MUHTELİF 5

Agustos da çıkıyor / out by August

MUHTELIF
güncel sanat yayını contemporary art publication İstanbul

Yaz 2009 Summer 2009 Sayı 5 Number 5 Ücretsizdir Free



Retroakt / Retroact
Susanne von Falkenhausen
Totaliteralizm ve Avangard?
Totalitarianism and the Avant-Gardes?

Diyalog / Dialogue
a conversation with Wael Shawky
“ıslak kültür – kuru kültür”
“wet culture - dry culture”

Praksis / Praxis
Markus Miessen in conversation with Rodney LaTourelle
İddalı, romantik, fakat tamamen anlayışlı.
Pretentious, romantic, but totally insightful.

Gramer / Grammer
a conversation with Lucien Kroll by Hans-Ulrich Obrist
“ertelenmiş katılımcılık”
“postponed participations”

Şimdi / Now
Ulus Atayurt
Sakın ola küçümseme…Anlatılan senin hikayen..
Don't you belittle it - It's your own story

Günlük / Daily
F.Zahir Mibineh
Tahran Günlüğü
Tehran Report

Havuz / Pool
Metahaven
“We Lived In Financial Times”



Editörler Editors Pelin Tan, Adnan Yıldız Asistan Editör Asistant Editör Banu Çiçek Tülü İngilizce Düzelti Proofreading Ashkan Sepahvand Türkçe Düzelti Turkish Proofreading Özge Açıkkol, Burak Şuşut Çeviri Translation Adnan Yıldız, İz Öztat, Banu Çiçek Tülü, Pelin Tan, Barış Çakan, Ashkan Sjavascript:void(0)epahvand Tasarım Design Ali Cindoruk Kapak Cover Elmas Deniz

Tehran Report / a collective will.

by F.Zahir Mibineh

June 14th, 2009

8:45 PM
....It‟s still less than ten days before the official beginning of summer.
Although the weather may be warm and the blossoms are gone, it is, according
to the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun, spring. Tehran Spring.

A period of political liberalization under a Reformist government, backed by
popular approval against the Soviet-backed Socialist system in Czechoslovakia
in 1968 has come to be known as the Prague Spring. Infamous for the brutality
of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into the city of Prague eight
months after President Alexander Dubcek loosened restrictions on speech, the
media and travel, millions of demonstrators were crushed within seconds,
although they remained peaceful the entire time. Czechoslovakia remained
occupied by Soviet military forces until 1990, when the Socialist system
collapsed. The Prague Spring may have not been successful from a populist,
anti-authoritarian perspective, but it indicated a trend, rising in Europe
and the world at the time, that unrest existed on many levels: cultural,
economic, social, and, most importantly, ideological. The demonstrations in
Prague temporarily shadowed the International Marxist movement, popular
amongst intellectuals in Western Europe, as the USSR proved once again that
the utopian yearning for revolution had seceded to authority hungry for
control. During the early months of the Prague Spring, inspired by the
Socialist reformist experiment in Czechoslovakia, students in Paris and other
Western European cities set the university ablaze, workers went on strike,
and the bureaucracy collapsed. A glimmer of hope, only temporary, until the
moment of the Grand Compromise between the „68ers and De Gaulle‟s government
occurred one month later, effectively paralyzing Leftism in the West until
even today. This paralysis was confirmed by the multilateral Soviet crushing
of the reformist movement later that summer.
Foucault‟s take on the Iranian Revolution has always been controversial. His
articles in France were read with disdain, as Foucault effectively stepped
outside of his typically meticulous mode of analysis to embrace a Hegelian
“Spirit” embedded deep within his psyche. He praised the “collective will of
the Iranian people” as an undeniable, inspirational force to be reckoned with
and to learn from. He was, per chance, nostalgic for “true”, “authentic”
revolutionary movement, a nostalgia whose origins lay potentially in the
dashed hopes of May 1968. Yet, in an interview between Foucault and
journalists Claire Briere and Pierre Blanchet (“Iran: The Spirit of a World
Without Spirit”), Foucault exhibits moments in which his analytical clarity
shines: “It is true that Iranian society is shot through with contradictions
that cannot in any way be denied, but it is certain that the revolutionary
event that has been taking place for a year now, and which is at the same
time an inner experience, a sort of constantly recommenced liturgy, a
community experience, and so on, all that is certainly articulated onto the
class struggle: but that doesn‟t find expression in an immediate, transparent
way..."

architecture and narrative

gillick/öğüt, 5 june 2009, venice.

