11 May 2012

£5 / Free to ICA Members

Join architect, scholar and curator Eyal Weizman for this lunchtime talk in which he discusses his approach to politics and philosophy.

A key figure within the study of contemporary humanism and architecture, Weizman’s most recent book, The Least of all Posssible Evils (Verso 2011) investigates the genealogy of human rights, from classical and Christian ethics through to modern political philosophy and contemporary theory.

Weizman is also a founding member of the collective, Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Bethlehem, and is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London where he directs the Centre for Research Architecture.

Since his PhD at Birkbeck College (in co-operation with London Consortium), Weizman has published numerous articles and books (Hollow Land, Verso 2007; A Civilian Occupation, Verso 2003; Yellow Rythms and the Territories 1,2, and 3 series. In addition to sitting on the board of numerous councils worldwide, he also manages the ‘Forensic Architecture’ project, funded by the European Research Council.

Tuesday 12 June – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmiths Main Building — all welcome

Readings:
Keller Easterling, “Zone,” in Urban Transformation, ed. Ilke and Andreas Ruby (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2008), 30-45.

Ridwan Laher,“Resisting Development in Kenya’s Lamu District: A Postcolonial reading”, Africa Institute of South Africa Policy Briefing No. 48, April 2011.

Mikey Salter and Johanna Von Braun, “Bio-cultural Community Protocols: Bridging the Gap between Customary, National and International Law.” , in: Effectius Newsletter 14, 2011.

Website: http://www.savelamu.org/

Dr Lindsay Bremner is Professor and Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster. She was previously Professor of Architecture in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and, before that, Chair of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is an award-winning architect and writer and published, lectured and exhibited widely on the transformation of Johannesburg after the end of apartheid. Her work on the city include Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998 – 2008 (2010), Johannesburg: One City Colliding Worlds (2004), and chapters in Johannesburg – the Elusive Metropolis (2008), The Endless City (2008), Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City (2007), Future City (2005), Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (2002), blank___architecture apartheid and after (1998) and contributions to Domus, Public Culture, Social Identities and Cities. In her design work, Bremner takes on projects having a socially or culturally transformative agenda, such as her third placed entry for a Cyclone Shelter in Bangladesh (with Jeremy Voorhees, 2011), award winning Sans Souci Cinema project in Kliptown, Soweto (with 26’10 South Architects, 2004 – 2007) and second placed entry to the Freedom Square Competition (with Mashabane Rose Architects, 2002). Bremner’s current research, Folded Ocean is investigating the impact of global mobility, trans-nationalism and environmental change on the Indian Ocean world. Bremner holds a B. Arch degree from the University of Cape Town and M. Arch and DSc. Arch degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Adrian Lahoud is an architect, urban designer and researcher. Through private practice, teaching and research, he explores the disputed, conflicting and often paradoxical transformations of cities.

In 2010 he edited a special issue of Architectural Design titled Post-traumatic Urbanism. Forthcoming in 2012 is Project for a Mediterranean Union on speculative transport, energy and media infrastructure in North Africa and the Middle East. His architectural work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. In 2011, his work was exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial, Gwangju Design Biennale Seoul curated by Ai Weiwei. His theoretical research work, The Life of Forms in the City explores the problem of scale and complexity in architecture and the city. In 2012 he will be Guest Curator for the Think Space Competition Cycle – Past Forward.

May 15 – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmiths – all welcome

Reading material:
Vladimir Paperny – Architecture in the Age of Stalin – Culture Two
Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York
Moisei Ginzburg – Style and Epoch
This blog: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/

Owen Hatherley is the author of the acclaimed Militant Modernism, a defense of the modernist movement, and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. He writes regularly on the political aesthetics of architecture, urbanism and popular culture for a variety of publications, including Building Design, Frieze, the Guardian and the New Statesman. He blogs on political aesthetics at nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com.

