In the villages of the metropolitan region, where pre-existing traits and urban artifacts are confronted with new urban growth models, it is rarely possible to imagine a future for historic cores beyond well-known urban processes related to tourism, decay or gentrification. However, a few old public basins that were once meeting places, spaces for socialization and household labour are here re-approppriated through creative practices based on collaboration and negotiation with the community and the diverse power flows.

On the basis of an attentive observation of several of these artistic interventions on those basins, it is posible to identify the potential of the so-called collaborative art practices in their most hybrid version, as a new dimension of creative, spatial and critical imagination, re-configuring and re-articulating the existing conditions of the place and the desires of its users and inhabitants.

This recognition activates both the people and the site, fostering a multiplicity of subsequent connections, actions and reactions that become a new social actor. An enormous transformative energy that unfolds virus-like, progressively influencing all spheres of society through a complex process that fosters interaction among the participants and includes: their own re-discovery of that space and the subsequent process of re-appropriation through the cooperative construction of an alternative and collective ‘imaginary’, a desire to tell ‘others’ about this new ‘imaginary’ and this ‘new’ place, a growing awareness of their ability to act for themselves and interfere in the definition of their environment and lives, and finally, a process of un-deliberated realization of their disagreement with reality that leads to real and genuine dissent.

These and other collaborative and critical spatial practices may represent an alternative to the hegemonic, much more autonomous, ‘professionalist’ and usual approaches to urban heritage, urban planning, architecture and other spatial disciplines. Such a process  implies the possibility of a new gaze that fosters the generation of an integrated urban model, encouraging participatory processes in the managing and revitalization of urban spaces.

Political activism may be also camouflaged within one of these hybrid practices and be then progressively deployed not only within a liminal thirdspace – which might well be the ‘locus’ for conspiracy and incubation – but also in the very essence of urban life, becoming an alternative but effective way of actively producing space, ultimately giving shape to the city.

A neighborhood meeting, a collective bath or swim, the re-opening of a once neglected public space, an artistic performance, a discussion and a series of conversations will be used to analyze and reflect upon the creative and social capital of other ways of making the city based on the recognition of an otherwise silenced and hidden experience.

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“Making community and making space for community cannot be separated. Planners and architects might start to consider the inherent social and relational dimension of the spaces they create, and to integrate their specific temporalities and mobilities into the design process. The Lefebvrian understanding of the ‘production of space’ being social and political is now widely accepted, far beyond Marxism and sociology, as a base for any sustainable approach in urban development. The question that remains is that of methodology and critical innovation, the degree of openness of the different professional and political frameworks that commission such approaches, which might leave room for unpredictability and bottom-up proposals issued from real claims. The architectural production of public space could start by identifying the claims for it. Sometimes these claims are modest and informal, but what is important is how to transform them into a brief, a challenge, and sometimes a proposal that will give room to the multiplicity of desires and needs of diverse sets of users.“ Doina Petrescu

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“Through its various programs, from urban planning, economic regulation, fiscal policy, and infrastructural investment to the spatially differentiated provision of core public goods such as housing, education, health, welfare, and policing, the state determines the extent of the distance between the top and the bottom of the urban order; the vehicles, pathways, and ease with which that distance may be travelled; and what forms of sociospatial seclusion take root and grow (whether deprived and defamed categories are hemmed in a ghetto, an ethnic cluster, or a slum; how big the prison system is; how closed and isolated upper-class districts are, etc.). Through its structure and policies, patterned actions and inactions, the Leviathan determines the scope, spread, and intensity of marginality in the city. This implies that, insofar as they collaborate in shaping the built environment, urban planners and architects partake in the production of the space of sociospatial relegation. And they will grow more implicated in the design of urban seclusion as advanced societies increasingly rely on spatial “solutions” to festering social problems in the dualizing metropolis.” Loïc Wacquant

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What are we to make of the immense concentrations of wealth, privilege and consumerism in almost all the cities of the world in the midst of an exploding planet of slums? Cities have always risen in the first place from the fact of the encounter or the meeting, the crossing point, the stimulus of interaction and activity…. but also and specially during the last years, through the geographical and social concentration of a surplus product.

