"... interpretation is not to be conceived restrictively in terms of subjective act. Rather, interpretation takes place by virtue of the structuring constraints of genre and form on the communicability of effect - and so sometimes takes place against one's will or, indeed, in spite of oneself. Thus, it is not just that the photographer and/or the viewer actively and deliberately interpret, but that the photograph itself becomes a structuring scene of interpretation - and one that may unsettle both maker and viewer in its turn"

Raymond Depardon

Ramond Depardon’s photography, known for his depictions of street life, includes a new and compelling exhibition of photos of first impressions of the world’s most populous cities. Nicely presented in the Guardian.

Johannesburg

I’m surprised no one has yet commented on the state of immobility in air travel brought about by the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland last week. The ash cloud spread across Northern Europe has caused tens of thousands of flights to be canceled. Removing air flight changes the mix of transport modes available to travelers and shippers for the affected regions. This is an important social experiment which demonstrates the effect that a future loss of transportation mobilities we now take for granted would have on societies and economies and how everyday life would have to be adjusted to adapt.

Eyjafjallajökull Volcano, Iceland April 15, 2010 (Thanks to NASA's Terra-MODIS Satellite)

-Rob

Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. David Gissen (2009). New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 224 pages. ISBN: 978-1-56898-777-4

Reviewed by Emily Snyder, University of Alberta

I am trying to better understand discomfort and disgust – what they reveal, what they conceal. This anxious interest compelled me to read David Gissen’s book on ‘subnatures.’ His unique engagement with things such as insects, odours, and stagnation is much appreciated and he offers a valuable starting point for reconsidering the relationship between architecture, urbanism, and marginalized forms of nature.

cc photo by gloomycorp

‘Nature,’ Gissen describes, is desirable in a city if it can be easily controlled and is pleasurable for citizens (for example, parks, ‘green belts,’ etc.).* Yet there are many natures that defy management and comfort. Gissen refers to these as ‘subnature’ – that which falls “below” (23) nature and threatens the notion of the modern city as clean, efficient, and safe. This includes things such as dankness, exhaust, dust, mud, weeds, pigeons, and crowds. Experiences with subnatures are explained as “the most fearsome, because it describes the limits in which contemporary life might be staged” (23). The fabrication in ‘Western’ societies that we can control and dominate all aspects of our environment is called into question by the critical acknowledgment of subnatures. Gissen shows that the process of what gets categorized as desirable or marginal is a political one and he hopes that his attention to subnatures will encourage readers to “consider the possibilities of exploiting subnature as a form of agitation or intellectual provocation” (25). Specifically, he urges architects and city planners to engage with subnatures in creative ways in order to expand our thinking on architecture and nature.

Gissen’s approach is valuable, as subnatures that evoke reactions of disgust and discomfort are consistently overlooked. Yet I encountered problems with the style and structure of his book, and connectedly, an under-developed theoretical foundation. His method in each chapter, of moving through historical to contemporary examples of how architects perceive various subnatures becomes repetitive and as one is inundated with examples, the discussion becomes more descriptive than analytic. Although his text is meant to be “somewhere between an exhibition catalog and an architectural theory book” (26), I suggest that it should have been more of a theory text given his goal to instigate innovative understandings of subnatures.

While the highly descriptive chapters provide a strong sense of what is ‘out there,’ I was left with several questions. For example, once a subnatural entity is entered into dialogue through architecture, does it begin to move the subnatural into the natural? Asked differently, do we end up removing subnature from the margins and treating it as though it is a ‘controllable’ and ‘pleasurable’ nature? What are the implications of this? Are subnatures meant to stay in the margins? Or is the goal simply to open up discussions on discomfort and to consider the social norms that influence our perceptions of nature? Gissen remarks that “at the very least, [a building that engages subnatures] enables the constituent features of nature to be understood, debated, and perhaps ultimately transformed, while leaving a record of an earlier struggle” (211). Yet at the end of his book, I still wonder how far we can push ourselves with discomfort in practice. How do we account for reactions of disgust to subnatures, especially the visceral aspect of these experiences of disgust, and the potential of the visceral to shut down engagement (see Kristeva, 1982; Ahmed, 2004)? I also wonder about the tensions of engaging with subnatures in highly governed spaces (building codes, health and safety regulations, etc.) and how these restrictions impact possibilities for activist subnature structures. Gissen argues that it would be undesirable, if not unethical, to embrace subnatures in all situations. Thus ethics must be woven more explicitly into the theoretical analysis that needs to emerge from this book. Overall, the concept of ‘subnature’ is a necessary one, and the value of Gissen’s work is that he initiates a much-needed discussion on several difficult subjects. It is worthwhile though to think further about the fundamental theoretical issues that subnatures compel.

