... this blog is an ongoing investigation into modes of suspension that started as a research project in Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College in 2011 ...

Friday 24 June 2011

Research Blurb V1

In a state of liminality, however brief, the past is momentarily suspended and the future has not yet begun. Dislocation of established structures, reversal of hierarchies and uncertainty regarding continuity of tradition and future outcomes, the liminal can also become permanent. When are things or matter suspended? What forms of governance appear between two desired end states? What is the mode of suspension? Grounding itself in three instances, this research explores how can one make a positive act of inbetween - a mode for suspension.

 

Monday 13 June 2011

CASE 3: Bridging the GAP

The Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP), Turkey's ambitious, 12-phase hydropower initiative, has been in the works since the late 1960s. Its completion will, its planners hope, provide Turkey with necessary energy and water resources. Stressing how political and economic policies are interrelated, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said on July 15, 2008 that economic goals were as important as political objectives. According to an official in Iraq's Water Resources Ministry, when Ilisu Dam, a critical component of GAP, is completed, it will reduce the Tigris River waters by 47 per cent a year. Up to 78,000 people, mainly Kurds, but also members of other ethnic origin (Armenian, Arab) and Turks, will be directly affected by the project in Turkey. Thousands more will be affected in the downstream neighbouring countries.

Sunday 12 June 2011

Disassembly-reassembly

Inspired by Fareed Armaly's ongoing project Shar(e)d Domains



“Archaeology begins with the shards. This is the most evident type of remain you will find excavated on an archeological site, because pottery was everywhere and broken everywhere.”

Archaeology begins with the shard and history obliges with an endless amount. As a museum science, archeology’s analysis of history operates with agreed-upon classifications. “Diagnostic shards” are collected as the more telltale rims, handles, bases, and parts with special features that identify the vessel. “Body shards” that seem featureless are deemed without meaning, unnecessary to archive.

[…]
My artwork begins through an archeological beginning: the shard. It matches the exhibition’s emphasis on history as a collection of fragments by operating through one - the Gaza amphora. Thus I commissioned a new ‘excavation’ of this amphora. A computer-assisted imaging process relieved the physical artifact of its surface appearance. Because nothing is “featureless” anymore in this resulting new shell of precise, depthless vectors of information coordinates, the distinction between body and diagnostic shards is suspended. This new artifact’s information from depthless vectors points to the exhibition’s unfinished center: the Gaza Archeological Museum.

[…]
The archeologists reassembling the Gaza-Geneva Amphora required montaging diagnostic and body shards, thus introducing one further element: the seam. This is the space between the original artifact as a construction and the event of its destruction. The seam functions as a chronicle of correspondences produced by the archeologist’s labor as they attempt to reconstitute the historical artifact in a present state.

In museological discourse the artifact serves as an expression of the contemporary routed through a historical condition. The vessel here is inversed, outlined, and suspended in a tenuos state of equilbrium that no longer contains but exposes. It reminds us that it is impossible to reconstruct history but only our current relation to the past as active discourse.

Saturday 11 June 2011

A Real Monument?

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, monuments all over the country were being toppled and carted off. A very old technique - either worship or destroy. Each time it is history, the past that is being conveniently obliterated. Usually by the same people! In most cases not by the passionate crowds, but cool hand officials. Is there a third way, beyond the tendency to either worship or destroy? Can the monuments be saved through transformation?

Pragmatically each monument is made to be admired, contemplated, worshipped. In reality, however, monuments rarely become objects of genuine cult or admiration. In the urban landscape, the monuments virtually disappear from the field of vision by the obligatory placement of the object - slightly above the eye level, keeping at a distance and inaccessible. But one must keep in mind that monuments are usually constructed on the locations of the old, demolished monuments. Destruction affirms the power of the victor in the same way as the erection of the new monument. In some sense it becomes a memorial to external destruction. The monument is paradoxical - it creates the illusion of continuity, introduces consciousness; but then again it demands a forerunner. Could the time when the monument is detached from a pedestal in fact be historically more valuable than the monument itself? And even more. Isn't the pedestal also a monument, even if there is no figure on top? Doesn't the pedestal designate continuity and stability? It becomes a monument in itself as the statue is just a subject to the influence of time.

