Monthly Archives: February 2012

# PALESTINE /// The Economical Means of Resistance for Gaza against the Blockade

One should not restrain Gaza’s economy to the simple clandestinity, and by extension, one should certainly not assume that every inhabitant of Gaza is involved in the resistance against the Israeli blockade they have to suffer from.  That is to say that the photos in this article do not depict the common life that people of Gaza experiences every day. However, such economy does exists and allows the importation of goods from Egypt which eases the lack of supplies in the Gaza strip. The means of transportation between Egypt and Gaza are insured by the several tunnels set up below the border and the no-construction zone set-up by the Israeli army in which the IDF bulldozers regularly comes to dig the earth.  On the contrary of the tunnels of Cu Chi (Vietnam) that I briefly evoked in a recent article, those tunnels are strictly dedicated to the flux of goods between one territory and another in order to resist at an economical level. It is well known that the fruit international exportation from Gaza suffers from the disloyal competition against Israeli products. The Palestinian production needs to transit via Israel to reach other countries and it often spent several days at Ben Gurion airport -Gaza’s airport having been destroyed in 2002- before being transported out of the region, thus partially loosing quality. The internal economy is therefore very important in the Palestinian region which suffers from a 45% unemployment rate precisely because of the blockade.

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# GUEST WRITERS ESSAYS 21 /// Old Media’s Ressurection by Linnéa Hussein

“audiocassette“ cover for i-phone 4

I am always happy to have non-architects participating to this guest writers series (see the essays by Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Raja Shehadeh) and that is the case again this week thanks to Linnéa Hussein and her essay Old Media’s Ressurection. She recently finished her Master in Film Studies at Columbia University and will  soon start a PhD in the same discipline. She was also a teacher assistant at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Westchester (New York).

Her essay investigates  the medium that the tape (audio and VHS) constitutes and its return in contemporary cinema. However, instead of only questioning the medium in its form, she explores two films, Omar Gatlato and La Bocca del Lupo in which the tape is both the main object of the narrative and the provider of the plot.

Old Media’s Ressurection
by Linnéa Hussein

In October 2011 The New York Times published an article on the revival of the VHS tape in the horror film genre. What makes these so-called neo-VHS tapes different from their outdated VHS companions is the fact that their role transformed from being technical to being esthetic. Whole magazines such as for example Lunchmeat or Fangoria are devoted to the subject of the VHS now. For these horror fans, the neo-VHS is not preferred for functional reasons, but because the grainy picture quality – i.e. the signs of usage that made the DVD and BluRay replace the VHS in the first place – became an indispensible trope of the bad horror film genre.

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# LECTURES AND SYMPOSIUM /// Stelarc at the Architectural Association (February 2012)

Australian Artist Stelarc recently gave a lecture at the Architectural Association in London entitled Circulating Flesh: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera. For about an hour an half, he allows us to explore thirty years of his work entirely dedicated to the human body, its abilities, its limits and its potential voluntary transformation via technology. From his work in the 80′s in which he was hanging his body with hoists directly in his skin, to the more recent surgical operation that transplanted him a third ear on his arm, his work is as fascinating as disturbing to consider. In fact, this difficulty to approach these experiments directly applied to his body tells us much about our profound ignorance and taboo that we associated our own body with.  It is also somehow shocking that we experience a stronger uneasiness when we see his work dedicated to his body transformation rather than this experiment he lead in the 90′s in which somebody was taking over his body’s behavior via a remote control sending nervous electrical signals. This latter work is indeed proposing the vision of potential terrifying futures…

Stelarc’s work is therefore as much interesting for its content than for the imaginary it opens on the way the body can be a terrain of experiments illustrating its characteristics. It thus participates to proposing a beginning of answer to the Spinozist problem (see previous article): What can a body do ?

