Fashion for a Revolution

25th of March is the date that Greece celebrates 

its independence from the Ottoman Empire

 listening to the Nationalistic paranoia on the streets today was a strange wake-up call

 because in fact Greece has nothing much to celebrate.

Certainly not the fact that we are faced with a dreary election, in which the two main parties participate with their worst leaders in years. An election which is really the last thing a country in such deep trouble needs.

maybe the only thing worth celebrating is the splendid t-shirt weather

 which made me take out these 25th January Arab Spring t-shirts bought in Tahrir square, 

celebrating the hoped independence of Egypt. 

I cant help but thinking that a revolution might be our only hope.

Civic City Cahiers

 recently I've been going through the  great Civic City Cahier series, 

from the lovely folks at Bedford Press (and fellow ASAPers)

 which deals with how we deal with the world

as architects, designers, artists.

 mostly, with how we can keep producing for a world economy 

 that seems to only want to screw us up

1st from the series was Margit Mayers Cahier #1, Social Movements in the (Post-) Neoliberal City suggests a strategic negation of design as a tool for creating cities based on values other than just profit. Picking up a strand of thinking started with Henri Lefebvres' Right to the City, Mayer seems to suggest cities where conflict is a positive tool. Even though she positions the problems of the city quite well, I think the line of thinking does not take us much farther than the Occupy and Indignados movements.

next on my list was Cahier #5, Eric Swyngedouws' Designing the Post-Political City and the Insurgent Polis focus on the anger that has been recently surfacing in public space.  He talks about returning to public space as an inherently political platform, away from the comme-il-faut capitalism of the endless megabrand franchise globalisation and the hopeless and almost banal explosions of anger: "Resistance as the ultimate horizon of urban movements has become a hysterical act; a subterfuge that masks what is truly at stake - how to make sure that nothing changes." Swyngedouw suggests we reclaim the Polis by moving closer to public space as an arena of dispute and even conflict, concluding with three points: to start by thinking of of a free public urbanity, to allow space for Speech, even if that is utopian speech, and third to go beyond the fantasy of neoliberal marketplace which keeps us in fear of a crisis, to accept that the catastrophe has already happened, that we are already within the collapse of a civilization and we just need to choose sides.

 

Cahier #3 though seems to be taking everything a step further, and I guess the numbering is not sequential, since Cahier #4 has yet to come out. (and sadly Cahier #2 is out of print, I guess I missed it)

Tom Holerts' Distributed Agency, Design's Potentiality goes beyond the refusal and resistance of the previous volumes,  towards a place where design has joined the system of post-capitalism and attempts to make changes from within, not against. Holert suggests design is a practice of distributed agency, a social, political, anthropological, aesthetic and even engineering practice, and says that what we need to be designing is not participants into the system, but the system itself. As I was reading this, I kept imagining that it would lead to a designing of how space is distributed, how buildings are sold, how construction companies get control of land, how developers actually profit from public space. If we could re-design this system, we would be redesigning our cities, we would be retaking control of public space. In fact, instead of buildings and spaces we should be busy designing political systems. I was taking these thoughts further and further as I've been for the last 6 months working on such a project, to be posted quite soon in this blog.

Yet Holert goes in another direction, perhaps equally interesting. He suggests the space of collaboration, and of the artisan as practices that can withstand the neoliberal tsunami, he imagines economies of community, new ways of "being together", of re-designing the city, improving inherited designs via micro-alterations that engage with the local, of design facing it's own responsibilities in the current landscape. 

Maybe we can do even more? as Holert quotes somewhere :

"If you're going to be a corporate tool, at least be a good one."

Ode to James Wines (SITE)

James Wines is the best

 because he melted buildings before anybody else

 he is the only architect to have made McDonald's levitate

 he rolled up parking lots like carpets

 just to sweep the building underneath

 

 James Wines allowed houses to be occupied by nature

 made buildings out of hay stacks

 

facades out of anti-gravity rocks

opened up buildings to reveal water

 cracked open shopping malls

 to let the people in

and maybe lock them inside?

that's why James Wines is great

fragments of a text on the paintings of Priscilla Tea

If you stared long at a screen image without blinking and then closed your eyes, what you would see for an instant, the memory of the image you were looking at, is somehow close to the subject matter of what Priscilla Tea seems to be capturing. Paintings that embed half-erased memories of images on canvas with thick layer upon thick layer of paint. 

Abstract landscapes of thoughts and negation, skate parks and palm trees in white and blue, these paintings appear as traffic signs from our subconscious image stream.

Studying these radically minimized landscapes of memory, suddenly I have the urge to imagine that they were made on a computer, I almost can recognize the software that made them, almost but never completely, this software exists just one level below my consciousness, if that was ever possible. Could we sketch in our subconscious? Could we even have subconscious computers? This is what their images would look like.