Thursday 9 June 2011

Monuments/ Defacement

"I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require the expenditure of so much strength." (Franz Kafka, diary entry, 1914)

In Lenin in Ruins Mark Lewis quotes Robert Musil to the effect that we never pay much attention to monuments in our city as we pass them by. Quite possibly we don't notice them at all. Why then, we must as all the fuss that suddenly arises concerning monuments during and after the toppling of the regime? Toppling of course gives the game away as if the regime itself is a monument and, what is more, as if there exists a sort of death wish deep within the monument, something in the monumentality of the monument that cries out to be stopped, besmirched, desecrated - in a word, defaced. This is the law of the base at the heart of religion and things sacred. Like Flaubert's concept of the act of writing, to erect a statue is to take revenge on reality. And reality in turn exacts its due. Mark Lewis suggests that the lies, or repressed history, of the regime are installed in the statue as a hidden flaw, an invisible fault line awaiting the resurgence of the truth of the past; and it is this, he suggests, that accounts for the fury of defacement and the effervescent magical effect thereof that yields more. But this hopeful suggestion itself suffers, so it seems to me, from the same monumental faith in truth and history, not to mention in memory, that sustains the self-portrayal of the regime. It lacks the defacement quality necessary to any worthwhile theory of defacement. It fails to see the law of the base, the attraction no less than the repulsion of ruins, and the ecstasy therein. How charming, therefore, the contributions to the defacing art provided to the New Yorker by several artists asked in 1993 what to do with the monuments of the recently toppled USSR. One inverts the statues, burying the tops of the figures in the ground, leaving the base in the air, on which vegetables arch as cabbages and carrots are planted. Another artist suggests simply to take the base away, or at least that part of it on which the Worker and Peasant are about to place their feet, leaving them both magically suspended in the air, unsure of what the next step shall bring. One step forward… Of course these stirring examples of defacement are somewhat weakened by the fact that they only occur after the regime has, as we say, fallen, emerging from the vantage point of the security provided by another strong state. (from Michael Taussig, Defacement)

Sunday 5 June 2011

CASE 1: In a parallel world, in a parallel time-scale

In 2008 Slavoj Zizek wrote an article for Die Zeit, where he argued that during contemporary tests of international politics, instead of the superpowers (e.g. USA and Russia), only small nations (e.g. Georgia and Iraq) get wounded, as they are treated like mice in a laboratory. The same argument applies in much smaller scale and in minority groups. In that sense, the Estonian government’s decision to remove an two-meter-long sculpture from the city center in Tallinn in 2007 can be seen as a sort of declaration to the world that Estonia has left its Soviet past completely behind. As if the object’s mere physical presence in the city center could threaten the country’s independence. Yet it is never just about things, in this instance the public statue; it is about the collective memory they embody.

Recent years have witnessed intensified action on the memory front in the Russian-Baltic relations, be they debates over ‘occupation’ or ‘liberation’ in the context of border treaties; or controversies over WWII monuments in Estonia. Both the Baltic and Russia attempt to seek pan-European recognition of ‘Europeanness’ and their ‘self’, whilst denying of the other. Relative geographically peripheral position has created a case where both sides use the other as a negative reference point in order to veil its own sense of inferiority. The attempts to fix certain meanings of the past show that in fact these are substantially struggles over power. The control over the narratives of the past enables one to gain control over the construction of further narratives for an imagined future. In recent years Russia has expressed the view that some of its neighboring countries are trying to ‘re-write history’. But is it re-writing history or perhaps writing your own parallel histories?

Saturday 4 June 2011

To govern is to govern things?

“Government is the right disposition of things arranged so as to lead to a suitable end.” 
Guilaumme de la Perriere

If we look at what characterizes the objects on which power bears in Macchiavelli’s The Prince, we see that objects, the target of power is, on the one hand, a territory, on the other, its inhabitants. From the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, sovereignty is not exercised on things, but first of all on a territory, and consequently on the subjects who inhabit it. In La Perrier’s text the definition of government does not refer to the territory in any way: one governs things. It is not a matter of an opposition of between things and men, but rather showing that government is not related to the territory, but to a sort of complex of men and things. The things government must be concerned about men in their relationships, bonds and complex involvements with things like wealth, resources, means of subsistence, and, of course, the territory with its borders, qualities, climate, dryness, fertility, and so on. “Things” are men in their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking. Finally, they are men in their relationship with things like accidents, misfortunes, famine, epidemics, and death. So, to govern means to govern things. Government therefore has a purpose; it arranges things (for an end).  Government is defined as a right way of arranging things in order to lead them, not to the ‘common good’, but to a ‘suitable end. This implies, first of all, a plurality of ends. It is not a matter of imposing law on men, but the of the disposition of things, that is to say that, of employing laws as tactics; arranging things so that this or that end may be achieved through a certain number of means.