deconcrete

< [...] a greying Mediterranean that stretches toward the horizon, above which heavy nimbus clouds appear ready to burst open in a mid-day shower. To the right of the screen, a volcanic mass juts from beneath the ocean’s surface, revealing a small island shaped much like a pumice stone – a tourist’s hideaway, perhaps, or a monastic sanctuary. The landscape, tinted in becalming pastels and high-definition aquamarine, suggests a placid environment on the verge of great turmoil. If Warnell’s mise-en-scène seems to bear a striking likeness to the fabled island shots in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960), it is likely not coincidence.  For much as the paradigmatic Italian art film used littoral space as a semiological and architectonic conduit for traversing the boundaries of the Étranges and the Étrangers, Outlandish’s camera eye translates the swirling atmospheres of the ocean into a fluid subject, a foreign skin, an interzone of sorts in which to theorize the body and its relation to the ‘outside’ unknown. [...] >

read full article by Erik Morse [frieze]

‘Outlandish are the bodies: they are made of the outside, of the extraneitas that forms the outsider’s outsidiness…’ 
The first line of Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘libretto’ for Outlandish

Phillip Warnell. Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies. 35 mm film, 20 min, 2009. [in collaboration with Jean-Luc Nancy]

[image> videostill via CPH:DOX 2011]

La Sublevación (The Uprising) is a recently published cartographic visualization of the pro-Franco military coup in Spain 18^th July 1936. Its author Víctor Hurtado maps the improvisation and deliberation with which both sides, fascist and republican, combatted. The role of dense narrow streets or wide avenues was decisive on the fate of the uprising that day: placing of the barricades, spacing and timing of shoot-outs. But also the physical and political distances between key institutions like Republican Governments or Military Headquarters and barracks (Gobierno Militar, Cuartel de Artillería…). With Hurtado’s maps, one realizes the complexity of the whole apparatus surrounding the event,of anything that had in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings. [G. Agamben’s definition]. The relational network of power structures is automatically revealed, making possible to understand the dynamics of Spanish cities at the time: which buildings had been playing the main role in everyday politics, where power decisions were actually taken, where to seek refuge under state of exception, who to negotiate with in critical moments and who to defeat first to gain control over population.

As Hurtado puts it in this meticulous atlas, the success of the fascist uprising was in many cities just a matter of small details, even a few hours.

V. Hurtado, 2011. La Sublevación. Edicions Dau: Barcelona.

^ V. Hurtado. Barcelona: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. Cádiz: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. Sevilla: Fascist Uprising 1936

^ V. Hurtado. San Sebastián: Fascist Uprising 1936

[all images by Victor Hurtado via C. Geli 09/12/2011. 18-J: cartografía de una sublevación. elpais]

TED Talk by Taryn Simon

Before Radar was invented warfare tactics could rely on visual tricks and trompe-l’oeil as a means of passive defence. The half-accomplished project of a Sham Paris outside Paris (Faux Paris, 1918) was a fake city to be largely exposed and to attract the most attention from German bomber planes flying above at night. Sham Saint-Denis, sham Aubervilliers, sham Gare de l’Est, and sham Champs-Élysées…

< The powers that were in Paris at the end of World War I tried to […] create a Sham Paris located on the outskirts of the real city – it was to be doomed, offered with confusing lights and displays that would disorient German aviators into bombing and destroying it rather than the real city. […] There were to be sham streets lined with electric lights, sham rail stations, sham industry, open to a sham population waiting to be bombed by real Germans. It is a perverse city, filled with the waiting-to-be-murdered in a civilian target. […] Sham Paris is a city of created murders to save the innocent. > 

Manipulating aerial views is a tool that has lately been empowered by Google Earth. In 2006, ecological activists denounced regional authorities in the Spanish Canary Islands for providing Google with out-dated photographs. Hence, irregular urban developments destroying the coastline could be hidden from the public eye.

Contrary to Sham Paris that built a new territory to be destroyed, the tactic in the Canary Islands was to build a new image of a sham coast in order not to be destroyed.

[text & images from the Illustrated London News, 6/11/1920 via Ptak Science Books]

thanks tito!