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

* ‘Citizens’ is used strategically here. As Gissen makes clear, those deemed lower class or less-than-citizens are perceived to have a very different relationships to subnature – harbourers of disease and dirt, ‘natural’ inhabitants of subnatures, etc.

I always enjoy getting my National Geographic Magazine in the post, and the current special issue on water is amazing.

The section on The World’s Freshwater has some gorgeous maps, The Hidden Water We Use section presents some startling infographics, and photography by Edward Burtynsky puts California’s Pipe Dream in new light.

“As developments such as Discovery Bay increase in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, so does the flood hazard. More than a million people now live behind delta levees.”

“Grass is not an option in Salton City, which survives on water pumped in from the Colorado River. With 20 million more residents expected in California by 2050, the quest for water is never over.”

The witness has become a key figure of our time, whether as the survivor testifying to what he has lived through or as the third party telling what he has seen or heard. Publicly bearing witness of suffering and injustice is precisely what departs the first (International Red Cross) and second (Doctors without Borders, Doctors of the World) ages of humanitarianism. Based on an etymological inquiry of the word in Greek and

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"in the sugar-cane plantations of the Cauca Valley and in the tin mines of highland Bolivia it is clear that the devil is intrinsic to the process of the proletarization of the peasant and to the commoditization of the peasant's world. (...) The neophyte proletarians and their surrounding peasant kinsman understand the world of market relations as intimately associated with the spirit of evil. Despite all possibilities of increasing their cash incomes, they still seem to view this mode of production as productive of barrenness and death as well.

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"Hence, it’s the political break that is decisive, and not the economic transformation. The true revolution in man’s history is not the Neolithic, since it may very well leave the previously existing social organization intact; it is the political revolution, that mysterious emergence – irreversible, fatal to primitive societies – of the thing we know by the name of the State. And if one wants to preserve the Marxist infrastructure and superstructure, then perhaps one must acknowledge that the infrastructure is the political, and the superstructure is the economic.

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Against Architecture (notes on the Amazon Frontier): By 1989, the rampant destruction of the rain forest in the Amazon basin had reached international media attention and became one of the paradigmatic questions that forced the introduction of environmental issues into the official agenda of global politics.

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EASST Conference 2010
2-4 September, 2010
University of Trento, Italy

Performing Places
Convenor: Katharine Willis

“The space of the city is not a static reality defined by built forms or demographic facts, but is instead a form of spatial practice created by the interweaving of everyday actions and interactions of its citizens. These interactions are no longer confined to face-to face contact, as communications media have re-arranged many social environments so that most people now find themselves in contact with others in new ways. Walls, doors, gates and distances still frame and isolate encounters, but new technologies have increasingly encroached on the situations that take place in physically defined settings. This session will look at how thinking about places as performative opens up new possibilities for both understanding and reacting to the potentials for communications technologies in space.

Networked space
The media theorist Castells has popularized the concept of the ‘space of flows’; where space is understood as linking up electronically separate locations in an interactive networks that connects activities and people in distinct geographical contexts. He contrasts this with the traditional concept of the ‘space of places’; which he defines as organizing experiences and activity around the confines of locality. One of the social consequences of such networked space is that that multiple social realities can occur in one place. The same physical space may be caught within the domain of two different social occasions. The social situations that occur in these overlapping behaviour settings support gatherings that possess a special characteristic in that they exist on more than one social level. For example, presence in public space and interaction has traditionally been equated with face-to-face contact. Yet, presence in public space as mediated by new technologies has a different type of aesthetic, no longer dominated by visual access but by informational access. The features and structure of the interaction is enabled by a connection, which is not necessarily achieved through physical movement from one location to another. As such, everyday actions and behaviours no longer belong to particular places, and are now multiplexed and overlaid; there now exists the possibility to switch rapidly from one activity to another while remaining in the same place, so we end up using the same place in many different ways. On one hand this gives rise to confusion, and ambiguous and contested zones emerge, where the multiple and overlapping behaviours created create disparate, fragmented and discontinuous spatial references. On the other hand we can consider space as a field of interaction, composed of intersections of mobile elements it is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it (de Certeau 1984, 117). In this case space is performed so that, rather than being inhabited as an intransitive bounded entity, it is experienced as a far more fluid event-based space that comes into existence only through the social actions of those present.

Performative space
In this session we will investigate the social effects of communications media on how space is inhabited and acted upon. We will explore the relevance of concepts such as neighbourhood, community and territory in times when cities become essentially transitory social spaces for many of those who experience them. In particular we will focus on the performative nature of space.”

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following website instructions) by March 15th 2010.

