Critical Spatial Practice

Critical Outer Spatial Practice?

2009-07-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

"Whitey on the Moon"

On Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" / Seneca Doane @ Daily Kos

My sense is that if most people know any reference to the music of Gil Scott-Heron ("GSH") nowadays, it would likely be the title of his arch, sardonic proto-rap single "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," from the 1974 compilation album of that name. For many of us who grew up in the mid-1970s, this GSH album was the Richard Pryor concert of music -- the rebellious and pugnacious and smart as hell spirit of Malcolm X in 40 or so minutes. It was a common fixture in the record collections of the hosts of parties I attended then, and one that, when I was hosting, a guest was likely to pull out to play.

This song contained not only proto-rap, but some of the most beautiful and haunting songs you could ever want to hear, such as "Lady Day" and "Pieces of a Man." But the one that prompts this diary, on the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11, is "Whitey on the Moon," because I can't think of the events of that day without thinking of that song and the challenge that it offers.

Continue reading...

"Whitey On the Moon" Lyrics by Gil Scott Heron

Stuff White People Do: Extend the White Conquest of the Earth Into Outer Space

Read "Outer Space and Inner Cities: African American Responses to NASA" in Lynn Spigel's Welcome to the Dreamhouse.

Read Lynn Spigel's "White Flight" in The Revolution Wasn't Televised.

Outer Spatial?

Project M.A.S.A

M.A.S.A. Mission Statement

To establish an awareness of outerspace as an integral part of the Chicano(a) ModernMythos/Reality/Iconography.

The Purpose of the MeChicano Alliance of Space Artists is revealing the presence of:

* Chicana(o) Issues
* Chicana(o) Culture
* World issues as related to Chicana(o)s in a modern global society

...through the use of modern outer space or cosmic iconography.

Space Ghost / Laurie Jo Reynolds / Video Data Bank

Space Ghost compares the experiences of astronauts and prisoners, using popular depictions of space travel to illustrate the physical and existential aspects of incarceration: sensory deprivation, the perception of time as chaotic and indistinguishable, the displacement of losing face-to-face contact, and the sense of existing in a different but parallel universe with family and loved-ones.

Physical comparisons such as the close living quarters, the intensity of the immediate environment, and sensory deprivation soon give way to psychological ones: the isolation, the changing sense of time, and the experience of earth as distant, inaccessible and desirable. The analogy extends to media representations that hold astronauts and prisoners in an inverse relationship: the super citizen vs. the super-predator. Astronauts, ceaselessly publicized, are frozen in time and memory whereas prisoners, anonymous and ignored, age without being remembered.

The end of the video introduces the notion of the "phantom zone" taken from Superman to describe incarceration as an in between space, a no man's land or a warehouse. A letter from an inmate explains how the space/time continuum can become reconfigured in prison: The time really goes by fast here. You can do years in prison and it seems like no time at all. That's because you don't remember any of the time you did. And that's because there's nothing to remember.

Astronauts and Prisoners Unite in 'Space Ghost' / Eight Forty-Eight on Chicago Public Radio

Trevor Paglen's The Other Night Sky

“The Other Night Sky” is a project to track and photograph classified American satellites in Earth orbit, a total of 189 covert spacecraft. To develop the body of work, I was assisted by observational data produced by an international network of amateur “satellite observers.” To translate the observational data into a useable form, I spent almost two years working with a team of computer scientists and engineers at the Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology to develop a software model to describe the orbital motion of classified spacecraft.

With these tools, I am able to calculate the position and timing of overhead reconnaissance satellite transits and photograph them with telescopes and large-format cameras using a computer-guided mechanical mount. The resultant skyscapes are marked by trails of sunlight reflected from the hulls of obscure spacecraft hurtling through the night.

In developing this project, I have been primarily inspired by the methods of early astronomers like Kepler and Galileo, who documented previously-unseen moons of Jupiter in the early 17th Century. Like contemporary reconnaissance satellites, Jupiter’s moons weren’t supposed to “exist,” but were nonetheless there. With this series, I want to ask what it means to see the traces of “secret moons” in the contemporary night sky.

The Other Night Sky at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Download the exhibition brochure (PDF)

Artist Trevor Paglen has his eye on satellites / San Francisco Chronicle

Photographer Documents Secret Satellites — All 189 of Them / WIRED

MISC.

Space is the Place / iCI - Independent Curators International

space tag @ Danger Room

End Torture in Illinois

2009-06-12T03:21:00.000-07:00

Illinois Torture Publicized with Ecological Art: Chicago and Milwaukee artists boost Tamms Year Ten message with mud stencils

On Saturday, June 6th in Chicago, local artists partnered with the Tamms Year Ten coalition to protest state-sanctioned torture at the supermax prison in Southern Illinois. And they did it with mud.

Artists from Chicago and Milwaukee engaged in a non-destructive type of public messaging called “mud-stenciling.” More than 30 volunteers stenciled their message “End Torture in Illinois” in the afternoon on walls and sidewalks around the city offering fact-sheets about TAMMS supermax prison to curious pedestrians. The teams hit spots such as Navy Pier, The Chicago Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Jane Adams Hull House, Hyde Park Art Center, the Logan Square skate park, the Chicago Zoo, DePaul University, as well as sidewalks, underpass walls, and numerous other locations....

Read full press release

Mud stencil video by Gretchen Hasse.

Eye Exam: Mud Slinging / Lori Waxman / Newcity Art

Dirt, water, whisk, sponge, bucket, box cutter, tar paper—these are not your typical artist’s materials. Mix the water and dirt in the bucket, lay the cut-out paper against a cement surface, and sponge on the mud, however, and the result is a handsome work of environmentally friendly graffiti.

Street artists often work with stencils, using them to shape spray-painted statements. But a chemical medium dispensed through an aerosol container reeks of toxicity, so Milwaukee-based Jesse Graves, intent on finding a more compatible way to apply his environmentally and politically conscious messages, evolved an alternate means of tagging: mud. The technique is nothing short of ingenious. Simple, cheap, graphically effective and not necessarily illegal, mud stencils, if protected from the elements, can last up to ten years; or, like all dirt, they can be washed off with water. Consistency is key, however, to achieving a bold visual with sharp edges: the mud mixture must be carefully controlled so that it achieves a viscosity akin to peanut butter or feces.

Yes, feces—like the feces sometimes smeared by inmates at Tamms prison on the walls of their cells. Cells where they are held in permanent solitary confinement, bereft of all human contact, for up to twenty-three hours a day, with breaks only for showers and individual exercise. It’s a supermax jail in Southern Illinois originally designed for the short-term punishment of violent inmates from other facilities, but one-third of whose occupants have now been locked up in extreme isolation for over a decade, with no clearly defined standards for transfer in or out. Widely believed to cause permanent physiological and psychological damage, these conditions contravene the Geneva Convention, two United Nations treaties and various other international human-rights accords. Conditions which have led inmates not only to paint their walls with shit in desperate attempts for attention, but also to mutilate themselves, to attempt suicide, and to require—for one in every ten men at Tamms—regular doses of psychotropic medication. All this for up to $90,000 a year per inmate, three to four times the cost of incarceration at other prisons in Illinois.

What any of this has to do with mud stenciling was revealed this past Saturday as some thirty artists and other activists took to the streets of Chicago armed with six-by-nine-foot cutouts, informational flyers and the resolve to help end torture in Illinois. That was the message they broadcast in mud—END TORTURE IN ILLINOIS—bordered with a broken line in the shape of the state, topped with a star for Tamms, the regional capital of cruel and unusual punishment. They hit locations across the city, from the Art Institute and the Board of Trade to the Logan Square Skate Park, Senator Rickey Hendon’s West Side office, the Lincoln Park Green City Market, the University of Illinois quad, the DePaul Student Center and various sidewalks, boarded-up buildings and underpasses in between.

The campaign was the latest tactical art action by Tamms Year Ten, and one of its most vivid and accessible yet. A coalition of more than seventy groups throughout Illinois, from mental-health alliances to human-rights advocacies and faith-based committees, Tamms Year Ten was founded last year on the occasion of the prison’s tenth anniversary with the goal of urging the governor of Illinois and the Illinois Department of Corrections to either close or convert the prison, following national trends; to establish transparency and standards at the facility; and at the very least to follow the original legislative intent for the supermax, which was only meant for short-term use.

Tamms Year Ten has also worked with Illinois lawmakers to introduce HB2633, which includes provisions for instituting accountability at the prison and prohibiting mentally ill prisoners from being moved there in the first place. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Julie Hamos with twenty-seven co-sponsors, seems like the least the state can do in the face of the grotesque human-rights violations it has been committing for the past decade in the name of law and order. Identical confinement at Guantanamo Bay, whose closure has been ordered by President Obama, has been determined by the Pentagon to be too isolating for prisoner safety. But, according to an editorial that appeared in the Tribune just a few weeks ago, it’s good enough for Illinois residents. Chicago’s newspaper of record fears that the situation at other prisons could get uglier if the IDOC loses its freedom to keep inmates locked up at Tamms indefinitely, despite studies that indicate supermax incarceration increases recidivism and that Tamms has done nothing to reduce violence in other state prisons. Never mind the international consensus that prolonged isolation equals torture—as the Tribune put it, the “worst of the worst” end up there. Read: who cares.

Who cares, indeed? With bold public rallies, calls to lawmakers, intelligent press, ever more studies and reports, meetings with legislators and IDOC officials, and some smart art activism, hopefully a whole lot more people. Mud washes off in the rain—years of being cut off from any social contact, being locked up and treated worse than any animal, doesn’t.

Link to full article by Lori Waxman at Newcity Art

Misc. Resources

See the Just Seeds blog for complete details of mud-stenciling.

Mud stencils (Jesse Graves)

Tamms Year Ten

Human Rights Watch public statement about Tamms

Amnesty International public statement about Tamms

New Yorker article about Tamms supermax ("Hellhole" by Atul Gawande)

There Goes The Neighbourhood

2009-04-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

There Goes the Neighbourhood is an exhibition, residency, discussion and publishing project for May 2009. The central element of this project will be an exploration of the politics of urban space, with a focus on Redfern, Sydney. The project will examine the complex life of cities and how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. While urban change itself is not always a bad thing, gentrification often happens at an accelerated rate, out pricing the lower income and marginalized communities from the neighbourhood and dislocating them from their existing connections to urban space. The project brings together artists from Australia and around the world whose work addresses these issues.

White man got no dreaming, Michael Rakowitz (2008)

The Politics of Urban Space...

What exactly is the mode of existence of social relationships?... The study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself
– Henri Lefebvre.

There Goes the Neighbourhood is the ironic chorus to the 1992 Body Count song which lamented the invasion of the once poor (and Black) into the neighbourhood of the rich (and white). But an alternative destruction of “The Neighbourhood” can happen when the poor get pushed out of their local community as part of the process of gentrification. This issue is particularly relevant for the suburb of Redfern, an inner city suburb of Sydney which has been home for a large working class and Indigenous community, and which is undergoing a process of rapid development and change.

The Block, Redfern, has been described as the "Black Heart" of Australia and occupies a unique place within Sydney's urban landscape as a centre for the Indigenous community. It was the site for the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, and has been the gathering point for many protests and community events. Just minutes from the second busiest train station in Sydney are the open camp fires and communal use of public space of the community on The Block. The Aboriginal Housing Company has had a long standing dream, just recently given the green light by the government to build The Pemulwuy Project; a new community housing project and cultural centre for Redfern's Aboriginal community. Redfern is also home to a number other non-Indigenous community housing projects such as the Department of Housing buildings (known as the "Suicide Towers") which the government is trying to redevelop. The suburb was once a strong working class neighbourhood and was the starting point for the 1917 general strike for a shorter working week: but in the 1980s the rail yards were closed down and transformed into a new cultural centre (where one of the exhibition venues Performance Space is based). Redfern grabbed headlines in 2004 when riots erupted when the police killed a 17 year old Aboriginal boy after chasing him in police cars as he rode his push-bike home. In that same year the Redfern-Waterloo Authority was established - a special government committee to oversee the rapid development and gentrification of the area. Redfern thus involves a complex, contested and controversial overlapping of uses of urban space.

There Goes the Neighbourhood is an exhibition, residency, discussion and publishing project for May 2009. The central element of this project will be an exploration of the politics of urban space. It will explore the complex life of cities and how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. While urban change itself is not always a bad thing, gentrification often happens at an accelerated rate, out pricing the lower income and marginalized communities from the neighbourhood and dislocating them from their existing connections to urban space.

As Henri Lefebvre reminds us “the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself”. The tussle over space is always one over the social relationships which are generated within the logic of place: revolving around people occupying, owning, seizing, developing, losing or transforming this space.

The project will bring together a smallish group of artists who have worked in various artistic projects which have explored the relationship between community and space and invite them to develop these issues further in the contested local environment of Redfern.

There Goes The Neighbourhood: Redfern and the Politics of Urban Space

To download a PDF of the book click here

There Goes the Neighborhood begins with a close study of Redfern before expanding into international examples to provide a detailed exploration of how the phenomenon of gentrification is altering the relationship between democracy and demography around the world. This book has been published in tandem with an exhibition of the same name and many of the contributions come from participating artists in the exhibition: Brenda L. Croft (Australia), 16beaver (USA), Daniel Boyd (Australia), Temporary Services (USA), Jakob Jakobsen (Denmark), Lisa Kelly (Australia), SquatSpace (Australia), Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro (Germany/Australia), Evil Brothers (Australia), You Are Here (Australia), Michael Rakowitz (USA), Miklos Erhardt and Little Warsaw (Hungary), Bijari (Brazil) and Democracia (Spain). The book also includes contributions from key thinkers about the complex life of cities such as the Situationists, Mike Davis, Brian Holmes, Gary Foley and Elizabeth Farrelly.

There Goes The Neighbourhood is edited by Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg from You Are Here, a Sydney based art collective which focuses on social and spatial mapping.

Discover Kauai

2009-04-23T12:41:00.000-07:00

Surfers vs. the Superferry / Jerry Mander & Koohan Paik / The Nation

We don't ordinarily seek inspirational models of grassroots uprisings--especially against global corporate-military boondoggles--from surfer beaches on luscious tropical islands. So it surprises colleagues on the left when we tell them they might check out some surprising events on the small "outer" islands in Hawaii that may have an impact on grand US aspirations for military domination of the Pacific basin. Few mainlanders have heard about it, but Hawaii is up in arms.

It all started in 2001 as a purportedly modest "local" effort to offer inter-island ferry service to "help local people more easily visit their relatives on other islands, and carry their farm produce to market." Most locals liked the idea but soon found that this ferry, the gigantic Hawaii Superferry, was an environmental nightmare. It uses far more fuel (in total and per person) than big planes. It races at high speed (40-45 miles per hour) through zones teeming with endangered humpback whales, dolphins and rare sea turtles. It could transport dangerous invasive species to pristine islands. And it carries hundreds of cars to tiny places already choking on traffic.

...CONTINUE READING...

Coup de Superferry / The Hawaii Independent

A Boatload of Trouble / Against the Grain

The Superferry is not some benign way of connecting the Hawaiian islands. According to Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander, the massive boat is closely connected to US military plans for a new Pacific fleet. It also endangers whales and other wildlife. Paik was part of momentous protests in Kauai that rebuffed the Superferry.

The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii’s Uprising Against Militarism, Commercialism, and the Desecration of the Earth / Jerry Mander & Koohan Paik

Hawai'i Superferry News at DMZ Hawai'i / Aloha 'Aina

An Interview with Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander / Akaku: Maui Community Television

The SuperFerry Chronicles I of V

A Video Challenge to Green Shoppers / Dot Earth

The New Geography

2009-04-23T12:30:00.000-07:00

The New Geography: A Roundtable

By Jeffrey Kastner, Tom McCarthy, Nato Thompson, and Eyal Weizman

bookforum.com / Apr-May 2009

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

—Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1967

The practice of geography is by its nature a ticklish, paradoxical enterprise. It is at once the study of objects and of subjects, of things and of behaviors, of the world around us as a phenomenon producing human activity and produced by it. A realization of the generative potential in such dichotomies—between the material and the symbolic, between places as conceived and places as experienced, between spatial and temporal models of existential understanding—has long influenced the academic discipline of geography. And in today’s world, where the familiar order of things seems increasingly contingent and fluid, destabilized by political and military turmoil, economic upheaval, and rapid technological development, a similar impulse among artists, writers, architects, and other cultural producers to interrogate and reimagine conventional notions of the physical and social landscape we inhabit grows only more vivid.

Each of the participants in this roundtable has developed innovative and unique practices that engage questions of space. Tom McCarthy’s role, since 2000, as a conceptual provocateur in the “semi-fictitious avant-garde network” known as the International Necronautical Society (INS) finds literary expression in his first novel, Remainder (2007), in which an unnamed protagonist, almost killed by a piece of high-tech debris that falls from the sky, awakens from a coma with his worldview permanently altered. Obsessed with finding a sense of heightened authenticity in the world around him, he’s driven to replay, to literally reenact, certain resonant moments that challenge his (and the reader’s) notions of space and time, as well as the kinds of activities—mundane and exceptional—that necessarily take place in both constructs. Nato Thompson’s work as a curator and writer has consistently examined the potential of social space as an arena for the artistic production of meaning. He persistently probes the idea, as he’s written, that, “ultimately, all phenomena resolve themselves in space. Cultural and material production are not simply abstract ideas, but are forces that shape who and what we are, and they do so in places we can walk to, intervene in, and tour.” Architect and theorist Eyal Weizman, meanwhile, has long focused his scholarship on the relationship between architecture and planning and the intractable social, political, and military conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis. Weizman is the author of Hollow Land (2007), which, he writes, “looks at the ways in which the different forms of Israeli rule inscribed themselves in space, analyzing the geographical, territorial, urban and architectural conceptions and the interrelated practices that form and sustain them.”

The four of us, two in London and two in New York, held a conversation within the spatially indeterminate surroundings of the Internet over the course of a week early last February from which the following transcript is taken.

—Jeffrey Kastner

...CONTINUE READING...

Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space

2009-03-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space / Trevor Paglen / The Brooklyn Rail

When most people think about geography, they think about maps. Lots of maps. Maps with state capitals and national territories, maps showing mountains and rivers, forests and lakes, or maps showing population distributions and migration patterns. And indeed, that isn’t a wholly inaccurate idea of what the field is all about. It is true that modern geography and mapmaking were once inseparable.

Renaissance geographers like Henricus Martellus Germanus and Pedro Reinel, having rediscovered Greek texts on geography (most importantly Ptolemy’s Geography), put the ancient knowledge to work in the service of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Martellus’s maps from the late 15th Century updated the old Greek cartographic projections to include Marco Polo’s explorations of the East as well as Portuguese forays along the African coast. Reinel’s portolan maps are some of the oldest modern nautical charts. Cartography, it turned out, was an indispensable tool for imperial expansion: if new territories were to be controlled, they had to be mapped. Within a few decades, royal cartographers filled in blank spots on old maps. In 1500, Juan de la Cosa, who accompanied Columbus on three voyages as captain of the Santa Maria, produced the Mappa Mundi, the first known map to depict the New World. Geography was such an important instrument of Portuguese and Spanish colonialism that early modern maps were some of these empires’ greatest secrets. Anyone caught leaking a map to a foreign power could be punished by death.

In our own time, another cartographic renaissance is taking place. In popular culture, free software applications like Google Earth and MapQuest have become almost indispensable parts of our everyday lives: we use online mapping applications to get directions to unfamiliar addresses and to virtually “explore” the globe with the aid of publicly available satellite imagery. Consumer-available global positioning systems (GPS) have made latitude and longitude coordinates a part of the cultural vernacular. In the arts, legions of cultural producers have been exercising the power to map. Gallery and museum exhibitions are dedicated to every variety of creative cartography; “locative media” has emerged as a form of techno-site-specificity; in the antiquities market, old maps have come to command historically unprecedented prices at auction. Academia, too, has been seized by the new powers of mapmaking: geographical information systems (GIS) have become a new lingua franca for collecting, collating, and representing data in fields as diverse as archaeology, biology, climatology, demography, epidemiology, and all the way to zoology. In many people’s minds, a newfound interest in geography has seized popular culture, the arts, and the academy. But does the proliferation of mapping technologies and practices really point to a new geographic cultural a priori? Not necessarily. Although geography and cartography have common intellectual and practical ancestors, and are often located within the same departments at universities, they can suggest very different ways of seeing and understanding the world.

Contemporary geography has little more than a cursory relationship to all varieties of cartography. In fact, most critical geographers have a healthy skepticism for the “God’s-Eye” vantage points implicit in much cartographic practice. As useful as maps can be, they can only provide very rough guides to what constitutes a particular space.

Geography is a curiously and powerfully transdisciplinary discipline. In any given geography department, one is likely to find people studying everything from the pre-Holocene atmospheric chemistry of northern Greenland to the effects of sovereign wealth funds on Hong Kong real estate markets, and from methyl chloride emissions in coastal salt marshes to the racial politics of nineteenth-century California labor movements. In the postwar United States, university officials routinely equated the discipline’s lack of systematic methodological and discursive norms with a lack of seriousness and rigor, a perception that led to numerous departments being closed for lack of institutional support. The end of geography at Harvard was typical of what happened to the field: university officials shut down its geography department in 1948, as CUNY geographer Neil Smith tells it, after being flummoxed by their “inability to extract a clear definition of the subject, to grasp the substance of geography, or to determine its boundaries with other disciplines.” The academic brass “saw the field as hopelessly amorphous.” But this “hopeless amorphousness” is, in fact, the discipline’s greatest strength.

No matter how diverse and transdisciplinary the field of geography may seem, and indeed is, a couple of axioms nevertheless unify the vast majority of contemporary geographers’ work. These axioms hold as true for the “hard science” in university laboratories as for human geographers studying the unpredictable workings of culture and society. Geography’s major theoretical underpinnings come from two related ideas: materialism and the production of space.

In the philosophical tradition, materialism is the simple idea that the world is made out of “stuff,” and that moreover, the world is only made out of “stuff.” All phenomena, then, from atmospheric dynamics to Jackson Pollock paintings, arise out of the interactions of material in the world. In the western tradition, philosophical materialism goes back to ancient Greek philosophers like Democritus, Anaxagoras, and Epicurus, whose conceptions of reality differed sharply from Plato’s metaphysics. Later philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx would develop materialist philosophies in contradistinction to Cartesian dualism and German idealism. Methodologically, materialism suggests an empirical (although not necessarily positivistic) approach to understanding the world. In the contemporary intellectual climate, a materialist approach takes relationality for granted, but an analytic approach that insists on “stuff” can be a powerful way of circumventing or tempering the quasi-solipsistic tendencies found in some strains of vulgar poststructuralism.

Geography’s second overarching axiom has to do with what we generally call “the production of space.” Although the idea of the “production of space” is usually attributed to the geographer-philosopher Henri Lefebvre, whose 1974 book La Production de l’Espace introduced the term to large numbers of people, the ideas animating Lefebvre’s work have a much longer history.Like materialism, the production of space is a relatively easy, even obvious, idea, but it has profoundimplications. In a nutshell, the production of space says that humans create the world around them and that humans are, in turn, created by the world around them. In other words, the human condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activity and our material surroundings. In this view, space is not a container for human activities to take place within, but is actively “produced” through human activity. The spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.

To illustrate this idea, we can take the university where I’m presently writing this text. At first blush, the university might seem like little more than a collection of buildings: libraries, laboratories, and classrooms with distinct locations in space. That’s what the university looks like on a map or on Google Earth. But this is an exceptionally partial view of the institution. The university is not an inert thing: it doesn’t “happen” until students arrive to attend classes, professors lock themselves away to do research, administrative staff pays the bills and registers the students, state legislators appropriate money for campus operations, and maintenance crews keep the institution’s physical infrastructure from falling apart. The university, then, cannot be separated from the people who go about “producing” the institution day after day. But the university also sculpts human activity: the university’s physical and bureaucratic structure creates conditions under which students attend lectures, read books, write papers, participate in discussions, and get grades. Human activity produces the university, but human activities are, in turn, shaped by the university. In these feedback loops, we see production of space at work.