Watch the lecture by following this link. (Thanks Frank)

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# GREAT SPECULATIONS /// Gamma by Factory Fifteen (in Chernobyl and Baikonur)

Factory Fifteen (see previous post) just released their new film that they shot during Liam Young and Kate Davies’ Unknown Fields 2011 in Chernobyl (Ukraine) and Baikonur (Kazakhstan). Gamma is a sort of short pseudo documentary depicting a future in which numerous zones of the earth needs to be deradiated after a decade of nuclear war.  As always in a capitalist world, this kind of public health operations are achived by private actors, here a company called Gamma which developed a type of roots that would absorb radioactivity. The film introduces the testimony of a survivor who describes how, very quickly, this root became autonomous and out of control, invading little by little his city.

The witness’ testimony talks about war machines to describe the vessels sent by Gamma, thus assimilating their action on the city as a sort of military invasion. In 1985, Ronald Reagan was claiming that the nine most terrifying words of the English language were ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help‘, we might want to paraphrase his claim against him saying that the most terrifying words are ‘I’m from a company and I’m here to help‘. The Fukushima experience clearly showed how private interests mixed with political corruption were leading to this kind of catastrophes.

GAMMA from Factory Fifteen on Vimeo.

You can watch the making-of video by following this link.

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# FINE ARTS /// The Materialist Creation of Perry Hall as discussed with Carla Leitão

Perry Hall: Tidal Empire (Coral Painting), 2011. Oil, acrylic and custom paints filmed live using a RED Epic digital cinema camera.

Carla Leitão dedicated her monthly contribution to the Huffington Post to a short conversation with American artist Perry Hall who brought to painting as well as other mediums, a whole new materialist approach that confuse mean and content in a fascinating expression of paint for its physical property and behavior. By doing so, he makes visible the invisible forces that animate the physical world and the cosmos in a literal application of Paul Klee’s definition of art. Perry and I are in contact to perhaps do something on this blog soon and this interview is a perfect mean to enter his work before this happens.

I copy here the article for the blog’s archive but it can (and probably should as it also includes a digital gallery of Perry Hall’s work) be read on the Huffington Post’s website itself.

Perry Hall: Sonified, Synesthesia and Livepaintings
By Carla Leitão

Contemporary discourse in architecture and design reflects upon the increasing ability to engage the lively part of matter and train this sensibility as not only a broader search for tools as much as an agenda of exploration — that expands realms of thought on the concepts of information exchange, nature and construction, environment and interaction or collaboration. My own interest in it has been temporarily focused on the flickering merging of the concepts of matter and media through the lens of seeing information as currency in the natural world.

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# MILITARIZED ARCHITECTURES /// The Camouflaged Paranoia of the Embassy (FAR in Belgrade)

New German Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia by FAR Frohn&Rojas (2009)

For the second time, I find the architectural behavior of FAR (Frohn & Rojas) highly debatable. The first time was when they started to sell in series their plans of the Wall House they designed in 2004 to be reproduced anywhere in the world. This second time focuses on the proposal they made in 2009 for the new German Embassy in Belgrade in the context of a competition.

Their project registers itself in the embrace of a paranoia as they write it in their short introduction:

The 21st century is an era of perceived terrorist and ecological threat which sends architecture to the frontline and the city into defensive mode. The embassy building lies at the core of this threat and embodies an apparently inevitable contradiction between being both welcoming and at the same under constant security alert.

However, this paranoia does not want to appear as such and needs in their opinion to be camouflaged in what they call friendly/disguised defense. Their facade is therefore composed of an aluminum foam screen that would prevent the building from being too much affected by a potential explosion coming from the outside. FAR is thus arguing for the delivery of a new architectural aesthetic which hides its militarized function in a contrast that would not miss to enrage Slavoj Zizek and his fight against decaf coffee, beer without alcohol etc.