http://www.savageobjects.com/

BOOK

Book Launch

2012 May, 3th – 17:30

Sociedade Martins Sarmento, Guimarães

Presentations by editor Godofredo Pereira and writer Ken Hollings

What is to be gained by arguing that objects speak? What do recent turns to the non-human and to things have in common? And what conflicts are emerging within the apparently consensual removal of the human from the centre of the problem of knowledge? Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in objects, things, and the non-human – a gradual departure from the domination of text, language, and discourse in previous decades, or, as is often said, a move away from the human as the central point of reference for thinking the world. The claim that there is a consensual turn is compounded by the emergence of numerous publications on non-human actors in fields as diverse as archaeology, science studies, anthropology, philosophy, history, art, and architecture; works in which the divide between nature and culture or between humans and non-humans is effaced, where complex assemblages of people and things challenge thought procedures, and where the ground upon which modernity itself was founded becomes the object of contention. However, if we look closely at the different ways in which these topics are being discussed, the image of a uniform turn immediately disappears; we find that recent attempts to emancipate objects are contingent upon and differentiated by the practices in which they emerge. With this in mind, the present book tries for the first time to bring together several different forums in which objects are being discussed anew, suggesting that the conflicts arising from fortuitous encounters between researchers might be more productive than a consensual turn to post-humanism

The book takes as its point of departure two well-worn notions, objects and savages, specifically in reference to a Savage Thought that we provocatively twist upon itself, bringing to light not the thought per se but its object and the resistance this object holds to thought. We invited contributions from very different fields to respond to this provocation – from philosophers, archaeologists and anthropologists, to activists, architects and artists – to focus not only on objects themselves but also on the practices within which they are constituted and the territories they refer to. By framing these discussions within object-research as well as academic discourse – in fields ranging from textual production, legal forums, image migration, state performance, and acoustic exploration – speculation about objects and things also becomes a discussion about conflicting ecologies of thought, thus providing insight into often overlooked pragmatic and political dimensions. Ultimately, our hope is that, by bringing such diverse practices together, new lines of thought can be suggested and spaces for new alliances be forged.

Contributors: Martin Holbraad; Ayesha Hameed; Michael Taussig; Graham Harman; Bjørnar Olsen; João Maria Gusmão; Eyal Weizman; Susan Schuppli; Reza Negarestani; Jonathan Saldanha; Regina de Miguel; Marcello Maggi; Paulo Tavares, Godofredo Pereira.

Edited by Godofredo Pereira

Tuesday, May 8 @ no-w-here

One of the early interests of our anthropological film “The Exception and the Rule” (2009) was whether we could make a work that invited the viewer to make theory, and not just consume it. That is, to create a filmic space where a viewer actively works through politics of representation for themselves. This mirrored our questioning of the very foundations of our own artistic practice, our imagination, our processes of withdrawal and our political perspective during the making of “The Exception and the Rule”. As a result we began to manifest a context that would envelop, extend and provoke our ideas: a “forcible frame”. The resulting body of work ‘The Museum of non Participation’ is a confluence of 15 years of artistic practice across disciplines, platforms and physical locations. It sits both inside and outside of our long term film practice, offering both a position to speak from and a way to elicit our (common) struggle ‘to speak’. Recent articulations of the Museum have taken place at the Arnolfini in Bristol, and in Spring 2012 we will present a new permutation of this work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In this talk I will overview key questions and concerns of this museum and how these have manifested into a variety of Acts in Art, Anthropology, Pedagogy and Film.

“Inseparable from economic advantage was the superiority of knowledge. Ownership involved greed, and the advantaged tried as long as possible to block the road to education to the have-nots. The privileges of the ruling class could not be eliminated until we gained insight into the conditions and acquired fundamental knowledge. We kept getting repulsed over and over because our ability to think, deduce and conclude was insufficiently developed. This state of affairs began changing with the realisation that the upper classes essentially opposed out thirst for knowledge. Ever since, our most important goal was to conquer an education, a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion”. (Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance)

Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film – most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations.

A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum, in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or ‘riotonaut’, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, personification of the ‘Deep State’, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism.

9 May, 7pm @ http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse/film/Deep_State/

‘Deep State’ is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils.