Fine. But what does all of this have to do with art? What does this have to do with “cultural production?”

...CONTINUE READING...

MISC.

Media Studies: Experimental Geography Reading List

Place Matters / Against the Grain

Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism / Nato Thompson and Independent Curators International

International Geographic: Interview with Nato Thompson / Art21 Blog

The City From Below

2009-01-12T19:21:00.000-08:00

The City From Below
March 27th-29th, 2009
Baltimore

!!! VIDEO DOCUMENTATION !!!

This special national issue of the Indypendent Reader (Spring/Summer 2009 Issue 12) comes out of the Baltimore conference.

The city has emerged in recent years as an indispensable concept for many of the struggles for social justice we are all engaged in - it's a place where theory meets practice, where the neighborhood organizes against global capitalism, where unequal divisions based on race and class can be mapped out block by block and contested, where the micropolitics of gender and sexual orientation are subject to metropolitan rearticulation, where every corner is a potential site of resistance and every vacant lot a commons to be reclaimed, and, most importantly, a place where all our diverse struggles and strategies have a chance of coming together into something greater. In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being, hidden histories and herstories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink the city from below.

To that end, a group of activists and organizers, including Red Emma's, the Indypendent Reader, campbaltimore, and the Campaign for a Better Baltimore are calling for a conference called The City From Below, to take place in Baltimore during the weekend of March 27th-29th, 2009 at 2640, a grassroots community center and events venue.

Our intention to focus on the city first and foremost stems from our own organizing experience, and a recognition that the city is very often the terrain on which we fight, and which we should be fighting for. To take a particularly salient example from Baltimore, it is increasingly the case that labor struggles, especially in the service sector, need to confront not just unfair employers, but structurally disastrous municipal development policies. While the financial crisis plays out in the national news and in the spectacle of legislative action, it is at the level of the urban community where foreclosures can be directly challenged and the right to a non-capitalist relation to housing can be fought for. Our right to an autonomous culture, to our freedom to dissent, to public spaces and to public education all hinge increasingly on our relation to the cities in which we live and to the people and forces in control of them. And our cities offer some truly inspiring and creative examples of resistance - from the community garden to the neighborhood assembly.

We are committed in organizing this conference to a horizontal framework of participation, one which allows us to concretely engage with and support ongoing social justice struggles. What we envision is a conference which isn't just about academics and other researchers talking to each other and at a passive audience, but one where some of the most inspiring campaigns and projects on the frontlines of the fight for the right to the city (community anti-gentrification groups, transit rights activists, tenant unions, alternative development advocates, sex worker's rights advocates, prison reform groups) will not just be represented, but will concretely benefit from the alliances they build and the knowledge they gain by attending.

At the same time, we also want to productively engage those within the academic system, as well as artists, journalists, and other researchers. It is a mistake to think that people who spend their lives working on urban geography and sociology, in urban planning, or on the history of cities have nothing to offer to our struggles. At the same time, we recognize that too often the way in which academics engage activists, if they do so at all, is to talk at them. We are envisioning something much different, closer to the notion of "accompaniment". We want academics and activists to talk to each other, to listen to each other, and to offer what they each are best able to. Concretely, we're hoping to facilitate this kind of dynamic by planning as much of the conference as possible as panels involving both scholars and organizers.

THEMES TO BE CONSIDERED

* Gentrification/uneven development
* Policing and incarceration
* Tenants rights/housing as a right
* Public transit
* Urban worker's rights
* Foreclosures/financial crisis
* Public education
* Slots/casinos/regressive taxation
* Cultural gentrification
* Underground economies
* Reclaiming public space
* The right to the city
* Squatting/Contesting Property Rights
* Urban sustainability

PROPOSAL SUBMISSIONS

Please share with us your proposal for workshops or presentations. We hope to host 15-25 sessions with a mixture of formats and welcome proposals from groups and individuals. The conference is geared towards discussion and participation. People are welcome to bring papers and other resources with them, but this conference is not oriented to the presentation of papers. There will be 50 and 110 minute sessions. We welcome self-organized workshops but will also work to incorporate individual proposals into panels with others. In your proposal please indicate how your proposal relates to the themes of the conference, expected participants, organizing partners and session format (training, panel, open discussion, video, etc.) and how long the session will be. We are especially interested in proposals which combine critique of the urban environment with discussions of new strategies for its reclamation.

Please get proposals to us no later than the 30th of January, but preferably before January 1st.

Please send proposals to: cityfrombelow -at- redemmas.org

Email is preferred, but you can also send a proposal to:

City from Below
c/o Red Emma's
800 St Paul St.
Baltimore MD 21202

CONTEXTS

Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse

Baltimore's Indypendent Reader / Past Issues

Baltimore Independent Media Center

East Baltimore: A Conversation between David Harvey & Marisela Gomez

Baltimore Free Store

Democracy in America / Town Hall Meetings (Baltimore)

Listening, Collaboration, Solidarity (PDF) / Critical Planning / Scott Berzofsky, Christopher Gladora, David Sloan, and Nicholas Wisniewski

Investigating the Creation of the Ghetto and the Prison Industrial Complex / Contemporary Museum / May 14-August 27, 2006

Reappropriate the Imagination! / Cindy Milstein / Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority, edited by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland (AK Press, 2007)

Collective Perspective: A Progressive Local Art Exhibition Births A Progressive Local Publication / Baltimore City Paper

Free Land / Ariel Luckey

2008-12-02T13:41:00.000-08:00

Free Land / Ariel Luckey

Free Land is a dynamic hip hop theater solo show written and performed by Ariel Luckey, directed by Margo Hall and scored by Ryan Luckey. The show follows a young white man’s search for his roots as it takes him from the streets of Oakland to the prairies of Wyoming on an unforgettable journey into the heart of American history. During an interview with his grandfather he learns that their beloved family ranch was actually a Homestead, a free land grant from the government. Haunted by the past, he’s compelled to dig deeper into the history of the land, only to come face to face with the legacy of theft and genocide in the Wild Wild West. Caught between the romantic cowboy tales of his childhood and the devastating reality of what he learns, he grapples with the contradictions in his own life and the possibility for justice and reconciliation. Free Land weaves spoken word poetry, acting, dance and hip hop music into a compelling performance that challenges us to take an unflinching look at the truth buried in the land beneath our feet.

"50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World" / Utne Reader

In the 19th century, U.S. forces displaced American Indian populations, often violently, before white homesteaders moved in to claim “free” land. “If you look at who owns land in this country, the pattern that’s here today was established in the 1860s,” says Oakland-based hip-hop artist and activist Ariel Luckey. To get people seeing the roots of that privilege, he created Free Land, a candid solo show about coming to terms with homesteading in his family’s history. With dance and song, Free Land cuts to the heart of inherited privilege with more resonance than 10,000 self-conscious liberal arts students could ever muster—and in doing so, opens the door for genuine national introspection.

Thangs Taken / Ariel Luckey

Thangs Taken rethinking thanksgiving is an annual cultural event that brings artists, activists, and communities together to explore the complex history of Thanksgiving and to acknowledge the legacy of US colonialism and genocide against Native Americans. Produced by the Free Land Project, Thangs Taken features live music, dance, film, spoken word poetry, hip hop theater, and visual art installations from Native and non-Native artists. Grounded in grassroots activism, Thangs Taken also features leaders from local social and environmental justice organizations to provide information on current campaigns and concrete ways to take action in the community. With the arts at the center, people from diverse backgrounds gather to engage in a critical dialogue about the impact of Thanksgiving and the history it represents on our communities and to stand in the power of our collective ability to create a world based in peace and justice that we can truly be thankful for.

Autonomous Geographies

2008-10-23T11:42:00.000-07:00

Autonomous Geographies is a two year action research project run jointly by geographers at the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

We use the term autonomous geographies to define those spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship, which are created through a combination of resistance and creation, and the questioning and challenging of dominant laws and social norms.

The project looks at how activists make and remake these types of spaces in their everyday lives by exploring their core ideas, beliefs and visions, how they are translated into action, what kinds of spaces for participation and identity are created and what it means to live in-between the overlapping spaces. We are currently participating in three UK-based case studies and are guided by an advisory group. By engaging in such research, our aim is to critically explore and support autonomous spaces in the UK and the ideas, struggles and practices that bring them to life, as well as help to introduce them to new audiences.

Who Runs Leeds?

An Action Research Project run by the School of Geography and Corporate Watch with financial and research support from local trade unions.

The emergence of Leeds as an economic powerhouse in Britain in the past decade has been nothing short of spectacular. The second largest metropolitan district in England, Leeds is now the leading financial and law centre outside London. In the last 20 years, more jobs have been created in Leeds than in any other UK city outside London, and it is expected to provide 45% of employment growth in the region over the next 10 years. But beneath this comprehensive transformation of Leeds from industrial town to thriving metropolis, a dramatic restructuring of power, ownership and wealth is taking place prompting citizens to ask: who is really running Leeds?

The Common Place - Leeds' autonomous, radical social centre

DO IT YOURSELF: A Handbook for Changing Our World / Edited by The Trapese Collective

A Radical Guide to Ethical and Sustainable Living

Climate change, resource wars, privatisation, the growing gap between rich and poor, politicians that don't listen. Massive issues, but how can we make any difference?

This book shows how. It's not a book about what's wrong with the world, but a collection of dynamic ideas which explore how we can build radical and meaningful social change, ourselves, here and now. Covering nine themes, the book weaves together analysis, stories and experiences. It combines in-depth analytical chapters followed by easy to follow "How to Guides" with practical ideas for organising collectively for change.

Download a Sample Chapter (PDF)

Trapese Collective

Trapese is a Popular Education Collective who offers workshops and training aimed at inspiring and promoting action for changing our world.

TRAPESE stands for ‘Taking Radical Action through Popular Education and Sustainable Everything!’ Our work involves interactive workshops, games, films, trainings, and action/campaign planning sessions. We aim to provide opportunities for children, young people and adults to explore the big issues of our time. Our work focuses on practical steps to inspire, inform and enable action, and how to develop workable alternatives. We are a not for profit collective motivated by a passionate belief in the power of learning together.

The Rocky Road to Transition: The Transition Towns movement and what it means for social change / Download Book (PDF)

Misc. Essays

Paul Chatterton / Jenny Pickerill

Chatterton, P (2008) "Demand the Possible: Journeys in Changing ourWorld as a Public Activist-Scholar".

Chatterton, P (2006) "'Give up Activism' and Change the World in Unknown Ways: Or, Learning to Walk with Others on Uncommon Ground", Antipode. Vol.38, No.2.

Pickerill, J & Chatterton, P (2006) "Notes towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics", Progress in Human Geography. Vol.30, No.6.

Pickerill, J (2008) "A surprising sense of hope", Antipode. Vol.40, No.3.

Beehive Design Collective's Coal Campaign

2008-10-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

Beehive Design Collective / Coal Campaign

Understanding the devastation of Mountaintop Removal is perhaps primarily a visual undertaking - the vastness of the altered landscape cannot be conveyed with words alone. And while the Beehive Collective is known for graphics that speak in pictures across the cultural and language barriers of North and South Americas, it is our hope through this campaign to use our image-based storytelling methods to cross domestic class, geographical, and literacy barriers very close to home. We intend to produce a learning tool that artfully captures the human and ecological scale of totalitarian resource extraction while reinforcing and participating in the rich storytelling tradition of Appalachia.

Coal Graphic Campaign / In Process Gallery

Halfway through our drawing process, the Beehive is beginning to share the Story of Coal with diverse audiences through two banners: one explaining our research trip and one outlining the upcoming graphic.

The Beehive Design Collective is a 100% volunteer driven non-profit political organization that uses graphical media as educational tools to communicate stories of resistance to corporate globalization. The group, based in Machias, Maine, has a mission objective to "Cross-pollinate the grassroots by using imagery as an effective organizing tool". The Beehive Collective is most renowned for its large format pen and ink posters which seek to provide a visual alternative to deconstruction of complicated social and political issues ranging from globalization, free trade, militarism, resource extraction, and biotechnology.

Eating in Public & Historic Waikiki

2008-10-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

EATING IN PUBLIC / Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma

In November of 2003 we planted twenty papaya seedlings on public land near our house in Kailua, Hawai'i. In doing so, we broke the existing laws of the state that delineate this space as 'public' and thereby set the terms for its use. Our act has two major purposes: one is to grow and share food; the other is to problematize the concept of 'public' within public space....

{ Part 1 : Autumn }
{ Part 2 : Winter }
{ Part 3 : Spring }
{ Part 4 : Summer }
{ Part 5 : Spring/Summer/Autumn }
{ Part 6 : Winter }

Eating in Public is an anti-capitalism project in Hawai'i nudging a little space outside of the commodity system. Unlike Santa and the State, they give equally to the naughty and the nice. They do not exploit anyone's labor. And they do not offer tax-deductions. They are, in all the word's various definitions, free. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, they gather at people's homes and plant food on public land. They currently have two ongoing free_stores and a website.

"Sowing the seeds of awareness" / Honolulu Star Bulletin

"Store's open — and free" / Honolulu Advertiser

"Eating in Public" in Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations, Collective Theorization

Historic Waikiki

Historic Waikiki is a project by DownWind Productions, a collaborative of artists, writers, teachers and activists who examine the impact of colonialism, capitalism, and tourism in Hawai'i. We distribute information and agitprop commodities through the marketplace and e-commerce to help tourists and locals alike understand our complicity in the decimation of Hawaii's land and people, and to imagine different relationships with each other and with our own desires and longings.

DownWind is subjected to everything that happens and happened upwind. When hunting, it is recommended that you position yourself downwind of the hunted.

Waikiki: A History of Forgetting and Remembering is a work of art, critical history, and investigative journalism that assumes the unlikely form of a coffee table book. Written in an accessible style, the book creatively draws from historical text and images to tell the story of Waikîkî’s transformation from a self-sustaining community to one of the world’s most popular and overdeveloped vacation destinations.

The result is an innovative collaboration between an art historian and an artist. Written by Andrea Feeser, the text is carefully researched and masterfully woven, using literary metaphors alongside documentary evidence and historical narrative. Artist Gaye Chan contributes lush and haunting imagery that at once serves to illustrate the text and questions the veracity of photographic evidence.

Equally satisfying for a Hawaiiana enthusiast or a cultural studies scholar, a visitor or a long-time Hawai‘i resident, the book offers little-known facts about Waikîkî as well as theoretical and poetic reflections on the very process of memory and history making.

Download Table of Contents (PDF)
Download an excerpt from the book, Chapter 3 - Ala Wai (PDF)

Gaye Chan @ Creative Capital

"Where Spouting Waters Ebb" / Honolulu Weekly

"Room for a View: Projects influence how we see Waikiki" / Malamalama

"Real-time and Digital Communication in and about Contested Hawai'i: The Public Art Project Historic Waikiki" / Andrea Feeser

THERE THERE / Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma

The Right to the City

2008-10-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Battle of the Bailout: The Fight For The City 2008

The Right to the City, David Harvey, New Left Review, September-October 2008

Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.

Download PDF

David Harvey: The Right to the City / Sustainable Cities

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be separated from what kind of people we want to be. David Harvey invites all manner of social movements to assert their 'right to the city' - the right to re-make the city in a different image.

Theory Talk #20: David Harvey

David Harvey on the Geography of Capitalism, Understanding Cities as Polities and Shifting Imperialisms

Right to the City Alliance

Right to the City (RTTC) is a newly formed alliance of base building organizations from cities across the country as well as researchers, academics, lawyers, and other allies. We came together in January of 2007 to build a united response to gentrification and the drastic changes imposed on our cities. We stand together under the notion of a Right to the City for all.

Right to the City offers a framework for resistance and a vision for a city that meets the needs of working class people. It connects our fights against gentrification and displacement to other local and international struggles for human rights, land, and democracy.

We are coming together under a common framework to increase the strength of our community organizations and our collective power. Our goal is to build a national urban movement for housing, education, health, racial justice and democracy.

Principles of Unity for the Right to the City Alliance

1. Land for People vs. Land for Speculation
2. Land Ownership
3. Economic Justice
4. Indigenous Justice
5. Environmental Justice
6. Freedom from Police & State Harassment
7. Immigrant Justice
8. Services and Community Institutions
9. Democracy and Participation
10. Reparations
11. Internationalism
12. Rural Justice

Building Power in the City: Reflections on the Emergence of the Right to the City Alliance and the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance / Harmony Goldberg / In the Middle of a Whirlwind

Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order (PDF) / Mark Purcell

Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant (PDF) / Mark Purcell

In the Middle of a Whirlwind

2008-10-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Will you join us in the middle of a whirlwind?

In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement and Movements

A one-off online journal of theory, art, activism and organizing out now!

Coordinated by: Team Colors Collective

Published by: The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press

In the Middle of a Whirlwind (Whirlwinds) inquires into current organizing efforts in the United States, and through that process, assembles a strategic analysis of current political composition as a tool for building political power.

Whirlwinds' strategic context is this summer's RNC and DNC protests; through these documents and the discussions that erupt from them we hope to directly impact the anti-Convention organizing. In a larger sense, and in the long-term, Whirlwinds is intended to provide a set of useful documents for contemporary radical organizing. Each essay and interview addresses the issues of movement, working class power and composition, and/or gives strategic insight into organizing, and the strengths and weaknesses of current movement/s in the U.S.

A Letter Among Friends: A Whirlwinds Introduction / Conor Cash, Craig Hughes & Kevin Van Meter/ Team Colors Collective

Team Colors News & Events

Team Colors @ MySpace

Making Policy Public

2008-09-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

Making Policy Public / The Center for Urban Pedagogy

CUP's new series of fold-out posters uses innovative graphic design to explore and explain public policy. Making Policy Public is published twice a year, and each poster is the product of a commissioned collaboration between a designer and an advocate.

How It Works

While the effects of public policy are widespread, the discussions around these policies are anything but. This series aims to make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared. By calling on designers to work with advocates to find new ways to make policy public, CUP aims to add vitality to crucial debates about our future. Making Policy Public facilitates new collaborations across the fields of design, education, and public policy by creating opportunities for designers to engage social issues without sacrificing experimentation and for organizations to better reach their constituencies through design.

Download 2008 Policy Briefs

The Cargo Chain

The Cargo Chain is an organizing tool for longshore workers that shows the players and pressure points in today’s globalized shipping network. How do commodities get from factory to shopping mall? Who really has the power to move today’s global economy? This pamphlet was produced through a collaboration between the Longshore Workers Coalition, Labor Notes (a quarterly journal of labor journalism and research), cartographer Bill Rankin, and the graphic design office Thumb.

Social Security Risk Machine

Social Security Risk Machine explains the mechanics of this “social machine”: how it works, why it was created, where the money comes from and where it goes. Most importantly, the poster shows the many adjustments that can be made to keep the machine running. This poster was written by Sam Stark and designed by David Reinfurt and Damon Rich.

SEE ALSO:

Understanding the Farm Bill / Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)

The U.S. Farm Bill leaves a huge footprint on the U.S. and the world. As Washington gears up for the debate, IATP analyzes what's at stake.

Via Social Design Notes and IATP's Ag Observatory

A Call To Farms / Midwest Radical Culture Corridor

2008-09-03T13:38:00.000-07:00

A CALL TO FARMS: Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor

Featuring the words of Claire Pentecost, Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross, Lisa Bralts-Kelly, Brett Bloom and Bonnie Fortune, Ryan Griffis, Mike Wolf, Martha Boyd and Naomi Davis, Rebecca Zorach, Nicolas Lampert, The Langby Family, Eric Haas, Sarah Holm, Brian Holmes, Dan S. Wang, mIEKAL aND, and Sarah Kanouse

FREE Download (PDF)

Designed by The Heavy Duty Press, offset printed at Bookmobile
8.5 x 6.75", 60 pages plus cover, first printing: 500 copies, $10
Available soon at the Heavy Duty Etsy Store.

MRCC & Continental Drift Resources

MRCC Blog

MRCC Drift @ Flickr

"The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor in the Recent Past and the Distant Futures" / Brian Holmes

"Finding, Being the Radical Midwest" / Dan S. Wang

The MRCC Schedule

Continental Drift & 16Beaver

"Songs of Returning, Both Silent and Aloud" (The Domestic Struggle Part Threee) @ Art of This
Minneapolis, Minnesota
August 23 - September 7, 2008

"The Audacity Of Desperation"
Urbana, Illinois
May 7 - June 15, 2008

The Missing Plaque Project

2008-07-29T13:00:00.000-07:00

History can be a tool for social change. It is often said that the victors of history write the history books in their favor. Some stories are promoted, and others are left to dwindle in obscurity. The Missing Plaque Project tries to stand as a force to stop this from happening, by shedding light on the hidden histories.

The project is based in Toronto, and has dedicated itself to changing the way we think about Toronto's history. The city's history is often portrayed as being conservative, British and boring. However, that is only part of the truth. People have lived in the area for thousands of years, but most people think of it as a young city with very little history. It is not that nothing is known of life here before the British set up shop, in 1793; rather those stories are not given the attention they deserve.

Another element to how Toronto's history is portrayed is that anything bad that happened in the city took place long in the past and that since multiculturalism was "invented" in the 1970's everything has been "honky dory". To cast this image many stories have been ignored, including the Bathhouse Raids (1981), the Yonge Street Riot (1992), and the treatment of homeless people.

But why are some histories overlooked? Racism and other biases are partly to blame. Another part of it is the result of efforts to always portray Toronto in a good light, or efforts to use history as a tool to promote tourism or to increase property values. Another part is that many of the people who do work around the city's history come from a narrow background and happy to focus on the history of the British and the rich. Many of them are interested in what most people find banal. Often are happy to look at the history of buildings in the city rather than the people who lived here, and the social turmoil of the past.

Most Torontonians don't find the history of their city relevant to their lives. The Missing Plaque Project attempts to show how our history is relevant to us today. The project does all it can to get people interested and thinking about our cities history. Although the project has began to use a variety of mediums, it started as a project to put up posters about little-known histories.

The project started on a freezing cold December night in 2002. After spending the evening at Kinko's, the founder of the project, Tim Groves, set out for Christie Pits with a steaming bucket of wheat paste and a roll of posters on the Christie Pits Riot. The idea of putting up posters had come to him as soon as he had learned the story of this riot. Before long, ideas for other posters sprang to mind. Slowly new posters were made.

One of the ideas behind putting up the posters is that they can be up right on the street in the areas where people live. Instead of having to go out of your way to learn about the history it can be stumbled on by anyone in the neighbourhood that the history took place.

One dilemma of using posters is that people have to stand in order to read them. They can not take it with them to sit down somewhere comfortable. This would suggest that the posters need to be as short and as easy to read as possible. However, we have been resistant to this, because so many historic plaques mark only that an event happened, but not why it is relevant. The content of our posters is a constant struggle between these two extremes.

In 2006, it was decided to move the project in more ambitious directions. Not only is the number of posters being expanded, but plans are underway to incorporate a variety of other mediums, to seek funding, and to find collaborators to work on various projects.

The Missing Plaque Project Blog

List of posters that may be released in the future

Guided Tours

The poster's potential / Tim Groves

Via Just Seeds

Critical Geographies

2008-07-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings
Edited by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

Radical Theory/Critical Praxis: Making a Difference Beyond the Academy?
Edited by Duncan Fuller and Rob Kitchin

Misc. Resources:

Praxis (e)Press

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies / Contents

Antipode Classic Articles (Free PDFs)

Antipode Themed Articles (Free PDFs)

Activist Geographers Grouping

David Harvey

2008-06-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey

David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume I for nearly 40 years, and his lectures are now available online for the first time. This open course consists of 13 two-hour video lectures of Professor Harvey’s close chapter by chapter reading of Capital, Volume I.

