj Dubai).

Due to a growing decrease in parishioners, the Evangelical Church closed 340 temples in Germany between 1990 and 2010. It is estimated that 700 additional churches will be shut down in the following 10 years. [source> el pais].

In order to financially cope with their heritage, they have recently launched an internet website to promote and deal with post-religious real-estate [www.kirchengrundstuecke.de]. However, controversies concerning the metamorphosis of these empty buildings have arrived to the public opinion.

For me, the conflict is not about WHAT to do inside unused churches, but WHO has the authority to determine that. Who should decide on them being turned into luxury retail, hotels, restaurants and Muslim mosques (i.e. Kapernaum, Hamburg): the archbishop, local parishioners or the State? Is it the owner, the user/non-user or the government?

^ Gerhard-Uhlhorn Church for sale in Hannover. 1,276 m2. 410,000 €

^ Parchim Church for sale near Schwerin. 829 m2. 298,500 €

^ Church and parochial house in Stöcken, Hannover. 4,618 m2. 990,000 €

^ Church in Frankfurt am Main. 3,068 m2. Price upon request.

^ Church in Hannover. 4,161 m2. 640,000 €

[source: Out of Sight, Out of Mind]

‘Since 2004, the US has been practicing in a new kind of clandestine military operation. The justification for using drones to take out enemy targets is appealing because it removes the risk of losing American military, it’s much cheaper than deploying soldiers, it’s politically much easier to maneuver (i.e. flying a drone within Pakistan vs. sending troops) and it keeps the world in the dark about what is actually happening. It takes the conflict out of sight, out of mind. The success rate is extremely low and the cost on civilian lives and the general well-being of the population is very high. This project helps to bring light on the topic of drones [...].’