The city: “is splitting into different separated parts, with the apparent formation of many microstates. Wealthy neighborhoods provided with all kinds of services, such as exclusive schools, golf courses, tennis courts and private police patrolling the area around the clock intertwine with illegal settlements where water is available only at public fountains, no sanitation system exists, electricity is pirated by a privileged few, the roads become mud streams whenever it rains, and where house-sharing is the norm. Each fragment appears to live and function autonomously, sticking firmly to what it has been able to grab in the daily fight for survival.” (Harvey, 2004)

Under these conditions, ideals of urban identity, citizenship and belonging, already threatened by the spreading of the neoliberal ethic, become much harder to sustain.

A process of displacement and of “accumulation by dispossession” lies also at the very core of the urban process under capitalism. Urbanization has indeed played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses and has done so at every increasing geographical scales but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that entail the dispossession of the urban masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet of slums collides with the planet as a vast building site.
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What is perhaps most striking in the dialectics of difference, differentiation and diversity, in
contemporary critique is a general shift from the collective to the singular, the issue of
typologies and classifications becoming the issue of personal identity. Difference, instead of being associated in a negative sense with the ascription of unequal social roles and places for discrimination, becomes thus a positive value, a freedom from homogeneity and uniformity, therefore a basic component of liberty.

The result are this two contrasting figures of difference: on the one hand a differentiation which is imposed from the point of view of a hierarchic totality, e.g. a typology of Human Races or Cultures, and on the other hand a differentiation that indicates how identities always differ from themselves (the fact that the most fundamental difference, the one that precisely resists classifications and typologies, always arises from the inside…)

“Therefore to differ from oneself or to be absolutely different is also, indeed, to differ from any difference that has been ascribed to the singular by narratives of domination and objectification.” (Balibar, 2002)

This post will be updated soon. You can upload your comments through the link below.

You can add your comments to week 6 film and texts through this post.

“The common definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese, the subject’s gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its “blind spot,” that which is “in the object more than object itself,” the point from which the object itself returns the gaze. “Sure, the picture is in my eye, but me, I am also in the picture”: 2 the first part of this Lacan’s statement designates subjectivization, the dependence of reality on its subjective constitution, while its second part provides a materialist supplement, reinscribing the subject into its own image in the guise of a stain (the objectivized splinter in its eye). Materialism is not the direct assertion of my inclusion into the objective reality (such an assertion presupposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of reality); it rather resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself am included into the picture constituted by me – it is this reflexive short-circuit, this necessary REDOUBLING of myself as standing outside AND inside my picture, that bears witness to my “material existence.” Materialism means that the reality I see is never “whole” – not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which signals my inclusion in it.”

(“The Parallax View”, Slavoj Zizek)

There will be no class on Wednesday 3rd of November. Please try to find/get the scheduled film for that week . Watch Fienne’s documentary on cinema and Zizek’s sharp and provocative deconstructions and reflections and write a comment that must be sent to the corresponding post  (WEEK 06, I will upload the post by the end of the week).

I am traveling to Göteborg in Sweden to deliver a guest lecture a Chalmers University of Technology, School of Architecture with the title “Objectual Imageries. Aesthetics, Politics and Pragmatic Dissent”. During the week I will be participating in two different design studios and several discussions that might be of interest for our course too. I will try to relate my posts to the talk, the reactions and the debates.

http://www.chalmers.se/arch/SV/aktuellt/kalendarium/alberto-altes-objectual

This post will be updated soon. Comments to the class and film can be already added through the link below.

Physical borders – conceptual borders – constructed borders

Is language performative? what can we do with words? what is the power of naming?

Foucault’s theory of power has implications for the attempt to locate power in the name. The name of power. “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society“. The name of a complexity that is not easily named.