Reading Marx’s Capital - Class 1, Introduction

Reading Marx’s Capital - Class 2, Chapters 1-2

The Right to the City (Part I)
Lecture by Professor David Harvey
Department of Geograhy / Lund University
May 28, 2008

The Right to the City (Part II)

Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development
Lecture by Professor David Harvey
Department of City & Regional Planning / Cornell University
March 13, 2008

(Part 1/10) / (Part 2/10) / (Part 3/10) / (Part 4/10) / (Part 5/10) / (Part 6/10) / (Part 7/10) / (Part 8/10) / (Part 9/10) / (Part 10/10)

Introduction to Continental Drift
16beaver / New York, Fall 2005

David Harvey on Neoliberalism (Quicktime)/ (Part 1/2) / (Part 2/2)

Spectres of Liberty

2008-06-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

Photo: Chris Harvey

Spectres of Liberty is a public memory, site-specific art project. Beginning with a sense of loss about the changing built environment of Troy, New York, we set out imagining ghosts of demolished buildings and structures. Through imagining inflatable sculptural extensions to buildings whose facades have been destroyed to thinking about recreating vanished historic sites, we decided on creating a ghost of the Liberty Street Church.

The Liberty Street Church is not only significant as a vanished part of Troy's architectural history, but also for its value as a historic site in the fight to abolish slavery. From old photos of the site provided by the Rensselaer Historical Society, we created an inflatable 1:1 scale reproduction of the church and will install it at the former site of the church, which is now a parking lot. We will be animating this ghost church through video projections that call forth the history of the site, as well as through the social context of a cultural event that will bring community members to the site to think more deeply about the space and its history.

Through our research we learned more about Henry Highland Garnet, the pastor of Liberty Street Church from 1843-1848. He was known around the world for his militant orations and publications calling on people to actively participate in the fight to end slavery. When we read Henry Highland Garnet's words from the 1840's: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance," we do not think they are dead words from a forgotten time - but a call, an urging, to participate in transforming our world now.

Spectres of Liberty is a project by Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee, and Dara Greenwald.

History / Pamphlet / Photos

Photo: Olivia Robinson

La geografia esborrada de la Barceloneta

2008-04-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

La Geografía esborrada de la Barceloneta

MAP > PDF

AUDIO > MP3

Passeja’t pel barri amb els teus auriculars, i deixa’t portar per les històries, imbueixe’t…

L’audio tour, és una saborosa barreja de veus, peces d’antigues cançons… el mar, les gavines… I explicacions obtingudes a través de la història oral del barri, acompanyades de deliciosos ar-pegis flamencs especialment composats per a l’ocasió. Tots els sons s’han obtingut, cuidadosament a la Barceloneta

VIDEO > Ruta por la Barceloneta desaparecida

La geografia esborrada, és un tour a través dels espais desapareguts del barri de la Barceloneta. Aquells que han estat emblemàtics, que han creat xarxes de solidaritat veïnals. És 1 projecte melancòlic, és un estat de turbulència i rebel.lió transitori, però no és 1 projecte purament regressiu i estancat en el passat. Vol saber sobre les seves arrels, vol llegir-les i sentir-les, vol explorar per reinventar, no pretèn idealitzar, vol obrir camins, portes….vol recordar, reimaginar…. Llegeix la història en diagonal, de principi a final, de final a principi, d’enmig cap amunt o cap avall. Cada espai que descobreix, és 1 nova font de circulació d’idees, formes i estructures que van connectant-se amb el reste de nuclis descoberts.

Public Space & Experimental Geography

2008-02-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

Creative Time Presents: Interrogating Public Space

Interrogating Public Space is an ongoing series of interviews by Creative Time Curator Nato Thompson with artists, theorists, policy makers, and community organizers about the issues surrounding public space. These questions serve to complicate and broaden the notion of what constitutes a public practice and what mechanisms are available to increase social justice. As the study of space has grown to include multiple discourses, this investigation anticipates finding connecting issues that bring together disparate forms of analysis—from public housing to theme parks to public art to community organizing to interventions.

Ava Bromberg, February 2008

Fritz Haeg, July 2007

Experimental Geography: Interview with Nato Thompson (Lauren Cornell)

The term "Experimental Geography" was coined by artist Trevor Paglen in 2002 and has become an umbrella term for a diverse and quickly multiplying range of art practices. Fittingly, Experimental Geography was selected as the title for a new exhibition, curated by Nato Thompson, that explores "the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether)." The traveling show, supported by the organization Independent Curators International, features an international group of artists, all of whom have made important strides in this new field.

You Are Here

A two-day conference featuring contemporary artists and researchers working with mapping and tactical media

November 30 - December 1, 2007, Houston, Texas

Performances and lectures by Center for Land Use Interpretation, Matt McCormick, Institute for Applied Autonomy and Nato Thompson.

You Are Here- Nato Thompson from bree edwards on Vimeo.

Lesbian National Parks and Services

2007-12-19T15:41:00.000-08:00

Lesbian National Parks and Services / Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan

Lesbian National Parks and Services was founded in 1997 to insert a lesbian presence into the landscape. In full uniform as Lesbian Rangers, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan patrol parklands, challenging the general public's ideas of tourism, recreation, and the "natural" environment. Equipped with informative brochures and well-researched knowledge, they are a visible homosexual presence in spaces where concepts of history and biology exclude all but a very few.

Lesbian National Parks and Services: A Force of Nature (Video Clip 7.2 MB)

This mock-u-mentary follows the intrepid Lesbian Rangers through Jr. Lesbian Ranger training camp, research missions, deep-sea rescue, and field work around the globe. Premiered at the Sydney (Australia) Gay/Lesbian Film Festival.

Watch another LNPS promotional video here.

Lesbian National Parks and Services: Field Guide to North America
By Ranger Shawna Dempsey and Ranger Lorri Millan
Illustrated by Daniel Barrow
Pedlar Press (2002)

Whether you are a veteran outdoors-woman or a novice bushwacker, this is the comprehensive lesbiancraft manual you have been waiting for! After extensive tours-of-duty around the globe and in the field, the world-famous Lesbian Rangers have compiled their exhaustive findings in this richly illustrated book. A practical field guide, the Lesbian Rangers describe Flora, Fauna, and Lesbian Survival Skills in intimate detail. Discover how to start a fire and keep it going, what and whom to eat, and the secrets of lesbian psychology.

Read excerpts from the Field Guide here.

Lesbian National Parks and Services: Field Guide to North America / Reviewed by Anne Borden / The Danforth Review

Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan's Field Guide is a witty, indelibly Canadian exploration of a variety of species, including, of course, our own. It is designed to mimic the field guides of the 1950s and 1960s, with rounded corners, pen-and-ink illustrations and a lilting, Audubon parlance. Through their double-voiced narration, the authors urge readers to protect not only the Atlantic Ridley Sea Turtle and other rare creatures, but the endangered beauty and diversity of queer culture, which is constantly under threat due to "unnatural disasters such as religious fundamentalism and assimilation."

The Lesbian Rangers were conceived by Dempsey and Millan as part of a residency through the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Center, in which they donned uniforms and established an onsite information centre for the preservation of "lesbian wildlife." The reaction from guests at the provincial park was overwhelmingly positive, in part because of Dempsey and Millan's adept humour, steeped in double-entendre that manages to fall far short of mockery, and never stoops to mean-spiritedness. "Busy Hands, Happy Heart" goes the Rangers' motto, but this work ethic expands beyond the work of preserving North American wildlife to advocating for LGBT visibility and establishing the important role that queers play in society, in a voice that alternates between authoritative fact and radical cheek.

Read the full review here.

Interview with Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan / The Danforth Review

As collaborators since 1989, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan have created a prolific body of performance art, print publications, video and film. Their most recent text, the Lesbian National Parks and Services Field Guide to North America (2002, Pedlar Press) is a thought-provoking, uproarious send-up of the field guide genre. It looks and feels like a field guide from the 1950's, from the light sheen of its pages and the cover lamination, to its rounded corners and romantic illustrations. But within its pages lies an examination of the diversity of sexual practices among animals and plants, and a radical critique of sexism in science and sexual conservatism in the broader culture.

Shawna and Lorri spoke with Anne Borden (The Danforth Review) via telephone in early February 2003. Read the full interview here.

Junior Lesbian Ranger Handbook

Everything you need to get started on life's bushpath. This handy guide covers knot-tying, how to move an insensible lesbian and more! Also includes a full-colour embroidered Junior Lesbian Ranger patch.

Recent Projects

Lesbian Rangers / Reorientation 2005 / University of Winnipeg

Consideration Liberation Army / The Revolution Begins June 21, 2007

Labor Histories

2007-12-12T20:00:00.000-08:00

The Howling Mob Society

The Howling Mob Society (HMS) is a collaboration of artists, activists and historians committed to unearthing stories neglected by mainstream history. HMS brings increased visibility to the radical history of Pittsburgh, PA through grassroots artistic practice. Our current focus is The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a national uprising that saw some of its most dramatic moments in Pittsburgh.

Ten New Historical Markers Commemorate The Great Railroad Strike of 1877

The Howling Mob Society has created ten historical markers, detailing events and significant locations from The Great Strike, and mounted them throughout the Strip District, Downtown, Polish Hill and Lawrenceville. Visit the map link to find out where the signs are located.

The events that unfolded in July of 1877 marked a unique moment in the history of the United States. Exceptional as it was, however, what has come to be known as the Great Railroad Strike goes largely unmentioned in mainstream accounts of Pittsburgh history. Common people were pushed to the breaking point and struck out in resistance, however they did not have the opportunity to preserve their stories for posterity. Those who had the means to record the strike quickly revealed their sympathetic relationship to the business leaders of the day and set the tone for how 1877 would be remembered. Their bias can be seen in published accounts of the riots, which use racist and xenophobic language to blame immigrants and transient laborers for the property damage and looting that took place. Considerably less attention is paid to the conditions that incited the riot in the first place; the fact that one quarter of the cities entire population participated in the uprising; or the lives lost at the hands of the state militia and National Guard.

In a culture that tells its history through the stories of great men and war heroes, a movement without iconic leaders quietly falls to the wayside. Telling the story of a decentralized social insurrection requires a different approach to history making. It requires that individuals outside the traditional power structure stand up and take responsibility for setting the record straight. The Howling Mob Society seeks to do just that.

Thanks Dara Greenwald and Just Seeds!!!

Don't Mourn / Sarah Kanouse / Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (Volume 3, Number 3)

Introduction

Dust rises in sheets from the hard-pounded ground, hesitates for a moment, and disperses on the dry wind. Hulking steel and concrete structures, their functions lost to Free Trade, rust ominously. A few second-generation industries — mostly recycling and storage concerns — have set up shop in some of the scattered outbuildings, and a trickle of dirty pick-ups checks in and out at the guard post, though the automatic gate seems permanently open. They take little notice of the car, my videographer, or me, a young woman with a battered, vinyl-sided suitcase and a HAM antenna cut to a commercial FM frequency.

I’ve been making pilgrimages to sites like this for a few years now to bear witness to the unmarked relics of old and not-so-old labor struggles in my home state, a place known for a solid union backbone that’s been much bent in recent years. Maybe it was always bent: the struggles I commemorate were not always the heroic or victorious ones but also the shameful episodes: armed conflicts between white strikers and black workers brought from faraway and tricked into taking their places, big unions selling out their struggling locals with a wink and a nod. Sometimes struggles that were victorious and heroic on one level were shameful and disquieting at another. I come to mourn but I don’t want it to stop at that.

The premise is simple: I make radio monuments, monuments composed of radio waves. I squat in the dust for two minutes to broadcast a mournful, distorted version of the Internationale over a commercial radio station to the usually empty immediate vicinity. Without a radio to listen in, it looks like a moment of silence, with luggage. In the name of the events that took place here, I bathe the site in radio waves in a slight, invisible, ephemeral memorial that doesn’t make heroes of the fallen, doesn’t fix the narrative, doesn’t pretend that the story — of the strike, the massacre, the battle, the labor movement, or capitalism — ended any differently or better.

Pana, Illinois

I do not make the bronze plaques, stone monuments or epic murals often sought by labor groups for their permanence and aura of legitimacy. I am not inspiring or instructing but remembering these events and their sometimes ambivalent outcomes. “Public memory” is more often performed than it is read, a difference that Diana Taylor has identified between the “archival” knowledge of history and the “repertoire” of embodied understanding. “Performed, embodied practices make the “past” available as a political resource in the present.... [A] performance may be about something that helps us understand the past, and it may reactivate issues or scenarios from the past by staging them in the present.” Uttering, singing, dancing, visiting, eating or drinking in a ritual fashion, imbued with symbolic meaning, is how individuals access the accumulated experience of a culture such that what has happened in times past to others feels as real, as palpable, as understandable as what has happened in their own lives.

Battle of the Viaduct

To my ears memorial is silent, and I have two minutes of silence in which to think — think about what I am doing, think about what happened here and about what is still happening here and in other places like it. The metal box, its whirring fan faintly audible even in the wind, is reorganizing a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, encoding it to carry my Internationale, more dirge-like than martial, to the unsuspecting receivers of passing cars. The disturbance to the commercial frequency I am jamming is so localized that car radios may flicker with only a few notes of a strange, sad march before resolving again to a steady, static-free mix of Top-40 and commercials. I have no way of knowing for sure how far my signal travels or if anyone is listening, yet the temporary and quixotic interruption of frequency-modulation-as-usual resonates in satisfying ways with the battles I am marking. The symbolic value of reclaiming the electromagnetic commons collides with the fact that the transmissions are local, dissipate, and are drowned out, just as the battles won or lost have been made mute by the onward march of capital and time.

The Labor Trail

The Labor Trail is the product of a joint effort to showcase the many generations of dramatic struggles and working-class life in the Chicago area's rich and turbulent past. The Trail's neighborhood tours invite you to get acquainted with the events, places, and people - often unsung - who have made the city what it is today. In addition, the statewide map is just a starting point for further exploration of Illinois' labor heritage. We invite you to report new themes for research and investigation on both the city and state level.

Labor Trail Map / Interactive Labor Trail

Frente 3 de Fevereiro

2007-11-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

Frente 3 de Fevereiro is a research and artistic intervention group concerned with racism in Brazilian society. The group’s goal is to create a new understanding and contextualize the fragmented information the general population receives via mass media. The group’s artistic interventions create new forms of protest pertaining to racial issues.

New strategies are required to think and to act in a constantly changing reality permeated by cultural transformations on a diverse scale. Frente 3 de Fevereiro connects with the artistic legacy of generations that thought out new ways to interact with urban space in light of the history of the Afro-Brazilian struggle and resistance.

We Are Zumbi: A Cartography of Racism to the Urban Youth - Chapters 1 & 2 (English - PDF)

About Cartography

Frente 3 de Fevereiro was founded by artists, a filmmaker, a graphic designer, musicians, a historian, a sociologist, a dancer, a lawyer, a set designer and actors. It was born out of this group’s mobilization after a real occurrence: on February 3rd, 2004 when a young black man, Flávio Sant’Ana, was mistaken by a thief and murdered by the São Paulo military police.

To us, the murder of Flávio, a young, recently graduated dentist, was more than a mere fact: it was an exemplary case, a denunciation of social contradiction. The idea of idealized racial democracy in Brazil is perpetuated, affirming a discourse that this is a mixed-race country, which is therefore automatically “free” of racism. On the other hand, Flávio’s death brings forth the daily racial profiling of a young black man as a “suspect”, as a “threat.” Therefore, Flávio Sant’Ana’s murder reveals racial democracy as a deliberate attempt to deny perverse social practices punctuated by legacy of slavery.

Following this event, the group began to observe how the media narrated the story, and we noticed that most of the time, the racial factor easily disappeared in the news, describing the murder as “yet another case of violence.” That was our catch: how to racialize this occurrence? How to expose the racism behind the police’s violent action legitimized by a society that is equally racist and violent?

We performed several actions: we built a horizontal monument in the exact spot where Flávio was murdered—a plate on the floor observing the occurrence in remembrance; we pasted posters throughout the city claiming: “Who polices the police? Police racism.”

Thus we began our cartography trying to decompose the historical thread that has been rendered “natural” through new social practices. But how are these practices structured? What are the limits of the slave legacy in our quotidian experience? How can we break free from this logic by inscribing other forms of sociability?

Cartography is to us more than a map. It is writing understood in a larger sense, a stance before the world. We are cartographers when we recognize and organize that which instigates us to act, giving us hearing, a voice and form to our anxieties and desires, poetically expressing and inscribing onto reality that which moves us.

It is not enough to unveil the past in the present. It is necessary to invent new ways of reading and writing our desires, therefore inventing new forms of sociability. Once we own our daily practices, believing in what we feel, we abandon a place of constant reactions to what is socially reproduced. That way, we recognize our historical legacy and move to an active place where we produce new practices, a new logic, and new maxims, always yet to be invented.

“Everything that voices the movements of desire, everything that serves to coin expressive material, is welcomed. All entry points are good, so long as there are multiple exits. That way the cartographer uses a variety of sources, not only written or theoretical [...]. The cartographer is a true cultural cannibal: always expropriating, appropriating devouring and giving birth, trans-valuing. The cartographer is always seeking elements/nourishment to compose his/her cartographies.”

Zumbi Somos Nós: Cartografia do Racismo para o Jovem Urbano (We are Zumbi: A Cartography of Racism for Urban Youth) is not a treatise about racism in Brazil. On the contrary, it is an attempt to create a device for dialogue through our paths, doubts and desires. We are Zumbi presents a sketch of our itinerary, the organization of a gaze attentive to quotidian experience, constructed through diverse layers of understanding: our actions, poetic manifestos, text fragments, interviews with scholars, research, newspaper articles, etc.

The group’s artistic actions synthesize different “areas” from this cartography. Our focus on urban space re-signifies quotidian elements through a symbolic “detour.” The power of direct action without institutional mediation, and the creation of poetic situations open to the subjectivity of possibilities to build a different future.

TRÁNSITOry PÚBLICO | PUBLIC TRANSITorio
NOVEMBER 13 - 20 : 2007
LOS ANGELES

Political art that is refreshingly amoral

A migratory installation of artists, activists, and militant researchers: in art spaces, parks, and a museum; around a university, under a bridge, and on the train.

These events will bring together artists and activists from throughout Latin America and Los Angeles to create public discussions and performances in Santa Monica, Westwood, Hollywood, Downtown, and on the way to Tijuana.

Participants include: the Internacional Errorista (founders of the errorist movement); Argentine militant performance group Etcétera; Brazilian antiracist art group Frente 3 de Fevereiro; activist sound art collective Ultra-red; BijaRi, an interventionist design+performance+VJ collective from São Paulo; Argentine art and environmental organization Ala Plástica; La Lleca, an artist social intervention based in the prison system in Mexico City; Guatemalan performance artists Regina José Galindo and María Adela Díaz; Ecuadorian performance artist Jenny Jaramillo; and Los Angeles performance ensemble Butchlalis de Panochtitlan. Participants also include leading feminist artists Mónica Mayer, from Mexico City; Kirsten Dufour, from Copenhagen, and Suzanne Lacy, from L.A.; the Mothers of East Los Angeles; the former Eastside Artistas; anthropologist Pilar Riaño-Alcalá; Boyle Heights community garden Proyecto Jardín; editors of the magazines Make/shift and LOUDmouth; Xicana/Indigenous filmmakers collective Womyn Image Makers; the creators of just space(s); The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest; and architect Teddy Cruz.

TRÁNSITOry PÚBLICO is presented in collaboration with the Political Equator II.

Download Tránsito(ry) Público / Public(o) Transit(orio) Poster (PDF)

Download The Political Equator II Poster (PDF)

The Pocho Research Society

2007-11-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

The Pocho Research Society is a collective of artists, activists and rasquache historians who reside in Los Angeles.

Dedicated to the systematic investigation of space, memory and displacement, the PRS understands history as a battleground of the present, a location where hidden and forgotten selves hijack and disrupt the oppression of our moment.

PROJECTS

Operation Invisible Monument

Public monuments are undeniably important sites in the projection and erection of hegemonic constructs. They often monumentalize heroic, romantic and militaristic versions of history and thereby deny density and complexity. Los Angeles is a rich and fertile terrain for the investigation of bulldozed and forgotten stories

In Operation Invisible Monument, the Pocho Research Society (PRS) confronts the construction of history through the public monument. Anonymous members installed mock historic plaques at four locations. These monuments entitled Tropical America, El Otro Ellis, The Displacement of the Displaced and The Triumph of the Tagger, commemorate moments in Los Angeles history that have not been officially recognized. In the first of several actions, the PRS identified strategic sites in an effort to pay homage to historic erasure. By inserting plaques, the PRS hopes to interrupt historical amnesia, trigger memory and interrogate the present in order to see the world with fresh eyes rather than the diesel haze of a media-blurred present. The result, ideally, is a reconstruction or destruction of the hegemonic world view responsible for the erection of the site's original monuments.

SITES: Tropical America / Displacement of the Displaced / El Otro Ellis / Triumph of the Tagger

Echoes in the Echo: A Series of Public Interventions About Gentrification In and Around Echo Park

Echoes in the Echo is a series of public interventions that will explore History and memory in and around Echo Park. This phase of the project commemorates a few of many queer Latina/o spaces that were a "home" to many for periods of up to a couple of decades and have since changed ownership and now cater to a new, straighter, younger and whiter clientele. This project takes place while the city, itself, is at a crossroads in its own history. Dramatic increases in real estate prices coupled with commercially driven development projects facilitated by elected officials are two of a multitude of forces that push many working class communities out of the city "core." Waves of new 'immigrants' (albeit from the Midwest) have in the process displaced longstanding cultural spaces created over several decades. Within this massive “land grab” questions like ‘where do drag queens, closeted quebradita dancers and gay cholos go once they been pushed out?’ arise. How and who defines a space? Is a space defined by its present incarnations or does its past ruthlessly resurface like dust in unswept corners?

Artist Leaves Mark on Former Latino Gay Bars (89.3 KPCC)

There's no shortage of opinion in the Southland about what constitutes a landmark. Earlier this week, in the dead of night, one Los Angeles artist cemented her own historical plaques to commemorate the Latino gay bars she says have been gentrified out of the Silver Lake area. KPCC's Adolfo Guzman-Lopez went along and filed this report.

Operation Invisible Monument @ The October Surprise

SITES: The DeCenter / The Popular Resource Center / The Vex

MISC.

Operation Invisible Monument / The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Issue#3

Sandra de la Loza Statement & Biography

The House That Herman Built

2007-10-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

For over thirty-five years Herman Joshua Wallace has been in solitary confinement in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Solitary Confinement, or Closed Cell Restriction (CCR) at Angola consists of spending a minimum of 23 hours a day in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell. Five years ago the activist/artist Jackie Sumell asked Herman a very simple question: "What kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6'x9' box for over thirty years dream of?" The answer to this question has manifested in a remarkable project called THE HOUSE THAT HERMAN BUILT.

You may download a PDF of the project, or watch a sample of the CAD video fly-through.

Project History / Statement / Press / Documentation / Get Involved

Jackie Sumell / Herman Wallace The House That Herman Built
Architecture and Design Project Space / Artists Space / NYC
October 12 - December 8, 2007

Download 24" X 36" poster (1.5MB PDF)

Mr. 76759 Designs His Dream House / The New York Times / March 11, 2007

Minor improvements still occur to him, but Herman Wallace has more or less finished his dream house. It's got a yellow kitchen, a hobby shop and custom-made pecan cabinets. It should be noted that no actual house exists, but this is understandable. Mr. Wallace has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola for the last 34 years. [continue...]

ANGOLA 3 / The National Coalition to Free the Angola 3

The National Coalition to Free the Angola 3 was formed in 1998 to find justice for three innocent and wrongfully convicted men locked down at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, for nearly three decades.

You can purchase the book, The House That Herman Built, by contacting the National Coalition to Free the Angola Three's Coordinator, Marina Drummer, orgmarina@communityfuturescollective.org. Books are $20 dollar MINIMUM donation, including shipping.

