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I'm having a fairly busy week but i promised myself i wouldn't abandon my blog as i tend to do when i'm on the road. So... quick post about an installation i was hoping to see earlier this month at Vooruit's festival Almost Cinema in Gent. Sadly, i couldn't make it to Belgium that week. But, youpiiie! Feedforward. The Angel of History, the exhibition that LABoral which opened last Thursday, gave me a second chance to finally get to see Smoke and Hot Air. Designed by Iranian artist Ali Momeni and Robin Mandel, with participation of artist Matthew Brackett, Smoke and Hot Air reflects Momeni's concern about the relentless threats that Iran has been receiving from many other countries in recent years.
The system searches for sentences including the words "attack Iran" on Google News. The sentences go through a text-to-speech synthesizer. The voice is in turn picked up by a microphone, analyzed, and translated into rhythmically corresponding smoke rings from a quartet of wooden smoke ring makers. Reflecting on the perception of countries as they are shaped by the news and media landscape, Smoke and Hot Air reverses the general view of Iran, which is frequently depicted as aggressor. The recent global support for the uprising after the 2009 Iranian election showed how quickly the general attitude towards a country can shift. Translating the news into old-fashioned smoke signals, Momeni's and Mandel's project illustrates how the complexities of national and political identity can get reduced to false impressions, deceit, and posturing.
I found the artwork particularly moving. Is simplicity can only be equaled by its efficiency and its peacefulness by the distressing political situation in the Middle East. The quiet and smoky atmosphere incites you to make a pause and reflect on the issue at stake. Also in the exhibition: Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-2006. |
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Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, North of Spain has opened a very very very good exhibition a few days ago. FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History addresses the current moment in history where the wreckage of political conflict and economic inequality is piling up, while globalized forces--largely enabled by the "progress" of digital information technologies--inexorably feed us forward. I'll write about it in details in the near future but i'd like to share with you straight away one of the most interesting artworks i've discovered there.
Hasan Elahi (you probably know his ongoing project Tracking Transience) Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad 1798-2006 (2009) Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad is a transparent map that documents the use of U.S. Armed Forces by means of 22LR caliber bullets. Shooter from the Olympic Society of Shooting in Gijón shot from a distance of 25 meters (the Spanish law wouldn't allow for a closer shot) into the polycarbonate map at the precise location where each incursion has occurred since 1798. According to Congressional Research Service report for Congress, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2006, there have been approximately 330 instances "in which the United States has used its armed forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes", or more than 1 per year.
In places, the resulting map is a literal wreck due to the number of incidents in certain areas. It is also a map of the expanding sphere of influence of the United States, as its military reach matches its economic scope of activities. FEEDFORWARD - The Angel of History is on view until April 5, 2010 at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain. |
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Publisher Dutton says: The adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer's road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and CIA "black ops" sites Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially "don't exist" leads him on a globe-trotting adventure into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire--the unmarked spots on a map, where our military conducts its most clandestine operations. Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire's annual budget is over $40 billion, yet almost no one knows how it works or what it does. Paglen spies on the covert site at Groom Lake, Nevada, taking photos from a mountain top thirty miles away. He visits the widow of Walter Kasza, who, while working construction at Groom Lake, was poisoned by the toxic garbage pits there. The U.S. Air Force defense to his estate's suit? The base does not exist. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case. Whether it's from a hotel room in Vegas, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Central American jungles, Washington, D.C., suburbs, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, Paglen's reporting is impassioned, rigorous, relentless--and eye-opening. Blank Spots on the Map is an exposé of a world that, officially, isn't even there.
There's a video of Paglen presenting Blank Spots on the Map for the Authors@Google series. I'd advise you to have a look and get back to me within one hour if you feel like it.
A report by Law Professor Mark Denbeaux examined the information released by the US defence department about the prisoners held at Gantanamo. The very prisoners that Former Vice President Dick Cheney himself had declared were "the worst of the worst". Debeaux' report revealed that 92% of the Guantanamo detainees had not been al-Qaeda fighters. Of those men, 42% had no clear connection to Al-Qaeda and 18% had no connection to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Moreover, only 5% of the Guantanamo detainees were captured by the Americans themselves. 440 of 517 detainees appeared to have been captured by bounty hunters, in return for a $5,000 reward. How did we get there? That one of the issues that this book attempts to discuss. Amateurs of conspiracy theories who understand the title a bit too literally might not swim in happiness after they've opened Blank Spots. Ultimate sacrilege, the book is written by a geographer and there's only one lousy map inside. However, once you've accepted that there's more to geography than maps and that Paglen is a geography professor at UC Berkeley who doesn't venture into speculative territory, you're on the road for a fascinating read.
I must admit that, at first, Blank Spots was very U.S.A., very exotic to me. CIA, fortresses that emerge after a dusty road, high-security military bases, clandestine operations in the desert, etc. Paglen himself could be cast by Hollywood producers for a role as the next Indiana Jones. Except that there's no superhero nor super-villain in the world that Blank Spots uncovers. There is a lot of ultra-normal people, however. People working in mundane-looking offices and embarking planes with the blandest fuselage you can imagine. According to Paglen up to 4 million people work for what Dick Cheney publicly called the 'dark side.' They seem to operate in a world that responds to laws very different from ours, they do anything they can to erase any trace of their actions and even innocent bystanders might have to get to grips with some of its members whether they want it or not. The tableau that Blank Spots draws is deeply distressing. Yet, Blank Spots demonstrates also that the 'black world' is made of human beings who sometimes make gross errors and sometimes disagree with each other. The most important lesson of the book however is that it's amazing what you can uncover with a telescope, a GPS device, a military-band-capable radio scanner and a bunch of maps, some of them partially blank after careful editing. We need people like Paglen to do the digging for us, otherwise what will our own history look like if a substantial portion of it has been 'classified?' See also Bryan Finoki's article on Trevor Paglen for archinect. |
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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. |
