Pornotopia: Architecture & Sexuality

 

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]

 

 

 

 

Published on November 18, 2011 18:42.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, homo ludens

terrorist-marked places

Three weeks ago Basque-separatist ETA terrorist organization declared the definitive cessation of its armed activity after 43 years of existence.

But the crime scenes where they perpetrated their assassinations still remain marked, as journalists Guillermo Abril and Álvaro Corcuera compile today in a very recommendable article in El Pais (Lugares Marcados). The article is not going through the whole history of ETA terrorist organization. Neither is the whole list of attacks included, nor the 829 victims of its terror. But it does show a series of 40 spaces where the terrorist organization left its trace in landscape.

Eduardo Nave has photographed some years later the crime scenes at the same hour and date as the assassinations occurred.

< These empty places make one think of the tragic moment when they were filled with death. > [Helena Taberna]

^ Murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco_Lasarte-Oria (Guipuzkoa)_16:50_12/07/1997

^ Murder of Estanislao Galíndez_Armurrio (Álava)_08:45_26/06/1985

^ Murder of Manuel Broseta_Valencia_10:15_15/01/1992

^ Murder of Carlos Arguimberri_N-634 Km.40_11:30_05/07/1975

Published on November 13, 2011 11:27.
Filed under: forensic destruction

open-source bulb

As magic as easy to install, and as many as you want. Similar to a 55W bulb, but without any electricity costs. It is elemental physics that takes care of refracting sunlight in 360º. A skylight suddenly appears in the ceiling. How is it that nobody had come up with the idea before?

The Solar Bottle Bulb (A Liter of Light_Isang Litrong Liwanag) consists of nothing else than a plastic bottle filled with water (and some drops of bleach to keep the liquid purified for up to 5 years). Developed in 2011 by MIT students and implemented by MyShelter Foundation for precarious housing in Manila, it provides a DIY ecological alternative for electric lighting. The users guide constitutes an open-source architectural manual, which allows the Solar Bottle Bulb to be replicated ad infinitum. It relies on local waste materials and basic skills as a new efficient tool for slum upgrading.

< According to statistics from the National Electrification Commission in 2009, 3 million households still remain powerless outside Metro Manila. And even in the metro, families still continue to live in darkness. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) has reported that a large number of fire-related incidents involve faulty electrical connections. Informal settlements are high-risk areas, since the BFP does not conduct fire hazard inspections in these communities. >

[images> via laformación & Isang Litrong Liwanag]

 

 

Published on November 9, 2011 00:38.
Filed under: non-pedigreed

starlings say the winter is here

With hungry predators hovering nearby, the little birds must converge, flocking together, in an attempt to confuse the sparrowhawks, buzzards and peregrine falcons. [...] Each starling tracks seven other birds – irrespective of distance – which produces the group’s aerial ballet.

[all images> "Murmurations" of starlings at Gretna, Anglo-Scottish border_November 2011 via dailymail]

Published on November 5, 2011 17:30.
Filed under: dérive, nomads

against air

After a talk by Nabil Ahmed on Environmental Emergency and Political-Natural Assemblages, I was struck by the impressive structures developed as cyclone shelters in Bangladesh. The fact of being a very low and flat land together with having the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghn Rivers delta increase the threat of flooding. Catastrophes have been happening every now and then. The most severe of the deadly storms occurred in November 1970 (Bhola Cyclone), taking up to 500,000 lives.

The triangular shape of the whole Bay of Bengal funnels tropical storms towards the shoreline (around 64 knots, 74 miles/hour). And this same triangular shape is the one that some cyclone shelters need to acquire in order to face strong winds coming from the coast with their pointed convex façade. They consist of tough, but aerodynamic structures at the same time.

The cost of building one windbreaker in Bangladesh rounds £45,000 [Oxfam]. The shelter is usually built on concrete pillars (letting waves go through underneath in case of tidal surges), windows have no glass and are covered with bars and metal shutters, stairs are located at the back of the building (the concave side in triangular constructions) with railings to help people hold or climb. Upstairs, there is a room for men and another one for women and children.

When not used as emergency shelters, these spaces provide public space for community centres, schools, marriage ceremonies, vaccination hospitals, or informal trials for local issues. However, beyond these specific functions, wind shelters may also act as powerful weapons of governing a territory on a broader level, either if built by international humanitarian funds or estate authorities. Along the lines with Alex de Waal’s concept of Philanthropic Imperialism, emergencies are the opportunity for the extension of political power and coercive administration, albeit with the greater good as the goal. [Whose Emergency Is It Anyway? Dreams, Tragedies and Traumas in the Humanitarian Encounter]

[1>Cyclone Shelter in Noakhali_Bangaldesh via fredhoogervorst] [2> by IFRC] [3-5> Cyclone shelters in Bangladesh_interiors via archnet]  [6> Cyclones Tracking over Bangladesh during the 20th century via islandnet]

Published on October 30, 2011 15:35.
Filed under: hybrids

and…and…and…

< ” It is odd how the tree has dominated Western reality and all of Western thought, from botany to biology and anatomy, but also gnosiology, theology, ontology, all of philosophy…: the root-foundation, Grund, racine, fondement. The West has a special relation to the forest, and deforestation; the fields carved from the forest are populated with seed plants produced by cultivation based on species lineages of the arborescent type; animal raising, carried out on fallow fields, selects lineages forming an entire animal arborescence. The East presents a different figure: a relation to the steppe and the garden (or in some cases, the desert and the oasis), rather than forest and field; cultivation of tubers by fragmentation of the individual; a casting aside or bracketing of animal raising, which is confined to closed spaces or pushed out on to the steppes of the nomads. The West: agriculture based on a chosen lineage containing a large number of variable individuals. The East: horticulture based on a small number of individuals derived from a wide range of ‘clones’ Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree? André Haudricourt even sees this as the basis for the opposition between the moralities or philosophies of transcendence dear to the West and the immanent ones of the East: the God who sows and reaps, as opposed to the God who replants and unearths (replanting of offshoots versus sowing of seeds). Transcendence: a specifically European disease. Neither is music the same, the music of the earth is different, as is sexuality: seed plants, even those with two sexes in the same plant, subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model; the rhizome, on the other hand, is a liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality. Here in the West, the tree has implanted itself in our bodies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes. We have lost the rhizome, or the grass.