Artist's Statement

- Angola is an 18,000 acre former slave-breeding plantation with an annual operating budget of $105,000,000.

- It was officially established as the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1901.

- There is a 1,500 cattle beef herd, which is sold for profit, to the open market through Prison Enterprises.

- Prison Enterprises also manages the for profit license tag shop, metal fabrication facility, mattress, broom and mop factories housed on Angola.

- Every physically able prisoner is required to work for 2- 20 cents an hour a minimum of 40 hours a week.

- LSP is the largest employer in West Feliciana Parish, providing more jobs than the nuclear power plant and paper mill combined.

- A new $10,000,000 Death Row facility was completed in April 2007.

- The 11,300 seat arena which houses the annual Angola Prison Rodeo, was completed in 2002, with prison labor.

- 2 New Chapels have been built on Angola in the last 2 years with profit from the Angola Rodeo and prison labor.

- 28,987 Religious Materials, and 8,424 Bibles were distributed in 2005.

- Approximately 400 religious services and programs are offered each month throughout LSP.

- Brent Miller rifle range was recently renovated and provides employees of Angola with training in firearms, tactical response, chemical agents, electronic capture shields, and restraints.(Brent Miller is the prison guard Herman and Albert are accused of killing)

- Prison View Golf Course, is open to the public inside Angola. 24 hour reservations are required and tee off is $20 (including cart rental).

Just Space(s)

2007-09-06T20:30:00.000-07:00

Photo: Best Not to Be Here? / Marie Cieri

Just Space(s)
September 26 – November 18, 2007
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
Organized by Ava Bromberg and Nicholas Brown

OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, September 26, 7-9pm

/// INTRODUCTION ///

Everyday we confront spaces that don't work - from our neighborhoods and parks, to our prisons, pipelines and borders. In this exhibition and programming series, artists, scholars and activists reveal how these spaces function - and dysfunction - making way for thought and action to create just societies and spaces.

The projects in this exhibition reflect the renewed recognition that space matters to cutting edge activist practices and to artists and scholars whose work pursues similar goals of social justice. A spatial frame offers new insights into understanding not only how injustices are produced, but also how spatial consciousness can advance the pursuit of social justice, informing concrete claims and the practices that make these claims visible. Understanding that space - like justice - is never simply handed out or given, that both are socially produced, differentiated, experienced and contested on constantly shifting social, political, economic, and geographical terrains, means that justice - if it is to be concretely achieved, experienced, and reproduced - must be engaged on spatial as well as social terms.

By transforming LACE, in part, into an active learning environment, Just Space(s) seeks to provide visitors with tools to consider alternatives to reactionary and essentializing political discourse that tends to dominate and frame our conceptions of justice - and constrain our abilities to imagine and implement it. The exhibition presents some of the most innovative and efficacious contemporary artistic, activist, and scholarly work engaging social and spatial analyses. In addition, a library/infoshop and symposia and event series extend the scope and scale of the main exhibition. Taken in whole or in part, Just Space(s) aims not merely to show what is unjust about our world, but to inspire visitors to consider what the active production of just space(s) might look like. It asks a crucial question: How do we move from injustice to justice exactly where we stand - in our neighborhoods and our institutions, at the level of the body, the home, the street corner, the city, the region, the network, the supranational trade agreement and every space within, between, and beyond? While much theorizing about - and active experimentation with - the role and potential of a spatial justice framework remains undone, this exhibition and its public programming contribute to the articulation of a powerful concept/tool that links critical theory and ethical practice.

Just Space(s) builds upon the recent publication of a special volume of Critical Planning (UCLA Journal of Urban Planning, Volume 14, Summer 2007) on the theme of spatial justice, which also serves as a companion to the exhibition. Click here to download PDFs of selected essays from the special volume, including Editorial Note: Why Spatial Justice? (3.7MB PDF) by Ava Bromberg, Gregory D. Morrow, and Deirdre Pfeiffer, and a spatial justice bibliography (2MB PDF). Visit the Critical Planning website for more information and to purchase a copy of the journal.

Download Just Space(s) Press Release & Events Schedule

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90028
Wed-Sun 12-6pm, Fri 12-9pm
323.957.1777 / www.welcometolace.org

EXHIBITION THEMES & PROJECTS

Photo: The Corrections Documentary Project / Ashley Hunt

THEME#1 >>> (IM)MOBILITY / PRISONS AND THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

The Corrections Documentary Project (Ashley Hunt) /// Million Dollar Blocks (Spatial Information Design Lab) /// Up the Ridge (Appalshop's Holler to the Hood)

Photo: Political Equator / Teddy Cruz

THEME#2 >>> (IM)MOBILITY / BORDERS, LABOR, MIGRATION

The Black Sea Files (Ursula Biemann) /// Political Equator (Teddy Cruz) /// disOrientation Guide (Counter-Cartographies Collective) /// Spatial Justice for Ayn Hawd (Sabine Horlitz and Oliver Clemens) /// Searching for Our Destination (Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri ) /// Water Station Maps and Warning Posters (Humane Borders and No More Deaths) /// Host Not Found: A Traveling Monument of the Suppression of Search (Markus Miessen and Patricia Reed)

Photo: Principles of Unity / Right to the City Alliance

THEME#3 >>> ECONOMIC JUSTICE / THE RIGHT TO THE CITY

The Figueroa Corridor Coalition for Economic Justice (Strategic Actions for a Just Economy) /// Listening, Collaboration, Solidarity (CampBaltimore) /// UTOPIA-dystopia (Los Angeles Poverty Department) /// Principles of Unity (Right to the City Alliance) /// RFK in EKY (Appalshop and John Malpede) /// Spatializing Labor Campaigns (Service Employees International Union)

Photo: Syracuse City Hunger Project Maps / Syracuse Community Geography

THEME#4 >>> ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE / PUBLIC HEALTH

Syracuse City Hunger Project Maps (Syracuse Community Geography) /// LATWIDNO - Land access to which is denied no one (Sarah Lewison and Erin McGonigle) /// Invisible5 (Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, and Kim Stringfellow) /// Public Green (Lize Mogel) /// Public Access 101 - Malibu Public Beaches (Los Angeles Urban Rangers) /// Best Not to Be Here? (Marie Cieri)

Photo: However Unspectacular: A New Suburbanism / The Center for Urban Pedagogy

THEME#5 >>> RACIALIZATION OF SPACE / SPATIALIZATION OF RACE

However Unspectacular: A New Suburbanism (The Center for Urban Pedagogy) /// Detroit's Underdevelopment (Adrian Blackwell) /// The New Yorkers' Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs (Friends of William Blake) /// A People's Guide to Los Angeles (Laura Pulido)

Photo: Dakota Commemorative March / Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and David Miller

THEME#6 >>> LAND / INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGIES, LAND CLAIMS & TREATY RIGHTS

A Century of Genocide in the Americas: The Residential School Experience (Rosemary Gibbons and Dax Thomas - Boarding School Healing Project) /// Dakota Commemorative March (Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and David Miller) /// Secret Military Landscapes and the Pentagon's "Black World" (Trevor Paglen) /// Spiral Lands (Andrea Geyer)

Spatial Justice

2007-08-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

Critical Planning: A Journal of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning / Spatial Justice, Volume 14, Summer 2007

Purchase a copy of Spatial Justice, Volume 14 of the Critical Planning Journal and help support Just Space(s), an upcoming exhibition and symposia in Los Angeles also on the theme of spatial justice.

Table of Contents / Volume 14 (52KB PDF)

What Makes Justice Spatial? What Makes Spaces Just? / Three Interviews on the Concept of Spatial Justice (3.3MB PDF) // Critical Spatial Practice Reading Group: Nicholas Brown, Ryan Griffis, Kevin Hamilton, Sharon Irish, and Sarah Kanouse

Spatial Justice for Ayn Hawd / Thoughts on an Alternative Master Plan for a Palestinian Village (2.6MB PDF) // Sabine Horlitz and Oliver Clemens

Listening, Collaboration, Solidarity (3.4MB PDF) // Scott Berzofsky, Christopher Gladora, David Sloan, and Nicholas Wisniewski

Sculpting the Social Geography of Lower Manhattan: Artists and AIDS Activists in the 1980s and 1990s (2MB PDF) // Tamar Carroll

Editorial Note: Why Spatial Justice? (3.7MB PDF) // Ava Bromberg, Gregory D. Morrow, and Deirdre Pfeiffer

This volume proceeds from the notion that justice is, and should be, a principal goal of urban planning in all its institutional and grassroots forms. Yet why speak of spatial justice instead of social justice? What do critical spatial thinking and practices contribute to the pursuit of justice?

Over the past three decades, activists seeking a more fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of society have increasingly turned from conceptions of (economic) equality to broader coalitions of justice. This appeal for a “just” society has been a powerful rallying point for a wide range of social justice movements – economic justice, racial justice, environmental justice, etc. – that collectively frame justice in both material (re-distributive policies) and non-material terms (liberty, happiness, opportunity, security, etc.). John Rawls (1971) most clearly articulated this paradigm with his two principles of justice: 1) that everyone should have an equal right to have equal basic liberties within a total system that ensures liberty for all, and 2) that social and economic inequalities, where necessary, should be arranged to benefit the least advantaged among us. Indeed, most post-war western democracies through the early-to-mid 1970s pursued Keynesian economic policies that operated within these principles – shifting resources from “have” to “have not” regions in an attempt to ensure the least advantaged would have an equal opportunity to succeed.

The economic crises of the 1970s, however, began to weaken these principles; global trade practices, the offloading of responsibilities to macro and micro-level institutions (the EU, WTO, World Bank, NAFTA, etc. at one extreme and common interest communities, business improvement districts, neighborhood associations, etc. at the other), and a concentration of investments in the most globally competitive urban agglomerations have collectively ushered in a new paradigm of neoliberal Darwinism. The predictable decline of rust-belt and rural regions is replicated at the micro level between have and have not neighborhoods, and at the macro level between have and have not global regions. The result is an intensification of a distinct pattern of geographic disparity.

It is out of this painful transition to the “new economy” (economic restructuring, globalization, flexible accumulation, etc.) that many of the current global justice movements emerged. Yet, these justice movements have largely retained the Rawlsian conception of a universal justice, illustrating the conflicting nature of Rawlsian justice that has guided much of recent efforts: while its intent seeks to ensure equality and fairness, as a normative ideal, it leaves social and spatial difference out of the equation. It also fails to discuss where such shared notions of justice would be established and activated.

By the 1990s, faith in this normative justice began to wane as activists recognized not only the new geographies of injustice but also that the circumstances of different social groups mattered – that a one-size-fits-all justice (as conceived by the well-educated, largely white elite) did not necessarily serve everyone equally (as Young (1990) and Harvey (1996) so vividly conveyed). Indeed, we now understand that the distribution of material wealth, opportunity, health outcomes, educational attainment, job creation, and virtually all of the metrics of quality of life are not distributed equally across space – that one-size-fits-all justice does not account for growing regional disparities (which are also strongly correlated with race and ethnicity).

A few key texts – for example, Harvey (1973), Lefebvre (1974), and Soja (1989) – especially challenged social scientists to question the long-accepted treatment of space (or territory) as fixed, unproblematic and inconsequential. Instead, seeking justice means understanding the dialectical relationship between not only the economic and social conditions of different groups, but also the geography of injustice – that is, how the social production of space, in turn, impacts social groups and their opportunities. The earliest use of the terms “territorial justice,” “spatial justice” or “socio-spatial justice” – for example, Davies (1968), Reynaud (1981), and Pirie (1983) – linked geographic distribution to concepts of fairness, but few scholars interested in social justice have thus far explicitly treated space as socially (re)produced. Among the notable exceptions are Flusty (1994), Soja (2000) and Dikec (2001). Much works remains, particularly in theorizing what spatial justice means and how it can be usefully deployed as a framework for critical practice. Yet, a growing body of literature is beginning to contribute to the concept; some additional references are included in the further reading section.

As the texts in this volume reflect, the renewed recognition that space matters offers new insights not only to understanding how injustices are produced through space, but also how spatial analyses of injustice can advance the fight for social justice, informing concrete claims and the activist practices that make these claims visible. Understanding that space – like justice – is never simply handed out or given, that both are socially produced, experienced and contested on constantly shifting social, political, economic, and geographical terrains, means that justice – if it is to be concretely achieved, experienced, and reproduced – must be engaged on spatial as well as social terms.

Thus, those vested with the power to produce the physical spaces we inhabit through development, investment, planning (and their antitheses) – as well as through grassroots embodied activisms – are likewise vested with the power to perpetuate injustices and/or create just spaces. If, as Lefebvre (1974) suggests, space is not just “out there” but is produced and reproduced by social relations, it is incumbent upon planning practitioners, theorists, community organizers and residents alike to take a critical position about their own roles in perpetuating or mitigating spatial injustice. What a just space looks like is necessarily left open, but must be rooted in the active negotiations of multiple publics, in search of productive ways to build solidarities across difference. This space – both process and product – is by definition public in the broadest sense; the opportunity to participate in inscribing its meaning is accessible to all. As Deutsche (1996: 269) eloquently states: “how we define public space is intimately connected with ideas about what it means to be human, the nature of society, and the kind of political community we want.” Justice is therefore not abstract, and not solely something “handed down” or doled out by the state; it is rather a shared responsibility of engaged actors in the socio-spatial systems they inhabit and (re)produce.

One idea not directly addressed by the contributors to this volume is how diverse struggles, being inherently connected through the fact that we live, experience, and reproduce justice and injustice in space, may be furthered by alliances and solidarities across different scales and scopes. The power of connecting “issue based” social movements (environmental, economic, racial, gender, labor, etc.) within and across geographical scales (from the local to the global) to organize collective action has yet to be fully explored in practice. Perhaps mobilizations at multiple and simultaneous scales can create sustained levels of visibility and greater pressure for change that broaden a base of popular support. Such attempts may yet produce ever more effective political and practical strategies, and inspire the extension of functional networks. A burgeoning national movement around “The Right to the City,” which began in late January with a convening of representatives from “over thirty community-based social movements and resource organizations from eight metropolitan areas” in Los Angeles, provides an excellent example of one such attempt. The objectives for the initial meeting – “to build collective capacity for local urban struggles to become a national movement around the right to the city; to provide a frame and structure…for regional organizing and for connecting intellectuals to the work being done; and to build a national network / alliance that will allow organizations to learn from one another, that will create a national debate on issues affecting urban communities…and [to] to coordinate a national program” – illustrate the goal of casting a wider net, to incorporate multiple issues as well as intellectual work to further shared struggle. (Right to the City, Notes from the inaugural convening 2007: 1) This is but one of many examples to follow closely in the years to come.

While much theorizing about – and active experimentation with – the role and potential of a spatial justice frame remains undone, we see this volume contributing to the articulation of a very powerful concept. The notion that this and future work can further the active production of just spaces remains at the heart of our interest in it. The specificity it provides may yet be part of what helps us evolve from a society with abstract and faraway aspirations for justice and highly developed modes of reacting to injustices, to a society that arrives at the particular expression of what a just version of our society will be like, and the means to secure it for all. The task is no less than the development of immaterial and concrete conditions that can reproduce justice exactly where we stand, in our neighborhoods and our institutions, at the level of the body, the home, the street corner, the city, the region, the network, the supranational trade agreement and every space within, between, and beyond.

Ava Bromberg
Gregory D. Morrow
Deirdre Pfeiffer

Just Space(s) exhibition and symposia at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), September 26 – November 18, 2007.

Military Tour of Southern California

2007-08-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

Dan Hirsch speaks to tour particpants at Sage Ranch overlooking the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in the hills between the Simi and San Fernando valleys.

Military Tour of Southern California / Physicians for Social Responsibility - Los Angeles

Click here to download a PDF of the tour guide (3.7MB PDF)

On June 10, 2006, PSR-LA offered the first-ever Military Tour of Southern California. This all-day tour took PSR members and supporters to the military sites that have shaped the world and, in some cases, the health of Californians.

Los Angeles is one of the nation's foremost military regions. Weapons are regularly shipped from our shores, from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station to warships outside Afghanistan and Iraq. U.S. Marines depart from Camp Pendleton to Iraq. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are built in Canoga Park, their engines are tested in the foothills, and test-launched from Santa Barbara's Vandenberg Air Force Base. The missile defense program, and most of our nation's military satellites are manufactured in the South Bay. The eastern half of the San Fernando Valley and entire San Gabriel Valley are EPA Superfund sites due to the military industry's sloppy environmental activities. PSR-LA's bus tour addressed the global security issues associated with these sites as well as the environmental, public health and moral repercussions of military production.

The Dirt on Our Dirt: Roll up, roll up for the military toxicity tour / Los Angeles CityBeat

Military Pollution in California

Building the most powerful military force in human history has profoundly affected American culture, morality and politics.

This unprecedented investment in building missiles, bombs, jets, bullets, rockets, submarines, ships, satellites, bombers, guns and nuclear arms has also profoundly affected the American landscape and environment. The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that the Defense Department is the nation's leading polluter.

Indeed, the health of millions are at risk. Over the past twenty years, millions of Californians have consumed water tainted with rocket fuel. During the Cold War, millions of American children were fed radioactive milk, contaminated by the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Many thousands of military workers got cancer from dealing with exotic chemicals and radioactive materials - and nearby communities were similarly exposed.

Physicians for Social Responsibility - Los Angeles believes that the military's historic mission — that of protecting Americans from harm — clearly extends to protecting Americans from the military's own environmental mess.

Southern California's health and environment has been profoundly transformed by military activity. Did you know that the entire San Gabriel Valley is an EPA Superfund site - and the eastern half of the San Fernando Valley is similarly a Superfund site due to military pollution?

Malibu Public Beach Safaris

2007-08-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

Malibu Public Beach Safaris
Los Angeles Urban Rangers
Summer 2007

Saturday, Aug. 4, 9:30am-1pm – West Malibu beaches
Sunday, Aug. 5, 9:30am-1pm – East Malibu beaches
Saturday, Aug. 11, 1:30-5pm – East Malibu beaches
Sunday, Aug. 12, 1:30-5pm – West Malibu beaches

Tired of Zuma and Surfrider? Want to find and use the other beaches in Malibu? The twenty miles that are lined with private development? The "Malibu Public Beaches" safaris will show you how to find, park, walk, picnic, and sunbathe on a Malibu beach. Each 3 1/2-hour safari visits two or three beaches and explores natural history, jurisdiction, and the identification of public and private property. Skills-enhancing activities include a public-private boundary hike, an accessway hunt, sign watching, and a public easement potluck.

Safaris in August are free, but are currently full. To sign up for our waiting list, please email us.

Download the "Malibu Public Beaches" guide, an easy-to-use resource for understanding the beaches and accessways. (PDF: 471KB)

Download the "Malibu Beaches Owners Manual," article by Jenny Price, reprinted from LA Observed. (PDF: 368KB)

Read the August 2, 2007 LA Times article "Open season on 'private' beaches" by Jennifer Kim.

Guide to Malibu's hidden beaches / Part I / Jenny Price

Guide to Malibu's Hidden Beaches / Part II / Jenny Price

Guide to Malibu's Hidden Beaches / Part III / Jenny Price

Andrea Geyer / Spiral Lands

2007-07-17T10:28:00.000-07:00

Andrea Geyer / Spiral Lands / Chapter 1 / 2007

installation with fiber based photographs and text (17 frames 70 x 175cm, 2 frames 70 x 230cm), brochure with footnotes

Geyer's Spiral Lands is a work of photographic and textual historiography that investigates the longest struggle for social justice in North America today - the dispossession of lands from American Indians by colonization, governmentality, capitalist development, and flat out force and violence. These claims for spatial justice are deeply temporal - legislation from Europe around the "Doctrine of Discovery" and the "Rights of Conquest" were written in 1493 and law suits initiated by native groups to uphold treaty rights and gain land claims have spanned most of the 20th century to today - and Spiral Lands sculpts a complex understanding of the dynamic of history, place, ownership, capitalism, vision and photography to explore how North America is literally a contested zone that has yet to reconcile its own history and its heroic narratives of conquest as a capitalist myth of origins. Foraging through the archive of colonial proclamations, treaties, manifestos from the American Indian Movement (AIM), anthropological texts, personal histories, corporate reports, travelogues, and oral histories, Geyer shows this relationship of land and ownership, of space and history, to be the very condition of the global present rather than a repressed history that can be brought into view by adding it to existing historical narratives. The landscape photographs of contested sites of Native lands challenge the historical scopic regimes of North American landscape photography and counter a photography of a spirit of place (genius loci) with the representation of place as process that is dynamically historical, intensely present, and visually uncanny. The heart of this work is a radical beauty of a cultural politics based not on cultural recognition and liberalism, but on social justice.

- Jeff Derksen

Download Footnotes (PDF)

Fronteres

2007-07-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

Fronteres @ Subtopia

elin o'Hara slavick

2007-07-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

World Map, Protesting Cartography: Places the United States has Bombed, 2002-ongoing, with pins marking each bombed site for which there is a corresponding drawing

Protesting Cartography or Places the United States has Bombed (1998 - 2005)

"History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. If one no longer has land but has memory of land, then one can make a map."

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Originally the series was called Everywhere the United States has Bombed, but as I learn about covert actions, mis- and dis-information, it would be irresponsible for me to call it that. Sometimes I think the title should be The United States has Bombed Everywhere.

Nevada Test Site, Area 20, Project Schooner (part of Project Plowshare), 35 Kilotons, December 1968. "Schooner bomb crater and football field. Project Plowshare was pursued for 15 years, including 30 experimental peaceful nuclear explosions." from "Peaceful Nuclear Explosions and the Geography of Scientific Authority," by Scott Kirsch

These drawings are manifestations of self-education on the subjects of U.S. military interventions, geography, politics, history, cartography, and the language of war. The drawings are also a means to educate others. I make them beautiful to seduce the viewer so that she will take a closer look, read the accompanying information that explains the horror beneath the surface. I wish for the viewer to be captured by the colors and lost in the patterns—as one would be if viewing an Impressionist painting—and then have the optical pleasure interrupted by the very real dots, or bombs, that make up the drawing. Unlike an Impressionist painting, there is no sense of light in these drawings. And unlike typical landscape paintings, these drawings are based on surveillance, military, and aerial photography and maps.

As Miles Harvey writes in The Island of Lost Maps, "In the seventeenth and eighteenth century mapmakers were referred to as 'world describers.' In geometry, describe means to draw or trace the outline of something; in poetry, it means to get at the essence of something, to bring it to life in a way that's both startling and beautiful. You've got to do both kinds of description – and do it in a medium that's partially visual, partially mathematical, partially textual, a complicated miscellany of scale, orientation, projection, grids, signs, symbols, lines, colors, words."

Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant, Sudan, August 20, 1998, "U.S. Military Strike on a Chemical Weapons Plant"

I draw inspiration and information from many sources, but especially from William Blum’s book, Killing Hope – U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since W.W.II. Blum writes, "What might be the effect upon the American psyche if we were compelled to witness the consequences of U.S. foreign policy close up? What if the Americans who dropped an infinite tonnage of bombs, on a dozen different countries, on people they knew nothing about, had to come down to earth and look upon and smell the burning flesh?" I believe Americans have begun to smell the "burning flesh" since September 11. Do bombing campaigns make the world safer or free from terrorism? Or do they just increase the death toll, the already high levels of fear and anger, the rage and endless grieving in this world? Can any deadly bombs distinguish between an innocent civilian and a terrorist, a child or a soldier, a wedding party or an ammunition facility?

Miles Harvey continues, "For early humans, mapping may have served to achieve what in modern behavioral therapy is known as desensitization: lessening fear by the repeated representation of what is feared. Representing supposedly dangerous terrae incognitae in map form as an extension of familiar territory may well have served to lessen fear of the peripheral world." I suppose I want to instill fear back in to us, but not fear of the peripheral world. We should be afraid of ourselves. Maps are preeminently a language of power, not protest. I offer these maps as protests against each and every bombing.