This project is therefore attempting to be the opposite of the fortress that constitutes the American Embassy in Baghdad which never lied on its militarization -let’s not forget that an Embassy has nothing to do with armed conflicts in the first place. However, the discrepancy between FAR’s very problematic discourse and their actual architectural proposition makes this project interesting as one might notice that they did not completely managed to erase its defensiveness aspect (see the last image below). The facade is in fact presenting an aggressive appearance that cannot be tarnished by the camouflaged paranoia of its textual description.
The consideration for a potential partial destruction of the building is a rare thing and as a direct product of paranoia applied to architecture, one might be able to question for better of for worse this discipline.

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# GUEST WRITERS ESSSAYS 20 /// The Clear-Blurry Line by Daniel Fernández Pascual

Exceptions to Environmentalism: Industrial Harbour Avilés

Our friend from Deconcrete, Daniel Fernández Pascual wrote this week’s guest writer essay in which he questions the idea of sovereignty on territories that remain legally blurry. Indeed, the paradigm of the two-dimensional map cannot be enough anymore to describe lands (sky, underground, space, other planets etc.) whose sovereignty had never necessitated to be discussed in another way than theoretically in the past. Our era opens a new paradigm in which the legal action of a State on a territory will be defined through the complexity of space and its multiple layers.
Nowadays, the American military drones fly over Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, Somalia without being seen. The United States are not officially at war with those states and such activity could be considered as an invasion. Once again the example of Palestine is interesting. There are a lot of us who describes the territorial struggle via maps and based on two dimensional interpretation of space. I usually use the figure of 63% to explain the part of absolute territorial control that Israel exercise in the West Bank. In reality Israel controls 100% of the Palestinian sky, 100% of the aquifer of this same territory and many part of the underground in which roads have been built to link the Israeli territory to the various settlements. In addition of that, the water of the Jordan river, the Dead Sea as well as the immediate part of the sea that should belongs to Gaza (thus controlling the fishing economy).

Daniel proposes at the end of his essay to rethink the space of the boundary, maybe the very notion of sovereignty has to be transformed as the Rabbi Martin Goodman proposes for the Israeli/Palestinian territory in his proposal of a double sovereignty for a same territory. A similar proposition was made approximately at the same time (last summer) by Keith Kahn-Harris who was basing his vision on China Miéville’s novel The City and the City in which two cities occupy the same place without interfering with each other…
My introduction is too long, I leave it to Daniel and his remarkable essay:

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# MILITARIZED ARCHITECTURES /// The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold & John Penycate

Mangold Tom and Penycate John, The Tunnels of Cu Chi. New York: Random House, 1985

The Tunnels of Cu Chi is a book written by Tom Mangold & John Penycate in 1985 focusing on a specific aspect of the Vietnam war which lead the U.S. Army to loose it. The technological and human asymmetry was nevertheless striking but such subterranean complexes allowed the Viet Cong to organize a strong resistance against the invading army. The ability for the earth to change its solidity characteristics was fundamental in the elaboration of a physical mean of defense:

The soil of Cu Chi is a mixture of sand and earth. During the rainy season it is soft like sugar, during the dry season as hard as rock. […] Such soil could stand the weight of a tank.

The U.S. Army volunteers who were exploring the discovered tunnels were named Rats. This name is not innocent as, for their psychological and physical survival they had to develop what Gilles Deleuze  and Felix Guattari called Becoming Animal. When reading from a witness of these operations, one might even talk of a becoming matter as the bodies needed to embrace their own material composition in relationship to the material environment:

I was just an animal – we were all animals, we were dogs, we were snakes, we were dirt.