[…]

Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states.

[…]

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be”, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’ “>

excerpt from RHIZOME in Deleuze, G / Guattari, F 1987: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[music & scores by Sylvano Bussotti]

Published on October 23, 2011 13:04.
Filed under: mutant

self-sufficiency calculator

How to visualize Neo-Agrosophy and the hypothetical reterritorialization of a field when living off-grid:

< FieldMachine 1.0 [developed by FieldClub] is an interactive webtool which you can use to design your own self-sufficiency ‘unit’ based on what you would like to eat in a Britain without imports, and what kind of fuel you would like to burn for heating and cooking. The FieldMachine 1.0 allows the individual to plan and achieve recommended daily levels of essential nutrients. As your chosen options are entered, the FieldMachine 1.0 determines how much land is needed to produce each chosen food/fuel item, and also how many other humans could live in Britain if everyone did the same.

Step 1: Use the sliders in the Daily Food Values table below to achieve a daily balanced diet (Blue = too little,Red = too much, Green = balanced).
Step 2: Choose your strawbale house size and renewable fuel type.

Tips:

Daily Kcals will be affected the most by high carbohydrate foods such as Wheat, Potato, and Butter.

Daily Proteins – by Meat, Egg, Beans and Nuts. Daily fats – by Cheese, Butter and Nuts.

The fuel type you choose can radically affect the area of timber required (for example Native Broadleaf Woodland yields at 3 tonnes per hectare, whereas Short Rotation Coppice Red Alder yields at 15 tonnes per hectare).
The equations in this calculator use data from the USDA, the CIA, the World Health Organisation, Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (UK gov), and the Organic Farm Management Handbook – (Organic Farming Research Unit, Institute of Rural Studies, University of Wales).
The ‘Population Discriminator’ calculation uses the current usable agricultural land (including woodland) in the UK (22,205,000Ha – DEFRA), and the current UK population (60,600,000 – CIA). >

[TRY DEMO to calculate your sef-sufficiency unit]

 

Published on October 17, 2011 19:34.
Filed under: mutant, nomads

15 O_occupy Madrid

watch more videos of 15O_Madrid

[1> 15 October protests_Occupy Madrid by Urbano 2011] [2> Media covering 15 O protests in Rome by Mauro Magnani]

Published on October 17, 2011 00:32.
Filed under: protest & critical space

5 plastic women

Men among a protesting crowd carry five female mannequins. They are the most visible women representation among the protesters. Because even during the Arab Spring protests extended to Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan, public space is also segregated by gender. Citizens mainly complained against government corruption and lack of public services, such as electricity supply to homes. With her action in February 2011, Rozghar Mahmood Mustafa invited her female compatriots to openly join the area reserved for male protesters. The fact of simply standing behind the delimited area, where women are supposed to be protected by a cordon of ropes tied up to street lamps, only kills their desire of protesting more actively.  Plastic Women is part of the screening and discussion Northern Iraq_State of Unrest curated by Jason Waite at no.w.here, also featuring the work of Hiwa K and Reben Majeed. Waite looks at the various aesthetic strategies employed during the protests in the north of Iraq, how they obscure the distinction between art and activism, as well as form a critical position within the space of dissent. 

< Less than a week after President Mubarak of Egypt fell from power, the shockwaves of the Arab Spring swept across the levant and fomented what would become a tumultuous 60 days of continuous protest in Iraq. While endless news cycles were devoted to the uprisings in Egypt, Syria and Libya, those facing the security forces in the mainly Kurdish region in the north of Iraq were largely invisible. Mainly self-organized, these protests included a diversity of individuals that cut across social and religious divisions. Among those in the street were a number of artists contributing both body and voice as citizens and artistic practice to the heterogeneous movement. >

[Images> Plastic Women, 2011 by Rozghar Mahmood Mustafa, courtesy of Jason Waite.]

Published on October 14, 2011 08:58.
Filed under: protest & critical space

we build it every night

<  At night, it’s like Dubai is waking up, exactly when the temperature is going down. During these hours, the future face of Dubai appears. The buildings are set out against the darkness by their construction lights. Each lit-level marks each new floor. Everything shifts at night. In the daytime Dubai is impressive, but not mystical. That’s why I began to feel that I wanted to shoot at night. I had a special interest in construction sites because there you can feel at night what is still hidden during the day. […] It is a surreal atmosphere. When the lights are switched off maybe they’ve gone. In a way, it is all a mirage, on the way to somewhere else. >

[text & images>Burj Dubai during construction: Susanne Schuricht_In the Night_2006 in BASAR, S / CARVER, A / MIESSEN, M (eds.) 2007: With/Without - Spatial Products, Practices and Politics in the Middle East. Bidoun & Moutamarat.]

