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Wanted to share with you a couple of links that have deeply interested and distressed me today and yesterday. The first one is a lecture that Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California, gave at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her recent research focuses on the concept of political sovereignty as it is connected to globalization and other transnational forces. Archived by Resist, a project i am involved in, the lecture explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Whether they aim to deter poor people, illegal workers, asylum seekers, drugs, weapons and other contraband, enslaved youth, ethnic or religious mixing, walls and fences basically do not work.
The list of walls she gave is absolutely alarming, especially considered that she focused on the ones that have risen since the much celebrated fall of the Berlin Wall: the U.S. border with Mexico and the Israeli West Bank barrier (these two share high technology, sub-contracting and they also reference each other for legitimation), Post-Apartheid South Africa's internal maze of walls and check point, Saudi Arabia concrete structure along its border with Yemen, India's reinforced border with Pakistan and Bengladesh, Botswana's electric fence along the border with Zimbabwe, the wall between Egypt and Gaza, etc. But also walls within walls: gated communities so popular in the U.S. (in particular in Southern Californian communities living closer to the Mexico border), walls around Israel settlements in West Bank, walls around the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem and the walls that partition the city itself, the triple layer of walls around Spanish enclaves in Morocco, the wall of Via Anelli inside the Italian city of Padua that separate white middle class with immigrants living in an "African ghetto" (i'd recommend Italian readers the documentary Stato di Paura, you can find the trailer here), the Baghdad wall built by the U.S. military, etc. The list goes on and on and the analysis Brown makes of the phenomenon is thought-provoking. I can't recommend enough the audio file of Prof. Brown's lecture.
The second video depicts in a particularly moving way a project which might not be new to most of you but i had never heard about it so far. Israeli NGO B'Tselem has given Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Simple, smart and apparently effective. Here's two interviews with Oren Yakobovich, Director of Video at B'Tselem: a video and an audio. The blog Subtopia covers this kind of topic in a very documented and intelligent way. |
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While in Madrid, i discovered that Santiago Sierra had a show at the Helga de Alvear gallery. I dragged my paracetamols, high fever and microbes out of the bed and headed to Calle Doctor Fourquet. I felt so bad that day i thought nothing Sierra could do would affect me. The show is called Los Penetrados / The Penetrated and it is exactly what you imagine. Sierra hardly ever trifles with subtlety.
October 12th is the National Day of Spain. It used to be called Día de la Raza (Day of the Race) as a celebration of the day Columbus arrived in the Americas, the day Europeans encountered Native Americans. Several countries celebrate October 12th. Over time, however, Día de la Raza took the form in many countries of a counter to Columbus Day. It is used to resist the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and celebrate native races.
On October 12th, 2008, Sierra shot The Penetrated, a series of photographies and a 45 min video in 8 Acts. Couples are geometrically arranged into compositions of up to 110 bodies with two colours. The Acts feature the various possible combinations of penetrator / penetrated: white man-white woman, white man-white man, white man-black woman, white man-black man, black man-black woman, black man-black man, black man-white woman, black man-white man. The persons' faces have been digitally erased to accentuate the modular character of the actors. A mirror set at an angle behind the actors multiplies the couples and the viewpoints. The current reality of Spain can be applied to the body patterns. The theoretical structural geometry of the action is echoed in a weave formed by the 10 blankets on which the successive couples are to be placed. The reality of the proposal is expressed when some of the blankets are left empty in those Acts in which the circumstances did not provide the necessary elements/actors to undertake it. For instance, in Act 3 there are only three couples, given that due to police pressure the majority of women did not turn up. On another note, social and cultural conditioning hampered the appearance of passive black men.
The final element of the action is the penetration and the negative connotation that almost inevitably accompanies it. The title of this work "Los penetrados" [The Penetrated] throws the focus onto the passiveness and submission of the penetrated. Sierra explains his work as a comment on immigration and racial issues: "The traditional paranoia of white people towards black people or of Europeans towards Africans is linked to a strong phobia. We thinks that sooner or later we will have to pay for our past and present greedy misdeeds. But this white paranoia is also related to the size of the dick or to the fear of a sexuality that demeans us. Our female and males might fall in love with it and that frightens us more than the perspective to lose our jobs, only your boss can take work away from us. The political reflections and the actions that derive from them are more primitive than what is ordinarily thought. Behaviours of racial identity are very animal because we are animals."
On view until February 28, 2009 at Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid. There's another work by Santiago Sierra on view in London until the end of the Year, Death Counter. Previously: Holocaust installation by Santiago Sierra, Guantanamo museum and other tales of extraordinary rendition at Helga de Alvear gallery in Madrid, Image of the day, All-Inclusive. A Tourist World. |
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While in Brussels a few days ago, i made a beeline for the Bozar to see an exhibition with a very promising title: Decolonizing Architecture. The show was way better and more subtle than i could have imagined from a superficial reading of its description.