Thinking: The Ruin

The Istanbul Studies Center at Kadir Has University is pleased to present Thinking: The Ruin, the first in a series of lectures by a select group of innovative scholars and artists willing to think beyond the narrow confines of traditional disciplines, and offered as a sequence delivered over the course of a week. Lectures will not necessarily focus on the city of Istanbul per se; Istanbul will be a frame, a foil, or a point of reference.

Thinking: The Ruin will begin on Friday 22 May and run until Friday 29 May. All lectures are in English, and will take place at 16:00 in the Fener Salonu, Kadir Has University, Cibali Campus.

For information on program and speakers, see:
www.khas.edu.tr/en/news/istanbul-sergi1.html

Program:
Friday 22 May
Matthew Gumpert: Opening Remarks: Catachresis, or the Ruin
Walid Raad: Sweet Talk

Monday 25 May
Trevor Hope: City as Monument: Pierre Loti

Tuesday 26 May
Trevor Hope: City as Archive: Orhan Pamuk

Wednesday 27 May
Jalal Toufic: Ruins
Film Screening: The Shining (18:00)

Thursday 28 May
Jalal Toufic: Transit Visa to the Labyrinth!

Friday 29 May
Pelin Tan: Did You Say Architectonic Homo Sacer or Vampires?


The Istanbul Studies Center is a newly opened academic research center at Kadir Has University providing a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary scholarship on the changing culture of the city of Istanbul, by way of symposia, seminars, fellowships, publications, and exhibitions.

Related links:
www.jalaltoufic.com
www.theatlasgroup.org
www.fai.org.lb
www.e-flux.com/journal/view/16
www.yesarchitecturenoarchitecture.blogspot.com

dwelling.humanrights.resistance.neihgborhoord.civilsociety.

9 Mayıs, Maria Papadimitrou, Volos Univ. den. ww.eu-roma.net prjesini son 10 senedir yurutuyor.saat 17:00

16 mayis, Ferhat Kentel ve bizim platformdan olan Dilek, Ayse ogrencileri ile toplumsal hareketler üzerine, .saat 17.00

23 Mayıs, Sukru Aslan, 1 Mayıs mah. üzerine saat:17.00

30 Mayıs, saat 16:00
STOP ekibi, altenatif Sulukule projesi üzerine
Erdoğan Yıldız ve Gülsuyu-Gülensu Derneği, Istanbul Mahalleler üzerine

"Sulukule Sergisi", konuşma/sunum Hafriyat'da, www.hafriyatkarakoy.com

---------------------------------

9 Mayıs, Maria Papadimitrou, Volos Univ.
ww.eu-roma.net, 5pm.

16 May, Ferhat Kentel, Alternative Social Movements, 5pm.

23 May, Sukru Aslan, 1 Mayıs Mahallesi, 5pm

30 May, 5pm
STOP, Alternative Sulukule Urban Planning Project
Erdoğan Yıldız and Gulsuyu-Gulensu Association, Istanbul Neighborhoods Platform


"Sulukule Exhibition", talks/presentation in Hafriyat, www.hafriyatkarakoy.com

Yenileme, Yersizlestirme, Sulukule

İstanbul Kentsel Dönüşüm Projesi kapsamına alınarak, 2005’den bu yana binlerce sakini yerinden edilen ve hızla yıkılan Sulukule’nin, yıkım ve mücadele sürecini anlatan sergiyi 6 Mayıs 2009’da, Hıdrellez kutlanırken, Hafriyat Karaköy’de aciyoruz.

Fotoğraflar, videolar, objeler, projeler, yerlestirmeler ve yazılı belgelerden oluşan sergi, “Sulukule’yi aldilar, Darbukami Kirdilar: Yenileme, Yersizlestirme, Sulukule” ismiyle Mayis ayi boyunca izlenebilecek.

your home is my home...my home is your home.

images from romany settlement from Greece.
(workshop by Maria Papadimitrou,www.eu-roma.net)




EU-ROMA WORKSHOP


EU-ROMA workshop that is a research about Romany community and their dwelling problem from the perspective of socially based architecture, participatory dwelling and art practices; initiated by Maria Papadimitrou with several partners with students from Thessly University – Architecture Faculty.