Published on October 9, 2011 11:23.
Filed under: invisible cities

oma/amo & the spectacle of failures

In a world of perfection and appearances, we become more and more eager to peep at failures. Specially, we enjoy finding out that celebrities and myths also belong to our everyday realm. With irony, sense of humor and a great dose of Dutch transparency, emergent Rotor collective has just curated the work of OMA/AMO for barbican under the title Progress. But far from being a standard show of chronologically ordered fetishized projects, we are delighted with a labyrinth of things that could conventionally been regarded as failures. They are however celebrated here as part of a successful trajectory to generate spaces. Walls are recycled from former shows without repainting; everyday objects are shamelessly displayed with a honest attitude towards the audience.

Tired as we are of overabundance of glamorous and glossy representations of OMA/AMO’s projects, this exhibition provides a representation of reality through images mediated by failures. Hidden stories from processes of building a building are rescued; politically incorrect tricks behind-the-scenes are simply revealed. Therefore, labels underneath every piece of work become even more important than the physical work itself. This exhibition of exhibits resembles a cabinet of curiosities compiled by some enlightened collector; but every item is here for a specific reason. Thus, they make a close connection between the visitor’s experience and the everyday reality at OMA/AMO.

Rotor collective debuted in Venice Biennale 2010 with a brilliant exhibition on users wearing out building materials and leaving trace evidence (Usus/Usures):

As a trace of use, wear reminds us that most of the time other users have gone before us, and still more will follow. In some cases, wear even provides a valuable clue as to the nature of these uses. In this sense, traces of wear play a vital part in our ability to read our environment and, by extension, appreciate it. […] Wear is always about situations.

One of their most relevant study cases when tracing back how building environment mutates was their photograph Blue Limestone Plinth (Brussels, 2010). It automatically unveiled how an area of the city was informally used:

The traces of wear on the plinth shown in this picture reveal the activity of prostitutes leaning against it, on a strategic corner in the centre of Brussels. The darkest marks show a polishing of the stone’s surface by different parts of the women’s bodies, while the lighter marks are scratches caused by their high heels. An analysis of the different traces of wear on the entire wall reveal the most popular spots, either because they are in full view of the street or because they offer slight protection from the rain.

This approach to architecture is what made them been commissioned for a similar curatorial concept. The unusual tandem at barbican composed of a curator that is not a great fan of the curated has made the collaboration even more thrilling. In words of Rem Koolhaas: This exhibition was a risk for us and we multiplied the risk by suggesting Rotor for curating it.

In addition, and following OMA/AMO’s current research on Preservation, the exhibition has opened up the Gallery West Entrance for the first time in history after completion of the building. A dead end has been turned into a public path, where pedestrians are allowed to see (only) part of the show free of charge.

[images 1-13> OMA/Progress, Curated by Rotor. barbican art gallery London 6/10/11-19/2/12. By deconcrete2011] [14> Blue Limestone Plinth by Rotor 2010]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published on October 5, 2011 18:00.
Filed under: forensic destruction, invisible cities, mutant

floods reaching prisons

Removed from Society: The Prison System and the Geography of Nowhere by Chase Dimock

< As the threat of Hurricane Irene loomed off the eastern coast last week, it was discovered mere hours before its arrival in New York that despite the city’s historic mandatory evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents, there was no plan to evacuate the estimated 14,000 prisoners held on Rikers Island. With the swift and efficient evacuation of the free citizens of New York, Mayor Bloomberg and the city government were praised by the media for taking steps to avoid a possible Hurricane Katrina style catastrophe. Yet, by failing to evacuate the prisoners of Rikers Island, they set themselves up to the possibility of replicating one of the most egregious episodes of human rights abuses surrounding Hurricane Katrina: the abandonment of the prisoners of the Orleans Parish Prison. According to the ACLU, prisoners at the Orleans Parish Prison were left locked in their cells as the flood reached the prison and were left without food or water for days until they were evacuated.

The incident at the Orleans Parish Prison received little notice from the mainstream press that preferred to chronicle the hardships of more sympathetic victims of the disaster. From the wardens that refused to evacuate them to the media that failed to cover them, it is evident that our society turns a blind eye to the notion that a prisoner has the same human rights and deserves the same consideration as free civilians. Upon becoming a criminal, the person in question cedes some essential element of humanity, as if his or her crime has voided his part in the social contract and his crime has been permanently etched into the offender’s DNA. What most effectively reinforces this view of the criminal in the public’s opinion is the prison space itself. Prisons are spaces that are removed from civic space of society. Once inside this space, the criminal becomes stripped of their humanity and is known only in the abstract for their crime and as a statistic in the ever-expanding, voiceless US prison population.

[...]

We base our modern beliefs in the system of crime and punishment on the idea that one who has committed a crime must be removed from society. Whether one believes in the prison system as deterrence or incapacitation, it is agreed that the function of the prison is to remove the offending individual from the society against which he or she has offended. What I find intriguing in this conventional wisdom is the idea that one can be “removed from society”, as if society is a space that can be located within a specific physical location that one can depart. Implicitly, if a criminal is sent to prison in order to be removed from society, then it holds that the prison itself is not a part of society. This line of reasoning would somehow ignore the ways in which ideologies of power, race, and human rights from society are reproduced and reconfigured within the prison space so as to produce behaviors compliant to recognizing the legitimate power of the state to punish and police incarcerated bodies. For the prison system, this assumption of a removal from society allows for a treatment of the incarcerated body outside of the most important feature of society that prevents the abuse of state power: the vigilance of civil society. While prisoners constitute their own unique form of a community, they are by definition unable to form a civil society as they have no rights to freely organize and have few avenues for the redressing of grievances. Outside of the vigilance of civil society, the incarcerated population falls from the memories and collective consciousness of society as a whole. > [Read full essay at As It Ought To Be]