More to come about these tunnels (involving Sartre, Negarestani and Kobo Abe) once my essay about the landscapes of resistance will be published…

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# PALESTINE /// The Ordinary Violence of the Colonial Apparatuses in the West Bank

Abu Dis, Judith s., December 2003

The Israeli women of MachsomWatch who struggle against the colonial apparatuses of movement control in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, have monitored in photos and videos the physicality of their government/army’s politics and thus assembled an important data base. Their Israeli citizenship allows them indeed to observe more closely the actions of the military as well as the implementation of various obstacles that have been conceived in the unique goal to administrate and disturb the Palestinian daily lives. Their presence is also used as a regulator to monitor and report the disrespectful if not violent behaviors of soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The apparatuses monitored below are all common in their design that filters, controls or simply prevents Palestinians’ movement by imposing a physical violence on their bodies. The wall, in all its forms is paradigmatic of such violence but so are the various turnstiles that must be experienced several times at every pedestrian checkpoints. Those could be easily confused with torture machines and the Israeli soldiers in charge of those same checkpoints often us them as a sort of prison threshold. In fact, they would regularly lock their turning characteristics in such a way that a person remains prisoner for few seconds or few minutes from their metal bars before being able to pass the checkpoint.

I am aware of my own redundancy; however it remains difficult to ignore the force of architecture in those photos (see below) when designed and used in a military and colonial administrative purpose, thus providing what we could in a tragic oxymoron: the ordinary violence.

The following links refers to two different galleries of photos of those apparatuses on the MachsomWatch website:
FlickR gallery
Powerpoint presentation

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# GUEST WRITERS ESSAYS 19 /// Two Questions for Seher Shah by Alexis Bhagat

Seher Shah Object Relic

This week’s guest writer is Alexis Bhagat., co-author with Lize Mogel of An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press) whose  upcoming Spanish publisher is nobody else than our friends of dpr-barcelona. Alexis’ essay is written in the form of questions to the artist Seher Shah who already kindly agreed to write her responses in another guest writer essay that should be released soon.
In the following text, through the  second question addressed to Seher, What does it mean to draw like an architect when architects no longer draw? Alexis explores the recent history of a shift of paradigm in the architectural practice, and more generally in the various forms of signifier and symbols. He indeed describes the evolution from the systems of representations that used to use the material mark of a tool (pen, pencil, ink etc.) on a piece of paper and the birth of a new system of representation, whether what is represented involves architecture, cartography, or simply literature, that digitized (and therefore complexified the intermediary translation between the intent and the output) this process. In an interesting move, Alexis explored the history of the company Autodesk which developed the software that allowed such a paradigm to shift in the realms of architecture. As he suggest the presence of a new paradigm is problematic as the movement that embraces it forgets to question it at the same time, resulting in a lack of criticality that can be lethal to a discipline if it lasts.
This paradigm problematic is indeed relevant to Seher Shah’s work as it interrogates and reinterpret paradigms as much in its form than in its contents. We look forward to her responses which probably won’t constitute  real answers, but rather means to go further in this exploration.

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# CINEMA /// The Entropy of Mind and Matter in The Turin Horse by Béla Tarr

I recently posted a note about the Béla Tarr retrospective that the Lincoln Center organized in New York. This occasion gave me the opportunity to add to Damnation and the Harmonies Werckmeister, a third movie from him that fascinated me both for its content and its technicality: The Turin Horse.

The Turin Horse refers to the horse that Nietzsche one day saw being beaten to death by its master and that he hugged before sinking in prostration for few days. This event is said to have been the trigger to Nietzsche’s madness from which he will never recover. This film is suggesting the life of this horse ‘s life as well as his master and his master’s daughter’s life before this event. The setting never changes: a small stone house in the middle of a Beckettian landscape in which the father and the daughter repeat the same routine every day that Béla Tarr shows in his beautiful long sequence shots that has been creating his style since Damnation.