The conference today, 08.03.2; was consisting of three parts: The first session was presentation of several examples of Romany communities, their dwelling problems and related solidarity activities from different geographies (Rome, London, Istanbul, North Greece). This session gave an overview of problems of representation of local communities (such as Romany), state-led urban transformation projects that develop evictions of the neighborhoods and about the useless function of EU policy of ethnic communities dwelling rights. The second session was consisting of the role of the artist with contemporary art practices as an initiator, mediator among social issues in everyday life. This session did provide several representations of artworks as site-specific, socially-engaged and community-related in order to discuss the role of the artists in public space. The third session focused on the role of education in architecture to involve to the anthropological aspect of space and role of the students in engagement to communities.
www.eu-roma.net



(photos from Volos - alize)



activists did squatter a place near to where Alexsis was killed; they do transform the place into a meeting place and park since three weeks.







(photos: 4-11 april, athens, p.tan)


(Athens - Exharia)

Mimarlıkta Semptom mu Dedin?

"...Sanırım tarihsel bir semptom derken, 1960’ların avangard, ütopik mimari tasarım önermelerinden bu yana 1980’lerin postmodern diliyle alınan yol ve 1990 sonrası yaşanan neoliberal ekonomik dönüşümle birlikte sözde sürdürülmeye çalışılan bir ütopyacılık geleneğinin temsiliyet krizinden bahsediyorum. Ekonomik krizle birlikte Batı dışı küresel bütçelere ve tekliflere (Çin, Dubai…) tâbi olmuş sözde son avangard mimarların Venedik gibi küresel bienallerde yer alan dijital teknoloji ve güncel sanat enstalasyon pratiğine özenen döküntü projelerini seyrediyorsunuz.", Mimarlıkta Semptom mu Dedin?, 2008 Venedik Mimarlik Bienali üzerinden güncel mimarlık üretimi üzerine bir semptom analizi yapmaya çalışıyorum.


Mimarlık Dergisi, Betonart,sayı 21, Şubat, 2009, Istanbul.


Stealh, Dutch Pavillon, 2008

Boundless Diffusion of Trans-Local Knowledge Production Map

. Pelin Tan


Boundless Diffusion of Trans-Local Knowledge Production Map

Ordinarily, we believe that knowledge is very near to us, sometimes we think knowledge is attainable and stable. Or we walk near it but don’t realise its movement and reflection. It is a kind of movement and a journey. It is personal but collective. It is boundless. It is emotional. In some cases it is a total, unstoppable experience. It exists and moves trans-locally. It is a representation. It is not presentable. Makes you feel alone as a singularity. Makes you feel near to something. Makes you feel like the Other. It is filled with space and love. You feel you are near it but it is always far away.

The mobile archive presents my trans-local production of knowledge. People think I travel a lot. No. I am mostly in Istanbul, in Tophane. Realities, objects, ideas, fly in the air that you can catch and reproduce. With people.

Iaspis Open House 13 – 14 February 2009
Iaspis, Konstnärsnämnden
Maria skolgata 83, Stockholm

Participants: Igor Antic, Eva Arnqvist, Maja Bajevic, Linnea Carlsson, Anna Kindgren & Carina Gunnars, Alevtina Kakhidze, Erik Olofsen, Daniel Peltz, Pratchaya Phinthong, Azat Sargsyan, Karin Seufert, Patrik Söderstam, Pelin Tan, Alexander Vaindorf, Steina Vasulka, Tris Vonna-Michell, Kristoffer Zetterstrand

Welcome to the Open House at Iaspis. This is one of Stockholm’s recurring open meeting-places for contemporary artists and their audience – a unique opportunity to gain an insight into a number of exciting Swedish and international artists’ work. During Friday the 13th and Saturday the 14th of February, we will present 17 Iaspis grant recipients. The artists will present their projects in the open studios and in a programme of lectures and video screenings.