 

 

 

Published on October 3, 2011 11:59.
Filed under: invisible cities

new york indignados

Global is the power of economy, and so are spreading the protests against its tyranny. The Funambulist posted today about the protest camp settled in Downtown Manhattan. In the same line with the protests of the 15-M movement of Spanish indignados, a new micro-society has recently begun at New York’s Zucotti Park. Being a private plot handed over to public use makes it easier to camp on, when compared to the troublesome evictions experienced in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol by the authorities (as long as the owner of the plot do not change his mind). Lambert denounces the incredible general silence of the media towards this grassroots movement that is growing bigger and bigger.

Like in Madrid, Occupy Wall Street protest camp has also renamed its site to Liberty Square, and its structure and usage of public space as a popular parliament reminds me to the Spanish ones: assemblies, commissions, support, actions… Current representative democracy can no longer be accepted as the least bad option for political systems. Global citizens seem to feel less and less identified with official leaders and they are claiming for more participation in politics and a change that is quite unexpected to come from within the establishment.

The Funambulist links to a very recommendable article by Gaston Gordillo [CriticalLegalThinking], featuring the resonance expansion of contemporary protests against corrupted systems of governance. As Gordillo refers to, The Revolution Will Not be Televised [Gill-Scott Heron, 1970s].

[all images> Occupy Wall Street via The Funambulist]

 

Published on September 29, 2011 11:38.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung, participation, protest & critical space

hortus conclusus

< A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. It is close to us. There we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

Enclosed gardens fascinate me. A forerunner of this fascination is my love of the fenced vegetable gardens on farms in the Alps, where farmers’ wives often planted flowers as well. I love the image of these small rectangles cut out of vast alpine meadows, the fence keeping the animals out. there is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.

The hortus conclusus that I dream of is enclosed all around and open to the sky. Every time I imagine a garden in an architectural setting, it turns into a magical place. I think of gardens that I have seen, that I believe I have seen, that I long to see, surrounded by simple walls, columns, arcades or the façades of buildings – sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time. > [Peter Zumthor, May 2011]

Hortus Conclusus (Peter Zumthor + Piet Oudolf) at the Serpentine Gallery London, until 16 October 2011.

 

 

[all images> Hortus Conclusus_the Serpentine Gallery Summer Pavilion_London, September 2011 by deconcrete]

 

 

Published on September 25, 2011 18:58.
Filed under: mutant

Travellers

Dale Farm is a territory of contradiction, where a legal border divides a community. Two adjoining sites, 30-min-train away from London, used to be scrapyards that were turned into living quarters. The first estate was self-established as a nomad settlement for Irish Travellers and Gypsy and Roma families some sixty years ago (45 plots). The other one is an extension that dates back to 2000 and is composed of 52 plots. The former is authorised, but the latter is not. These ethnic minorities purchased both sites and legally own them. Prefab-houses and caravans are scattered along the lanes. However, after many applications, the most recent one still lacks any building permission, whereas the neighbouring one was built in a formal way in past decades.

Consequently, conservative-run Basildon District Council decided to carry out the demolition of the second settlement, the largest eviction in UK history, with a total cost of £18 million for the clearance and without providing any other site for the resident families. Today, the Court should have decided the final fate for the settlement. Activists had already started a protest camp inside (“Camp Constant”), and built several barricades across the inner lanes of this community together with the residents by applying the wittiest military resistance tactics. But the verdict has been postponed till Monday, so dwellers are returning some of the caravans that were brought to the legal site in case of eviction back to the illegal one.

Irish Travellers minority used to share with gypsies a nomad lifestyle. Today what remains is still their seasonal working schedule. Activists have referred to the eviction as “ethnic cleansing”. But personally, I do not think it is a matter of cultural identities, but aporophobia and fear to the unstable. The contemporary spatial habits of Irish Travellers are just a direct result of social exclusion. Their cultural identity is very much influenced by the fact of being “out of established society”. That’s what joins them and makes them configure a strongly tied community. Unfortunately, it is the society that they cannot belong to what eventually gives meaning to their identity.

Dale Farm is located in the middle of the countryside, about 10 km away from the nearest village. One can only wonder why it is so important for authorities to evict the settlers living in that remote site lacking building permission.

Why did the Council even provide the needy families on-site with tax benefits if their dwellings were not legal?

If their mere existence makes villagers feel so uncomfortable, why not directly promote the eviction of both sites?

Why has their application for allowance to build on the site they legally own been constantly denied?

Authorities argument that the illegal site lies on a green belt land, but at the same time, there used to be a scrapyard in the same area only 10 years ago.

The only way for us to reach Dale Farm from the nearby railway station was by taxi. And maybe the only explanation to these questions, as absurd as coherent, was revealed to us in a conversation with the extremely prejudiced driver, who took us to the nearest crossroads to the site from the station (he refused to drop us off at the very entrance):

You will understand it when you grow older.

 

 

 

[1-8>Dale Farm Protests by deconcrete2011][9> Dale Farm_aerial view via bbc]

Published on September 23, 2011 19:17.
Filed under: forensic destruction, nomads, protest & critical space

NO projection above the pope

…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!