Decolonizing Architecture, a research undertaken by architects Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and architect and theorist Eyal Weizman, throws architecture into the arms of burning social and political issues and uses the discipline to explore possible scenarios that could emerge from a partial-or complete -evacuation of Israeli colonies and military bases. Recognizing that Israeli colonies and military bases are amongst the most excruciating instruments of domination, the project assumes that a viable approach to the issue of their appropriation is to be found not only in the professional language of architecture and planning but rather in inaugurating an "arena of speculation" that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives through the participation of a multiplicity of individuals and organizations. How could the architecture of Israel domination be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by Palestinians?
The two most common approaches adopted when dealing with evacuated colonial architecture are either destruction or re-use. Destruction is often regarded as a mean to achieve 'liberation' from an architecture that acts as an instrument of domination and control. Making tabula rasa is never as simple as it seems, destruction generates desolation and environmental damage that may last for decades. As the project reminds us, when Israel evacuated the Gaza settlements in 2005, 3,000 homes were destroyed. One of the outcomes of the destruction was a million and a half tons of toxic rubble that poisoned the ground and water aquifers.
Re-use is the strategy adopted by many post-colonial governments. They would simply recycle the infrastructures for their own needs of administration, establishing a sense of continuity rather than of rupture and change: colonial villas are inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, are reused by the governments that replaced them.
Is there any strategy left? Yes, there is subversion which speculates on the use of colonial architecture for purposes other than those they were designed to perform. The key principle is to reorient the destructive potential of the occupation's built spaces to other aims. Given the scale of Israeli construction in Palestine, and the need for housing, all three approaches may need to be adopted simultaneously. Some areas of settlements will be destroyed, some reused and others subverted. The Decolonizing Architecture project does not aim to present a single, unified architectural solution, but rather "fragments of possibility".
The exhibition exemplifies the architects proposals and thoughts in two case studies: the settlement of P'sagot, a hill near Ramallah that dominates the Palestinian area and the abandonned military camp of Oush Grab, near Bethleem. While the first project is an imagined set of scenarios, the second is a real battleground between Palestinians who want to turn it into a public park and Israeli settlers who try to claim it, heavily armed and escorted by the Israeli army. You can get more details either in the PDF of the exhibition booklet or on the website of the project. Decolonizing Architecture is running at the Bozar in Brussels until January 4, 2008. |
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Publisher City Lights says: Wafaa Bilal's childhood in Iraq was defined by the horrific rule of Saddam Hussein, two wars, a bloody uprising, and time spent interned in chaotic refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bilal eventually made it to the U.S. to become a professor and a successful artist, but when his brother was killed at a U.S. checkpoint in 2005, he decided to use his art to confront those in the comfort zone with the realities of life in a conflict zone. Thus the creation and staging of Domestic Tension, an unsettling interactive performance piece: for one month, Bilal lived alone in a prison cell-sized room in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers around the world. Visitors to the gallery and a virtual audience that grew by the thousands could shoot at him 24 hours a day. The project received overwhelming worldwide attention, garnering the praise of the Chicago Tribune, which called it "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time," and Newsweek's assessment "breathtaking." It spawned provocative online debates and ultimately, Bilal was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Artist of the Year Award. Soot an Iraqi is a tale that walks you through refugee camps and experiments in interactive art. It is both a biography of artist Wafaa Bilal and the chronicle of his one-month experience as a paintball target at Flatfile Galleries. The book pertains to the political, the art, the activist fields. It is not a novel but it reads like one.
Defining the book is no straightforward enterprise and things do not get any more clean-cut when ones decides to focus on the performance at the center of the book. Domestic Tension is a playful and provocative online game, a cathartic performance that went further than the artist expected, a reflection on the impact that a seemingly innocent online gesture can have in the physical world, an invitation to dialog -no matter how contentiously- about war in Iraq. The artwork attracted the attention and most enthusiastic comments from art critics but it also appealed to the geeky type who'd define conceptual art a pretentious bore. And even there, one should stear clear of any hasty judgment, the experience taught the Bilal (and now its readers) that people you wouldn't expect to have much sympathy for Iraq's plight or for conceptual art turned out to be more supportive than expected. Shoot an Iraqi has a lesson for everyone, even for those who 'know better.' I just wish all lesson-bearing books could be as devoid of self-pity, regrets, anger or hauteur as one is. City Lights also uploaded a video in which Wafaa Bilal discusses the motivation behind Domestic Tension: Photo on homepage by Shawn Lawson. Copyright: Wafaa Bilal, 2007. More images in Universe in Universe. Previously: A few words with Wafaa Bilal and When interactive art becomes bored with you. |
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Two of my favourite mags The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and Volume are out: Volume is an architecture and urbanism magazine. It's neither a highly specialized print that mere mortals like me find hard to approach nor is it one of those glossy Vogue-lookalikes with chichi spreads of fashionably 'sustainable' buildings. It's not 'something in between' either.