The Open House will include: a lecture by Patrik Söderstam covering a fictitious fashion company and his time as an Iaspis grant recipient in Tokyo in 2008; a comment on the Swedish IKEA culture by Igor Antic; a lecture on consumption and desire by artist Alevtina Kakhidze; the sound installation Detroit Dream by Tris Vonna-Michell; an exhibition of Kristoffer Zetterstrand’s paintings which he has created by a computer animation process; a screening of experimental video works by the electronica artist Steina Vasulka, and much more.

Guest producer: Lisa Rosendahl, Baltic Art Center, Visby

Harvey's speech at Belem, 2009

Opening speech at the Urban Reform Tent, January 29, 2009, World Social
Forum, Belem

David Harvey

I'm delighted to be here, but first of all I'd like to apologize for speaking English which is the language of international imperialism. I hope that what I have to say is sufficiently anti-imperialist that you people will forgive me. (applause)

I am very grateful for this invitation because I learn a great deal from the social movements. I've come here to learn and to listen and therefore I am already finding this a great educational experience because as Karl Marx once put it there is always the big question of who will educate the educators.

I have been working for some time on the idea of the Right to the City. I take it that Right to the City means the right of all of us to create cities that meet human needs, our needs. The right to the city is not the right to have - and I'll use an English expression - crumbs from the rich mans table. We should all have the same rights to further construct the different kinds of cities that we want to exist.

The right to the city is not simply the right to what already exists in the city but the right to make the city into something radically different. When I look at history I see that cities have been managed by capital more than by people. So in this struggle for the right to the city there is going to be a struggle against capital.

I want to talk a little bit now about the history of the relationship between capital and city building and ask the question: Why is it that capital manages to exercise so much rights over the city? And why is it that popular forces are relatively weak against that power? And I'd also like to talk about how, actually, the way capital works in cities is one of its weaknesses. So at this time I think the struggle for the right to the city is at the center of the struggle against capital. We have now - as you all know - a financial crisis of capitalism. If you look at recent history you will find that over the last 30 years there have been many financial crises. Somebody did a calculation and said that since 1970 there have been 378 financial crisis in the world. Between 1945 and 1970 there were only 56 financial crises. So capital has been producing many financial crises over the last 30 to 40 years. And what is interesting is that many of these financial crises have a basis in urbanization. At the end of the 1980s the Japanese economy crashed and it crashed around property and land speculation. In 1987 in the United States there was a huge crisis in which hundreds of banks went bankrupt and it was all about housing and property development speculation. In the 1970s there was a big, world-wide crises in property markets. And I could go on and on giving you examples of financial crises that are urban based. My guess is that half of the financial crises over the last 30 years are urban property based. The origins of this crisis in the United States came from something called the sub prime mortgage crises. I call this not a sub prime mortgage crisis but an urban crisis.

This is what happened. In the 1990s there came about a problem of surplus money with nowhere to go. Capitalism is a system that always produces surpluses. You can think of it this way: the capitalist wakes up in the morning and he goes into the market with a certain amount of money and buys labor and means of production. He puts those elements to work and produces a commodity and sells it for more money than he began with. So at the end of the day the capitalist has more than he had at the beginning of the day. And the big question is what does he do with the more that he's picked up? Now if he were like you and me he would probably go out and have a good time and spend it. But capitalism is not like that. There are competitive forces that push him to reinvest part of his capital in new developments. In the history of capitalism there has been a 3% rate of growth since 1750. Now a 3% growth rate means that you have to find outlets for capital. So capitalism is always faced with what I call a capital surplus absorption problem. Where can I find a profitable outlet to apply my capital? Now back in 1750 the whole world was open for that question. And at that time the total value of the global economy was $135 billion in goods and services. By the time you get to 1950 there is $4 Trillion in circulation and you have to find outlets for 3% of $4 trillion. By the time you get to the year 2000 you have $42 trillion in circulation. Around now its probably $50 Trillion. In another 25 years at 3% rate of growth it will be $100 trillion. What this means is that there is an increasing difficulty in finding profitable outlets for the surplus capital. This situation can be presented in another way. When capitalism was essentially what was going on in Manchester and a few other places in the World, a 3% growth rate posed no problem. Now we have to put a 3% rate of growth on everything that is happening in China, East and Southeast Asia, Europe, much of Latin America and North America and there is a huge, huge problem. Now capitalists, when they have money, have a choice as to how they reinvest it. You can invest in new production. An argument for making the rich richer is that they will reinvest in production and that this will generate employment and a better standard of living for the people. But since 1970 they have invested less and less in new production. They have invested in buying assets, stock shares, property rights, intellectual property rights and of course property. So since 1970, more and more money has gone into financial assets and when the capitalist class starts buying assets the value of the assets increases. So they start to make money out of the increase in the value of their assets. So property prices go up and up and up. And this does not make for a better city it makes for a more expensive city. Furthermore, to the degree that they want to build condominiums and affluent housing they have to drive poor people off their land. They have to take away our right to the city. So that in New York City I find it very difficult to live in Manhattan, and I am a reasonably well paid professor. The mass of the population that actually works in the city cannot afford to live in the city because property prices have gone up and up and up and up. In other words the people's right to the city has been taken away. Sometimes it has been taken away through actions of the market, sometimes its been taken away by government action expelling people from where they live, sometimes it has been taken away by illegal means, violence, setting fire to a building. There was a period where one part of New York City had fire after fire after fire.