The films starts with the beginning of a storm that will never stops to increase. Leaves, trees, clothes, fabrics are all subject to this heavy wind; even the light itself changes drastically from quasi-monochromatic whites to the darkness of the end of the movie. Everything seems submitted to a sort of entropy in which all means of subsistence got affected. The Horse refuses to move, then to eat and drink, the water of the well disappear, the words of the book the daughter reads resounds as pure meaningless sound and eventually the light itself dies. Nietzsche is never evoked (although the prophet who visits them at some point does recall Zarathustra to some extent), but one might want to see this entropy of matter as a parallel of the entropy of the mind he experiences. I would even be keen to  propose an interpretation in which this whole film consists in the vision that Nietzsche had when he saw this horse being beaten to death. The long sequences of Béla Tarr would therefore contrast with the sudden and punctual event Nietzsche experiences in a paradoxical parallelism of time scale that I remain fascinating by. (see my similar interpretations of The Trial and Enter the Void)

# DELEUZE /// Transpierce the Mountains: Indian Medieval Art History by Élie Faure


Ajanta Caves in Maharashtra

In their Treatise on Nomadology, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari introduce their concept of Holey Space (see previous article) by the following injunction:

Metallurgical India. Transpierce the mountains instead of scaling them, excavate the land instead of striating it, bore holes in space instead of keeping it smooth, turn the earth into Swiss cheese.

Deleuze Gilles & Guattari Felix, Treatise of Nomadology – The War Machine in A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

This evocation of India comes directly from an excerpt of French historian Élie Faure‘s Medieval Art History which dedicates a chapter to seven civilizations (India, China, Japan, Tropics, Byzantine, Islam and Christianity) during Middle Age. The excerpt that Deleuze and Guattari are referring to is therefore extracted from the first chapter about India in which Élie Faure describe splendidly the birth of Indian caves carved within the granite:

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# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// A Conversation with Patrik Schumacher

Few days ago I wrote an open-letter to Patrik Schumacher in reaction to an article he wrote in which he doubted that architecture could be a site of radical political activism as well as affirming that architects are neither legitimised, nor competent to argue for a different politics or to ‘disagree with the consensus of global politics’ . This letter was followed by an impressive sum of comments which, for most of them, participated to this debate as well as the problem of architecture education in the United Kingdom (which was the original topic of the article on Architectural Review). Three of those comments were written by Patrik Schumacher himself, and it seems only fair to publish them here as a response to my letter.
In a more personal note, I have to acknowledge that, despite our opposite interpretations of the problem, Mr. Schumacher responded very calmly and constructively thus disregarding the personal attacks that I opened my letter with, and I am thankful for that.
The following pieces of text are his comments and are followed to my own response to them:

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# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// A 19th Century Proletarian Citadel within Paris (Part 3)

Document from the ‘Plan Local d’Urbanisme‘ of Paris  illustrating the fragmentation of the complex in many property lots

This article constitutes the third and last part of a series about this Hausmannian social housing complex in Paris :
- Read Part 1
- Read Part2

As I wrote in the first part of this series, this 19th century Proletarian Citadel has lost its identity as a whole and became fragmented into many real estate lots disconnected from each other. The most visible materialization of such fragmentation can be seen in the courtyards which have been, not only separated from each other for most of them, but also split up to six times sometimes for the same courtyard (see plan above and photo below).  Just as much architecture, by its physicality, was providing this inter-connexion between the courtyards as public spaces offered to a proletarian community, it now materializes the limits created by the market to maximize the profits done on this housing complex. Those limits are embodied by various elements from low concrete walls to high fences which claim their pieces of property. Rather than sharing -and therefore negotiating- a large common public space, landlords and inhabitants -who are not so much proletarian anymore- prefer a smaller piece of land that they can call theirs.

To go even further, when looking at the incredible richness of Paris’ interior courtyards, one may regret that those are not open -at least during day time- to the public who would find in them zones liberated from the compulsory movement of the street as well as a labyrinthine network of paths similarly to the one developed in Lyon with the Traboules. The Situationist’ derive would probably find in this project, an interesting improvement…

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HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// A 19th Century Proletarian Citadel within Paris (Part 2)

This article is a sequel of a first one written on January 7th 2012.

