deconcrete

<’They Rule’ aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 1000 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. […] A few companies control much of the economy and oligopolies exert control in nearly every sector of the economy. The people who head up these companies swap on and off the boards from one company to another, and in and out of government committees and positions. These people run the most powerful institutions on the planet, and we have almost no say in who they are. This is not a conspiracy, they are proud to rule, yet these connections of power are not always visible to the public eye.>

Theyrule.net was launched in 2001 by Josh On.

^ Remains of the Hejaz Railway in Saudi Arabia, Von Medina an die jordanische Grenze, photographed by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, 2002-2003.

 
Designed by German engineer Heinrich Meissner, the Hejaz Railway was built under the Ottoman Empire 1900-1908; a 1,300 km-long line linking Damascus with Medina (originally thought to connect Constantinople with the holy city of Mecca in 120 hours). It was meant to shorten distances for both population as well as soldiers, in order to strengthen authority within Arab provinces of the Empire. This strategy of controlling a vast territory through transport infrastructure goes very much in line with what Scott proposes as the Art of Not being Governed: remaining stateless by seeking refuge in remote regions beyond authority reach. Nonetheless, bedouin tribes in rebellion against Ottoman rule – supported by the legendary Lawrence of Arabia – torn out the railway tracks of the Hejaz Railway in 1916-17. What remains in the middle of nowhere are these abandoned railroad stations, where no train stops any longer. They consist of standardized pieces of architecture, made out of two L-shaped volumes and a few window openings. The lines can vaguely be distinguished today on the gravel surface of the desert.

^ Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. Image included in Börner’s Atlas of Science, via scimaps

Mapping and land surveying were the physical outcome of colonial practices during Renaissance and Enlightenment, where invented lines demarcating a territory materialized the old obsession of fixing, enlarging and protecting borders. As Foucault put it when analysing Machiavelli’s Prince in Security, Territory, Population (1978), Machiavelli’s problem was not power of a sovereign being legitimate or not, but precisely how to ensure the sovereign’s power. Drawing the first cartographic representation of an uncharted land was very much linked in colonial times to claiming rights of sovereignty over the place. The stunning and meticulous Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) of India from the 18^th century developed by Col. Lambton and Sir George Everest among others proofed a very efficient tool of control. In Mapping an Empire: the geographical construction of British India 1765-1843, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain employed modern scientific survey techniques not only to create and define the spatial image of its Indian empire but also to legitimate its colonialist activities as triumphs of liberal, rational science bringing ‘civilization’ to irrational, mystical, and despotic Indians. The reshaping of cartographic technologies in Europe into their modern form, including the adoption of the technique of triangulation (known at the time as ‘trigonometrical survey’) at the beginning of the nineteenth century, played a key role in the use of the GTS as an instrument of British cartographic control over India.

Foucault added that sovereignty and governance of a territory have progressively evolved towards the allowance of circulation of value to take place, rather than a fixation of the borders. However, I would argue that we might be assisting to a contemporary redefinition of territorial boundaries, in order to keep on with such circulations of capital. The increasing re-colonization that almost every nation is carrying out of their commons (nature reserves, or underground and water resources) is reshaping the role of sovereignty within those national boundaries.

^ Brazil Electromagnetic spectrum division

by Paulo Tavares:

<In the last five years, police forces have shut down approximately 7,000 illegal radios throughout the Brazilian territory, almost double the number of radio frequency concessions given by the national government in the same period. In 2008 alone, out of approximately 19,000 claims for concessions, only 2,800 were licensed and around 1,200 illegal broadcastings were cut off air. This video shows excerpts of a radio deactivation mock-up made to be braodcast by the largest media corporation in Brasil (Globo). By portraying radio-practitioners as criminals, media trusts aim to hold power over the definition of what is technically and legally legitimate in relation to broadcasting.> [Read full essay]

^ Original building plans of Osama’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Graphics via bbc news.