So what this does is to create a situation where the rich can increasingly take over the whole domination of the city. And they have to do that because this is the only way they can use their surplus capital. And at some point however there is also the incentive for this process of city building to go down to the poorer people. The financial institutions lend to the property developers to get them to develop large areas of the city. You have the developers but then the problem is who do the developers sell their properties too? If working class incomes were increasing then maybe you could sell to the working class. But since the 1970s the policies of neoliberalism have been about wage repression. In the United States real wages haven't risen since 1970, so you have a situation where real wages are constant but property prices are going up. So where is the demand for the houses going to come from? The answer was you invite the working classes into the debt environment. And what we see is that household debt in the United States has gone from about $40,000 per household to over $120,000 per household in the last 20 years. The financial institutions knock on the doors of working class people and say, "we have a good deal for you. You borrow money from us and you can become a homeowner, and don't worry, if at some point you can't pay your debt the housing prices are going to go up so everything is fine".

So more and more low income people were bought into the debt environment. But then about two years ago property prices started to come down. The gap between what working class people could afford and what the debt was too big. Suddenly you had a foreclosure wave going through many American cities. But as usually happens with something of this kind there is an uneven geographical development of that wave. The first wave hit very low income communities in many of the older cities in the United States. There is a wonderful map that you can see on the BBC website of the foreclosures in the city of Cleveland. And what you see is a dot map of the foreclosures that is highly concentrated in certain areas of he city. There is a map beside it which shows a distribution of the African American population, and the two maps correspond. What this means is that this was robbery of a low income African American population. This has been the biggest loss of assets for low income populations in the United States that there has ever been. 2 Million people have lost their homes. And at that very moment when that was happening the bonuses paid out on Wall street were coming to over $30 Billion - that is the extra money that is paid to the bankers for their work. So $30 billion ends up on Wall Street which has effectively been taken from low income neighborhoods. There is talk about this in the United States as a financial Katrina because as you remember Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans differentially and it was the low income black population that got left behind and many of them died. The rich protected their right to the city but the poor essentially lost theirs. In Florida, California and the American South West the pattern was different. It was very much out on the periphery of the cities. And there a lot of money was being lent to the building groups and the developers. They were building housing way out, 30 miles outside of Tuscon and Los Angeles and they couldn't find anybody to sell to so they actually went for a white population that did not like living near immigrants and blacks in the central cities. What this then led to was a situation that happened a year ago when the high gas prices made it very difficult for communities. Many of the people had difficulties paying their debt and so we find a foreclosure wave which is happening in the suburbs and is manly white in places like Florida, Arizona and California. Meanwhile what Wall Street had done is to take all of these risky mortgages and to package them in strange financial instruments. You take all of the mortgages from a particular place and put them into a pot and then sell shares of that pot to somebody else. The result is that the whole of the mortgage financial market has globalized. And you sell pieces of ownership to mortgages to people in Norway or Germany or the Gulf or whatever. Everybody was told that these mortgages and these financial instruments were as safe as houses. They turned out not to be safe and we then had the big crisis which keeps going and going and going. My argument is that if this crisis is basically a crisis of urbanization then the solution should be urbanization of a different sort and this is where the struggle for the right to the city becomes crucial because we have the opportunity to do something different.