A name tends to fix, to freeze, to delimit, to render substantial, indeed, it appears to recall a metaphysics of substance, of discrete and singular kinds of beings.

What does it mean for a word not only to name, but also in some sense to perform and, in particular, to perform what it names?

Do we perform the border by naming it or by crossing it? Who draws the border?

Gitai is undoubtedly a sensitive observer and a gifted storyteller, architect and filmmaker, he continuous to develop a vast project that is also insanely ambitious on both the cinematic and the political level.

In Alila, the relationship with architecture is perhaps a bit more direct than in previous weeks, the film attends to the structure, representation and characteristics of several buildings, their spaces becoming another character in the film. Their openings, materials, layers and construction are dissected and explored by a camera that flows silently and undisturbed from the chaotic, loud and uncertain outside to the most inner and intimate stances of ‘the home’ and ‘the room’.

Gitai’s composition seems to be that of an architect too: strictly delineated and conceived sequence shots, blocks superimposed on other blocks, “finally resulting in an aesthetic indication of a Cubist mise en scène”.

Those sequences, often tracking shots, work their way from place to place, removing walls, going through them, rendering space and relationships visible, following the characters and creating a coexistence of time, spaces, actions and characters. A coexistence that can be read as an attempt at drawing the dramatic proximity of bodies and minds in the uncertain territories of Israel, as well as the breaks and dislocations of private and public spaces.

The border, the frontier. It is the theme of both the novel “Returning Lost Loves” by Yehoshua Kenaz, from which the film draws extensively, and Gitai’s trilogy.

Gitai’s starting point is much more the everyday life of a popular district than a geopolitical reflection, although his approach proves much more effective at communicating the extremely ‘cramped’ nature of Israel and the results this condition has on the mingling of bodies and people.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Gitai’s movie, beyond the superb images and extraordinary light (as already noted below by some of you), has to do with a description of ‘compressed’ humanity, a description of the ‘ethos’ of Mediterranean society, a representation of spatial, bodily, verbal and atmospheric promiscuity.

Borders. The border between personal and public space. The limit between private and public space. The possibilities for each to shape themselves as a person and within the collective.

A border, a distance, a separation.

(More on borders to come next week.)

Please upload your comments to the second week class and film by answering to this post. Those of you have already uploaded comments using older posts please do it again here.

I will start by recalling on my previous posts about the work of Ulrich Seidl in order to frame the discussion and then I will try to reflect on the film and the themes explored during the class.

Ulrich Seidl’s cinema of disturbance forces the otherwise passive spectator into an active role: he/she, the viewer, must now “read” the image, think and react. By leaving an open space in the film, Seidl offers the viewer a chance to understand the everyday life scenarios and grotesque episodes from his/her own perspective. This freedom is also a trap, and viewers are often confronted with themselves and thus feel afraid or uncomfortable.

Nevertheless, his work is not so much focused on the individual, but rather deconstructs and criticizes society as a whole, offering an unprecedented look through a series of unexplored gaps and cracks, effectively attacking the overwhelming totalitarism of indifference that currently rules the world.

As I tried to present it, the truly disturbing condition of a ‘capsular’ society as the one theorized by Lieven de Cauter or the one depicted by Seidl, is a sort of total breakdown in communication. Absolute miscommunication, or an absolute lack thereof. The deeper each individual falls into her own capsule, the harder it is to get to the “surface” where “representation” necessarily takes place, and thus the harder it is to effectively communicate.

As society keeps on becoming segregated, polarized and capsularized, an interior and an exterior are defined and separated… fear then drives to further capsularization, which in turn generates more fear. Isolated cells need however to communicate, but capsules force to a mediated communication through diverse representational devices and thus to failure.

Such a breakdown or failure is brilliantly pictured by Seidl, who is able to present the everyday lives of the Viennese characters in a way that amplifies their everyday human “oddness”. And of course this amplification is aiming precisely at creating the necessary “distance” from the spectator, a distance for the viewer to be able to think and reflect while watching, a distance for the viewer not to be sucked-in by the movie, a distance to avoid a passive viewer.