I have completed 60 drawings.

Philadelphia, the Firebombing of M.O.V.E., May 13, 1985, for Ramona Africa and Mumia Abu-Jamal, "11 men, women, and children are burned alive, along with an entire city block, when the Philadelphia Police Department drop an incendiary bomb (200 lbs. of gasoline with a detonator) from a police helicopter onto the roof of M.O.V.E.'s building because the separatists refused to come out and face the police firing squad." - John Africa

Bomb after Bomb, A Violent Cartography / Elin O'Hara Slavick, Foreword by Howard Zinn, Text by Carol Mavor, Interviews by Catherine Lutz.

Protesting Cartography: Places the United States has Bombed (PDF) is a series of protest drawings of US military interventions. Utilizing surveillance imagery, military websites such as the US Department of Defense battle plans, aerial photography, mass media, and maps, each drawing is based on a rendering of a place, almost always viewed from the air, which has been targeted by US bombers. I choose to make these drawings by hand rather than to employ photographic or other mechanical means in the hope that people will take their time with them. This project is an attempt to provide: a comprehensive and more humane acknowledgment of war; a revelation and analysis of our own complicity and passive acceptance of things as they are; different and multiple ways to access, interpret, and act on the magnitude of war and its aftermath; the truth; an uncovering of covert operations; and a remembrance of the dead for the living.

Images of War (PDF) / UNC-CH Teach-In, 1 Oct 2001, "Understanding Terror: What is War? What is Peace?"

Haiti, 1959, (for Aristide, Stan Goff, and my father), "The U.S. military mission in Haiti, to train the troops of noted dictator Francois Duvalier, used its air, sea and ground power to smash an attempt to overthrow Duvalier by a small group of Haitians aided by some Cubans and other Latin Americans." - William Blum, Rogue State

OTHER PROJECTS

45 QUESTIONS ABOUT ART & ACTIVISM / Catherine D'Ignazio & Jane D. Marsching

fayetteville
workers dreaming
travel posters
proud red banners, torn
post colonial girl

elin o'Hara slavick bio

Amchitka Island, "Midway point on the great arc of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, designated a national wildlife refuge in 1913. The Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission went looking for a place to blow up H-bombs. As a result, Amchitka was the site of 3 large underground nuclear tests, including the most powerful nuclear explosion ever detonated by the United States. 1965: the Long Shot test exploded an 80-kiloton bomb. 1969: the Milrow Nuclear test of one megaton, 10 times more powerful than Long Shot. 1971: Cannikan Bomb, 5 megatons, 385 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima." - Jeffrey St. Clair, In These Times, August 8, 1999 "The purpose was to test an island, not a weapon." - military official, online source

An Atlas of Radical Cartography

2007-06-21T15:51:00.000-07:00

An Atlas of Radical Cartography pairs artists, architects, designers, and collectives with writers to explore the map's role as political agent. These 10 mapping projects and critical essays take on social and political issues from globalization to garbage.

The publication, a boxed set including a book of essays and 10 fold-out maps, will be published in September 2007 by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, Los Angeles.... This is an independent publication, produced and created by artists. We see this as a collective effort, and so we ask for your help in covering the printing costs. All profits will go to compensating the writers, mapmakers, editors, and designers. Donations of $35 or more receive a complimentary copy of An Atlas!

Lize Mogel & Lex Bhagat (Editors)

Map: AnArchitektur, "Geography of a Border"
Essay: Sebastian Cobarrubias & Maribel Casas-Cortes, "Drawing Escape Tunnels Through Borders: Cartographic Research Experiments by European Social Movements"

The drama of these [mass border crossings and detention-center riots] belies the increasing complexity of the border regime developing in the European Union. This regime is more than policed national borders - it includes the development of pan-European border policies through agencies such as FRONTEX, international organizations such as the IOM (International Organization on Migration), as well as myriad of prisons and holding centers for migrants strewn throughout the EU and beyond. The mix of the explosiveness of the issues and the increasing complexity and mobility of the border regime has led to many collectives/artists/activists to dig into these questions.

The border is beginning to multiply and fractalize both within and outside the razor wire fences in Eastern Poland or Ceuta. This challenges our ideas of the border as the geographical edge of a country/nation (where the color changes on the school map.) The logic of the border goes beyond physical check-points to permeate labor, institutional, family and other relationships. The population is stratified according to "internal borders" that create divisions between EU citizens and extra-communitarians. This separation is marked by an inherent racism used to justify the aggressive border regime. Among the initiatives that question this proliferation of the border, many activist efforts have used cartography as a tool in order to reorient themselves through the dizzying institutional maze of the EU border regime. In the next pages, we will explore cartographic interventions as activist experiments that are part of the burgeoning activity on border mappings in the EU.

Map: Center for Urban Pedagogy, "New York City Garbage Machine"
Essay: Heather Rogers, "The Power of Garbage "

"Where you gonna go? Who you gonna get? No one's gonna service you!" yelled a Barretti Carting Corporation representative into the phone before slamming the receiver down. This was customer service in New York City under the notorious Mafia-led garbage cartel. Clients who didn't like their rates or wanted to switch haulers had a lot of trouble on their hands. Fussy patrons might suffer verbal abuse, or they might get a visit from their garbage collector, which wasn't always a pleasant experience. "Hey, why send a poodle when you can send a pit bull?" a Barretti enforcer explained.

Since the mid-1950s, when local officials handed over commercial waste collection to private haulers, New York City's garbage industry had been dominated by a Mafia-led cartel. (The city government's Department of Sanitation has continued to collect residential garbage). Under this regime, most shops, restaurants, offices and large apartment buildings suffered the fate that Barretti's customers were subjected to. The Mob was in charge of garbage and, it seemed, no one could stop them. Some of the Big Apple's trash carting businesses were more directly Mafia-connected, like Barretti, but many were not; yet if they wanted to run their collection trucks down New York City streets, they had to join the cartel. The payoff for being a member was guaranteed customers and a healthy income--in other words protection against the market forces that might drive prices down and companies out of business. Estimates put the amount that the cartel overcharged its customers in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

All this ended rather abruptly in the mid-1990s when the Mafia's New York City garbage monopoly was destroyed. The confluence of forces behind the cartel's demise included a police crackdown on Mob activity and, perhaps more significantly, a major restructuring in the garbage industry. No longer was refuse treatment simply a service municipalities conducted themselves or contracted out to quaint mom-and-pop hauling companies. Multinational trash corporations, started in the 1970s and 1980s by a handful of innovative refuse firms, were seizing control of the garbage trade.

Two early players in the corporatization of garbage were Waste Management, Inc. (WMI) and Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI). These conglomerates spearheaded the consolidation of the industry, buying out smaller firms in towns across the Sunbelt, then spreading north and into international markets. In building their empires, WMI and BFI brought the dark and fetid world of rejectamenta into the realm of billion-dollar revenues and the New York Stock Exchange, and in the process radically remade garbage handling. Among the most significant changes the rubbish conglomerates wrought were the domination of the waste market by a few large firms, the reinvigoration of the sanitary landfill, and the exporting of garbage. All of these changes happened in rapid succession in New York City during the 1990s as the Mafia was driven out of the garbage trade.

Map: Institute for Applied Autonomy & Steve Rowell, "I-See Map"
Essay: Institute for Applied Autonomy, "Tactical Cartographies"

In taking up the term "tactical" in an arts context, we link cartography with "tactical media," an approach to art production that privileges critical social engagement. Since the early 90's the tactical media label has become something of a house brand for a host of widely divergent media practices embracing themes of politics and empowerment. Particularly, the term has expanded from its origin in interventionist art to ultimately include a wide variety of "alternative" and "indy" media strategies. In considering the term here, we emphasize its connotations of instrumentality.

At root, tactical media is about intervention - it is concerned with creating disruptions within existing systems of power and control. Less a methodology than an orientation, it is fundamentally pragmatic, utilizing any and all available technologies, aesthetics, and methods as dictated by the goals of a given action. Tactical media events are necessarily ephemeral - they exist only as long as they continue to be effective; once their utility has been exhausted, they vanish into thin air. While it may form a part of a long-term strategy, tactical media itself is concerned with temporary destabilization rather than permanent transformation.

Extending these notions to spatial representation, then, we claim that "tactical cartography" refers to the creation, distribution, and use of spatial data to intervene in systems of control affecting spatial meaning and practice. Simply put, tactical cartographies aren't just about politics and power; they are political machines that work on power relations.

Map: Brooke Singer "The Fossil Fuel Fix"
Essay: Kolya Abramsky "From Animal Traction to Renewable Energy"

We live in a world in which close to half of the worlds population still use basic biomass fuels (unprocessed wood and animal dung) to cook and heat their houses, where women and children often walk for hours to gather these fuels. Even the dream of subsidized air travel and SUVs is beyond the reach of most people. In this context, all too often it is simply the wrong questions that are asked about energy and the current (and future) "energy crisis". The question as to how can the countries with the highest consumption of energy, especially the USA, maintain their "lifestyles" and standards of living becomes the center of attention surely pales in the face of the more confrontational question that strives to address today's enormous global energy inequalities.

Without doubt, people in the US can, and indeed must, play a crucial role in this process, but together with people from around the world, and in a way that simultaneously challenges the inequalities and coerciveness of the current energy regime, but also in a way that challenges that the energy demands of society are set by commercial interests rather than human need.

There is an urgent need for people living in high energy consuming countries (especially the USA) to learn about the existing energy flows and structures in a global context, talking to the people who suffer from it, in Nigeria, in Iraq, in disappearing Islands etc. In addition to this, there is also an urgent need to learn and experiment with other models of energy, including a discussion about public and decommodified forms of producing and consuming energy. And, above all there is the urgency to ensure that a transition to a post-petrol economy (hopefully 100% renewables) will not be trapped into preserving the "American way" at the expense of others.

There is nothing inherently progressive about renewable energies. This is one of the biggest mistakes that advocates of renewable energies can make (and I include myself as one). Renewable energies implemented within existing social relations, while perhaps alleviating some of the worst aspects of climate change, are unlikely to solve other social and ecological problems. In fact, they may even exacerbate them if renewable energy becomes another profit orientated and privately controlled industrial growth sector just like any other.

Map: Jane Tsong "The LA Water Cycle"
Essay: Roundtable with Jenny Price, DJ Waldie, Paul Kibel, Ellen Sollod, etc.

Jenny Price: The diagram makes me think about what larger-scale and smaller-scale versions would look like. Larger-scale versions might connect, for example, to Fiji and Switzerland, as sources of bottled water. But smaller-scale versions might show how the water cycle differs for different Angelenos. We don't all drink the same water in LA. Not even close. Take the tap water, for example. Some neighborhoods drink more Owens River water, some more groundwater, some more from the Colorado River. In her new book "Left In the Dust" about LA and the Owens Valley, Karen Piper tells us that the Department of Water and Power mixes Owens River water with polluted groundwater, to the point that the EPA still deems drinkable. The closer you live to the aqueduct, the higher the concentration of Owens River water. So the Valley and the Westside drink water with almost no pollutants, and Central and East and South LA...well, you might want to ask for bottled water at your favorite downtown taqueria....

Jane Tsong: Years ago, plates were installed by all the storm drains throughout the city with a picture of a fish skeleton, and the words "No dumping: this drains to ocean". This is a phenomenal and eye opening image. Without such reminders, one might find it unbelievable that your storm drain runs DIRECTLY to the ocean when you are more than an hour's drive away.

Now what if such plates were required to label all sources of tap water? Your water faucet might say, "from 60% from Owens Valley, 15% from Colorado River, 10% from wells in the San Fernando Valley....", and the one on the toilet might say "drains to the ocean-- wastewater treatment breaks down biodegradable substances only"? What if on each water bottle we purchased, there would be...a real photograph of the actual place the water comes from was required to be shown on the front (instead of a mythical mountain stream), just the way "Nutrition Facts" are now mandated to appear on labels?

Lize Mogel: The no-dumping logo always makes me think of the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant (in Los Angeles), which pumps secondary effluent (treated sewage which is considered "cleaned") out into Santa Monica Bay, 5 miles off the shore. Worth noting that the Hyperion plant dumped tons of sewage sludge into the Bay for 30 years until the 1980s, resulting in huge environmental problems. There are always plenty of people swimming at the beach directly in front of the Hyperion plant - not that the treated effluent necessarily rolls back in to that very spot (the LA City website optimistically states that "the water does not return to shore"), but it points to a disconnect between the physical manifestations of the water system and its social meaning.

Shit is always entering the water system, in one form or another. It's a question of how we collectively understand and accept the real meaning of "tap water" or "fresh water" - and how that understanding might change the actions/habits of people, industry, etcetera.

DJ Waldie: Just three little words - "toilet to tap" - in a Daily News headline in April 2000 doomed the Department of Water and Power's goal to do many things with the city's reclaimed water, all designed to stretch local drinking water supplies while retaining, without a draconian conservation regime, the city's illusion of a lush oasis.

"Toilet to tap" in 2000 meant spreading as much as 35,000 acre-feet of highly processed reclaimed water on percolation fields in the Valley. From there, it would migrate, over time, into aquifers 500 or more feet below, mingle with unprocessed water that collects from the hillside watershed. The water would flow through layers of Pleistocene sand, gravel, and silt until, about five years later, the blended water (97% from nature, 3% reclaimed) would appear in city-owned wells to be drawn into the domestic water system where, after a lot of routine testing and chlorination, it would flow from the kitchen taps and hose bibs of Los Angeles households.

It's not enough to know that all water is reused water and that it has passed through a lot of lives in the past 3.5 billion years. Or that the Valley's own watershed, like all the outdoors, is a vast latrine for every thing that doesn't live in a house, and all of nature's effluent, untreated and unregulated, makes some passage into the Valley aquifers.

Not is enough to know that much of the water Los Angeles gets from the Colorado River has previously seen the inside of the septic tanks and sewage systems of upstream cities and arrives here in a condition not much different from the tertiary treated waste water produced by the Tillman Water Reclamation plant [in the San Fernando Valley]...reclaimed water is crucial to maintenance of the region's precarious fresh water balance.

Additional Mapmakers/Writers

Ashley Hunt / Avery Gordon
on the global prison-industrial complex

Pedro Lasch / Alejandro DaCosta
on migration in the Americas

Lize Mogel / Sarah Lewison
on geography, gentrification, and globalization

Trevor Paglen & John Emerson / Naeem Mohaiemen
on extraordinary rendition

Unayyan / Jai Sen
on mapping the unintended city in 1980s Calcutta

Justice Re-Investment New Orleans

2007-06-03T19:46:00.000-07:00

New Orleans Metropolitan Area Prison Expenditures by Census Block.

Justice Re-Investment New Orleans is a study of topography, prison admissions and expenditures in New Orleans including a focus on one specific housing project in the Ninth Ward, The Florida Homes.

Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) > Publications > Justice Re-Investment New Orleans (PDF / 4MB)

Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) > Publications > City Council of New Orleans Criminal Justice Committee Meeting / July 12, 2007 (PDF / 43MB)

New Orleans, LIDAR elevation image with cross-section from Lake Pontchartrain through Ninth Ward to Mississippi River identified.

In New Orleans, in 2003, upwards of 28,000 city residents (about 4 out every thousand) left the city — because they were sent to prison....

Here’s a project: if you had a half million dollars a year, this neighborhood, and the people who live there, what would you do? Would you continue to spend it all renting prison cells for a few years at a time? Or would you invest some of that money differently, in the civil infrastructure of the block?...

The story of New Orleans is a story of population transfers and displacements. Year after year, parts of the population are moved around, dispersed from “problematic” public housing projects between prisons, jails, Section 8 housing, and shelters — moving from one low-lying part of the city to another....

Elevation above sea-level through a cross-section (Ninth Ward, New Orleans) versus Prison Admissions (top) and versus Prison Expenditures (bottom).

While Katrina exposed neglected physical infrastructure, it also exposed a deeper problem — the fragility of civil institutions in New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods, an infrastructure made even more unstable by the constant displacement and resettlement of people in the criminal justice system.

The New Orleans rebuilding effort will pit many competing development approaches against one another. Rebuilding must involve more than the physical infrastructure of the city. Rethinking local and institutional investments requires paying attention to the neighborhood’s cyclical refugee phenomenon. Not only the one caused by the storm, but the everyday fact of displacement which defines daily life in so many high-resettlement neighborhoods around the country — a phenomenon we have not been willing to see, but which Katrina has made sorely evident.

The rebuilding effort that New Orleans is facing is one that many city neighborhoods should take note of. Taken together, housing and criminal justice policies amount to a de facto population resettlement policy; but one without an explicit direction. What would it be like to rethink development from the perspective of resettlement?

Justice reinvestment? Miss Cee pointed to education, jobs, and good government, and concluded: “without addressing those issues ... i dont care if you tear down every the florida, the new desire, the st. bernard, the nolia, AND the iberville. aint nothin gon change.”

New Orleans, Ninth Ward detail with Florida Homes identified, 2004.

New Orleans, Ninth Ward detail with Florida Homes identified, 2005.

The first satellite photograph, taken on January 11, 2004, shows a public housing project called the Florida Housing Development, a WWII-era complex of buildings in the city’s Ninth Ward, occupying about 20 acres. The State of Louisiana spent nearly half a million dollars the previous year incarcerating some of the people who otherwise lived in this census block. And over the course of just a couple years, the State spent millions of dollars to remove and return residents of “the Florida” back and forth between prison and home. Criminal justice experts call this a “million dollar block....”

The second overhead image, taken on August 31, 2005 by a NOAA satellite, shows the census block submerged under eight feet of water. What’s left of the housing project is practically invisible....

Spatial Information Design Lab / New Orleans Studio Spring 2007

Amnesty for Prisoners of Katrina / Critical Resistance

Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences / Social Science Research Council

There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster / Neil Smith

It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster – causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction – the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom. This is not simply an academic point but a practical one, and it has everything to do with how societies prepare for and absorb natural events and how they can or should reconstruct afterward. It is difficult, so soon on the heels of such an unnecessarily deadly disaster, to be discompassionate, but it is important in the heat of the moment to put social science to work as a counterweight to official attempts to relegate Katrina to the historical dustbin of inevitable “natural” disasters....

Cities Under Siege: Katrina and the Politics of Metropolitan America / Stephen Graham

Even Hollywood, so skilled in fantastical depictions of urban apocalypse, would have struggled to imagine the horrors of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. As well as resonating unnervingly with staples of urban doom in popular culture, the tragedy has remorselessly exposed some of the darker sides of metropolitan USA in the Bush era. It has acted as a window revealing how decades of Federal urban disinvestment, exurbanization and White Flight have helped leave large swathes of the central cores of US cities demonised, neglected and increasingly abandoned. The tragic consequences of Bush’s recent efforts to radically reduce the public service efforts of the Federal state in the mitigation of natural catastrophes have emerged in startling focus. Katrina has revealed the deep and troubling politics surrounding varying definitions of the ‘security’ of metropolitan America with uncompromising clarity. Finally, Katrina has underlined the ironies and contradictions that run through the politics and geopolitics of the Bush administration’s post 9/11 strategy with unprecedented power....

Terminal Air

2007-05-31T07:57:00.000-07:00

Terminal Air is a project that explores complex interconnections between government agencies and private contractors involved with the United States Central Intelligence Agency's extraordinary rendition program. Since the mid-90’s, the CIA has operated the extraordinary rendition program, in which suspected terrorists captured in Western nations are transported to secret locations for torture and interrogation. A thoroughly modern enterprise, the extraordinary rendition program is largely carried out using leased equipment and private contractors. These private charter planes often use civilian airports for refueling, making their movements subject to public record and visible to anyone who knows which tail numbers to look for. However, while these missions are carried out under the guise of protecting the American people, the nature of the program has thus far remained out of reach to both American and International law. With only the knowledge of what these planes have been used for in the past, human rights activists are left to view their movements as a vast “black box” and can only speculate whether any specific plane is currently carrying human cargo en-route to being tortured in a so-called CIA “dark prison”.

Terminal Air was developed through a partnership between Trevor Paglen and the Institute for Applied Autonomy. Support has been provided by Rhizome, Kurator.org and the Plymouth Arts Center.

No Bases

2007-04-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

Scott Ludlam's No Bases World Map Project / MAP

REPORTS

Outposts of Empire: The case against foreign military bases / Sarah Irving, Wilbert van der Zeijden, Oscar Reyes / 1 March 2007 / Transnational Institute

Outposts of Empire tells of the everyday effects of foreign military bases at a local or national level: the displacement of people; the democratic deficit and loss of sovereignty that bases cause; their devastating economic, environmental and health impacts; and impunity about the crime that bases bring with them, including sexual violence. These analyses are accompanied by case studies that illustrate the problems of bases in Diego Garcia, Guam, Hawaii, Japan, Korea, Panama, the Philippines and Turkey, as well as highlighting the remarkable efforts that people on the ground have made to struggle against them. An introductory essay sets out the broader history and changing geopolitics of the US military presence abroad, and introduces the emerging global network that aim to close these outposts of empire and send the troops home.

Introduction
Loss of sovereignty: Turkey
Democratic Deficit: Philippines
Economic drain: Hawai’i
Map: global US military involvement (PDF)
Displacement: Diego Garcia
Environmental impact: Panama
Health hazards: Guam
Crime and impunity: Korea
Sex crimes and prostitution: Okinawa
Further reading

The International Network Against Foreign Military Bases / MAP (PDF) / LINKS / ARTICLES / Transnational Institute

US Department of Defense Base Structure Report 2005 (PDF)

This government document provides statistics on more than 700 bases that the US military maintains in dozens of foreign countries and territories. The report includes details such as locations, acreage, numbers of personnel, and “replacement value” in US dollars for the components of its worldwide infrastructure. For a critical analysis of the 2003 Base Structure Report, see this article by Chalmers Johnson.

ESSAYS

Outpost of empire / Wilber van der Zeijden / Red Pepper

America's Empire of Bases / Chalmers Johnson / TomDispatch.com

Empire v. Democracy: Why Nemesis Is at Our Door / Chalmers Johnson / TomDispatch.com

Bases, Bases Everywhere: Pentagon Planning in Iraq, 2003-2005 / Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch.com

737 U.S. Military Bases = Global Empire / Chalmers Johnson / AlterNet

Evolving Empire: Chalmers Johnson on Bush's Major Troop Realignment / Democracy Now

Chalmers Johnson: “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" / Democracy Now

U.S. Military Bases and Empire / MAP (PDF) / Monthly Review

US Military Bases Around the World / Daily Kos

US Military Bases: The Spoils and Deceptions of War / Kurt Nimmo / CounterPunch

New US Military Bases: Side Effects or Causes of War? / Zoltan Grossman / CounterPunch

Thomas P.M. Barnett / The Pentagon's New Map / MAP / BOOK

The Pentagon's New Map: Conversation with Thomas P.M. Barnett / Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

MISC

Closing Bases: Supporting Communities / Fellowship / Winter 2007

This special issue of Fellowship has been published in conjunction with the International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, held in Quito and Manta, Ecuador from March 5-9, 2007. Please visit www.no-bases.net for more information about the conference and to support the global movement to close military bases.

Bases, Empire, and Global Response / Catherine Lutz / Fellowship / Winter 2007

Global Expansion of U.S. Military Involvement: A World Map for Activists (PDF) / Brian McAdoo / Fellowship / Winter 2007

"Enduring" U.S. Bases in Iraq: Monopolizing the Middle East Prize / Joseph Gerson / Fellowship / Winter 2007

U.S. Foreign Military Bases & Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives / Joseph Gerson / International Consultation on U.S. Bases / Seoul / December 1-2, 2003

Ten Reasons to Withdraw all US Foreign Military Bases / Joseph Gerson / Peacework

Global Spread of U.S. Bases (Real Audio) / Chicago Public Radio

Empire? / US Military Expansion and Intervention / MAP / Global US Troop Deployment, 1950-2005 / Global Policy Forum

Democratic Social Movements against Militarization (PDF) / Bibliography of Recent Research on Militarization and Demilitarization (PDF) / Catherine Lutz / Watson Institute

Empire is in the details (PDF) / Catherine Lutz

Recent writing that identifies the United States as an empire has focused overwhelmingly on its political-economic underpinnings, without questioning the cultural making of value or examining empire as more than an elite project. This writing has not drawn on ethnographic work that would reshape it in more adequate, less economistic forms, make the human face and frailties of imperialism more visible, and, in so doing, make challenges to imperial practice more likely. Focusing on military institutions, and via some examples from U.S. imperial projects in the Philippines and elsewhere, I suggest where ethnographies of empire might be done and what vulnerabilities they might explore.