But I am often asked if this crisis is the end of neoliberalism.. My answer is "no" if you look at what is being proposed in Washington and London. One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s is that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. And there is a conflict between the well being of financial institutions and the well being of people you chose the well being of the financial institutions. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City in the mid 1970s, and was first defined internationally in Mexico it threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. If Mexico had gone bankrupt it would have destroyed the New York investment banks. So the United States Treasury and the International Monetary Fund combined to help Mexico not go bankrupt. In other words they lent the money to Mexico to pay off the New York bankers. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and destroyed the people. This has been the standard practice in the International Monetary Fund ever since. Now if you look at the response to the crisis in the United States and Britain, what they have done in effect is to bail out the banks. $700 billion to the banks in the United States. They have done nothing whatsoever to protect the homeowners who have lost their houses. So it is the same principal that we are seeing at work – protect the financial institutions and fuck the people. What we should have done is to take the $700 billion and create an urban redevelopment bank to save all of those neighborhoods that were being destroyed and reconstruct cities more out of popular demand. Interestingly if we had done that then a lot of the crisis would have disappeared because there would be no foreclosed mortgages. Meanwhile we need to organize an anti-eviction movement and we have seen some of that going on in Boston and some other cities. But at this historical moment in the United States there is a sense that popular mobilization is restricted because the election of Obama was a priority. Many people hope that Obama will do something different, unfortunately his economic advisors are exactly those who organized this whole problem in the first place. I doubt that Obama will be as progressive as Lula. You will have to wait a little bit before I think social movements will begin to go in motion. We need a national movement of Urban Reform like you have here. We need to build a militancy in the way that you have done here. We need in fact to begin to exercise our right to the city. And at some point we'll have to reverse this whole way in which the financial institutions are given priority over us. We have to ask the question what is more important, the value of the banks or the value of humanity. The banking system should serve the people, not live off the people. And the only way in which at some point we are really going to be able to exert the right to the city is that we have to take command of the capitalist surplus absorption problem. We have to socialize the capital surplus. We have to use it to meet social needs. We have to get out of the problem of 3% accumulation forever. We are now at a point where 3% growth rate forever is going to exert such tremendous environmental costs, its going to exert tremendous pressure on social situations that we are going to go from one financial crisis to another. If we come out of this financial crisis in the way they want there will be another financial crisis 5 years from now. So its come to the point when its no longer a matter of accepting what Margaret Thatcher said, that "there is no alternative", and we say that there has to be an alternative. There has to be an alternative to capitalism in general. And we can begin to approach that alternative by perceiving the right to the city as a popular and international demand and I hope that we can all join together in that mission. Thank you very much.


Original transcript appeared on a Brian Mier article, reporting from the WSF in Belem for Vice Magazine :
http://vice.typepad.com/vice_magazine/2009/02/belem—introdu.html#more

Spatial Manoeuvres

Talks/Sunumlar

2 Şubat / February, 2009
Arkitektonik Kutsal İnsan: Kısıtlı Ara Mekanların Meşrulaştırılma Krizi

5 Şubat /February, 2009
Neoliberal Urban Transformation in Istanbul and Opportunities of Counter-Culture in Urban Spaces
Taranta Duba, Dortmund
INURA, Heinrich Böll Stiftung


7 Şubat / February, 2009
Städtische Konflikte, counter spaces, transnationale Netzwerke
metroZones.SALOON 2
Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Kreuzberg


photo/gorsel emir hamarat
28.01.2009, Sulukule, Fatih Municipality demolishes the Children workshop place and few house early in the morning.

sokaklar bizim! /streets belong to us!

yağmur,pazar sabahı, çingeneler, davul/zurna, bizim mahalleden bi kız gelin oldu...
rain, sunday morning, gypsies, drum/horn, a bride leaving our neighborhood...
21.12.2008, Kapıkulu sokak

tear gas and flower... slingshot and bomb

(Young students offer flowers to riot police while others blocked off Syntagma (Parliament) Square on December 13, 2008, following more than a week of clashes over the police killing of a 15-year-old. (LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images) #