<The Pentagon refused to release any official photographs that would credibly establish the al Qaeda chief as having been among those killed in the attack. […] In the society of the spectacle should we be surprised that the two most widely circulated images surrounding Operation Neptune’s Spear are pictures of people watching TV.> [Iain Boal in his essay Heads in a Box, Photoworks Magazine Nov-April 2011/12]

These pictures that Boal refers to consisted of: Obama’s team faces clustered around a screen in the White House (we cannot see what they watch), and Osama watching himself on a domestic TV monitor while sitting alone in his Abbottabad compound (we can see what he watches). Apart from that, two other relevant images widely circulated through the Internet, both low-res and high-res hybrids. First, a blurry image of a bed on top of a rug covered in blood inside Osama’s Pakistani residential complex after the US military attack. In our current hyper-technified age, low-quality footage recorded with some sort of mobile device still proofs more authentic than professional imagery. And second, a fake photocomposition of Osama’s corpse. The world was eager to find material proof of the event, but the intelligentsia decided that we should rather believe it.

Last week, the demolition of the site was accomplished, and with it, all remaining evidence of Osama’s presence disappeared. The process of tearing down his hideout physically exposed its interior to the world for some minutes before vanishing forever.

^ Obama’s team watching news. Released by the White House, 1 May 2011. Image via dailymail

^ Osama watching TV in his Abbottabad compound. Image via dailymail

^ Osama’s Abbottabad compound after US military attack. Still from abc news.

^ Photocomposite of Osama’s corpse. Image via indiavision.

^ Demolishing Osama Bin Laden’s compound. AFP. Image via deccanchronicle.

Give off / Give out, video, 3’30″. Video & Text by Philippe Van Wolputte, 2011

<”Give off / Give out” documents an intervention in Jakarta Januari 5th 2011, dealing with the problems of fine dust after the demolition of buildings. Indonesia is the second biggest importer of asbestos which is extremely dangerous when inhaled. In the video you see a small team trying to prevent the fine dust, which carries asbestos in it, of spreading through the air by watering the site. This intervention gets repeated in different parts of the city.>

^ Monument of Sugar, 2007 by Van Brummelen & De Haan. 304 sugar blocks installed at Argos, Brussels.

<Following the discovery that a large amount of European sugar ends up outside of Europe, we embarked on a research trip to investigate the European subsidized sugar trade. We travelled to Nigeria to purchase European excess sugar cheaply and to ship it back home. To elude the European trade barrier for sugar imports we made use of a minimal artistic intervention and transformed the sugar in situ into a monument. In this way we could submit our import application under the Uniform Commercial Code Law 9703, which applies to all monuments and original artworks regardless of the material in which they are produced. The material result of this research, two groups of sugar modules, is shown together with a film essay, which charts our travels and investigations into the sugar trade. Slowly running titles narrate the obstacles we faced to find out more about the sugar trade as well as the difficulties we encountered in the production of the monument. These running titles are intersected by documentary footage exploring, in long slow takes, hidden production landscapes of global trade, like crop fields, sugar refineries, flow-bands, harbors, and the different sites where we performed our drifting studio practice.>

Deconcrete for The Funambulist:

<Our friend from Deconcrete, Daniel Fernández Pascual wrote this week’s guest writer essay in which he questions the idea of sovereignty on territories that remain legally blurry. Indeed, the paradigm of the two-dimensional map cannot be enough anymore to describe lands (sky, underground, space, other planets etc.) whose sovereignty had never necessitated to be discussed in another way than theoretically in the past. Our era opens a new paradigm in which the legal action of a State on a territory will be defined through the complexity of space and its multiple layers.>

read full essay

thanks, Léopold!

film by Jacob Sutton [2012]

^^ Communist World, 2011 by Theo Deutinger & Catarina Dantas [Mark#30]. <Communism is still alive. Although capitalism won a victory when the Berlin Wall went down, communism is triumphing as nation states continue to bail out banks in the wake of the recent economic crisis. Global capitalism is hugely unorganized and has no interest in a comprehensive plan for the future of the world – and, if it did, it would not know how to go about achieving such a goal. Global communism, on the other hand, has a clear idea about the organization of the world but does not know how to maintain competition, preserve individual freedom and generate public enthusiasm. Each of these ideologies falls short of its potential. This seems to leave only two possibilities: the two must merge or must face extinction. Either way, the consequence will be an era without ideology.>

vs.