Published on September 22, 2011 09:15.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, protest & critical space

columns of air and threads of cloud

 

Barefoot, one enters a white curved room, apparently empty. The most relevant objects seem to be the fire protection systems and mechanical pipes above and the air-conditioning grilles. There are also tiny rope barriers preventing visitors from trespassing a certain area, but it is hard to distinguish on which side of the barrier one should walk along. Am I in front of the Emperor’s New Clothes?! Then, the curved colonnade of white vertical rods becomes more and more visible to the naked eye. The rods are not attached to the walls and they do not hang from the ceiling either. We are told that raindrops measure approximately 1 mm. And cloud droplets 0.01 mm. And those are exactly the diameters of this extreme lightweight structure, transparent as air. Its components are only revealed when a wave of air shakes them or a person in black stands behind them. One feels like a cinematographic burglar lacking his high-tech glasses to move through an invisible laser-beam labyrinth. The curved shape of the room potentiates the atmospheric installation and vice versa. During the visitor’s promenade at an utterly unhurried walking pace, one enjoys wondering whether the colonnade should ever come to an end.

Junya Ishigami wants us to experience this delicately built space with his “cute” exhibition Architecture as Air (at The Curve, Barbican Centre; curated by Catherine Ince), and thus, experience the basic elements composing natural phenomena. For him, architecture should deal with the real scale of raindrops and cloud droplets to achieve and explore the limits of a man-made equilibrium.

< In the same manner as rain falls to the earth, as clouds form in the sky, 54 columns of rain have been erected, beams placed across them, and the resulting structure strung with 2,808 threads of cloud. The result: a highly transparent building that seems to dissolve into the air. I find myself irresistibly drawn to this transparent quality, because architectural space is essentially transparent. […] by doing so, we might be able to create through architecture the kind of transparency found in nature that until now, architecture has been unable to provide. […] Such transparency, we surmised, could extinguish the boundary between ‘space as void’ in which there appears to be nothing, and ‘structure as frame’, in which a clear presence is perceivable. We have endeavoured to think of architecture as something akin to the air that surrounds us, filling space into infinity. > [Junya Ishigami]

The fact that we, pragmatist minds, are always eager to touch in order to believe, unfortunately made the structure collapse once, but it is now open to the public again. As architectural historian Taro Igarashi puts it: one might even call it “architecture as incident”. Permanence is not the be-all and end-all of architecture.

[1> Installation. Photo Lyndon Douglas. Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery, London] [2-6> Video stills. Miguel Santa Clara]

Published on September 21, 2011 14:51.
Filed under: invisible cities

london passwords

< 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]

Published on September 16, 2011 12:08.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, dérive, invisible cities

user5160788

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 21st 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

 

Published on September 6, 2011 09:59.
Filed under: BOOKS/news

cars on fire

After two intense weeks of cars being set on fire at night in the streets of Berlin, yesterday was calm again. Since January 2011 more than 530 cars have burnt, but the pyromaniac series has been going on for 4 years now. And there is still no clue for the actual reasons behind the incendiary crimes: youngster vandalism, cheating insurance companies or straight discontent among Berlin citizens.

Only two perpetrators have been arrested so far. However, if we take a look at the areas where they have taken place (see Brennende-Autos map above), a dozen are only to be found in the East Banlieu (Marzahn) and some dozens in the well-off neighbourhoods on the West periphery (Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf). Whereas in the central districts inside the inner ring, are to be count in hundreds. The more gentrified these neighbourhoods have become; the more social protests have broken out in the past 5 years. Collision in public space usually has a political background. Graffiti against Mieterhöhung (Rent increase) and Yuppies (specially from wealthy Southwest Germany) are to be found on many façades. Former working/ethnic districts Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauerberg and Neukölln have experienced an unprecedented rise in rents, which has forced locals to leave their affordable dwellings and move out somewhere far away.

Gentrification is still a double-edged weapon. Contingents of Turkish people among others were invited to immigrate and raise a city in ruins in past decades, but their city seems not to need them anymore. Obviously for Chancellor Merkel, multicultural society has utterly failed (“Multi-Kulti hat ausgedient”). But there is rage against the machinery.

[1> Cars on Fire in Berlin 2007-2010 via Brennende-Autos] [2> by Enrico Vogler] [3-5>Cars on Fire in Berlin via der Taggespiegel Berlin] [6> by Steffen Tzscheuschner via elpais]

Published on September 1, 2011 11:13.
Filed under: forensic destruction, protest & critical space

juridical masks

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 20th 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]

 

Published on August 30, 2011 11:28.
Filed under: BOOKS/news, homo ludens, mutant

the second window

Skvallerspegel are gossip mirrors. They consist of a very simple and popular device, which may be attached to the outdoor side of any window in Sweden. Being placed at 45º, they allow to look into the street without being seen. Gossip mirrors are communication tools linking interior and exterior, but working at the same time as privacy filters. They might be regarded either as the maximal extension of a traditional window or as the most efficient compression of a balcony: a second window. With unclear origins, they provide a relation between dwellers and pedestrians by means of a visual threshold. They lack the verbal or auditive channel that an open veranda would foster, but climatic conditions don’t precisely invite to establish such a connection under freezing temperatures. Severe weather might have invented Skvallerspegel to make winter time more enjoyable – dwellers curious about life outside; or perhaps it might have been dwellers’ perception of intimacy the reason for inventing them.