Catherine Lutz on US empire and militarism (MP3) / The Monitor

Subtopia's Baseworld Archipelago Meltdown / Subtopia's "bases" tag @ del.icio.us

If the U.S. is ultimately leaving Iraq, why is the military building 'permanent' bases? / Friends Committee on National Legislation

Report on the International Conference for the Abolition of All Military Bases (PDF) / Lalit

Military Geography for Professionals and the Public / John M. Collins / National Defense University / Reviewed by Megan Shaw Prelinger at Bad Subjects

US Air Force Bases / GLOBEMASTER: US Military Aviation Database

NO BASES / CONFERENCE 2007

NO BASES: International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / Ecuador / 5-9 March, 2007

Dispatches from the No Foreign Military Bases Conference 2007 / Declaration: International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / American Friends Service Committee

Bases Fuera: No Military Bases Network Launch Conference / Joseph Gerson / Quito, Ecuador / March 5, 2007 / American Friends Service Committee

A New Network Forms to Close U.S. Overseas Military Bases / Medea Benjamin

An Anti-Bases Network Finds its Base / Herbert Docena / Focus on the Global South

Ecuador: International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases / Marc Becker / naclanews

Europe solidaire sans frontières / Military Bases

Report of the International Anti-US Bases Conference / World Social Forum / Mumbai, India / 17-20 January 2004

LATIN AMERICA

U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean / October 2001 / Foreign Policy in Focus / International Relations Center

U.S. Military Bases in Latin America and the Caribbean / August 2004 / Foreign Policy in Focus / International Relations Center

The Inescapable Beat: US Military Bases in Brazil / Robert Fisk / CounterPunch

ACJ Ecuador - No bases militares

ASIA

U.S. Military Bases in Central Asia / Lionel Beehner / Council on Foreign Relations

U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, Japan (MAP)

No Crimes by U.S.Troops! / Korea

YONIP! Yes, Observe National Independence & Peace / Philippines

AUSTRALIA

Australian Anti-Bases Campaign Coalition

HAWAI'I

DMZ Hawai'i/Aloha 'Aina / A Brief Overview of Militarization and Resistance in Hawai‘i (PDF) / Hawai'i Involvement in Foreign/US Military Bases Movement

Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai'i / Map of Military Occupied Areas in Hawai'i

The military takes up 20.6% of the total land area of the State of Hawai'i (about 200,000 acres). 56% of these lands are "ceded lands", or lands once under the Hawaiian monarchy that were granted when Hawai'i was purportedly annexed to the United States in 1898. In 1995 there were 405 toxic military sites in 122 facilities, with 6 of those facilities on the "Superfund" National Priorities List. As of 1995 the cleanup cost to taxpayers was $1.08 billion.

Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai'i is a documentary film that began as a project about resistance to the post 9-11 military expansion happening in Hawai'i, the largest expansion since WWII. The Army is bringing a Stryker Brigade to Hawai'i, which consists of about 300 urban assault vehicles that weigh 20 tons each, scheduled to arrive here by the end of the year. The amount of land being taken by the military to accommodate the Stryker is roughly the size of the island of Kaho'olawe, which was destroyed by the military. In addition, the state of Hawai'i is currently trying to bring a nuclear aircraft carrier group to Pearl Harbor, a site that history has shown us is a prime military target.

"INDIAN COUNTRY"

Native American Sacred Sites and the Department of Defense / Edited by Vine Deloria, Jr. and Richard W. Stoffle

Native American Affairs and the Department of Defense / Donald Mitchell and David Rubenson (RAND)

Nuclear and chemical warfare operations - Unwanted neighbors / Brenda Norrell / Indian Country Today

Trashing the Neoliberal City

2007-04-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

Trashing the Neoliberal City: Autonomous Cultural Practices in Chicago from 2000-2005

Edited by Daniel Tucker and Emily Forman, Learning Site, 2006

With contributions by Ava Bromberg, Rachel Caidor, Emily Forman, Dara Greenwald, Nicolas Lampert, Pauline Lipman, Josh MacPhee, Micah Maidenberg, Laurie Palmer, the Pink Bloque, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Daniel Tucker. Design by Dakota Brown and Daniel Tucker

Download as PDF

"We need an exciting new energy that challenges who will live in the city, who will benefit from its growth and development, and who will get to participate in fundamental decisions affecting economic, cultural, and social life. What we need is a space to contest whose city Chicago will be." - Pauline Lipman's essay from the publication entitled "Whose City Is It Anyways?"

Chicago is a post-industrial success story. At least that is what the spring 2006 special feature article on the 3rd largest city in the United States had to say about the matter. Increasingly cities, especially those that qualify as "Global Cities" of significant importance to the world economic stage, compete for success in terms of quality of life for white collar service workers and the so-called Creative Class and to facilitate the proper business climate to satisfy the needs of globalized capital. Other characteristics include the privatization of services previously managed by the state and the deregulation of labor and markets. Aspects of this contemporary phase of neoliberal capitalism are new, while some are as old as the free market itself. When we look at the implications of such a moment in time on a single city, many questions about the social impact on precarious residents arise. This publication catalogues a diverse range of cultural projects that responded to and questioned the state of social and political life in Chicago at the turn of the century.

The projects in this publication raise fundamental questions about our right to the city and the possible uses of culture in the struggle for community self-determination: How do we want to interact with our neighbors? What kinds of reforms do we want from the state and what kinds of collective infrastructures should we be building ourselves instead? What kinds of spaces encourage resistance, free movement and the well being of the whole population?

Most of the work featured in this publication has never been published or seen in print. For the first time, seventeen of the most compelling self-organized projects, events and initiatives from Chicago's recent past have been catalogued together to present a document of a unique period of cultural activism. Only the surface is scratched with 1-3 pages dedicated to each individual project, yet we get a sense of the projects essence and motivation through the inclusion of original press releases and reproductions of promotional materials as well as documentation. The work is divided up into three sections which attempt to organize the work according to it's most significant themes. The sections are "The Right to the City" featuring work that deals with housing and gentrification, "Protest Experiments" that address the policing of public space and dissent, and "Social Reorganization" which offers alternative contexts for gathering and relating to strangers, friends and collaborators in times of intense alienation and social isolation.

Earlier on CSP > Department of Space and Land Reclamation / Counter Productive Industries

UNHOUSED

2007-03-21T14:31:00.000-07:00

UNHOUSED
organized by In the Field

Opening Reception:
Tuesday March 27, 6-8pm

Lecture by Brett Bloom and Ava Bromberg of In the Field:

Thursday March 29, 7pm

common room 2
465 Grand Street
New York, NY 10002
www.common-room.net

Global housing crises are not abstract. They are visible and viscerally experienced on the ground where people sleep, gather, eat and raise their families. While conditions in distinct and distant cultures may differ, they are increasingly interrelated; so are the processes that generate these conditions. People are actively (and passively) unhoused by markets, governments, wars, ethnic violence, gentrification, natural and manmade disasters, and other factors. Where markets and governments fail to provide housing, people are left to provide housing for themselves. The creative efforts of individuals, groups, and others invested in improving the condition of daily life and shelter at the margins of affordability are the subject of this exhibition. The material presented here is drawn from research on creative responses to global housing crises we are doing in preparation for a book called UNHOUSED.

We are putting multiple forms of housing crises in relation to one another in a way they never are. We are exploring the relationships between diverse phenomena: gentrification in wealthy Western cities, the slum clearance that accompanies the Olympic Games nearly wherever it goes, the occupation of large tracts of land in rural Brazil by thousands of “landless” people and more. The purpose of this project is not to glorify or fetishize life under difficult conditions. Rather, our intention is to give visibility to the magnitude and complexity of housing crises and to stimulate thoughtful action, facilitate potential collaborations amongst innovators on the ground, and – we hope – inspire meaningful policies that can better house people at all levels of society.

Over the next 5 years, we will travel to dozens of cities to conduct research. We will seek out highly localized forms of creative engagement with housing problems all over the world – from direct actions to house people to innovative changes in public policy. Our efforts will combine the work of artists, urban planners, activists, architects, and UNHOUSED populations themselves. We will seek out people who have already conducted in depth investigations of UNHOUSING, like some of the material presented in this exhibition.

UNHOUSED BLOG

See also: squattercity and spacing wire

Rozalinda Borcila

2007-03-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

Geography Lessons / Video Set #1 / Video Set #2

An on-going archive of videos and still images generated from trespasses in airport security zones.

Increasingly, the spaces we navigate are policed through technologies of visualization and information management. The X-Ray machine, racial profiling practices, surveillance devices, scrutiny of documents, fingerprinting etc are meant to make everything, visible or invisible, available for inspection. Justified through the imperative of security, vast databases track our movements, health records, purchases, reading habits, web navigation and so on.

And much is at stake in representation.

This series of small interventions in highly controlled spaces began shortly after September 11th 2001. Using a video camera as a way of looking back, I shoot images in airport security zones: inside X-Ray machines, at passport check points, immigration control, baggage claim. Geography Lessons (... cont.) is an on-going archive of these video images, a structured and somewhat absurd system of unauthorized counter surveillance, a meditation on the nature and implications of representation. This website contains a small portion of the archive: excerpts of a few videos taken around, and inside of, airport X-Ray machines.

The Naturalization Project

National parks, immigration law, Olympic television, travel guides, night vision, wedding rituals, border crossings.... A collusion of multiple articulations of the national and the natural....

This long-term project explores the problematics of naturalization by considering multiple sites in which this construct is articulated. In each site, the citizen/foreigner dynamic is produced through a series of tropes. The focus is primarily on the production of the Eastern European other via tropes of gymnastics, poverty, nationalism, violence and orphans – as well as the production of the Western citizen subject as a type of viewer (a way of watching). This project consists of a series of multi-channel video installation, 5 short videos, a series of border trespass interventions, interventions within immigration proceedings and wedding rituals.

Composition in Black and White (Danube Bridge, 042099)

Photos shot off the targeting screen of US bomber aircraft during operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. The images are taken a few frames after the moment of explosion, when heat patterns translate on the screen into compositions in black and white. The photos are taken without authorization.

911+1: The Perplexities of Security / Rozalinda Borcila / The Information Technology, War and Peace Project / Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University

A Different Kind of Border

2007-03-04T12:20:00.000-08:00

Craig Robinson for The New York Times / September 17, 2006
Manuel Heart, center, chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, at a recent memorial march near Farmington, N.M., for victims of racial violence.

Indian Blood / Susy Buchanan / Southern Poverty Law Center

Native Americans have been brutalized from the beginning. And the hate goes on. Violence against American Indians, much of it motivated by racial hatred, is a pervasive yet obscure problem that is especially prevalent in so-called "border towns" - majority-white cities abutting reservations - where cultures clash against the historical backdrop of institutionalized racism, cultural subjugation, and genocide.

Malign Neglect / Susy Buchanan / Southern Poverty Law Center

Racial violence against Native Americans has drawn attention from the federal government twice in recent years, but many hate crimes still seem to get a pass.

Edge of the Rez Revisited / A KNAU Special Series

Ten years ago, KNAU explored racism in reservation border towns with the award-winning documentary Edge of the Rez. KNAU is now presenting an updated version. Edge of the Rez Revisited profiles the people who inhabit the disparate worlds on and off the reservation.

Day 1 / Racism in Border Towns >> For the first installment of KNAU's Edge of the Rez Revisited series, we'll learn what the Navajo Nation is doing to combat racism in reservation border towns....

AP Photo/Donovan Quintero
Army veteran George Wells Jr., held an eagle staff while a fellow veteran adjusted the handle before a memorial walk Sept. 2 near Farmington, N.M. American Indians walked that day down a 1-1/2 mile stretch of U.S. 64, the main highway into the city, to honor those who have been victims of violence and discrimination in towns that border the Navajo Nation. Navajo leaders planned the event after a summer in which 21-year-old Clint John of Kirtland was shot to death by a Farmington police officer and another Navajo man allegedly was beaten by three young Anglo men.

NEWS

In Shadow of 70’s Racism, Recent Violence Stirs Rage / New York Times

In Navajo country, racism rides again / Salon.com

Report looks at discrimination in Navajo border towns / Indian Country Today

Navajos march against discrimination, violence / Indian Country Today

Racism a possible issue in reservation bordertown murders / Indian Country Today

Tensions run high along the border / Missoulian

Conference explores racism in cities near reservations / Missoulian

RADIO

Navajos Protest Violence Against Tribe / NPR Morning Edition

Violent Crime and Native Americans / Democracy Now

REPORTS

The Farmington Report: Civil Rights for Native Americans 30 Years Later / New Mexico Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

American Indians and Crime: A BJS Statistical Profile, 1992-2002 / U.S. Department of Justice / Bureau of Justice Statistics

American Indians and Crime / U.S. Department of Justice / Bureau of Justice Statistics

Policing on American Indian Reservations / A Report to the National Institute of Justice

MISC

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide / Andrea Smith / Lecture in Grand Rapids, Michigan (February 7, 2006)

Not an Indian Tradition: The Sexual Colonization of Native Peoples / Andrea Smith

The Prison Industrial Complex in Indigenous California / Stormy Ogden

Vectors / Perception

2007-02-15T12:42:00.000-08:00

Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular is pleased to announce the launch of its Winter 2007 issue devoted to the theme of Perception.

Our fourth issue of Vectors examines the sensory, phenomenological, and epistemological stakes of perception at different moments of history and in varied geographies, paying special attention to the cultural, ethical and ideological stakes of what, how, and when we perceive. Featured scholars include Sharon Daniel, Eric Faden, Anne Friedberg, Perry Hoberman, Donald Hoffman, Caren Kaplan, Laura Marks, and Trevor Paglen. Vectors is produced by editors Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, co-creative directors Erik Loyer and Raegan Kelly, and programmer Craig Dietrich.

Dead Reckoning: Aerial Perception and the Social Construction of Targets
By Caren Kaplan
Design by Raegan Kelly

In this piece I explore the idea that altitude-the view from above the ground-inspires and creates some of the most powerful social relations of sight and knowledge in the European Enlightenment and its imperial and neoliberal aftermath. That geography has depended heavily on the "bird's eye view" comes as little surprise to anyone who has navigated a locale by map (climbing a hill or building almost always seems to enhance the navigational experience of using a map). But the extent to which this set of discourses and practices pervades art, science, and popular culture remains a matter of some urgent scholarly attention. As the aerial photographs and satellite images of the devastated Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina demonstrate all too clearly, views from the air can represent seemingly everything and nothing. The particularism of thousands of pixels reveals startlingly detailed images of submerged rooftops and decimated levees yet the information cannot convey, apparently, the sheer need of thousands of people in a convention center waiting for evacuation. The expectation that the picture will deliver the truth, that the higher you go the better the view of that truth, and the more precise the information will be bears directly not just on social policy in an era of heightened national security but on the ways we imagine and act on national identity. Aerial perspective and the rise of an imperial world view become intrinsic to the discursive representations of contemporary nation-states.... [continue]

VIEW PROJECT

Public Secrets
By Sharon Daniel
Design by Erik Loyer

There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are "public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself, like the troubling "don't ask, don't tell." The trick to the public secret is in knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are "public secrets."

The public perception of justice - the figure of its appearance - relies on the public not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism, poverty, addiction, abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.

The expansion of the prison system is possible because it is a public secret - a secret kept in an unacknowledged but public agreement not to know what imprisonment really means to individuals and their communities. As the number of prisons increases, so does the level of secrecy about what goes on inside them. The secret of the abuses perpetrated by the Criminal Justice System and Prison Industrial Complex can be heard in many stories told by many narrators, but only when they are allowed to speak. After a series of news stories and lawsuits documenting egregious mistreatment of prisoners in 1993, the California Department of Corrections imposed a media ban on all of its facilities. This ongoing ban prohibits journalists from face-to-face interviews, eliminates prisoners' right to confidential correspondence with media representatives, and bars the use of cameras, recording devices, and writing instruments in interviews with media representatives. Women incarcerated in California are allowed visits only from family members and legal representatives. Inmates are not allowed access to computers, cameras, tape recorders or media equipment of any kind. Such restrictions preserve the public secret.... [continue]

VIEW PROJECT

Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies
By Trevor Paglen
Design by Raegan Kelly & Craig Dietrich

You can learn a lot about geography by tracking the movements of airplanes. Open up the in-flight magazine on any airplane and you’ll see what I mean. Within the glossy pages of those magazines, you’ll inevitably find maps of the world with lines connecting cities to one another – these are of course routes flown by the airline whose plane you’re sitting in. But they represent something more than that. Aircraft flights and routes help visualize a form of what geographers call “relational space”: the often hidden ways in which non-contiguous spaces are in fact profoundly interwoven. London is intensely connected to New York to Los Angles to Tokyo… one the other hand, how many lines connect to Kinshasa? Ashgabat? Kabul? These absences represent a different kind of relational space.

But there are many, many kinds of aircraft besides the cramped, coach-class commercial planes that many of us are accustomed to. There are the private executive jets of the extremely rich; the light prop planes of recreational pilots; the cargo fleets of UPS, Federal Express, DHL and the like; the helicopters and light planes of police departments; need I go on?; then there is, of course, the military. And within the military – which sometimes seems like a world unto itself - there are also scores of different aircraft types: cargo planes, fighters, bombers, trainers, transports, spy planes. Just as the movements of commercial aircraft describe various kinds of relational space, so do the movements of military aircraft.

This project is about one very peculiar subset of military aircraft – a fleet of nondescript Boeing 737s and Beechcraft King Airs that use the call-sign JANET when they’re operating in civilian airspace. The JANETs are an airline operating in the service of the military whose purpose is to shuttle workers to and from a collection of secret military installations in the Southwest and to undertake support operations for some of the most obscure activities within the Military Industrial Complex. The JANETs' movements represent a very peculiar kind of relational space indeed – a geography of secret projects, places, and people that military and defense-industry insiders refer to as the “black world”.... [continue]

VIEW PROJECT

Vectors is an international peer-reviewed electronic journal dedicated to expanding the potentials of academic publication via emergent and transitional media. Vectors brings together visionary scholars with cutting-edge designers and technologists to propose a thorough rethinking of the dynamic relationship of form to content in academic research, focusing on the ways technology shapes, transforms and reconfigures social and cultural relations. We only publish works that exceed the boundaries of print.

Hang Trees

2007-01-29T14:50:00.000-08:00

run up, 2002
40 x 50 inches, chromogenic print

Hang Trees / Ken Gonzales-Day

The images on this page are part of a series entitled, Searching for California's Hang Trees, or just Hang Trees, for short. They were taken over a five-year period. The series extended across other distances as well, and in photographing these sites, I traveled to nearly every county in the state of California. All of the images were taken with an old wooden Deardorff 8 x 10 camera that I bought on eBay. As straightforward as this series may be photographically, it is also part of a larger project that has come to be know as Lynching in the West.

Searching for California's Hang Trees derived from my own research into the history of lynching in California. When I started this project, few people even believed that California had a history of lynching and Western terms like, frontier justice, vigilance committee, necktie party, and kangaroo court, colored those cases that were known.

I began this project by trying to assemble the most complete record of lynching in California that I could, and I was particularly interested in discovering how nineteenth century conceptions of difference (race, creed, color, national origin, and even gender) might have obscured the fact that, when taken collectively, Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Latinos, fell victim to the mob's anger more often than persons of Anglo or European descent.

Using historical records, I spent many long hours wandering in the landscape or looking for clues to the dismal past. I set out to look for, to witness, as many of the sites as I could - even knowing that many could never be found.

Lynching in the West: Los Angeles Downtown Walking Tour

This walking tour revisits places and events made infamous in the first decades of the city - a period that was colored by great social, economic, and cultural unrest. The modern city has erased much of this past, but there are still places where the old city can be found, and like a war-torn battlefield, it demands recognition for its dead.

The Tongva tribe, later called the Gabrieliños, inhabited the region for over a thousand years. The combined Spanish and Mexican periods (1769 - 1850) did not even last a century. In the 1850s, the dirt roads leading out of the old Spanish plaza were still lined with many of the same adobe homes, and families, that had built them. In these early days, the plaza was little more than a dusty patch of land whose presence was intended to symbolize civilization more than embody it.

Surrounded by prominent Latino families and some of the city's most successful entrepreneurs from Europe and the "States," it remained the city's center until the 1870s when, from such noble beginnings, these same streets would house brothels, bars, and Chinese gambling houses. Race hatred would also mark the city's first decades as cultural tensions, crime, and a fledgling legal system would each inflame and infect the plaza square.

Even in the 1850s, as visitors flooded into the Bella Union Hotel to dine on a bear that had been killed in the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, others made their way to the Montgomery Saloon where Anglos crowded in to get a glimpse at a rare necklace. The necklace was made of human ears that had once belonged to some of the regions most notorious Latino bandits. The necklace's maker remains a subject of historical debate, but one can be certain that in such fierce times, no person of Mexican or Latin American descent would have risked entering an establishment where the bloody gleam of such jewels was admired. Each of these buildings stood near the intersection of Main and Arcadia Streets.

The Tour:

This self-guided tour begins at Union Station. Once known as the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal, it is located at 800 N. Alameda Avenue in downtown Los Angeles (1). The father and son team of John and Donald B. Parkinson designed this landmark building. It opened its doors in 1939 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Its design is as remarkable as the city itself, blending the Spanish Colonial, Mission Revival, and Streamline Moderne styles with Moorish elements.

Continue the tour...

"Walking Tour of Los Angeles Lynch Sites," Meet at Union Station: January 31, 2007, 1pm

"The Wonder Gaze: Lynching in Los Angeles," Humanities Institute, Scripps College, Claremont, CA. January 30, 2007, 7:30pm

two men were found on a tree, 2005
36 x 46 inches

Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 / Duke University Press, 2006

Ken Gonzales-Day’s Lynching in the West / Catalogue Essay for Cue Art Foundation / by Juli Carson

An Interview with Ken Gonzales-Day / The Harvard Advocate / by Jennifer Flores Sternad

Ken Gonzales-Day on Pacific Drift (89.3 KPCC)

with none but the omni-present stars to witness..., 2002
40 x 50 inches, chromogenic print

thanks ryan!

Evasions of Power

2007-01-26T10:26:00.000-08:00

Evasions of Power Conference / March 30-31, 2007

Slought Foundation is pleased to announce "Evasions of Power," a series of roundtable discussions exploring the relations between architecture, literature and geo-politics. The proceedings will take place in Philadelphia from March 30-31, 2007 and have been jointly organized by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Aaron Levy, and Katherine Carl, on behalf of Slought Foundation and the Department of Architecture, Penn School of Design, in conjunction with the Centre for Architecture Research, Goldsmiths College, London, the Department of Art History, University of Pennsylvania, the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania, and Eastern State Penitentiary historic site and museum, Philadelphia. Major support for Evasions of Power has been provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Departing from the usual academic convention of presenting knowledge in the form of straightforward talks or presentations, this project will include a series of roundtable discussions, debates and interventions of varying duration, with an integrated online presence.

These events reveal an array of understanding about the consequences and implications of "spatial practice" today, with presentations by distinguished artists, architects, theorists, and curators whose work explores urban zones, state borders, enclaves, and extra-territorial sites throughout the world. The conference will explore the following questions: how are questions of politics, conflict, and human rights articulated today in fields such as architecture and literary study? How is power theorized? How is power evaded? How can institutions aspire not just to accumulate power but also to evade power and certain forms of authority? What practices and forms might such an institution occupy, invent or build?

