deconcrete

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.]

<  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.]

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]

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]

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]

< 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]

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]

…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!

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]

< 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]

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 21^st 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

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]

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 20^th 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]

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]

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.