^ McWorld, 2006 by OMA/AMO, Theo Deutinger & Bea Ramo. Brand New Food [2006] re-edited AMO-map. <Out of all Fast food chains in the World, McDonalds is not only its synonym but also by far the largest, most successful and most criticised. McDonalds was founded 15th may 1940 in San Bernardino, California by Ray Kroc. Today McDonald’s operates over 31,000 restaurants in more than 119 countries on six continents, employing more than 1.5 million people. Every day McDonald’s serves more than 47 million customers around the world. Though its principle is to serve its clients all over the world with the same menu, some exceptions are made for dishes that are based on local specialties for which there is a great demand, and which can be integrated into the company’s product line. In predominantly Muslim countries like Malaysia, pork is not served due to Muslim dietary laws and is replaced by beef. In India, the fact that Hinduism forbids the eating of beef, and Islam forbids pork, prompted McDonald’s initially to use lamb instead; it later switched to chicken.>

^ Avoid the Center, 2008 by Theo Deutinger & Theresia Kohlmayr [Mark#15]. <The investigation into the relationship between the size of a country and its prosperity shows that extreme dimensions are an advantage. By reorganizing the countries of the world according to their physical size, an interesting phenomenon emerges that shows prosperity at the edges and meagerness in the middle of the scale. The segment of the super-sized countries is dominated by Canada, USA and Australia with the vastly developing BRIC-Countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) joining in while the zone of XXS-States is dominated by countries like Luxembourg as world’s richest country and tax-havens like the Cayman Islands. Seen in this light the European Union established itself as a perfect androgynous state that, at its will, is able to bridge this gap and appear wherever it is most suitable. Its member states can either appear as toothless dwarfs or, if the members are working together, the European Union can appear as important player amidst of world’s largest and powerful countries.>

^^ ‘Encampments’ in Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea (waiting areas for admission or deportation of migrants). By Migreurop, 2009.

vs.

^ Irregular Migrant routes, by ICMPD.

^ Barcelona Dark Rooms, 2007 by Pol Esteve Castello & Marc Navarro Fornós. Courtesy: the authors.

This plan atlas compiles 15 typologies of dark rooms in Barcelona for anonymous male sexual encounters, where fantasy and real pleasure operate in constant negotiation. Researched by Pol Esteve Castello & Marc Navarro Fornós (2007), the plans of these barely furnished homes include structural elements with semantic relevance for collective ecstasy. The audacity of revealing the otherwise invisible plans, for outsiders as well as for insiders, plays with the irony of an intentional desecration. Darkness is mapped here through the exact location of light spots and TV monitors screening porn movies. The intricate partitions (panels, columns, corners…) and elaborate width of each opening (aisles, thresholds, glory holes…) are the basic elements defining these labyrinthine liminal spaces of desire. Holmes, O’Byrne & Gastaldo (Setting the space for sex, 2007) define them as refusing ‘to function in and be part of what Deleuze (1992) calls “societies of control”. Public gay sex spaces, such as parks, alleys, restrooms, rest stops, adult theatres, video arcades, bookstores, bars and gay bathhouses are often thought of as being filthy and residing outside “the social”. However, it is the public nature of the location and its on-site sexual possibilities inextricably linked with risk that intensifies the power and pleasure of the erotic encounter (Leap, 1999). […] Desire is not an “absence” (a lack of something), but a force that makes us move (Colebrook, 2002) […] To paraphrase Bataille, gay bathhouses are necessary “architectures of excess” that permit desire to free itself from the constraints of everyday life.’

^ War Primer 2, Plate 23. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

< War Primer 2 is a limited edition book that physically inhabits the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable 1955 publication War Primer. The original is  a collection of Brecht’s newspaper clippings, each accompanied by a four-line poem that he called Photo-epigrams. It was the culmination of almost three decades of intermittent activity.  The title deliberately recalls the textbooks used to teach elementary school children how to read; Brecht’s book is a practical manual, demonstrating how to “read” or “translate” press photographs. Brecht was profoundly uneasy about the affirmative role played by the medium within the political economy of capitalism and referred to press photographs as hieroglyphics in need of decoding.

War Primer 2 is the belated sequel. While Brecht’s War Primer was concerned with images of the Second World War, War Primer 2 is concerned with the images of conflict generated by both sides of the so-called “War on Terror”.

