Lina Bo Bardi: MASP in Sao Paolo. Modernism takes an urban, social and material turn in Lina Bo Bardis masterpiece from the 50’ies. The building creates a third space between the city and the inside exhibition space. This urban public space, Bo Bardi saw as a meeting place for work and play; what I today will call a performative urban space. Already then, Bo Bardi saw culture as something public connected to the urban as she envisioned the space as an open arena for gatherings, exhibitions, festivals and social life. Today it appears much more social inclusive and urban than contemporary urban performance spaces such as the High Line (DS+R, Field Operations) in New York or the Red Square (BIG, TOPOTEK 1) in Copenhagen. Lina Bo Bardi actually succeeds in making modernist architecture socially inclusive and spatially performative. It is not only great architecture - it is urban design where social life emerges in the space left open by the architecture. Simply brilliant!
Sao Paolo, region ABC, Santo André
Nomad Citizenship - Eugene Holland
“By most definitions, citizenship applies to an exclusive group of people identified by their belonging to a clearly demar cated, well-defined, and well-defended state territory. Nomad citizenship is designed to break with that definition and its territorialization of the concept of citizenship: nomadism, by most definitions, broadly applies to groups that are precisely not identified with state territory; Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadism, as we will see, is broader still. But the point of combining nomadism with citizenship in this way is to smash the State’s territorializing monopoly on belonging and redistribute it globally, in alternative or minor forms of sociality both within and beyond the boundaries of the State”
Eugene Holland in the Introduction to Nomad Citizenship 2011
Suely Rolnik: Injecting poetry in the circuit
“Finding out whether or not museums permit this kind of critical conflagration may not be the best way of posing the problem. Unlike what the first generation of institutional critique may have thought, there are no regions of reality that are good or evil in themselves, with a supposedly essential identity or morality that would define them once and for all. We have to shift the givens of the problem, as it has recently started to happen. The focus of the question should be ethical: one has to sketch out the diagram of forces that invest each museum at each moment of its existence: from the most poetic forces to those of the most undignified instrumental manipulation. Between the two poles, active and reactive, a changing multiplicity of forces is asserted, at varied and variable degrees of potential, in a constant reordering of the diagrams of power. (…)
Whether this enterprise is carried out within museological spaces or not depends on their singularity and on the kind of problem that gives rise to it; and if, in certain cases, the museum can be one of the possible sites for such actions, the choice of the adequate institution involves a cartography of the forces at work before one launches any initiative. It is in this way that the properly poetic force can participate in the destiny of a society, contributing so that its vitality can affirm itself in immunity to the seductive call of the market, which proposes an orientation in exclusive accord with its own interests.”
Suely Rolnik: The Body’s Contagious Memory 2007
On assemblages and vibrant matter
“Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within. They have uneven topographies, because some points at which the various affects and bodies Crosspaths are more heavily trafficked than others, and so power is not distributed equally across its surface. Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of materials has sufficient competence to determine the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (…) is distinct from the sum of the vital forces of each materiality considered alone” (Jane Bennet Vibrant Matter 2010:24)
via prostheticknowledge: Blinking Cities by Instant Hutong
Ongoing project uses urban geographic information as a creative colourful grammar and highlight the changing forms of these places:
Blinking City is a project investigating the inadequacy of traditional maps for city environments characterized by fast pace transformation and urban growth. As soon as the map is done, the city it describes has already gone. We transferredone of the Blinking City pattern, based on a collage of several Hutongneighbourhoods of Beijing, onto a wall of a dilapidated courtyard house inXianyukou district, located in the core of the city
Currently, there are three forms of this project, graffiti, lenticular animated disks, and an animation, embedded below:
BLINKING CITY [ animation ] from instanthutong on Vimeo.
You can find out more about the project here, here, and here.
PS - The Gifs above are not my own, and should be credited to the artist.
(via fuckyeahcartography)
Material reuse clearly is not just a simple task of force-fitting a material into a building for the sake of reuse: it is a viable, sustainable alternative to incorporating newly created materials, and can be done so in ways that are attractive and appealing.
—Adam Nowek on why material reuse should be commonplace in architecture.
(Source: thisbigcity)
Uncanny forms and objects in Lea Porsager’s Anatta Experiment. Installation view from the wood house in Karlsaue Park during dOKUMENTA 13. The house and the film is inspired by the Monte Verita experiments - consisting of a microcollective of artists experimenting with the spiritual, nature and art in Schweiz in the early 1900.
Lea Porsager on the Anatta Experiment
Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
from Monoskop via philosophyandtheory
Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits
—Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (via neutralnatura)
(Source: infinity-on-trial, via deactiavtedhookedonsemiotics)
I cannot forget the The dog with the pink leg. Installation detail in Pierre Huyghes organic and hybrid landscape-human-animal installation during dOKUMENTA. This extraordinary work of art is in a state of continuous becoming. Even though the installation is probably closed down after the closing of dOKUMENTA, it still reconfigures in the minds of the visitors. At least in my mind.
dOKUMENTA 13 cultivated this processual and organic approach to art: “An exhibition is an unfolding organism, like a vegetable bud. It comes from intuitions, then it forms an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge; like a plant — which contains in itself many other living entities — it has roots, buds and fruit.” (…) On June 9, 2012, when the exhibition opened in Kassel, we said that dOCUMENTA (13) was dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment, and active living in connection with, yet not subordinated to, theory. We said these were terrains where politics are inseparable from a sensual, energetic, and worldly alliance between current research in various scientific and artistic fields and other knowledges, both ancient and contemporary, and that dOCUMENTA (13) was driven by a holistic and non-logocentric vision that is skeptical of the persisting belief in economic growth, a vision that is shared with, and recognizes, the shapes and practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world, including people. And now we add that an exhibition could be thought of as a pre-reflexive consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without itself. A bliss able to go beyond the aporias of the subject and the object—an experience of life no longer dependent on the first, nor submitted to the latter. Art is ceaselessly posed in life.”
From dOKUMENTA webpage
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I really think dOKUMENTA 13 succeeded in the upheaval of the boundaries between art and life.
And And And during dOKUMENTA. Interesting to see how the laboratory paradigm of the 90ies ispired by Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ have developed into a socio-political workshop paradigm of alternative nows in today’s contemporary art.
Interestingly, artists no longer consider themselves as artist producing art works. Rather they consider themselves as catalysts for social change.
With the words of the artist group AND AND AND: “AND AND AND is an artist run initiative, which has used the time between 2010 and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 to consider with individuals and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today and the constituent publics or communities which could be addressed. The series of interventions, situations, and occurrences entitled AND AND AND are part of dOCUMENTA (13) and compose a map of emergent positions, concerns, and possible points of solidarity.”
Read more on AND AND AND, and their three planes of consistency