< The sculpture La Fisiología del Gusto [The Physiology of Taste] by Adán Vallecillo presents the contradiction between the stainless steel tray, from the world of gourmet cooking, and its content of hundreds of corroded teeth. This macabre recipient alludes to the foreign medical teams that have arrived at the indigenous communities in the poorest regions of Honduras, extracting the decayed teeth of the inhabitants. Vallecillo exposes the waste and precarious living situation of these groups, while shedding light on the accumulation of this extraction, and the need for a remedial politics. Physiology – the science that studies the organs, including the functions of taste – operates in this work as a critical metaphor to identify the socially approved and the rejected. The tray with the teeth therefore provokes in the viewer a physiological and social distaste, generating a moment of awareness and recognition of the violence involved in these politics of extraction. >  [text> Venice Biennale 2011]

[1> Adán Vallecillo_La Fisiología del Gusto [The Physiology of Taste], 2010. Carious teeth and stainless steel tray, 3 x 44 x 25 cm. via vvork] [2> Adán Vallecillo's installation representing Honduras at the Venice Biennale 2011 by daniel fernández pascual]

There is a circular hole in the wall, about 30-40 cm diameter and perforated at 1 metre above the ground. A man enters through the hole in the wall and a man (apparently the same individual) exits again through the same hole. His mate is standing right next to the hole and seems to be waiting for him. Yesterday I came across these pictures again. The enigmatic hole is the entrance to a room. It is a door that keeps you fit, elastic and flexible, if you want to discover what there is at the other side of the wall. Its dimension relies on the utmost reduction of a bending human body. And the erotic experience of penetrating it is intimately connected both to the materiality of the hole and the earthen texture of the wall. It is an intuitive understanding of a house as the shelter of a woman’s uterus. It requires thinking where to place first a leg, an arm, then a hand and a foot. But even if it looks like a perforation, as if material had been removed out of the massive surface, the hole was indeed already there before the wall was built all around it. It is incredibly mysterious when our iconic idea of a rectangular door mutates and becomes something else that defines a new type of threshold.

Below there is another door of Korongo houses that also fascinates me: the oversized threshold, shaped as a human-size keyhole. One discovers its meaningfulness after knowing that it lets villagers access the room while carrying two large jars with drinking water hanging from a stick over their shoulders.

George Rodger captured in his photographs the everyday lives of the Nuba people in Sudan in late 1940s, their houses, their wrestling combats with sharp-edge bracelets, and their aesthetic scars that adorn their bodies.

[photos by George Rodger in Village of the Nubas. Phaidon 1999]

In the middle of nowhere they date back to the early 2000s. But these lines are still very well preserved. They measure around 70 feet wide (21,3 metres). Oblique lines configuring two main gigantic structural grids that cover around 1 square mile each, made to be seen from above. One of them is framed in a rectangular shape. For the other one, they might have realized that it was not necessary any frame. Instead, they drastically increased its Albedo (light reflectivity coefficient) through a highly reflective mineral composition. This fact together with the alignment of both mega-structures with seasonal alluvial flows lead to different speculations on their actual function, either related to war, power or natural resources (issues which surprisingly tend to be linked altogether):

(a) Calibrate optics for Chinese satellites or even weapons.

(b) Geo-engineering attempts to guide or redirect the unpredictable alluvial fans caused by water flow through the desert.

(c) Assist in mining exploration guidance by discovering the flow patterns of alluvial gold, silver, platinum or other metal/mineral deposits. Which for me appears to be the most plausible hypothesis.

The decay of the lines is not simply due to natural abandonment but a way to be easily monitored from above. Are we assisting to a gold rush in the Gobi Desert? The region of nearby Altay Mountain (“the place producing gold”) has over 138 ores located in the same area. Vehicle tracks and tailings reveal the trace of intensive mining operations. If that were the case, it would be all about humans modifying a landscape to observe how it changes; watching the metamorphosis of the metamorphosis.

Looking forward to what the alteration of the image of the territory eventually unearths.

Thanks, laura!

[speculations & images via quora]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

< ” 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]

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]

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]