Through this invisible software, we almost recognize places we have seen before, we almost visualize skate parks and suburban swimming pools, we almost have a sense of the continuous feeling of being on the edge of town, in a softly abandoned suburbia. Yet maybe we are just imagining these, maybe these paintings are just lines and blocks of color and some shapes. Maybe these are abstract paintings after all. Even if we doubt what is really shown here, somehow the images linger, like retinal residue from screens and landscapes.

When you look at Priscilla Tea's paintings in real life, the surface of the canvas manifests an almost absurd insistence in the shape of these places, because these horizon lines and suburban landscapes are painted over and over so many times that the paint finally acquires a physical depth, the paint itself becomes a place.

This sharp contradiction on how one perceives the paintings online and how one experiences them physically is perhaps one of the few ways we can enjoy painting today. The physical object is allowed to be more than it's representation. The painting is no longer just an image, it is a physical object, a place even, and perhaps Priscilla Tea already is just preparing the ground for places for which to feel this nostalgia. The work understands the contemporary condition of looking at too many images on screens all day long, of continuously mistaking the real work for it's mechanical reproduction;  

The question of painting in the age of the screen persists.
Even in Art fairs, where you walk around to see art, often times the place where you'll see the most paintings is on the screens of the myriad ipads that art dealers have adopted in their quest to sell more. Browsing paintings on an ipad is easier and sometimes more pleasurable that walking about. Everything is crisp and looks good on the ipad screen, better than the pages of art magazines. So what can a painting offer that it's photograph doesn't offer better? And what will happen to paintings when our walls become touchscreens?

In Tea's most recent paintings, the memories of the places she paints seem to have drowned, burned out, cancelled by aggressive diagonal lines over them. This cancellation is a place in itself, built up by slow, sure, endlessly, almost maniacally repeated brushstrokes that complete a solid and ephemeral image. This is painting at the moment when our culture has completely digested it's digital revolution, screen and reality are one, online friends are offline ghosts, and we survive every day in an endless torrent of images, all gone by the time that we close our eyes, except perhaps those insistent landscapes by Priscilla Tea.

LOST in Luxor (Egyptian saga continues)

Is it possible to overblog a trip to Egypt? Are three posts on the same subject too many? and can you possibly take too many pictures in one trip? These are questions I've been pondering while concluding the posts on Egypt (or not). 

(so at the last post, we were trying to teleport out of Luxor)

and we found ourselves at the apparently over-photographed Valley of the Kings. 

So over-photographed in fact, 

that they dont let you take any pics, ever, never. 

they have secured the entrance with miniature meta-pyramids that no doubt send messages to the sky if they see you take your camera out.

at the tombs, so much security that they dont even let you in. 

Is the Valley of the Kings that precious really?

or is it just so over-renovated 

that it does not look like an ancient extraterrestrial monument anymore, 

but like present day Las Vegas instead? 

(I would show you more pics, 

but the guard that caught me insisted that I delete all the photos, 

after I refused to pay him to get my iphone back, 

it was quite lol, etc)

anyway so the Tombs have been manicured and botoxed to perfection, becoming unreal and unruins in the process. It is clearly the Knossos school of Fake Ruinry.

pretty little path so you dont think it's just a desert mountain

 most of the tombs look like this, though some of them had no hieroglyphics on them, and we wondered wether they had just not applied the Egyptian Ruin coating on yet. Alas, those pics will never see the light of day.

Other temples were friendlier, though disappointingly authentic in their ruination

on the way back we stopped at the temple of Hatshepsut

where we witnessed an impromptu Alien visitation

on the way back to town, yet more Security inspired meta-puramids

and were rather spooked when we had to pass a drawbridge 

and a complete security check to enter our next hotel.

all the security hysteria seemed to be worth it,

since it was situated on a beautiful private island on the Nile.

some of the landscape did seem a bit artificial, but who could complain?

the island was dotted with cute little vernacular egyptian huts,
with some strange infrastructural things on the roofs.
Did machines live in these huts?

other huts seemed to be hiding inside specially constructed trees

then we started to notice various machines hiding in the bushes



even machines hiding in the sand











machines trying to pass as trees

suddenly it all started to make sense

 we had landed right into the lost Egyptian season of LOST, 

this was Dharma Central, right down to the hexagonal bungalows

the cores of the bungalows were inhabited by machines too

some buildings were curiously upsidedown

an innocent looking swimming pool was just a place to hide more machines

even the smoke monster was immortalized in the topiary designs

 suddenly trees seemed threatening

 Hexagonal Conspiracy #3

 Hysteria checkpoint #6

 Museum of Disaster?

suddenly screams and people running and coughing

it was the Jollie Ville Smoke Monster!  we had to get out of here!

(the hotel staff assured us this was just the regular anti-mosquito cloud, that they unleashed every evening)

we located a Topiary Teleport near the entrance and decided to make a run for it

(do be continued, perhaps)