It is necessary to stop by Brecht’s epic theatre here and reflect a little bit more on that “distance”. One of Brecht’s most interesting and famous “narrative machines” is the “Verfremdungseffekt”. (A working translation of which could be “distancing effect” provided we assume “Verfremden” means “to distance” in German, which is altogether a simplification of the original term…)

Again, as opposed to the fascinating display of luxury and fake illusions to be found in so many films, here everything starts from everyday life… a critique of everyday life. A critique enacted through the use of the ‘reverse image’, as Lefebvre explains in his own “Critique of Everyday Life”: “an image of everyday reality, taken in its totality or as a fragment, reflecting that reality in all its depth through people, ideas and things which are apparently quite different from everyday experience, and therefore exceptional, deviant, abnormal”.

In order to understand this complex problem, Lefebvre suggests we think about ourselves and our lives, and reflect about the impression of familiarity we get from the everyday familiar terms in which we operate with our own family, group, milieu…The familiarity makes us think that we know them, but the familiar is not necessarily the known: “Was ist bekannt is nicht erkannt”. What is familiar conceals human beings and makes them difficult to know by giving them a mask we can recognize, a mask that is merely the lack of something.

In our society, today, within the liquid space of flows and the forms of exchange, labour and production, there is no social relation without a certain alienation. Brecht perceived the ‘epic’ content of everyday life, the hardness of actions, the necessity of judging… and was perfectly aware of the alienation that was to be found in this same everyday life. To see people properly we need to place them at a reasonable distance. It is then the consciousness of alienation (a strange awareness of the strange) that liberates us, begins to liberate us, from alienation. The spectator is meant to ‘disalienate’ himself in and through the consciousness of alienation.

In that sense, the discussion around the “oddness” and “normality” of different characters is ultimately a discussion about our own “oddness” and “normality”. I think it has much more to do with the hiding and displaying of it, with the subjective perception of it, with the “masks” we are projecting onto the characters and onto ourselves, than with a supposedly “normal” truth, or “flawless” ideal standard we want to create for ourselves.

Most of us watching the movie are “odd” as well, just “odd” in a different way… but we do not represent by no means “the average” either, if that is closer to such an ‘ideal standard’ or exists at all: we are among the privileged few that can discuss films and study or teach at the university, we move within our own environment, groups and milieu… and yet we can’t say we know everyone around us so well… The group-sex session is certainly not that odd in northern European countries, I would say neither here, and as Seidl tries to show, takes place “naturally”, meters away from the corridor of the shopping mall… almost as if it were a sports center…

And are the violence, the hate, the sad loneliness, the despair, the lack of communicative skills, the weakness, the ignorance, the fear, so rare and hard to find?… or are they all around us…?

Seidl work is not about “weird” or “disturbed” individuals. It is about an alienated society. The everyday episodes and characters are just a way to present such alienation. Distant enough to make the “Verfremdungseffekt” happen and “disalienation” possible.

Yet, Seidl is wise enough to provide some hope and humor mixed with the cruelty and rawness of some episodes… The hitchhiker is clearly the anti-character, the one that breaks into the limits of other’s capsules, fearless, utterly communicative… but still unable to reach their souls: she speaks a different language, less representational, more direct and crude. She is constantly misunderstood, unwanted, judged and excluded.

But yet, she is the most skilled for communication, and when she is rejected here, goes on talking there, as if strangely aware of the big problem, as if in a mission to foster communication… to finally end up communicating with the lights, subverting the use of the presence-activated light systems in the entrances of houses, joyfully and playfully active, she is, ultimately, the only one having fun…

The rain, and a few other moments throughout the film, such as the scene of the couple swinging in silence, can also be read positively, as if leaving some hope for relief and recovery in the glimpses of their awareness of their own alienation and their will to communicate…