I would like today to follow yesterday’s assimilation of what I called a Proletarian Citadel within Paris to a solid mass incised by two streets and punched by a multitude of more or less narrow courtyards. While walking on the roof of this mass, one could imagine being actually on the top of a fantastic subterranean complex looking down to the dark depths of the multitude of the various sizes of holes that populate this ground. The Woman in the Dunes by Abe/Teshigahara (see previous article) comes to mind…
Once again, an effort of imagination needs to be made to envision this citadel at the end of the 19th century thus dramatizing a very probable appropriation of those spaces by their inhabitants. Laundry drying, well buckets bringing up goods coming from the depths, people conversing from one window to another, maybe even bridges who knows? We can even go further in this fictitious historic description by imagining artisans who audaciously added more or less reflecting pieces of bad metal on the courtyard walls to bring down more light, or others who organized networks of ropes used for a horizontal and vertical circulation of objects and bodies. Such stories are created by the successful balance between the uniformity of the block (it is an Hausmannian building after all !) and the multitude of local moments that trigger both a sense of community and a potential individual appropriation of those small localities. The courtyards, as narrow and dark as they are, constitute the key to such balance.

A third and last part will be published tomorrow or Friday.

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# HETEROTOPIC ARCHITECTURES /// A 19th Century Proletarian Citadel within Paris (Part 1)

Photograph by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

I recently rediscovered a collection of documents that Martin Le Bourgeois and myself had collected and produced, almost four years ago, about a very interesting group of housing buildings in Paris’ 18th arrondissement (district).  Situated at the intersection of the rue Eugene Sue and the rue Simart these blocks had been built in the second part of the 19th century during Haussmann’s transformations of Paris in order to host 10,000 workers. I described them above as a group of housing buildings but what really struck us back then was the fact that this group appeared actually as a unique built mass, incised by two streets and punched by a multitude of more or less narrow courtyards. What also appeared to us is that this mass’ area was almost exactly the same of a more well-known compact mass of buildings that the low social class transformed into a proletarian citadel: the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong (see previous article and the fantastic section). Although the Parisian citadel is probably one of the densest blocks of the city, the Walled City used to be five time denser until it was destroyed in 1993.

Just like the Walled City has been associated for a long time with its own myth in which the police did not want to enter it and was hosting all kind of crooks, clandestine and other pirates – in reality it seems that this reputation was usurped – one could imagine a fictitious re-reading of Paris’ history in which this block could have functioned as an autonomous entity with its 10,000 inhabitants -during the bloodshed of the attack of the Commune by the Versailles troops in 1871 for example – and resists to the various forces of suppression by the use of this architecture’s defensiveness and labyrinthine organization of space. Unfortunately, the reality is somehow more prosaic and nothing like that happened. The Citadel is now subjected to Paris’ real estate (although the neighborhood is very far from being one of the most expensive in Paris), the density decreased and the blocks have been divided in individual lots, thus suppressing any form of potential community within it.

This concludes the first part of this article, a second one explores the depth of the multitude of courtyards which populate the citadel.

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# MILITARIZED ARCHITECTURES /// Military Training Village of Marnehuizen on Socks Studio

PLAYGROUND Harskamp/Reek by Jeroen Hofman (2011)

Socks Studio just released an interesting article about the Potemkin village of Marnehuizen in the North of Netherlands, which was built inside the military base Marnewaard in order to simulate and train military attacks in urban environment. This fake village is one more on the list of training settlements that trains the various armies of the world (see this (too) short previous article); however, this one seems to be dedicated to a potential suppression internal to the Netherlands as the architectural typology seems to indicate.

This leads me to a fundamental problem for architects that echoes directly the recent debate that the Funambulist has been hosting this week. In fact, the more an architecture is conform to the archetype used in this kind of training village, the more the military action -that was precisely trained to operate within this archetype- gains in efficiency. Uniformity implies an indubitable potential of control whereas difference reduces legibility, and this way also decreases the risk of capture of space. One can even think on playing on those archetypes to develop a strategy of decoy that participate even more actively to forms of resistance against a military/police state. What is valid for architecture is also valid for urban design as we have been exploring it many times on this platform (as an example see the comparative Manhattan/Casbah).