Policy

Let's get together, get some land
Raise our food, like the man
Save our money like the mob
Put up the factory on the job

James Brown, “Funky President”

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Law comprises a particularly important part of the social construction of territory and region. This function of the law is often obscured by an enduring emphasis on the study of legal systems that appear more or less coterminous with political jurisdictions. But legal practices crossed boundaries and helped to constitute legal cultures of unruly dimensions. In empire, law traveled with legal officials and also with merchants, sailors, soldiers, sojourners, and settlers.

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This is a five week series of films that were selected due to a research on how cinematic space is constructed and with
which means the filmic space relates and correlates with the construction of social space. This selection of films wants to
draw attention to architecture‘s performative aspect and the space that is constructed in visual media. „The space that
appears in the image (…) is concrete and not abstract or purely mathematical space. And it is (…) to a certain degree,

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Adam Pańczuk – Karczeby (2008-2009)

“In one of the dialects spoken in the east of Poland, which is a mixture of Polish and Belorussian, people strongly attached to the soil they had been cultivating for generations were called ‘Karczeby’. With their bare hands Karczeby cleared forests in order to grow crops. The word karczeb was also used to describe what remains after a tree is cut down — a trunk with roots, which remains stuck in the ground. This also applied to people — it was not easy for the authorities to root them out from their land, even in the Stalinism times. The price they paid for their attachment to their soil was often their freedom or life. After death, buried nearby their farmland, a karczeb himself became the soil, later cultivated by his descendants.”

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This friday at the roundtable I will present a 15-20 min presentation on my recent project. This new body of research develops out of a two year practice based project titled the Museum of Non Participation launched in London in 2009. My research question asks 'What might a collection be for The Museum of Non participation'. I will also be screening my new film The Exception and the Rule, 37min 2009, alongside extracts of Godard's Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) 1967.

Dear All,
This Friday the roundtable will be hosting a conversation on Terrorism and Urban Space to be published in Detritos (www.revistadetritos.com)

The topic of terrorism is extremely vast, so perhaps we could focus on 3 main directions:
1) A definition of terrorism: who has the right to define what is inside or outside the scope of terrorism, and the politics behind it, etc.
2) Terrorism and the politics of exception: allowing us to connect to contemporary policy-making, population control and internal security (war on terror; war on narcotrafic; war on illegal immigration; etc).

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Parkour Motion Reel by saggyarmpit

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Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor.

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YIN XIUZHEN
Portable City: Jia Yu Guan, 2009
Courtesy Beijing Commune

“While Beijing has been the focus of inspiration for much of Yin Xiuzhen’s work, documenting the process of deconstruction and reconstruction, Yin has since installed her work worldwide, examining cultural changes in different locales. Investigating the repercussions of globalization, with the massive changes brought about by mass transportation and communication, where physical distances have decreased by massive leaps and bounds—she examines how the cultural fabric that identifies individual cultures are either reinforced or broken down by change. In addition to examining the effects of globalization, Yin also draws heavily from her personal experiences. In her work, Portable Cities, Yin recreates her personal images/memories of a city, and experiences of ‘living out of a suitcase’, into miniaturized cities.”

YIN XIUZHEN
Portable City: Melbourne, 2009
Courtesy Beijing Commune

“Taking found fabric and clothing from the city in question (i.e. Vancouver, Berlin etc.), Yin sews together little buildings, bridges, and greenscapes inside suitcases, manufacturing transportable cities. With landmark buildings recreated on a miniaturized scale in the likes of gingham cloth, corduroy, and cotton, and recorded soundscapes of the city in question, the pieces are at once humorous, nostalgic and poignant. With their hand-crafted appeal and use of old clothing, they infuse the anonymity of city-living with the personal. While globalization and the increased openness of China has allowed the possibility for more people like Yin to travel and visit all the cities within her suitcases, ironically it has also meant that the cities themselves have incurred a certain proclivity to becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Confronting the notions of increased homogenization of cultures and environments, versus the conflicting stratifications of wealth distribution and access to commodities and exchange, Yin’s work brings about questions concerning the desire for rapid modernization and globalization.”

YIN XIUZHEN
Portable City: Shenzhen, 2008
Courtesy Beijing Commune

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A Coffee Guide to Wellington

“This tea towel, probably from the mid-1960s provides a coffee guide to Wellington, complete with descriptions of the type of food served in each café.”

Wellington café culture + media gallery

“Wellington’s café culture is today an integral part of its identity as a city. This culture began in the 1930s with the arrival of the milk bar, followed closely by coffee houses in the 1950s. After a period of decline in the 1960s and 70s, the city’s café scene has grown in spectacular fashion over the last 20 years…”

Cafés and civic life have long interested scholars of space and culture, and Wellington is considered one of the best cities in the world for drinking coffee. Midnight Espresso, located stumbling distance from my office,  is where I most often procure the flat whites (and cheese scones) that sustain my work. But after seeing this strangely fascinating coffee log, I’ve been careful to make sure most of that money goes to our holiday fund instead.