[1-4> gossip mirrors_Stockholm_deconcrete 2011]

 

Published on August 17, 2011 21:05.
Filed under: hybrids

collision in public space, a chronology

When appropriation of public space happens, it happens at two levels. Protesters reclaim a physical site, but at the same time they appropriate a symbol of political identity. The outbreak of rioting or violence always shows civil unrest amongst certain groups of population. London has a long history experiencing them, dating back to the Peasants’ Revolt (1381), the Gin Riots (1743) or Bloody Sunday (1887). As featured yesterday in socks-studio & il post, here is a visual chronology of London’s history throughout its rioting in public space since 1915: communist marches, clashes between leftist and extreme right, disadvantaged neighbourhoods, racially motivated protests, against cuts or increased government taxes; anarchists, environmentalists, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist…

 

*1915: Destruction of a German shop by Londoners, Poplar High St.

 

*1936: Brit bobbies destroy a communist-built barricade near Mark Lane, opening the street to Oswald Mosley fascist supporters. Communist parade in the East End.

 

*September 1958: Racial turmoils, Notting Hill.

 

*March 1968: Pacific demonstration against war in Vietnam, Grosvenor Sq. (US Embassy).

 

*November 1970: Bobbies free Houghton Street from barricades built by London School of Economics students. They protested against traffic noise.

 

*September 1976: Notting Hill blacks vs. white turmoil.

 

*August 1979: Bobbies during racial turmoil in Notting Hill

 

*April 1981: Brixton turmoil.

*October 1985: Tottenham clashes arrests

 

*March 1990: Trafalgar Square’s protests against Poll Tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher.

 

*April 1993: Anti-nazi protests in front of BNP’s headquarter in Welling, South-East.

 

*April 1997: Environmental and anti-globalisation protests in front of Downing Street.

 

*November 1999: Aftermath of a parade against privatization of the railway system and against WTO, Euston Station.

 

*April 2009: Police hit by an egg during an anarchist, anti-capitalist and environmentalist protest the day before the G20 in London.

 

*November 2010: Students turmoils against increase in education taxes, London center.

 

*March 2011: Bobbies in front of a barricade in Jermyn St. after a parade against Governmental cuts.

 

 

Published on August 12, 2011 12:21.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung, forensic destruction, protest & critical space

this square is not the Pope’s

The emblematic Central Madrid has turned into a vibrating site of proactive politics again.

2 August 2011, a few minutes before sunrise. It was the second day in the national holiday period for the masses and the city was almost empty. Everyone wants to scape the scorching summer temperatures, but some 15M “indignant” protesters remained still camped. They had marched from all over the country to bring their voice to the capital city. After 2,5 months of pacifist protests since the movement began, riot policemen decided to take action. They evicted the grass-roots information booth and the few tents from the protest camp with premeditation and nocturnality.

This Governmental shift has boosted the general outrage of a movement that was getting ready to hibernate for the summer; it has resurged now instead of September. For the past three days, policemen were told to block Plaza del Sol, emblematic public space for the demonstrators, and where the 15 May movement for real democracy was born. If the whole public square was turned into a massive protest camp since May, now it is an over-controlled empty void, a sort of Bastille-fortress. The same policemen that used to prevent anyone from camping outside the square are now preventing anyone from entering. No civil person has been allowed in the square: the absurdity of controlling a political symbol. The subway nodal station has even already been closed down for a total of 24 hours; trains do not stop at Sol.

Counterproductive as it has proved, blocking public space from people to express their ideas has only strengthened them. Even the policemen trade union (SUP) have publicly considered today Sol’s blockade as a political mistake. Madrid Central has turned from a consumption and commerce hub into a space for debate and consensus. Several surrounding squares (not sieged by police forces yet) like Jacinto Benavente, Mayor, Callao, Cibeles, Pontejos, Atocha have been spontaneously taken over to celebrate bottom-up meetings. Critical issues are being discussed, proposed and questioned: financial crisis, citizen participation, politicians’ corruption and abuse of power… The politics of public space are more active than ever and back to the very origins of Greek agoras: open places of assembly. In Valencia, Tenerife or Madrid, squares that have housed these protests are now commonly referred to as the 15M Square. Even main streets like Madrid’s Gran Vía have been turned into people’s parliaments after stopping car traffic at night. There is an urgent need for real debate; power structures need to listen.

Only 10 days left for the Pope’s bombastic visit to Madrid and the global Catholic Youth Encounter (JMJ). They are to be largely funded by the Government of our secular country in one of the worst moments for national economy. Madrid authorities start to take action in order to show global pilgrims that there is no trouble among its citizens, but tension is heavily felt everywhere. During the Papal visit, the same streets that now function as sites for political expression and debate will house hundreds of temporary confession booths, where Catholic pilgrims will be able to confess their sins in every language.

Meanwhile, 15M “indignados” claim that this square is not the Pope’s (“esta plaza, no es del Papa”). Yesterday, riot policemen started to brutally attack for the first time, beating pacific protesters: 20 injured. Today there will be gatherings and demonstrations claiming again for Real Democracy NOW in most Spanish cities around 7 pm.

[images> August protests in Madrid by Carlos Rosillo (Mayor, Preciados, Alcalá & Cibeles), Alberto Martín (Gran Vía), Samuel Sánchez (Preciados, injured & Jacinto Benavente), Kiko Huesca (Parliament), Dani Pozo (Preciados), Emilio Naranjo (Sol), Uly Martín (Sol)]

 

 

 

Published on August 5, 2011 10:49.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung, participation, post-crisis, protest & critical space

quixotic ghost airports

Spain has 52 provinces and 48 airports. Several capital towns got one during the golden 2000’s. 37 are loss-making infrastructures.