The "Evasions of Power" project contributes to an ongoing discourse about human rights, war, extra-territoriality, and political and social enclaves. "Evasions of Power" continues these efforts and will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in fields ranging from art, literature, and political philosophy, to architecture, design, and urban studies.

Evasions of Power, Session 1: Introduction (2007-03-30)
Featuring: Detlef Mertins, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Aaron Levy, Katherine Carl

Evasions of Power, Session 2: Territories (2007-03-30)
Featuring: Keller Easterling, Sanjay Krishnan, Laura Kurgan, Eyal Weizman, Manuel Hertz, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss

Evasions of Power, Session 3: Institutions (2007-03-30)
Featuring: Anselm Franke, Sarah Herda, David Kazanjian, Thomas Keenan, John Palmesino, Katherine Carl

Evasions of Power, Session 4: Interventions (2007-03-30)
Featuring: Carlos Basualdo and Jeanne van Heeswijk, Lindsay Bremner, Deborah Gans, David Ruy, Nebojsa Seric-Shoba, Teddy Cruz, Shumon Basar, Helene Furjan, Goldsmiths Centre for Architecture Research members

Samuel Weber on Networks, Netwar, and Narratives (2007-03-30)
Featuring: Samuel Weber, Catherine Liu, Peter Krapp, Eduardo Cadava, Jean-Michel Rabaté

From Pennsylvania Panopticon to Experiential Site: Eastern State Penitentiary (2007-03-31)
Featuring: Sean Kelley

Tracking Tactics and Rhetorics: Thomas y. Levin on the Vicissitudes of the Panoptic from Surveillance to Dataveillance (2007-03-31)
Featuring: Thomas Y. Levin, Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths Centre for Architecture Research members

Military forces install a shrine, created by the Serbian Orthodox Church, on the disputed border between Serbia and Montenegro. Photographer unknown, 2005.

Thanks jbeau!

From the Slought archives:

Cities Without Citizens: Statelessness and Settlements

Rosenbach Museum Holdings, Gans and Jelacic Architecture, Lars Wallsten, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Aaron Levy

Exhibit Duration: July 08 - September 28, 2003

Cities Without Citizens, curated by Aaron Levy of Slought Foundation, juxtaposes historical materials from the Rosenbach collections with contemporary works to examine the cities, settlements and peoples of early America and illuminate how our nation's past connects with contemporary life. As a commentary on art, archiving and human rights, the exhibition re-indexes Rosenbach holdings according to four social parameters - settlement, citizenship, discipline, and liquidation. "Cities Without Citizens presents an inquisitive look at the processes and idiosyncrasies of building and liquidating a city in both early and modern times," says Levy. "How did early American settlers determine borders? How did they identify citizens versus outsiders, criminals and slaves, and further negotiate the respective freedoms and limitations of each? And how are these functions handled in modern-day contexts?"

Invisible Trajectories

2007-01-16T13:51:00.000-08:00

Invisible Trajectories: Passing Through the Inland Empire
Wignall Museum / Chaffey College
Rancho Cucamonga, California
January 22 – March 3, 2007

Everyone has a story, after all, and it's the juxtaposition and intersection of citizen's many stories that creates the truest impression of a city.
-Andrea Moed, Conversations With Maps

Inside the wrinkles of the city, spaces exist in transit have grown, territories in continuous transformation in time. These are the places where today it is possible to go beyond the age-old division between nomadic space and settled space.
-Francesco Careri

Invisible Trajectories: Passing Through the Inland Empire is a story project that was conceived almost two years ago by Claude Willey and Deena Capparelli. At that time, the two set out, with the much-needed help of Mark Tsang, to map the previously uncharted: the vast stretch of urban settlement known as California’s Inland Empire and the obscure pathways utilized by its mobile citizens. In March 2005, the group started a number of short-range reconnaissance missions from their base in Alta Loma, California, probing the various boundaries and routes that define this expanding mega-region. One year ago, the group acquired funding from the California Council for the Humanities' California Stories Initiative to further develop their working process and range of activity. Since that time, the trio has traveled the expanse of the Inland Empire, engaging directly with some of its citizens and collecting observations and sorted tales from their junkets.

The stories presented here are derived from a series of interwoven, overlapping, and intricately linked journeys. The stories are told by a group of urban travelers, their hosts, and guides, who have surveyed the vast Empire on foot and bicycle with occasional excursions undertaken via bus and automobile. Revealing the extraordinary behind the mundane, this nomadic group has sifted through their archives to reconstruct their maneuvers with maps, written excerpts, photographs, and Internet blogs. Understand that there is no beginning, middle, or end on this site. Expect only to find the fragments, lost thoughts, and vague recollections as there is no specific argument to be supported.

On the macro-level, this project was designed to document the experience of travel within the landscape of the Inland Empire, one of the fastest growing regions in the country, against the backdrop of world oil decline. Access, development, growth, and mobility are all issues of concern here, but none take center stage. This is what you get when you observe a key node in the global economy, the Inland Empire, through the eyes of those who inhabit it. The invisible trajectories of commuters, material goods, immigrants, and electronic data all seem to converge in this age of hyper-mobility. The only cohesive threads pulling all of these stories together are the close ties of mobility, stasis, and uncertainly.

Where are we going and why?

Claude Willey & Deena Capparelli
December, 2006

Find more information online at:

iemobilities.typepad.com/
www.chaffey.edu/wignall/current.shtml
greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=229#willey
moisture.greenmuseum.org/

Camp Campaign

2007-01-14T20:00:00.000-08:00

ART IN GENERAL / NEW COMMISSION

Camp Campaign
Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
Exhibition: December 13, 2006 – March 31, 2007

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri's newest project, Camp Campaign, consisted of a nation-wide campaign beginning, in New York City, with the question, "How is it that a camp like Guantanamo Bay can exist in our time?"

During the months of July and August 2006, Ayreen and Rene visited detention camps, internment camps, camping sites, and relief camps, among other types of camps in the USA. During their travel, they filmed and photographed these places, as well as the roads in-between, creating a collection of images that together show a political landscape of this country. They camped in the rural outdoors, and in metropolitan areas they camped at homes. In towns, they parked their van, which also functioned as a studio, and set-up a tent, where their campaign materials, buttons, stickers and the like were distributed. They gathered with camp people, lawyers, theorists, artists and activists. Sometimes they conducted interviews; other times, they discussed different manifestations of states of exception (government's suspension of the rule of law).

Aside from these engagements, the artists created www.campcampaign.info, a website that they updated regularly during their travel. Including their writing, an anthology of reference texts, and journalistic accounts accompanied with images or podcasts of their activities, this website does more than set the campaign’s ideals and political platform. It also becomes a site where the artists openly question the project’s form, beginning from its naming, that of a campaign, and on to its efficacy.

Fear is Somehow Our For Whom? For What? + Proximity to Everything Far Away. is a map by Ayreen and Rene that traces the geographic and intellectual cartography of their project Camp Campaign. It is published on the reverse side of Art in General’s Winter INSIDE newsletter, and is distributed for free beginning in January 2007. To make this map, Ayreen and Rene took their original plan - a pristine, digital drawing that sketched the travel route that the artists would follow - and rendered their actual journey they made through the USA during the summer. But this time, the artists included a more meticulous map legend, list of relevant terms, and an index route which is a series of notations. Numbered, as to refer to a loose chronology and to operate as footnotes to the sites they visited, these notations begin in the style of travelogue but, almost immediately, move away into an intellectual journey.

While the map can be seen as a documentation piece of their travel, Ayreen and Rene’s Camp Campaign exhibition at Art in General’s Project Space takes a different stance. The exhibition is neither curated nor organized as an archive of the campaign, but instead “follows” a script of a different kind. In a way, it is about what is impending in Camp Campaign, a resolution of sorts. Here, this imminence is presented as a script that is being performed.

The script, tentatively titled, "Project for an Inhibition in New York or How Do You Arrest a Hurricane?" is a proposal authored by two artists known as RL and VL. On the one hand, this script is a program for the gallery or art installation, and on the other, it is a screenplay for a film. Yet, both of these are meta-scenarios, that is, both proposals are themselves written and formalized as a work in progress. The script is a self-reflexive text that puts into play the reality and physicality of the installation and the screenplay for a film to be shot. A copy of the script as screenplay is available at the space.

As a screenplay, the script describes the process of two artists, RL and VL, who are working out how to give form to their questions, concerns, and ideas. They are challenged by the idea of an exhibition, particularly as it relates to the themes they have been exploring. They are thinking about a possible video, but they remain undecided.

As a program, the script becomes a playful guide for what the public can expect to see in the space at different points during the time of the exhibition. The script begins at the end, with an opening for the two artists. It looks like a conventional show, with a bare space with some projections and sound accompanying it. The next day, however, the same space is transformed into the working studio for the two artists and the public is invited to an unfolding process, an alternative scenario or proposal for an exhibition.

Ayreen’s and Rene’s campaign materials - both the promotional or documentary materials they produced - now become a part of the materials inside the RL and VL’s studio. The space contains unedited film/video footage, photos, slides, materials for building a model, plans, drawings, and other objects related to their trip through the US as well as other journeys the artists took in exploring their theme. These materials and how they are arranged in the space change according to the script.

The dependence to the script in order to construct the installation, activate it, and even experience it, is due, in part, to the project's own syntax, formally, the "as if" that is necessary to describe it and that signals to the overlapping of the conditional and hypothetical reality of the work. In other words, making or experiencing the exhibition as if it were a work in progress by the artists RL and VL is one way of engaging with the script; the installation suggests a fiction, the activity of those two absent artists whose materials are there to be worked upon, on a different level, by both them and its audience.

While the Camp Campaign trip is the main aspect of Ayreen and Rene's project, and the website one of its public manifestations, the publication of the map and the exhibition at Art in General are two other iterations of the desires and questions which motivated the artists. Each with its own form, space and distinct public, these are continually both sites of production and exhibition provoked by a common inquiry: to question the legality, as well as the phenomenological impact, of governing principles created, historically and today, "in the name of security."

Ayreen Anastas writes in fragments and makes films and videos. Pasolini Pa* Palestine (2005), m* of Bethlehem (2003), the Library of Useful Knowledge (2002) have been shown internationally in festivals, museums and cinemas but not yet broadcast on television. The new shorter Oxford English Dictionary was published in Rethinking Marxism, Volume 16, Number 3, July 2004. She has no affection for the proclamation of victory. Troubled by any image of herself, suffers when she is named.

Rene Gabri is interested in the complex mechanisms that constitute the world around us. He works alone as well as collaboratively within the folds of cultural practice and politics. Through his involvement with 16 Beaver (16beavergroup.org), , Rene has helped organize public readings, discussions and social activities. Along with Erin McGonigle and Heimo Lattner, he also works under the name e-Xplo (e-Xplo.org), which has resulted in a variety of public art projects exploring social, economic and political forces.

Collaborative works and projects by Ayreen and Rene have emerged through their extensive work together at 16 Beaver (www.16beavergroup.org). Their recent text, audio, web and video works have focused on the evolving legal and discursive shifts around different notions of security and the subsequent effects on everyday life.

Camp Campaign by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri is commissioned by Art in General.

3Cs / counter-cartographies collective

2006-11-25T12:00:00.000-08:00

3Cs is a working group of the Cultures of Economies Project supported by the University Program of Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

3Cs formed in the spring of 2005 as a way to explore the uses of cartography and map-making to critically understand and intervene in the world we live in, especially the communities, ecologies and economies of our university.

3Cs is a network of people contributing their skills and knowledge to build a common project for a different/better University. As an open collective, 3Cs attempts to engage in non-hierarchical forms of decision-making, as well as participatory and action-oriented projects.

Terms like globalization, global networks, cyber infrastructures, mass immigration, global free trade policies leave us questioning how these issues pertain to us. Is it just something that happens “out there”? Mapping provides a way to make the connections between UNC and the “real world” visible.

Maps are more and more common in daily life. Through popular programs such as Google Maps and Pentagon mainframe cartographic systems, mapping is an increasingly important way for individuals and institutions to frame their roles and activities in the world. Mapping the university challenges existing notions of higher education institutions and our roles in them.

In referring to the work of Foucault and post-Foucaultian social theory as the ‘new cartographer’ (along with the new archivist), Gilles Deleuze pointed to a mode of investigation and writing that sought, not to trace out representations of the real, but to construct mappings that refigure relations in ways that render alternative worlds. In this project, we begin with this understanding of new cartographies/new mappings, and then turn to the ways in which these new mappings are emerging within social movement, activist, and artist projects to rethink economic practices and institutions. In forging this research group, we are interested in understanding how this particular genealogy of a new cartography is being and can be mobilized to render new images (and practices) of economies, how it is being deployed in community and alternative economic projects, and how it is being used to understand the institutions and networks of economic organizations such as corporations, military-state economies, and the university.

The Rethinking Economies Research Group emerged over the past eight months out of conversations stimulated by the Cultures of Economies Research Group (COE) and the Social Movements Research Group (SMRG). The focus on mapping and new cartographies emerged out of specific sections of the SMRG focused on ‘Spacing Movements’ and the emergence in social movements of innovative appropriations of mapping practices and theory to study and mobilize interest around structures and practices of the economy, alternative economic spaces of interaction and flows, and approaches to the refiguration of the local.

In the next year we plan to focus on conceptual and technical issues involved in using these new mappings to elaborate the topographies and topologies of economic relations and power;using network and meshwork mappings to make new relations/spaces/practices visible, including experimental mappings of institutional and individual movements and flows. The mappings group will also be working with the Alternative Economies Community Group and with other community and participatory mapping projects to develop experimental mappings of community, state, and private economies. The purpose of these mappings is partly to rethink and refigure the role of representation of spaces, regions, and identities in thinking economies. It is also partly an effort to investigate the possibilities for a cartographic economics that responds to the methodological and conceptual innovations deriving from genealogy, schizoanalysis, situationism, and psycho-geography.

One specific area on which the group will focus in this first year is building links to artists and artist groups working with mappings. From the intersection between mapping and traditional art found in the work of such figures as Oyvind Fahlstrom and Mark Lombardi to theorists such as Brian Holmes’ reworking of the role of space in contemporary site-specific projects (particularly those of the Situationists), the concept of the ‘map’ has become even more central to contemporary visual culture. It is our hope to further explore this connection through the study of relevant readings, visiting speakers, but also events that will allow for academics and artists to begin a dialogue about these issues. There are several individuals in the local area and we hope to organize ‘evenings with’ these artists, in conjunction with the Ackland Museum.

disOrientation guide 2006

Over the spring and summer of 2006, 3Cs worked in collaboration with other campus and community groups to produce the first disOrientation map to UNC. Designed for incoming first-year undergraduate and graduate students, as well as new faculty, the map details UNC's local and global ties, decentering the notion of the university as "ivory tower" and positing overlapping and conflicting notions of UNC as "... a functioning body," "... a factory," "... producing your world". The map also contains gobs of useful information about courses offered at UNC, interesting community groups, even coffee shops!

3Cs Documents / Maps / Presentations / Papers & Articles

Thanksgiving and Thankstaking

2006-11-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

Thankstaking Mix / Hard Knock Radio / Thursday, November 23, 2006

Thankstaking / Uprising Radio / November 22, 2006

On the eve of the Thankstaking holiday, we pull back the saccharine marketing of turkeys and children in pilgrim pagents to look at what this holiday truly marks. With our Professor Cindy Alvitre we’ll discuss the American historical amnesia that allows for a holiday like Thankstaking and how it is rooted in the American reluctancy to admit the genocide that was the foundation this country was built on.

Mumia Abu Jamal on Thanksgiving / Uprising Radio / November 22, 2006

Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Economic Globalization: A Celebration of Victories, Rights and Cultures / Democracy Now / November 23, 2006

Hundreds of people from around the world recently gathered in New York for the "Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Economic Globalization a Celebration of Victories, Rights and Cultures" teach-in put on by the International Forum on Globalization and the Tebtebba Foundation.

Native Lands: The Struggle for Sovereignty / Making Contact / July 21, 2004

Broken treaties, contested land, reservations, loss of resources. Land sovereignty is a key issue for indigenous peoples. On this edition, we take a look at the Mapuche people in Argentina, the Shuswap Nation in the British Columbia province of Canada, and the Oglala Sioux in the state of South Dakota in the United States.

Native Feminisms: Without Apology / UIUC / April 28, 2006

Deconstructing the Myths of “The First Thanksgiving” / by Judy Dow (Abenaki) and Beverly Slapin

Thanksgiving: The National Day of Mourning / Text of 1970 speech by Wampsutta

International Indian Treaty Council and American Indian Contemporary Arts presents the 32nd Annual Alcatraz Island Sunrise Gathering “American Indian Thanksgiving Day” November 23rd, 2006

Thanksgiving: A National Day of Mourning for Indians / by Moonanum James and Mahtowin Munro / Z Magazine

No Thanks to Thanksgiving / by Robert Jensen / AlterNet

Native Americans Will Mourn Thanksgiving / by Viji Sundaram / New America Media

Thankstaking? Celebrating Genocide! / by Dan Brook / CounterPunch / November 28, 2002

An Occupation Worth Applauding: Celebrate Un-Thanksgiving / by Mickey Z.

BORDERS: Hybrid Imaginaries / Fractured Geographies

2006-11-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

BORDERS: Hybrid Imaginaries / Fractured Geographies
e-misférica / November 2006 / Volume 3.2

Editorial remarks

by Ulla Berg and Roberto Varea

While globalization pundits and scholars in the 1990s optimistically predicted the beginning of a post-national era, marking the end of the international border and of the nation-state as it had been known until then, recent world events have signaled just the opposite: the challenges posed by globalization for maintaining and ensuring sovereignty, coupled with the furious rebirth of the "security state" after 9/11, have intensified the interest of nation-states to maintain control over national borders and, in particular, over the flow of human bodies across such borders. The increase in security walls, checkpoints, sophisticated surveillance technologies, intolerance and criminalization of the cultural, religious, and political "Other," however, have luckily not been able to hinder or silence the unwavering will, necessity, or desire to "cross over" displayed by many social actors in different contexts. In tandem with attempts by powerful institutions such as colonialism, the state, and the law in setting rigid boundaries, categorizing populations, and limiting spaces for civic participation, we are witnessing a prolific imagination made immediate in the territory of the human body or in the virtual space of digital communication. This issue of e-misférica is dedicated to exploring how the lived and performed realities of trans-localism have created new global geographies and imaginaries marked not only by enduring exclusionary borders, but also by new liberating ones.

The current interest in the study of borders reflected here is not only influenced by actual changes in the world, but also by the ways in which we look at the world and approach it for analysis. Postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist critical theories have opened important "third spaces" for the questioning of dominant hierarchies and "imposed borders" based on taken-for-granted categories of race, sex, gender, and nationality. Positions claiming to speak "from the margins" or from the "colonial difference" have called attention to how borders can be productive to think with or to think from, making explicit the very politics of knowledge production. BORDERS: Hybrid Imaginaries / Fractured Geographies builds on such interdisciplinary and anti-authoritarian approaches to the study of borders. Engaging borders, in plural, from a performance perspective is particularly useful in that it allows us to look at them as produced by different performative events and expressions, as well as being represented and enacted by a multiplicity of actors. The study of borders is thus timely and valuable. Rather than witnessing the disappearence of borders, we are in fact experiencing their multiplication. New, previously unthinkable, physical, virtual, and imagined frontiers emerge all around us—not only in the Americas, but also in the rest of the world.

This issue brings together original work in different formats—essays, brief articles, performance documentation, photography, and video, as well as reviews of books, projects, and performances—by artists, scholars, and activists that address border issues from various angles, disciplines, and geographical locations. As editors, we have tried to balance the issue, selecting both scholarly and artistic work as well as activist interventions, which illuminate the various dimensions—poetic, political, and at times perverse—of borders and their crossers....

Continued....

The Speculative Archive

2006-11-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Speculative Archive produces video, photography, and installation projects focusing on the records and effects of political violence. Current projects deal with the use of documents — images, texts, objects, bodies, and physical structures — to project and claim visions of the future. Past projects have addressed the bureaucracy of secrecy and memory. The Archive is a collaboration of Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne.

Julia Meltzer is a media artist and director of Clockshop, a non-profit production company in Los Angeles. For the past fifteen years she has produced media projects and documentaries that deal with social issues such as police brutality and the criminal justice system. She received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship and was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria in 2005-6.

David Thorne’s current projects include The Speculative Archive; the ongoing series of photo-works a certain interpretation based on a certain set of assumptions in order to take a certain position (1991–present); and scripts, a collaboration with artists Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Ashley Hunt, and Katya Sander. David is a 2004 recipient of a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, and completed his MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. In spring 2006, he was a visiting artist at The Cooper Union in New York City.

Projects

We don’t like it as it is but we don’t know what we want it to be

“We don’t like it as it is but we don’t know what we want it to be.” is a documentary video in five parts about competing visions of an uncertain future. Shot in 2005-6 in Damascus, Syria, this video combines fiction and non-fiction. A dissident intellectual, an architect, a US political analyst, a confidant of the ruling family, and a young Koranic scholar each offer their perspective on a place where people live between the competing forces of a repressive regime, a growing conservative Islamic movement, and intense pressure from the world’s superpower.

Notes for a Possible Timeline / NYFA Interactive

Not a matter of if but when: brief records of a time in which expectations were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or was still to come

“Peace. I don’t want it. Fairness. Why? Victory? Makes me sick! Love? What a pity. Freedom? Ugly! Friendship? My ass!”

Rami Farah, a young Syrian performer, uses various modes of address such as a promise, a threat, a curse, a joke, a lament, and a premonition in order to speak to the current state of affairs in Syria and the Middle East.

In Possession of a Picture: A selection of incidents of photographing or video-taping by persons of interest at various sites of interest, referenced with images from other sources

Photographic diptychs raise questions about taking pictures, having pictures in one’s possession, and about how we imagine future acts of terror.

It’s not my memory of it: three recollected documents

"It's not my memory of it" is a documentary about secrecy, memory, and documents. Mobilizing specific historical records as memories which flash up in moments of danger, the tape addresses the logic of the bureaucracy of secrecy in the current climate of heightened security.

A former CIA source recounts his disappearance through shredded classified documents that were painstakingly reassembled by radical fundamentalist students in Iran in 1979. A CIA film-recorded in 1974 but unacknowledged until 1992-documents the burial at sea of six Soviet sailors, in a ceremony which collapses Cold War antagonisms in a moment of death and honor. Images pertaining to a publicly acknowledged but top secret U.S. missile strike in Yemen in 2002 are the source of a concluding reflection on the role of documents in the constitution of the dynamic of knowing and not knowing.

These records are punctuated by fragments of interviews with information management officials from various federal agencies, who distinguish between "real" and "protocol" secrets, explain what it means to "neither confirm nor deny" the existence of records on a given subject, and clarify the process of separating classified from unclassified information.

FREE THE, DEMAND YOUR, WE WANT, ALL POWER TO THE, WE MUST, STOP THE, END ALL, DON’T, FUCK THE, THE PEOPLE WILL, YOU CAN’T, THOSE WHO, WOMEN ARE, IF YOU, RESISTANCE IS: some positions and slogans recollected from an archive of political posters

In 2002 we spent 3 months conducting research at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics resulting in this installation. Six digital images reflect on six recurrent themes and images that we encountered in this collection. The bullhorn plays a recording of 100 slogans taken from posters in the collection.

As though there were nothing else on the drawing board

A conversation takes place through an exchange of notes posted somewhere in Santiago in 1973.

Misc.