“Don’t start with the good old things but the bad new ones” Brecht famously said, and in this spirit Broomberg and Chanarin [choppedliver] have gathered their material from the internet - compressed, uploaded, ripped, squeezed, reformatted, re-edited and often anonymous images - rather than sifting through newspapers with a pair of scissors.

Heiner Müller once said that to use Brecht without changing him is an act of betrayal. With War Primer 2 Broomberg and Chanarin have appropriated Brecht’s original, giving us their critique of images of contemporary conflict, which is simultaneously a betrayal and a homage.> [source text> MACK books]

^ War Primer 2, Plate 72. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

^ War Primer 2, Plate 6. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

^ War Primer 2, Plate 21. 2011, by Oliver Chanarin & Adam Broomberg.

^  Saturday Come Slow, 2010. Filmed inside Cambridge University’s anechoic chamber (designed to create total silence) and featuring former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Ruhal Ahmed, this short by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is a reflection on Ahmed’s experiences whilst in detention (particularly how he was interrogated using high-volume music) and about the use of human sound on the body. 

^ B/W: Photograph series of Armenian bus-stops in The Architecture of Waiting, 1997/2004 by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg.

Colour: Bus-stops in Burgos, Spain. Designed by H&deM, 2011. Photos by Ángel Ayala.

This week my hometown’s newspapers revealed that our recently built bus-stops designed by H&deM are indeed a direct replica of soviet ones erected in Armenia in 1970s. Apart from the banality of this interesting fact, together with the local anger caused by the high fees paid to the architects, I would like to make three small remarks to the excellent argumentation of the architects’ concept in their website:

< Instead of designing a Herzog & de Meuron bus shelter, we were inspired by the work of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg called “The Architectures of Waiting”. It is a series of photographs that she took in 1997 * of bus-stops in Armenia (the oldest Christian Country**). We have recreated some of these bus-stops in polished concrete and galvanized steel. Instead of being simply functional shelters, the beauty of these small structures is how they relate to the human body, and that they are sculptural and somewhat poetic social gathering places***. >

* There is no recognition to the soviet designer of the bus stops in the 1970s, but to the German photographer who took pictures of them in 1997. The inspiration is linked to the book where they were published. The image has completely erased the original architect: fewer problems with copyright in buildings. But it makes sense: if the ultimate author was the Soviet Union and it doesn’t exist anymore, there is total freedom to reuse the idea.

** It seems that the main reason for justifying their decision is that Armenia is the oldest Christian country in the world. Both Spain and Armenia appear to share tight religious connections, even if many Spaniards would have difficulties to locate Armenia accurately in a global map. This is a fantastic argument for copying a soviet bus-stop from the Armenian steppe and pasting it in the ‘Catholic’ Spanish steppe.

*** We copy Armenian bus-stops, even if they might look like ‘simply functional shelters’ (=boring). So H&deM upgrade them by declaring that, although they have almost 1:1 similar shape, they are nonetheless ‘poetic and gathering spaces relating to the human body’. Armenians alike, we are also Christians, so we need to believe it.

^ Split, Croatia: Roman Emperor Diocletian’s Palace and the densely populated city in 1912. [images via American Urban Architecture & wikimedia]

^ Berlin, Germany: the medieval monastery, the Baroque castle, the communist Palace of the Republic and the shopping mall replicating the Baroque Stadtschloss. [image via stadtentwicklung]

^ Mexico City, Mexico: the pre-Colombian Tenochtitlán pyramids overlay the Conquistadors’ cathedral and governmental palace. [image via skyscrapercity]

^ Córdoba, Spain: Roman temple – Visigoth church – Muslim Mosque (8^th century) – Catholic Cathedral inserted inside the Mosque (13^th &16^th century). The minaret turned into a bell-tower.

< the mosque’s lamps were melted down to make new bells for the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, 800 km to the north. This probably seemed only fair, since the lamps had themselves been made from Santiago’s original bells: when the Moors had conquered the city in 997 they had dragged the bells to Cordoba and melted them down into lamps. > [source: Bevan, R 2006. The destruction of memory - Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. Image via otraarquitecturaesposible]