My hometown is no exception. Its flying terminal, which looks as big as the long-distance bus station, has five similar airports in less than 125 km distance (one hour drive): Logroño, Bilbao, Vitoria, Santander and Valladolid. Mobility efficiency is left aside when every politician from the National Government wants his own hometown to get an airport. It is like a monument to glorify his political ego amongst their fellow countrymen.

The second main aim of building a local airport is obviously real estate value increase on the surrounding terrain: industrial, logistic and hotel complexes are to blossom out of agricultural land like manna from Heaven. However, Spanish airports may also serve as a wise tool to track back many speculation processes occurring during the last decade. Two-year-old Huesca airport will not have any more commercial flights; just the cafeteria will remain open for pricy daily menus. Lleida’s almost inexistent air traffic makes it possible to have local sheep in charge of the maintenance of the lawn surrounding the landing track.

Villanubla Airport is in Valladolid and dates back from the 1970s. Villanubla literally means Fog Valley, an ideal site for a delirious airport. The local name of the area was proudly kept for the new infrastructure, so that everybody could admire the harsh climatic conditions that they bravely need to deal with every day. But at least, this flying node is still working. In Ciudad Real, after being opened in 2008, the terminal is going to close down in October and become the ultimate ghost airport, only three years after completion. Ciudad Real, in English both Royal City and Real City, is only 2,5 hours drive from Madrid Barajas International Airport. However, it was built with great ambitions: the longest landing track in Europe (4 km). The bigger the construction, the more progress it will bring along with; its name “Don Quixote Airport” matches this foolish disproportion very well.

Another mega-infrastructure near there, the high-speed AVE railway connection between Toledo and Cuenca has been recently withdrawn. The reason: 18,000-euro daily maintenance cost for an average of 9 passengers. How can high-speed trains in such a small country be so developed that American and Chinese engineers even came to learn from Spanish infrastructures?

Spain, obsessed with its inferiority complex, used most of the virtual benefits of the construction boom for pharaonic mobility works; in order to show the world how to build monumental railway, airports and toll roads. Madrid alone has built five new radial private speedways to access the city. Today, the loan has not even been payed off and only 14,000 daily drivers (60,000 expected) are using them.

Every town wanted her own Guggenheim, her own International Convention Centre and her own global University. This has resulted into empty museums, eerie architectural landmarks and mediocre faculties spread all over the country. Financial crisis seems to be the only brake to Spain’s quixotic urban development.

[for further information on infrastructural remnants after the Spanish Crisis, watch ¿Era necesario construirlo?]

[1> Ciudad Real ghost airport via abc]

Published on August 2, 2011 19:21.
Filed under: post-crisis

Parangolés & Penetráveis

Parangolés and Penetráveis. The former consist of a series of complicate capes that only reveal their intricate nature to the viewer when the person who wears one moves and dances. The latter are labyrinth-like constructions waiting for the viewer to penetrate their boundaries and get lost in a series of tropical colourful panels. Hélio Oiticica’s works from 1960s Brazilian avant-garde contributed enormously to the world of interactivity. A Parangolé is both an object and the representation of its own movements; as long as the fabric waves in the air, it turns dancers’ changing trajectories automatically visible. They are able to visualize unstable spaces. As Simone Osthoff beautifully describes them:

<[Oiticica] created interrelations around the sensual body and the many spatial forms it interacts with. His participatory creations were based on two key concepts that he named “Crelazer” and the “Supra-Sensorial.” Crelazer, one of Oiticica’s neologisms meaning “to believe in leisure,” was for him a condition for the existence of creativity and is based on joy, pleasure and phenomenological knowledge. The second concept, the Supra-Sensorial, promotes the expansion of the individual’s normal sensory capacities in order to discover his/her internal creative center. The Supra-Sensorial could be represented by hallucinogenic states (induced with or without the use of drugs), religious trance and other alternate states of consciousness such as the ecstasy and delirium facilitated by the samba dance. For Oiticica, the Supra-Sensorial created a complete de-aesthetization of art underscoring transformative processes.

[…]

Oiticica’s work fused formal investigation with leisure activities, inviting viewer participation in the creation of “unconditioned behaviour”. In the cultural context of “the country where all free wills seem to be repressed or castrated”, the concepts of Crelazer and the Supra-Sensorial directly defied a pleasure-denying productivist work ethic, subverting it through activities that embraced pleasure, humor, leisure and carnivalesque strategies. Reverie and revolt were never far apart in Oiticica’s work, as Brett has pointed out. Leisure for him was first and foremost a revolutionary anti-colonialist strategy.

[…]

Oiticica described his relation to the popular samba, making reference to the intense experience provoked by dance: “The rehearsals themselves are the whole activity, and the participation in it is not really what Westerners would call participation because the people bring inside themselves the “samba fever” as I call it, for I became ill of it too, impregnated completely, and I am sure that from that disease no one recovers, because it is the revelation of mythical activity…Samba sessions all through the night revealed to me that myth is indispensable in life, something more important than intellectual activity or rational thought when these become exaggerated and distorted.”>

 Thanks, Santiago!

[sources> solarflareark, the art section, the boulevardier]

 

Published on July 29, 2011 09:20.
Filed under: homo ludens

landscape-generated languages


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 15th 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]

Published on July 26, 2011 20:04.
Filed under: BOOKS/news

everything has been photoshopped

 

A statue of the Virgin was turned into a personification of Justice, simply by removing the Christ Child and replacing him with scales.