PUBLIC RECORD ARCHIVE / Documents from THE SPECULATIVE ARCHIVE

What does it mean for the State to have intelligence? To what extent is intelligence the excavation of positive facts and to what extent is that procedure bound up in the fixing of historical memory? Does the resulting historical memory precede the ideological underpinnings of the State, or is it an effect of ideology? The Speculative Archive have produced a series of video records exclusively for Public Record. These records focus on the production of documents, their collection, circulation and reception, and their socio-political effects. The Archive describe their work as "speculative" as a way to foreground the temporal complexities of archival and documentary practices. Their "archive" is not a physical site where a kind of static retention occurs or where historical truth is fixed, but rather exists as a set of socio-political and cultural practices in which documents, objects, and memories are taken up in ongoing processes of transformation.

The Art of Forgetting: Speculative Archive's It's Not My Memory of It / by John Menick

The Culture of Secrecy / Cabinet Magazine / A series of interviews with government officials involved in the regulation and release of secret government information

Kosovo, Colorado takes a simulated Balkan village built in Colorado by the US army as a starting point to unravel further links between these two places, such as: the disappearance and reappearance of nuclear waste, incidents of high school violence and violence backed by the state, and the oblique language which is used to rationalize and define these events. A project by Julia Meltzer (2001).

Oliver Ressler

2006-11-13T11:31:00.000-08:00

Oliver Ressler, born in Knittelfeld, Austria, in 1970, lives and works in Vienna.

Oliver Ressler is an artist who is doing projects on various socio-political themes. Since 1994 he has been concerned with theme specific exhibitions, projects in public space, and videos on issues of racism, migration, genetic engineering, economics, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Many of Resslers works are realized as collaborations: The ongoing project “Boom!” with the US-artist David Thorne, the videos “Venezuela from Below” and “Disobbedienti” with the political analyst Dario Azzellini, and numerous of projects on racism and migration with artist Martin Krenn.

Projects

235.000.000.000 / 777.000.000.000.000

Intervention by Oliver Ressler at the main train station in Zurich, eBoard, 2006

During the exhibition at the Shedhalle a new piece made for the electronic billboard of the Zurich main train station will be shown. The piece displays the foreign debts of Africa in relation to the damages which were caused by colonialism and slavery on this continent. If it is possible to elicit the foreign debts of Africa, which were tripled between 1980 and 2000, out of the World Banks databanks (235 billion dollars for the ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ 2004), then the calculations of the damages caused by colonialism and slavery represent a disparate and much more difficult undertaking. At the occasion of the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 the African World Reparations and Repatriations Truth Commission brought forward a calculation based on comprehensive research and announced the sum of 777 trillion dollars. The claims of the African states were calculated using the reparation numbers of Germany for the victims of the Nazi-Regime as a point of reference. Out of fear of amend claims the Western countries deny any responsibility for colonialism and its aftermath and decline a guilt confession.

The Fittest Survive

Factors like “danger”, “risk” and “wilderness” are no longer considered only in the dark, suppressed underside of the globalisation dream. These possibly deterring factors have become a resistance to be overcome by, apparently, only the best and the strongest. Thus, to a certain extent, mastering these daunting elements have become standards for achievement in the economic discipline. The crisis regions’ growth markets make particularly clear that the law of market economics requires hardness and ruthlessness. This warlike character of market economics transforms life into a fight in which specific individuals face ever-higher demands for better performance.

In order to prepare for this competitive, social Darwinist, pecking order of global capitalism, privately-owned, security enterprises offer their self-developed, civilian training programs that simulate conflict-situations – in varying complexities up to war scenarios. One of these enterprises, the British AKE Group, promises, according to their web page, to provide “...clients the competitive advantage of engaging safely in areas that might otherwise have been closed to opportunity.”

The video “The Fittest Survive” is based on filming the five-day course “Surviving Hostile Regions” done in January 2006 in Wales, Great Britain by the AKE Group. The course instructors are British ex-special force soldiers. The participants are businessmen who are preparing for business in Iraq and other dangerous regions, government officials and mainstream journalists who, with their dishonest discourse of democracy and human rights, help to legitimise and secure the ideology of market-economics expansion.

5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela

Dario Azzellini & Oliver Ressler, 81 min.

In their second film regarding political and social change in Venezuela, after “Venezuela from Below” (67 min., 2004), Azzellini and Ressler focus on the industrial sector in “5 Factories–Worker Control in Venezuela“. The changes in Venezuela's productive sphere are demonstrated with five large companies in various regions: a textile company, aluminum works, a tomato factory, a cocoa factory, and a paper factory. In all, the workers are struggling for different forms of co- or self-management supported by credits from the government. “The assembly is basically governing the company”, says Rigoberto López from the textile factory “Textileros del Táchira” in front of steaming tubs. And coning machine operator Carmen Ortiz summarizes the experience as follows: “Working collectively is much better than working for another–working for another is like being a slave to that other”.

The protagonists portrayed at the five production locations present insights into ways of alternative organizing and models of workers' control. Mechanisms and difficulties of self-organization are explained as well as the production processes. The portrayal of machine processes could be seen as a metaphor for the dream machine of the “Bolivarian process”, and the hopes and desires it inspires among the workers. The situation in the five factories varies, but they share the common search for better models of production and life. This not only means concrete improvements for the workers. Aury Arocha, laboratory analyst at the ketchup factory “Tomates Guárico”, emphasizes that the difference between “social production companies” (EPS) and capitalist corporations is that the EPS “work for the community and society”. Carlos Lanz, president of the second largest aluminum factory in Venezuela, Alcasa, coins the key question: “How does a company push toward socialism within a capitalist framework?” The film ends with an extended sequence from a management meeting at Alcasa, a company with 2.700 workers, with discussions about co-management and the changes of production relations they aspire towards.

Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies

A series of billboards, posters and banners by Oliver Ressler

The central idea behind the billboard series “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” is to present different suggestions, which might be of interest when considering the principles on which an alternative to the existing capitalist system could be based. Such a society should in my opinion be less hierarchical, based on ideas of direct democracy and involve as many people as possible in decision-making processes. In the field of economy this would lead towards a variety of different models of workers self-management. The billboard series, which has been carried out in public inner-city spaces in Europe and South America so far, might provide some ideas for people who are interested in thinking about a future society. The billboards can work as food for thought, as the basis for discussions, which are so necessary today when strategies for alternatives are not clear. But it also has to be clear that a desirable society should be realized and created by the people who live in it. A model, which prescribes and determines every aspect of this future society, cannot lead towards an ideal society.

The poster and billboard texts, with their large and highly visible fonts, are in the form of appeals, questioning existing dominant power relationships and indicating alternatives that share the rejection of the capitalist system of rule. Some of the ideas presented in this project have been elaborated upon in concepts such as “Participatory Economy” by Michael Albert, “Inclusive Democracy” by Takis Fotopoulos, are suggestions for an anarchist consensual democracy by Ralf Burnicki, or are based on considerations by the theorist John Holloway, especially in his book “Change the World Without Taking Power”. This project uses the format of posters and billboards as arenas for the imagination. “Imagination is a very powerful liberating tool. If you cannot imagine something different you cannot work towards it”, explains Marge Piercy in a video interview conducted for the ongoing exhibition project “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” by Oliver Ressler, to which this project is related.

The first presentation of this poster series took place in the framework of the project “Quicksand in De Pijp” by SKOR and Combiwel, curated by Amiel Grumberg, which was a program of artistic interventions taking place in the De Pijp neighborhood of Amsterdam in 2004. Since then, the posters, billboards or banners have been displayed in several cities, invited and funded by art institutions, and always carried out in the local language. Sometimes the presentations in public inner-city spaces were linked with the ongoing exhibitions project “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies”, which was the case with the poster presentations in Rijeka, Karlsruhe and Lima. Sometimes the billboards were realized on their own (as in Bratislava and Copenhagen). While in Amsterdam around 2000 posters were placarded more or less illegal throughout several months, in Bratislava the large-scale billboards were displayed on city-owned commercial billboard sites, which were left for free to the Billboartgallery Europe, which makes them available for artists. In several of the other presentations, the house facades of art institutions, which invited me to realize works, were used for the public interventions.

The global 500

The 500 largest companies, which are annually published in a ranking by the economic magazine Fortune, as transnational "global players" can be seen as the main protagonists of economic globalization. Starting point of the project "The global 500" is research done on the websites and the annual reports of the 500 largest transnational companies. The website, the exhibitions and the video in it are based on a selection of these corporate statements representing different strategies and discourses of economic globalization. These hegemonic globalization theses are discussed, analyzed and criticized by representatives of unions and NGOs, theorists and an economist.

“In fortress Europe you still have holes where we can enter, and people are still entering.”
(Jean Jacques Effson Effa, The Voice)

Border Crossing Services

The European Union member states' restrictive immigration regulations mean that there is almost no chance to legally migrate to the EU and reside in a member state. For those who want to enter, making use of border crossing services is often the only possibility for penetrating “Fortress Europe.”

The goal of the project “Border Crossing Services” (“Dienstleistung: Fluchthilfe”) is to redefine and highlight the positive aspects of terms such as “smuggler” or "trafficker" which have been given a negative connotation through the dominant medial discourse. In contrast to the widespread model for representation, the actual act of “smuggling” is not presented as a criminal exploitation of asylum seekers. Instead, we highlight the service character of this business made necessary by European policies of exclusion. Associated themes such as borders, migration and escape were worked on in cooperation with anti-racist groups, migrant organizations and students at the University of Lüneburg.

The project “Border Crossing Services” was realized in a variety of media such as a direct mailing and a video which, together with additional fields of information, form an exhibition in the Kunstraum Lüneburg. The project is based on a process-oriented approach. Throughout the course of the project, results from the different areas of research mutually influenced the other aspects of the project.

European Corrections Corporation

A Project by Martin Krenn & Oliver Ressler / Container Installation in Graz and Wels

The institution prison is an instrument of discipline, punishment, and exclusion, and functions as an agent of control and normalization. In today's society, the prison also has an additional important role as a site of economic production, in which the prisoners must work for a minimum wage. For the most part, it is the expanding prison industry that profits from this enterprise.

In the U.S., corporations such as Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) have aspired to high profits through building and operating correctional facilities since the 1980s. Their influence has also continued to increase in Europe for the past years. They consider the European market as a growth market, which they want a share of as early as possible. CCA has pushed forward the construction and management of partially privatized prisons in France. Wackenhut and CCA have already been building and running correctional facilities in Great Britain for more than ten years. There, not one single state prison has been built since opening the prison system to private companies.

The project "European Corrections Corporation" focuses on the phenomenon of the advancing privatization of prisons in Europe and questions the institution prison. A walk-in container, 605 x 243 x 259 cm, covered with a printed tarpaulin, will be placed in the pedestrian zones in the center of Graz and Wels. On the tarpaulin is a detailed CAD graphic with text commentary, which visualizes a private corporation's future privatization and rebuilding of the Graz-Karlau and Wels correctional facility. Like a real company, EUCC (European Corrections Corporation) attempts to use the prison as a de-territorialized site of production within the capitalist economy and presents a model for the profitable utilization of the prisoners' labor power. Thus, the constructions of prison buildings in the correctional facilities in Graz and Wels is meant to double the number of spaces available for prisoners.

Projected inside the container will be a seventeen-minute video based on an interview with the British activist Mark Barnsley. Barnsley was incarcerated for eight years in twenty-two different private and state prisons in Great Britain and consistently refused to work there. Barnsley shows that underlying both state run and privately run prisons is the idea that criminality is a disease and a social evil, which they attempt to maintain with force, with disciplinary machines. The video thematizes the function and the transformation of the prison as an institution and shows possibilities for resistance inside and outside of the prisons.

This is what democracy looks like!

The video "This is what democracy looks like!" thematizes the events of 1 July 2001 which took place surrounding a demonstration against the World Economic Forum - a private lobbying organization of major capital - which was meeting in Salzburg at the time.

"At those meetings, in the absence of the public, billion dollar deals are set into motion by the self-appointed 'global leaders.' These deals bring wealth and prosperity to a few, and exploitation and poverty to many. To assure the orderly proceedings of economic globalization, the conference facilities, located in the center of Salzburg, are largely blocked off and all demonstrations are forbidden other than a rally at the square in front of the train station." (Excerpt from the introduction of the video)

This video gives insight into the course of events of the first "anti-globalization demonstration" in Austria, held subsequent to the demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, Davos, Quebec, and Gothenburg, which all received a great deal of media attention. In this demonstration in Salzburg, which was forbidden by the police, 919 demonstrators were encircled in a police blockade and detained for over seven hours

In the video "This is what democracy looks like!" anti-capitalist demonstrators take the role of active spokespersons, contrary to dominant media representations that denigrate them as either naive or violent chaotic rowdies. Conversations about the events in Salzburg were carried out with six demonstrators. The central themes developed in the video are; the limitation of basic democratic rights - which is shown mainly in the ban on demonstrating and the detainment of hundreds of people in police encirclement - and the tension between the limited physical force of a few demonstrators and the structural violence practiced by state power. Excerpts from the conversations are put together with my own video recordings and those from (video) activists in Salzburg. The camera angle corresponds with the perspective of the demonstrators, thereby placing video viewers in direct confrontation with the events.

Texts

Counter-Globalisation Manuals / by Marina Grzinic and Oliver Ressler

This text is based on a public talk between artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler and media theorist Marina Grzinic at Galerija Skuc in Ljubljana, November 2003. Focusing on Ressler's projects, from the anti-globalisation epic This is what democracy looks like!, to his more recent works The Global 500 and Disobbedienti, the discussion looks at artistic strategies for communicating political messages in non-'art' situations. What are the politics of representing anti-corporate globalisation protests?

Utopia and Actuality – The Chances of an Alternative / by Brian Holmes

A Private Riot Going On? / by Christian Parenti & Jeff Derksen

Occupied Factories, An Occupied Present / by Chris Gilbert

Along the Path of Revolution: Worker Control in Venezuela, Agency in Art / by Ava Bromberg

Appeal for non-hierarchic, self-determined, social and economic alternatives / Interview by kuda.org

BOOM! / by Yates Mckee

Editors note: This piece was originally written by Yates Mckee for a small publication produced by the artist David Thorne on the subject of Oliver Ressler and Thorne’s artwork “Boom!”. We are reprinting McKee’s essay here in full, because of the essential criticism it offers of generalized protest art. Written last year, McKee has expressed to the editor that he feels that the piece may be too harsh towards Unions whom he recognizes as having a necessarily pragmatic approach to their mediation. He wishes to center the criticism herein on activist groups whom he feels are less tied to a solid constituency, and hence can afford experimentation with their signifiers.

Exhibitions

2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
“The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society”
Artistic director: Okwui Enwezor
26.10.2006 – 08.01.2007

For the exhibition "The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society" one
new video for the project "Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies" was commissioned by the Biennial in Seville.

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMICS, ALTERNATIVE SOCIETIES

A project by Oliver Ressler

After the loss of a counter-model for capitalism – which socialism, in its real, existing form had presented until its collapse – alternative concepts for economic and social development face hard times at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the industrial nations, broadly discussed are only those “alternatives” that do not question the existing power relations of the capitalist system and representative democracies. Other socio-economic approaches are labeled utopian, devalued, and excluded from serious discussion, if even considered at all.

The thematic installation, "Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies," focuses on diverse concepts and models for alternative economies and societies, which all share a rejection of the capitalist system of rule. An interview was carried out for each concept. Interview partners include economists, political scientists, authors, and historians. From these interviews, a video in English was produced. In the exhibition, these single-channel 20- to 37-minute videos are each shown on a separate monitor, thus forming the central element of the artistic installation.

LA Freewaves: New Videos by Oliver Ressler
Pomona College Museum of Art
November 5 - December 17, 2006

“LA Freewaves: New Videos by Oliver Ressler” will present two recent films by Oliver Ressler—the United States premiere of Ressler’s newest film, The Fittest Survive, and 5 Factories: Worker Control in Venezuela, a 2006 collaboration between Ressler and Dario Azzellini that will represent the film’s second United States showing.

The Maghreb Connection

2006-11-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

THE MAGHREB CONNECTION / 2006-2007

Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, December 2006
Centre D'art Contemporain, Geneva, February 2007

THE MAGHREB CONNECTION focuses on systems and modalities of migratory movements which constitute the Maghreb and Mediterranean area. From a range of aesthetic positions, the project seeks to develop discursive and visual representations of the growing complexity of North African mobility in relation with the development of the European Union.

In parallel to the agreements about “free movement” inside the European Union, its external borders are increasingly being sealed. In this new scheme, the Maghrebi migrants and those sub-Saharans who use the Maghreb as transit zone are perceived as a threat. While this notion of an invasion - largely spread by the European media - seems to legitimate the restrictive political measures concerning immigration, the European economy reaches further down into the Maghreb to establish giant transnational logistic centers or to find cheap labour for outsourced production. At this point, the relations between Europe and Africa have entered a new post-colonial phase.

In the Maghreb, migration flows rely on - and intersect with - other forms of organized mobility such as existing nomadic movements, tourism, roaming martial formations including rebel groups, and migration-related humanitarian personnel. The junction of these movements generates synergies, conflicts, and sometimes surprising alliances. THE MAGHREB CONNECTION aims to develop a visual representation of the connective space that emerges in the process. This geographic approach (geography being understood as a signifying system that allows us to understand the relation between subject, movement and space) focuses on specific zones of transit migration, such as Agadez in Niger, Lampedusa off the Tunisian shore, Oujda and Tangier in Morocco, Laayoune in the Western Sahara, Sicily and Cairo as destinations for migrants coming through the Suez canal. After in-depth research and investigation, the artists present a series of works under various forms, such as cartography, video, photography, text or animation.

THE MAGHREB CONNECTION is a collaborative art and visual research project on the North African migratory space. A special focus is placed on Sub-Saharan transit migration-now the dominant and undoubtedly the most highly mediatized form of movement in the region-which has turned the Maghreb into a transit zone. In response to the human conditions under which trans-Saharan migration takes place and the dramatizing media images and calls for border reinforcements that it has brought forth, THE MAGHREB CONNECTION sets out to intervene in the current discursive and visual representations with a contribution of new videos, photo series and research essays. In the course of eighteen months, eight art projects were developed in dialogue with each other. They brought us out into the field and made us engage in collaborations with scholars, researchers, NGO activists on location and with many migrants who were on their perilous way through North Africa.

With art projects by DOA ALY (Cairo), YTO BARRADA (Tangier), RAPHAËL CUOMO/MARIA IORIO (Geneva), HALA ELKOUSSY (Cairo), CHARLES HELLER (Geneva), URSULA BIEMANN, (Zurich), HELENA MALENO (Tangier) in collaboration with media/design activists OBSERVATORIO TECNOLOGICO DEL ESTRECHO (Malaga), ARMIN LINKE (Milan) and CAMILLE PONCET/MOUHAMED COULIBALY-MASSASSI (esba Geneva).

The Townhouse Gallery, Cairo
December 11, 2006 - January 13, 2007
Exhibition opening: December 10, 7pm
Conference: December 11, 11am - 7pm

With ALI BENSAÂD, geographer, Research Institute of the Arab and Muslim World (Marseille)

MICHEL AGIER, urban anthropologist, Centre for African Studies, EHESS (Paris)

MEHDI ALIOUA, sociologist (Rabat/Toulouse)

HELENA MALENO (Tangier) and NICO SCUGLIA (Malaga) from Observatorio Tecnologico

and presentations of the research projects by the artists and activists moderated by

BRIAN HOLMES, art critic and essayist (Paris)

THE MAGHREB CONNECTION is a research project initiated and directed by Ursula Biemann. The development and production of the exhibition project and the publication has been funded by PRO HELVETIA Swiss Arts Council, Cairo. The conference and the publication has been generously supported by Heinrich Boell Foundation Middle East Office. The research is based at the Ecole Supérieure de Beaux Arts, Geneva and the Institute for Art and Design Theory, HGKZ Zurich. The exhibition will travel to the CAC Geneva who contributed also to the publication.

AGADEZ CHRONICLE / 2006-2007 / A COLLECTION OF VIDEOS ON MOBILITY AND THE POLITICS OF CONTAINMENT IN THE SAHARA

The multiple video installation is an exploration of the post-colonial entanglement underlying the present sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. It examines the politics of mobility and containment which lies at the heart of the current global geopolitics with regard to human circulation, a tendency which comes into sharp profile in this specific geography. Dedicated to experimentation, the Agadez Chronicle is fractured into 4 videos, representing a gesture towards spatializing the signifying process and creating a simultaneous reading of different temporalities.

AGADEZ CHRONICLE is part for THE MAGHREB CONNECTION Art and Research project.

TRUCK TERMINAL 13'00"
DESERT DRONE 5'40"
ALGERIAN LINE 10'10"
URANIUM MINE 4'15"

Agadez, at the heart of Niger, is the Southern gate to the Saharan basin for the main routes coming from West Africa, it is a major trans-Saharan trading centre, and capital of the Tuareg. Forgotten places now emerge as crucial nodes and relays in the international migration network in North Africa. After Agadez no one goes alone. The scene of the Agadez Chronicle is set in the courtyard of the Sahara Ténéré Transportation Company in Agadez, where trucks are prepared for the desert passage, tickets sold, last prayers made. The quiet daily routine of handling life-changing journeys.

Agadez Chronicle is an exploration of this post-colonial entanglement underlying the present sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. It examines the politics of mobility and containment which lies at the heart of the current tendencies in global geopolitics with regard to human circulation, a tendency which comes into sharp profile in this specific geography. At the moment when Europe is redefining and consolidating itself, the post-colonial legacy is reemerging full force; unresolved business is coming to light.

The space of mobility and livelihood of the Tuareg covers substantial areas of 5 nations - Algeria, Libya, Mali, Niger and Chad. They maintain nevertheless their identification as a people across the boundaries. They are by definition transnational. Tuareg culture has developed a system of information, specific topographic literacy, mobility and communication. Their unique expertise is in high demand since a steady flow of sub-Saharan migrants transit Agadez before crossing the desert to reach the Maghreb. The video documents the various players in the Agadez migrant-transportation racket.

Social injustice and the exclusion from the wealth generated by the uranium found on their territory had pushed them to armed action. Arlit represents a particularly interesting economic and political constellation which manifests, in the video, through the dignified figure of Adawa, former rebl leader and today head of the clandestine transportation operations of the Algerian line.

Equipped with high-tech observation machines, desert drones are gliding over the expansive topography, searching for undocumented migrants. The territory has turned into a carpet of satellite and radio signals, audio and visual, encoded and jammed, where migratory and digital geographies overlap. On the big scale of international contracts between governments, migrants have become a subject of negotiation. In fact, they are traded against these very image technologies which reveals to what degree image making is an integral part of the politics of movement.

Even though the desert plays a central part in the Agadez Chronicle, there is no single panoramic view of the Sahara, no vision of the natural monster. The landscape appears only in the narrative, as the social construct of a transportation network and as a medium to examine the aesthetic grammar of movement and the construction of video space. Dedicated to experimentation, the Agadez Chronicle is a gesture towards spatializing the signifying process and creating a simultaneous reading of different temporalities by orchestrating several videos that operate on different discursive planes.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, theorist and curator who has in recent years produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. In a series of internationally exhibited video projects, as well as in several books ("Been There and Back to Nowhere"(2000), "Geography and the Politics of Mobility"(2003), "Stuff It - The Video Essay in the Digital Age“ (2003) she has focused on the gendered dimension of migrant labour from smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border to migrant sex workers moving from the East to the West. Insisting that location is spatially produced rather than pre-determined by governance, she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis in the curatorial project "Geography and the Politics of Mobility" (2003) in Vienna, the recent art research projects “The Black Sea Files” on the Caspian oil politics at Kunstwerke Berlin (2005), or the Maghreb Project on Mediterranean mobility, Cairo/Geneva (2006). Biemann's practice has long included discussions with academics and other practitioners, she has worked with anthropologists, cultural theorists, NGO members, architects, as well as scholars of aural and sonic culture. She researches at the Institute for Theory of Art and Design at HGK Zurich lectures at the CCC program of esba Geneva, and teaches seminars and workshops internationally.