This issue presents many trends, people, ideas that might look like they do not directly belong to the world of architecture and urbanism but are perfectly pertinent and relevant to architects and urbanists. And because almost anything architects and urbanists do ends up concerning the hoi polloi (that's you and me, my friend), there's much food for thoughts and heated discussions in Volume 17: The editors explain: At the close of this era of expansion and surplus Volume speculates on one of the period's emblematic inventions: Content Management, or the collecting, organizing and sharing of digital information. Our retrospective appraisal of recent developments in the managing of information offers inside into the ability of Content Management to serve the current realities of digital abundance and material shortage, and to protect both vast and extremely limited quantities. Jesse Seegers and Jeffrey Inaba quizz Ken Goldberg on burning dollar bills and other less trivial matters, Chris Anderson about 'free' culture and PageRanking on business cards. They also get Julien De Smedt to discuss his views on free-wheel experiementation, the proliferation of 'post-OMA offices', why not choosing and mismanaging can be valuable strategies. Benedict Clouette and Forrest Jessee's interview with publisher Lars Müller (whose Face of Human Rights is on my must read list) evokes books as a form of content management. Volume dives into almost mainstream US culture with an interview of Rachel Maddow (available online) and another one with Arianna Huffington (best enjoyed after having savoured this article about the so-called death of the blogosphere.)
Those are only a few of the many interviews of smart people by other smart people. Just to contradict all the above i should add that many of the issues covered in Volume 17 2. openly belong to the world of architecture. For example, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Mark Wigley has a short essay on architecture seen under the lens of content management. The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest by the same publishers who released the very excellent the book, An Atlas of Radical Cartography.
Among all paper magazines, JoA&P is probably the one most likely to truly and gently give rise to social changes. Smart, wonderfully edited and available for a mere $15, the magazine is heavily centered on the US scene and i wonder if we have anything similar in Europe. And if we don't i wonder what we're waiting for. The 300 pages of the sixth issue are broken down in three 'conceptual' sections. 1. I Love To We is a call for a new terminology to describe the formations of grassroots cultural resistant practices. These "interventions, strategies and tactics in the territory" explore the war on terror and the global order. A quick selection of the many essays featured in this section: LA-based organization Bicicocina (or Bicycle Kitchen) describes its self-assigned mission to teach people to work on their own bikes. Lisa Anne Auerbach wrote an insightful essay on the new "Don't Do It Yourself" battle triggered by corporations' avid assault and capitalisation of the D.I.Y. culture. Aimee Le Duc analyzes what happens when an old police station in San Francisco is bought and transformed into a home and office by someone like artist and architect Bruce Tomb. 2. Antiwar Survey Respondents has almost 20 activists not only describe their antiwar activities but also answer vital questions such as "How do you measure success for this activity?' and 'In order to continue and be successful with this or other related activities, what would you do or need?' The answers should convince readers that activist actions do have an impact and inspire them to join the movements or start their own.
3. Another Theory Section. Under a title which could hardly get any more cloudy and bland are a handful of lessons learnt (sometimes the hard way) by artists and activists: problems encountered when trying to get art in public space, the recent history of the art collective in light of the persecution of the Critcal Art Ensemble, the danger of nostalgia to culture, etc. |
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The Estonian pavilion is on many 'must see' lists. I wouldn't bother to write that you 'must' see it. Truth is you just can't miss it. It's that lemon yellow section of a natural gas pipe that snakes down the Giardini from the German to the Russian pavilion. The sixty-three meters long of real scale elevated gas pipe draws attention to Nord Stream, the controversial Gazprom project to construct a direct pipeline between Russia and Germany. The pipe would run along the Baltic seabed, which could have major political and ecological implications for neighboring countries.
Gaasitoru/Gas Pipe puts in broad day light the one of the most pressing factors that will determine how the architecture of the 21st century develops is not the quest for beauty but energy. In spite of the undeniable relevance of the project, getting the authorization to install the pipe in the garden of the Biennale was no easy task. 'When we introduced the project to the board of Biennale, the first reaction was a clear no - the Italians didn't want to see this project, uncomfortable in both essence and construction, on the Biennale,' commented Maarja Kask to Baltic Business News, 'Thanks to the support of the general curator of this Biennale, Aaron Betsky, we were allowed in the end to install the gas pipe if we get permission to from all the states whose pavilion the pipe will pass in front of.' Fortunately, they didn't get any veto from Germany, Canada, the UK, Czech, Slovakia, France, the Northern states, Japan, and Russia.
The Estonian team address in a bold and tangible way a series of political issues that should be put on the table more often when discussing architecture: the growing imprint of large-scale infrastructure on contemporary landscape, the architect's position and his or her potentially critical role in relation to power; the future of energy, etc.
Images of the pipeline. The Venice Biennale of Architecture continues until Nov. 23, 2008. |
