DANIEL FERNANDEZ PASCUAL /// Blurred Territories: Sovereignty Claims and Techno-Logical Legislations

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Daniel and I had this conversation the day after the 2013 Goldsmiths Graduate Conference, where we were both participating in a panel suitably entitled “The Sea, Shores, Islands – Territory, Sovereignty and the State.” His paper “The Construction of the End,” given that day is the starting point of our discussion, in which we discuss the legal debates about the location of the shore line in Spain, the national claims of sovereignty of a given territory based on scientific and technological criteria, as well as the various circumventions of the law that provide a form of cabinet of architectural curiosities of which Daniel is keen to make an inventory.

Daniel Fernández Pascual is no ordinary architect. His online platform, Deconcrete, is a cabinet of architectural curiosities, an inventory of structures that find their peculiarity not so much through their form, but rather through their ambiguous legal properties. His academic status of PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University of London and his participation to the fascinating collective Forensic Architecture could make us think of him as a scholar. However, he also talks about territories, culture and economics through another activity at which he excels and that he sometimes publically perform, cooking. As he writes himself, “food shapes markets, and markets shape flows of capital, and capital shapes territories, futures and speculation; but also because territories shape governmentality, and governmentality shapes sovereignty, and sovereignty ultimately constructs living space.” (The Funambulist Papers Volume 1, Punctum Books, 2013.)

WEBSITES:

– http://www.deconcrete.org/
– http://www.forensic-architecture.org

ARTICLES QUOTED:

– “The Clear Blurry Line” for The Funambulist Papers: Volume 1 (Punctum Books, 2013)

REFERENCES BOOKS:

– Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, Telos Press Publishing, 2006.
– Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
– Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture, New York: Routledge, 2000.