(A protester shouts at riot police in central Athens on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008. Athens and other Greek cities were ravaged by three successive nights of rioting after police shot teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos dead. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias) #

http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=943356



"The system will be prepared to use any means, however scandalous, in order to restrict our terrain and show its determination to oppose us." U.M.,1971


Greek fire: lost principles, lost control by Takis Michas

MUHTELIF 4

Culture, Urbanism and Gentrification

Consistorium talk: A Debate on the relation between Culture, Urbanism and Gentrification

with Andrej Holm (sociologist), Matteo Pasquinelli (researcher / Queen Mary University of London), Pelin Tan (sociologist), Mathias Einhoff and Philip Horst (founders of Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum)

Public Roundtable Discussion at Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum,
December, 13, 2008, 7pm, at the assembly room of KUNSTrePublik e.V., Neue Gruenstr., 20, 10179, Berlin.

www.kunstrepublik.de
www.skulpturenpark.org

-----------------------------

1. Symposium "Architektur ohne Architektur"

Der Lehrstuhl für Architektur und Stadtforschung an der Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg veranstaltet am 12.12.2008 das Symposium "Architektur ohne Architektur".

"Architektur ohne Architektur" vertritt die These, wonach sich die Frage einer (gesellschaftlich) relevanten Architektur weniger denn je aus konstruktiven, proportionsgebenden und raumbildenden Aspekten beantworten lässt. Das Symposium versammelt, erörtert und entwickelt Ansätze, die - ob "projektiv", situativ, prozessual, partizipativ oder einfach billig - Architektur nicht (primär) in Kategorien von Architektur denken.

Eingeladene Referenten: Jesko Fezer, Ole W. Fischer, Christoph Heinemann u. Christoph Schmidt (ifau), Christa Kamleithner und Pelin Tan.

Das Symposium beginnt um 13:00 Uhr und findet an der Akademie statt.
Die Veranstaltung ist nicht öffentlich - eine begrenzte Zahl von Gästen jedoch herzlich willkommen. Zur Anmeldung ist bitte bis spätestens zum 4.12. eine E-mail mit kurzer Begründung des Interesses an mail@a42.org zu senden.

"Architektur ohne Architektur" wird mit weiteren Symposien und einer Publikation fortgeführt. Die nächste Diskussionsrunde soll im Frühjahr 2009 stattfinden.


a42.org
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Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nürnberg
Bingstr. 60 / 90480 Nürnberg
www.a42.org
mail@a42.org

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JournalIssue #0, November 2008

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Editorial

* Omer Fast Take a Deep Breath

In the summer of 2002, Martin F. was standing outside a falafel shop in Jerusalem when it exploded. A trained medic, he went in and discovered the body of a young man on the floor. The young man had lost both legs below the waist, as well as an arm, but his eyes were open and focused.

* Boris Groys The Obligation to Self-Design

Since the death of God, of course, we can no longer believe that there is something like the soul that is distinguished from the body in the sense that it is made independent of the body and can be separated from it. However, that does not by any means suggest that a metanoia is no longer possible. Modern design is the attempt to bring about such a metanoia—an effort to see one's own body and one's own surroundings as purified of everything arbitrary, tasteful, and earthly. In a sense, it could be said that modernism substituted the design of the corpse for the design of the soul.


* Bilal Khbeiz Los Angeles: The Invention of Public Weather

Public spaces in Los Angeles seem reserved for what will happen outside the city. Once finished, those events will be acted out here: here a stage set for the battle of Tora Bora, there another for the swamps of Al Ahwaz and over there a little Wall Street. But not until the event has passed will it be ready to be filmed and unpacked. Because it is reserved, all that happens now in public spaces is a reenactment of past events without any suggestion that people can use these spaces. Events are malleable because of the past, while the living are not. Only cinema can recall the past, but in order to do so, the living must be cast aside. The stage set must not be disturbed by the contingencies brought along by the living.

* Sebastjan Leban Conditioned Contemporaneity (Reartikulacija, Part 1 of 3)

It is also important, when speaking about processes of passiveness, to be keenly aware of the fact that the system has developed a parallel strategy through which processes of de-politicization, de-theorization, and de-radicalization are introduced through apparently radical, political, and theoretical discourses. As a result, not only are borders between real criticism and its mere illustration blurred, but so also is the subversive power of radical and critical analysis gradually abolished.