Network artist Oliver Laric reinterprets Susan Sontag’s statement that just about everything had been photographed (1977), and proclaims that just about everything has been photoshopped. His video essay and statement on visual culture Versions (2010) also features the Iranian incident from 2008, where the Revolutionary Guards released an image with a digitally added missile. This resulted in an explosion of versions and speculations about the real amount of missiles that had actually been fired, at both official and informal level. Dozens of anonymous graphic jokes also explored fantastic and absurd re-combinations of missiles.

Versions coexist. […] Authenticity is decided by the viewer. […] In the telling and the retelling (of different interpretations), the people reveal not the action but themselves. […] We have an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one. Laric collects text fragments and squeezes them with collages out of images found in the Internet. In Versions, he shows resemblances between animation movies (Winnie the Pooh, the Jungle Book or ET); different ways of reproducing Zidane’s kick incident; bootleg recordings of films; celebrities’ faces replacing porn actors’; as well as simultaneous visits to a modernist architecture icon in LA. Laric (also co-author of vvork platform) uses available Internet material for his remixes dealing with iconoclasm and iconography.

PN: How do you use stealing?

OL: Stealing creates a feeling of liberty because everything belongs to you while simultaneously causing stress as you have to constantly make restrictions what not to use.  (Oliver Laric interviewed by Peter Nowogrodzki for Incite!)

There are more books about books than any other subject.

[see also Oliver Laric's Versions 2009]

 

Published on July 25, 2011 13:35.
Filed under: mutant

Stop Evictions flash mobs

Yesterday, and for the 8th time, around 50 activists managed to stop another eviction for loan non-payment since 15-May Spanish protests began. Only in Madrid, 2,532 families were evicted during the first quarter 2011. The victims of the mortgage crisis assume some of the responsibility for having signed a loan over their possibilities, in a context of national encouragement towards home-property as the only way of housing. However, bank institutions largely overvalued real estate, which has led to a paradox. Not only does a household pay off their debt by loosing their home, but due to the current legislation they also owe additional money; real estate is valued now at a much lower price by the same banking institution. Furthermore, over 700,000 new apartments in Spain remain empty after completion, trapped in after-crisis legal limbos.

The Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Mortgage Victims Platform) proposes to change this amongst their solutions compiled in form of a manifest. Debt must be settled with foreclosed homes and without any additional fee, like it happens in the US and in other countries of the EU. If a household is unable to make mortgage loan payments, the bank must only repossess the home. This grass-roots association aims to stop evictions, but also urges the Government to take over mortgaged dwellings and turn them into low-rent social housing. This initiative has already proofed successful in the Basque Country. The PAH also proposes the loan market to be audited, as well as limiting loan installments to a maximum 30% of the monthly income. As they state in their manifest, the call to stop evictions comes from the current violation of the UDHR Article 25, the Spanish Constitution Article 47, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Article 11.

Today, more than 50 riot policemen prevented a 9th flash mob from achieving their goal. Moreover, the method to notify evictions has become stricter, according to the current state of affairs. Instead of notifying a certain date and time, from now on they will rather mention a time interval spanning several days or weeks. This measure tries to avoid demonstrators chaining themselves to the entrance door. Activists have reacted by staying overnight at to-be-foreclosed homes at critical nights, and have recently called to squat every evicted dwelling.

Suffocating situation  in Madrid’s turmoil summer, and still two hot events to come: the national protest march for True Democracy is arriving 23rd July to the capital, demonstrators coming from all over the country; and the Pope’s mega-visit in August with a disproportionate cost of 50 million euros. Suffocating.

[image> Stop Evictions Flash Mob, Madrid 19/07/2011 via elpais]

Published on July 20, 2011 15:04.
Filed under: post-crisis, protest & critical space

berlin trash connection

Pfand is a magic and highly used German word for deposit; it functions as a sort of informal contract between two parties or even a contemporary form of barter. Usually involving small valuables, it is largely used for returnable bottles. In Germany there are three official prices for empties:

*Standard beer bottles: 0,08 € / unit

*Other glass bottles and special ones: 0,15 € / unit

*Aluminium cans and most hard plastic bottles: 0,25 € / unit

Supermarket machines scan returned empties and one gets the value of the goods back.

Pfandgeben.de is a non-profit platform to bring people together. It puts empties’ holders (Pfandbesitzern) and collectors (Pfandsammlern) simply in contact. By means of a website, it is possible to search a list of available collectors in one’s neighbourhood, call or text to their cell phone numbers, so that they pick up the empties for free. Depending on the amount of bottles that one needs to get rid of, different names appear to be willing to pick them up: under 20 bottles, around 20, around 30, around 40 or more than 40. Jonas Kakoschke, assisted by Corinna Northe and Mareike Geiling, started the initiative within his communication design studies at HTW in Berlin. However, the list of service providers is growing out of town; the network is expanding already to other German cities like Augsburg, Essen or Cologne. The website provides also the possibility to enter new phone numbers from potential collectors, as well as accept donations of old cell phones and SIM cards for collectors even lacking this basic infrastructure.

The returnable bottles system has basically an ecological and energetic aspiration to reduce pollution and human waste. But the bottom-up network launched by Kakoschke implements it with a social plus: a mutual benefit for both holder and collector in form of a Win-Win typical situation. The empties’ holder does not need to take them back to the supermarket and the nomad collector becomes extra earnings for the job, without wandering around the streets for so long.

Trash collection is regarded as something natural and logic in developing countries, making informal networks recycle as many materials as formal systems provided by Governments. But it makes even more sense that this phenomenon takes place in the developed consumption world. Communication development and Internet politics build a parallel virtual city of negotiations, which can facilitate the exchange of super specific products and services.

 

Published on July 17, 2011 09:37.
Filed under: invisible cities, nomads