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/homepage/fields/investigations/sea

FO provided the spatial analysis that lead to the Council of Europe report on NATO’s responsibility for these deaths in the Mediterranean.

The Council of Europe report whose release was covered very widely in all major papers makes makes several references to FO research.
The Guardian has published our sequence of FO maps in this interactive feature.

FO also appears at Human Rights Watch summary of report. The research team is now completing a large report that will be submitted to NATO the EU and the relevant courts.

“In this absorbing study, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman show how the politics of human rights was transformed by scientists who treated human remains as a form of photography and photography as a form of human remains. Exposed to all the details of a person’s life like a very sensitive negative, bones were made to speak. Victims and victimizers could now reappear in the lab and take their place in court. The arrival of forensic aesthetics is the arrival of the articulate object. This object that speaks occupies the position of the witness, and in so doing inaugurates a whole new chapter in justice. This fascinating book asks us to reconsider how facts are constructed and opens a new and expanded landscape for thinking.”

– Beatriz Colomina, Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

“In what ways, Keenan and Weizman ask, can the physical remains of the dead be made to speak? In this lucidly focused text on the exhumation of the historical past, the authors identify a crucial shift in the ongoing work of justice for the victims of state violence and accountability for perpetrators. While avoiding any reductive conclusions, they persuasively insist on the importance of a critical evaluation of how forensic science, with its presumed expertise and ‘objectivity,’ is transforming the nature of evidence.”
– Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University

On the margins of aesthetics, science, and law
Anselm Franke

Forensic aesthetics brings into view the way in which boundaries are currently drawn and stabilized, transgressed and shuttered. In practice, forensics is called upon after the fact: in the aftermath of conflict, crime, and violence, when limits have already been breached, fractured, violated, and are put to the test by ongoing crises that call for resolution. But forensics is not primarily concerned with justice; it is both before justice, as that which establishes the conditions for judgment, and that which happens in place of justice, when agents are no longer accountable. The borderland investigated by forensic aesthetics is one in which the categories of living and dead, subjects and objects, past and present are put into question. It is concerned with the technologies and protocols governing this borderland: its biopolitical containment and expansion, the representation of violence, the (re)construction of historical narrative, or the politics of proof manifest in entertainment and mass media. It is at this frontier that objects are brought to speak.
In this sense, forensics is also a projective practice that constructs languages and spaces of agency. Forensic aesthetics accounts for this blurring of borders—a blurring registered by aesthetics—and also testifies to new sensibilities, describes new territories of action and agency, and critically reflects on the technologies of assessing, calculating, restoring, and redrawing those very boundaries. This book was commissioned to instigate, rather than represent, an exhibition. In this curatorial experiment, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman were asked to produce a book and Hito Steyerl was asked to respond to their text by creating a series of works. This process constructed a form of research within the margins of science, aesthetics, and law— an entangled set of circumstances from which we can examine these fields anew.

http://www.sternberg-press.com/

http://www.versobooks.com/books/532-the-least-of-all-possible-evils

Reviews:

“Eyal Weizman’s work has become an indispensable source of both insight and guidance in these difficult times. He understands the evolving dynamics of war and sovereignty better than anyone.”
– Paul Gilroy, Professor of Social History, London School of Economics

“This is a wonderful book, written with clarity, precision, and passion. It takes the reader into the heart of contemporary necro-politics and calculations of “lesser evils” by powerful states and their humanitarian accomplices. Deeply learned and informative on every page, this is essential reading for anyone who cares about contemporary conditions of warfare and state-controlled violence; about the spatial practices that reinforce and regulate systemic forms of violence, such as the calculation of minimal requirements for human survival. In the spirit of Doctors Without Borders, Weizman is an architect without borders, at home in political philosophy, military history, just war theory, and the spatial systems of controlled, calculated violence that constitute Israel–Palestine, and much of the world today.”
– W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago

“Originality, ingenuity, and brilliance do not even begin to do justice to this amazing study, this architectural forensics of battle and human rights as pieced together from the study of the ruin and the terrifying logic of “the lesser evil”. How astonishing to see our new world this new way.”
– Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University