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# CINEMA /// Retrospective Béla Tarr in New York

The Turin Horse (2011)

The Lincoln Center Film Society in New York starts today a retrospective of the films created and directed by Béla Tarr (see previous article about Werckmeister Harmonies) several months after the Hungarian filmmaker announced that he will now stop making movies. The Turin Horse is his last movie and introduces the life of the horse that drove Nietzsche to his madness after he saw it being beaten to death by its owner.

Jacques Rancière recently published a book about his work: Béla Tarr, le temps d’après (Capricci editions) and gave the following lecture at the Pompidou Center in December:

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# ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES /// Open-Letter to Mr. Patrik Schumacher: Yes, Architects are Legitimized and Competent to address the Political Debate

Truth, Power and Knowledge by Daniel Lauand

Dear Mr. Schumacher,

Today, I read the article that you wrote two days ago for The Architectural Review and I felt the urge, the necessity to send you a response as such rebuttal would almost constitute a manifesto since your discourse seems the exact opposite of the one I am defending on this platform. I won’t insist too much on your heavy undelicateness as a professor to attack on a very specific level a certain amount of students’ project, students who, I hope, are careless enough not to feel personally affected by your attacks. Orienting your discourse on your pairs, other professors would have been more diplomatic, but, once again that does not constitute the main reason of my reaction.

I will not take too much time either to underline the irony of having you complaining that the students’ work is not oriented enough on the ordinary life, I think that everybody did not miss to smile when reading you while considering the work that you have been developing along the years in the various schools that you have been teaching for.

Before going truly to the argument that is important to me in my reaction to your article, I would like to say that, despite some  problematic attitudes (nowhere is a perfect place), I believe that what breaks the  ambition of  many young architects in the United Kingdom is not their exploration and production of fictions but rather the hyper-reality of professional exploitation that the Behemoths firms practice on many of them when they leave the Academic world.

That leads me to the main argument of this letter, which goes far beyond from the architecture education. In fact, in your article you claim for a – self declared – subtle realism and write:

” I also doubt that architecture could be a site of radical political activism. I believe that architecture is a sui generis discipline (discourse and practice) with its own, unique societal responsibility and competency. As such it should be sharply demarcated against other competencies like art, science/engineering and politics. Architects are called upon to develop urban and architectural forms that are congenial to contemporary economic and political life. They are neither legitimised, nor competent to argue for a different politics or to ‘disagree with the consensus of global politics’ (as David Gloster suggests).”

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# CINEMA & LITERATURE /// The Walking Forest of Throne of Blood/MacBeth by Kurosawa/Shakespeare

SIWARD: What wood is this before us?
MENTEITH: The wood of Birnam.
MALCOLM: Let every soldier hew him down a bough
And bear’t before him: thereby shall we shadow
The numbers of our host and make discovery
Err in report of us.
SOLDIERS: It shall be done.

Shakespeare William, The Tragedy of MacBeth, 1611

This very short text which opens the scene IV of the Act V of The Tragedy of MacBeth by William Shakespeare profoundly inspired Akira Kurosawa when he directed his cinematographic adaptation in 1957, Throne of Blood (蜘蛛巣城). This film takes place in a medieval Japan in which the generalized warfare matches well with Shakespeare’s narrative of Great Britain. In Throne of Blood, Kurosawa re-interprets MacBeth’s three witches’ prophecy by announcing via a spirit to Washizu/MacBeth that he shall not be defeated until the trees attack his castle. Washizu’s arrogance is soon to end as he sees – in an incredibly beautiful cinematographic shot – indeed the forest marching towards his castle. Of course, the walking forest is nothing else than his enemies’ soldiers camouflaged under the trees in order to hide their number and their weapons, but for a moment, the spectator – who first looks at it with Washizu’s point of view – effectively sees an autonomous forest moving forward, and nothing seems to be able to resists to this materialization of an awaken entity of Shintoism.

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