City Garden - Kanal Labs

I had a very early start on the Saturday in order to attend the event ‘Kanal Labs: Traingulated’ planned for that day. After struggling to find the right tram to get me from the Eurostar terminal to FoAM, I showed up a little before midday. I met Christina and Weitske, as well as Lina, and had a cup of tea. Christina got out a large map and explained that we were to go foraging for food in a nearby wasteland. Leaving my bags in the entrance, we headed out not long after and made our way over to the area near Tour & Taxis (you can see it on Google Maps). Funnily enough, its tagline is ‘An Urban Experience’! Weitske pointed out the plants that we might collect and we set up about foraging for edibles. Although we had forgotten to bring a trowel or scissors, we came across a small strange metallic structure which could be unscrewed, and fashioned into two digging tools. We collected evening primose, rosehip, some plums, carrot flowers and more.

We had a late lunch and then set about preparing the food for the evening. The idea was that FoAM would serve detoxifying appetizers flavoured with plants from the canal zone, intended to combat urban afflictions. The kitchen: a space of experiments, unexpected combinations, and collective work. I helped out where I could and also had my camera to hand. Often, one of the group would be documenting the event and so I suppose I was documenting the documenters at times. People who are part of FoAM continued to arrive as the afternoon turned into evening, and two of them dressed up as ‘food doctors’. Their uniform: a white lab-coat with a mouth-mask around the neck. I was struck by the similarity of the outfit to those worn at the ‘Experimentality’ conference I attended earlier on in the year, and how this plays to familiar imaginations of science. They were to provide a sort of ad-hoc clinic, filling in forms of what ailments people had, sending these up in a basket to FoAM (several floors up) and then, a few minutes later, hand their patients a particular dish that would help. The basket was operated by a child of one of the FoAM collective and added to a ‘family feel’; one where everybody was comfortable and at home in this studio-lab-space.

I went down to see the doctors in action, on the terrace of another lab, Okno, and had been asked to take some photos of the event. On my way down the stairs, I noticed that the whole complex had a large number of cultural-, or creative-spaces which I looked up the following day. There were a lot of people out and about, and it seemed as if the Kanal Festival (organised by Platform Kanal) was proving to be a success. A little further down the street from the Kanal Labs, was a reconstruction of Checkpoint Charlie; a suggestion that Brussels was a segregated city, divided by its canal (a programme of events is available here). When I returned to FoAM, the pace of activity in the kitchen had slowed and later, we had a few drinks to celebrate. There were lots of questions from the others, many of whom I had met at the Luminous Green gathering, about what I would be doing… to which I had no answers but only smiles.

Kanal Labs: Triangulated

Start: 2010-09-18 19:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2010-09-18 21:00 Europe/Brussels

Location:

FoAM & Open Green, The Mill, Koolmijnenkaai 30-34, B-1080 Brussels, Belgium

Three Brussels art labs invite you in Koolmijnenkaai 30-34. OKNO opens their rooftop garden and Open Greens-project to all. You can taste urban honey and drinks made of plants from the garden. You can nibble on FoAM’s detoxifying treats to help you fight urban afflictions, spiced up with plants from the Kanal area. Q-O2 invites the sound artist Pierre Berthet for a concert using waterdrops as an instrument.

After a day of walking between various urban gardens alongside the canal, FoAM will serve a range of detoxifying bites, especially crafted to eliminate toxins and pollutants from the human bodily ecology. The aperitif combines ingredients, methods and performance-eating techniques that can assist your body in fighting some of the most prominent urban afflictions, including allergies, stress related disorders, diabetes and cancer. In collaboration with OKNO and Irma Firma, the cooks will incorporate edible plants gathered and grown in the Brussels’ Kanal area.

http://f0.am/festival_kanal

Bright lights, Brussels

I’m just back from a short residency with the transdisciplinary lab, FoAM. Whilst my plans for a study/stay were fairly vague – as it wasn’t clear what might be possible – I had been keen to go there for some time and to be involved, or help out, with a project. It had also been discussed that I might take a more informal role: more an observer than a co-experimenter (an on-going tension). I was also keen to chat about the working practices and processes, and get to know the spaces in and with which FoAM were working. Although emails had been sent back and forth, and I attended Luminous Green at the end of July, things only fell into place late on. This culminated in me being offered a more-than-generous residency.

The dates, 18-24 September, were arranged and the Eurostar tickets were booked. I had a vague idea of what would be happening from the ‘events’ part of FoAM’s website (soon to be overhauled). Whilst there, I would meet an AI researcher who also had a residency, as well as be around for the writing of a funding proposal and a small post-Luminous Green publication, as well as other on-going projects. With the suggestion that there was “plenty of stuff going on and much help needed (primarily writing and editing though, not sure if that’s interesting for you)” and that there would also be time for chatting, I was very keen to visit. The posts that follow will try to gesture towards some of those activities, and examine the notion of a ‘geographer in residence’.

'Press only': pre-opening of Innen Stadt Außen, Berlin

Yesterday I got the opportunity to attend the press opening for Olafur’s latest exhibition: Innen Stadt Außen.