* Marjetica Potrč New Territories in Acre and Why They Matter

After all, one of the most successful and sought-after models of living together today is the gated community – the small-scale residential entity. But unlike gated communities, which represent static strategies of retreat and self-enclosure, the new territories in Acre are dynamic and proactive: they reach out to others.


* Raqs Media Collective Stammer, Mumble, Sweat, Scrawl, and Tic

Caught between petitions, jottings and files, Ghulam Ali tried to read himself— sometimes as an Indian, at other times as a Pakistani. But all he could say with confidence was that he had learnt to play the Kettle Drum in the British Indian Army Band. Kettle Drumming is not a legible nationality. You cant just rat-a-tat-a-tat your way through two new warring nations as if it were a parade. Not if you are an ordinary decommissioned soldier with nothing to your name but a quest for a missing relative. Your petitions may travel, but you stay where you are written into history. Over time, even the inscription in the file, overwritten many times over, becomes as illegible as the acts of travel that it sought to contain. Legibility, when it eats its own tail, digests itself into illegibility.

* Irit Rogoff Turning

"Academy" becomes the site of this duality, of an understanding of "I can" as always, already yoked to an eternal "I can’t." If this duality is not paralyzing, which I do not think it is, then it has possibilities for an understanding of what it is about an "academy" that can actually become a model for "being in the world." Perhaps there is an excitement in shifting our perception of an educational or training ground which is not pure preparation, pure resolution. Instead, it might encompass fallibility, which can be understood as a form of knowledge production rather than one of disappointment.

* Pelin Tan Beneath Our Skin

I look to the works of Åsdam and Dreyfus to explain the formation of a specific aesthetic language in which relationships between subjectivity and spatial context are in conflict. Where the two fail to meet or overlap, a sort of non-relationship is formed. Concepts such as empathy and the uncanny (especially in relation to undefined territories, architectural, and urban environments) have often been described from subject-oriented perspectives.

Liminal Zones Seminar - Nicosia

LIMINAL ZONES - the Nicosia seminar, 5,6,7 November 2008
organized by Angela Melitopoulos and Socrates Stratis





Aristide Antonas, Haim Bresheeth, Celine Condorelli, Armin Linke, Angela Melitopoulos, John Nassari, John Palmesino, Yiannis Papadakis, Ines Schaber, Florian Schneider, Eyal Sivan, Pelin Tan, Eyal Weizman, Phillipe Zourgane

Any attempt to understand the rapid transformation of territories in the 21st century reveals shifting landscapes and moving boundaries, thus a continuous struggle for their redefinition through conflicts and exclusions. Different conditions of mobility and migration encouraged by the so-called 'globalised world' inscribe in material environments social and psychological borders. In this context Cyprus and its inherent division acts as one of the frontiers to the EU. The aim of this workshop is to explore such liminal spaces with a particular reference to Cyprus and the Middle East.

How are liminal spaces constructed and managed and how can one think them from an interdisciplinary perspective?
What dictates the organization and management of these liminal spaces? What facts on the ground challenge the actual negotiation of such "zones under construction"? How do liminal spaces relate to a larger genre of boundaries present in contemporary urban environments? How do continuous fragmentations and reconnections in liminal zones shape contemporary urban societies?

This seminar proposes to engage in several roundtable discussions as productive strategies and tactics encouraging engagement between publics fragmented by the limit. We would like to explore the interdisciplinary roles of visual culture and architecture as porous interfaces within such a territory.

The seminar will take place within the Department of Architecture (University of Cyprus) and the Goethe Institut Nicosia. It will bring together scholars and practitioners from Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Palestine, Turkey and the UK. "Liminal Zones" proposes the creation of a research platform that will be continued in the future as a model for exchange and production of diverse methodologies.

contact: angela melitopoulos, melitopoulos@gmail.com - germany


related interviews from the past/geçmişte ilgili söyleşiler:
Socratis Stratis ile: www.arkitera.com/s50-socrates-stratis.html
Eyal Weizman ile: www.arkitera.com/s27-eyal-weizman-ve-rafi-segal.html