Innen Stadt Außen (Inner City Out) is the first solo exhibition by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson (b.1967) in a Berlin institution. The show’s central theme stems from Eliasson’s close relationship with this city, in which he has lived and worked for many years. His site-specific investigations within the Martin-Gropius-Bau are amplified and commented on through various ephemeral projects in public space, thus linking the museum to other places within the city.¹

I picked up a press kit – full of papers and details concerning copyright – and a pair of headphones for on-the-go translation into English and managed to be seated in the second row. The work was introduced by Daniel Birnbaum, famous for his writing about art, who talked about the process of curating the exhibition: how do you do an exhibition in Berlin for Berlin? Arguing that it is the meeting – the encounter – that is the art, he explained that it was important to not only exhibit in the museum and pointed to a variety of works that can be found in the city (including pavilions, driftwood, and an amazing bike). Olafur Eliasson’s work was not really about science itself, but rather about things you already know, reminding you of what you know and can do; natural phenomena were simply points of departure for artistic experimentation.

Olafur then spoke of his attachment to Berlin and how he had lived and worked in the city since the early 1990s. Describing it as an unpredictable city, he noted how it had been rather remote and removed from the market which had allowed for experiments without the need for exhibitions.  Luckily, though, and he said it with a grin, more exhibitions had come along since. Rather than tell the gathered press how to experience or interpret his work, he was interested in teasing some of the ideas and questions that he had been attending during the process of putting the exhibition together. Calling it a very personal experience, he talked about the relationship between museums and public space, claiming that we need to recreate a public space that is animated by the values we ascribe to it, such as values, styles, and a reflection of society. Moreover, acknowledging the close relationship between art and politics, he contended that artists are co-creators who can, and should, have serious relationships with wider society on important issues.

Allowing, or enabling, space to be unpredictable allows for meetings to happen. This is a dialogue with space. Creating space by engaging with it. And it comes with a responsibility: to co-create space rather than to conceive of space as fixed, static, awaiting consumption. Working with the museum to admit unclear spaces is not easy but it is important. Olafur also complicated the temporality of the exhibition, arguing that the exhibition had already started as soon as he had started talking about it, and that the memories of the exhibition would also be part of it all. When you walk through, there is an interplay of the inside and outside, bringing the outside into the museum and the inside out in all manner of contortions. He talked about the spread of rooms, where his work spreads over several at a time, not quite fitting into one particular room. But here again, he didn’t want to talk too much; it’s for you to discover yourselves, he said, it’s up to you. He mentioned the two different entrances/exits and abruptly, decided he was going to leave it at that.

Questions followed, once the director of the museum and one of the sponsors’ representatives had spoken. Do you try to teach perception? Do you have a political-societal aim? No, not to teach, but to challenge perception. Perception is a process and can be changed and debated. As you see, you become active; it is a case of actively perceiving rather than passively consuming.  Therefore, it is political, as consumption is a driving force of the world. Art can make possible, as well as investigate, a co-creation of the world; it is both political and critical. Is a volcano a piece of art? This topical question had apparently already been considered by Olafur; noting that near the particular volcano which recently erupted in Iceland, the Earth’s crust vibrates and was a nebulous and interesting space, he playfully suggested people should visit to improve the country’s economy. Where is all the driftwood? There are some logs in the city, he answered, but you don’t need to search for them. Instead, the hope was that you might stumble upon them, happen on a log in an unexpected part of town. The driftwood does not seek to solve problems or issues of space, what we allow space to do and how we share it, but is a way of engaging with space which does so without recourse to fetishism. Quite frankly, Olafur said, it does not even have to be art. The label of ‘art’ adds nothing to the role of the driftwood, furthermore it is not about the market!

The exhibition which we were then able to explore was fascinating. I am not sure I feel like I can write about it: I lack an understanding of art history and am not aware of the constellations of artists it might draw upon or reference. What I can say, however, is that the work is both immediate and extensive. It is not an exhibition that you need to be patient with: it is surprising and captivating. Yet I found that the intensity of the experience did not dissipate. I found myself almost forced to move. To move differently. To watch my shadow, realising it was no longer my shadow. Catching a glimpse of a room full of models, of all sizes and structures, bathed in a yellow-light. An empty room somehow became different;  imbued with a sense of anticipation. And grass at the window sill. And mirrors, lots of mirrors. Not just reflections but constructions of different spaces, a proliferation of new spaces created as you moved in the enormous structure known as the Mikroskop. Some parts of the exhibition felt as if they had been abandoned, leftovers, little holding them together. An experimental assemblage perhaps. And then a room, which you could not see. Bathed in fog and colours, lots of colours. Incredibly intense colour. Pure colour? I think of the fog now. It is blue. Nothing but blue.

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Galerie M, Marzahn

On Wednesday 21 April one of the students at the school organised a trip for people to get the chance to visit her work in a gallery just outside of Berlin.  Timea had been working with people living in Marzahn and wanted to show her work there too. A day before, an email was sent round on the IfREX mailing list with a few observations on the work from one of her colleagues:

What I saw was a somewhat fragmented afterimage of a long period of interaction between immigrants who stranded in Marzahn and Timea. The majority of the communities Timea got involved with where Vietnamese. This reminded me of the project ‘Reorient’ that has represented Hungary on the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Reorient had put enormous effort and time into mapping Chinese communities in Budapest just to find how impossible this undertaking was. After Reorient fell flat due to the impenetrability of the closed world of this huge immigrant community, they even had to come up with a plan-B that they were able to exhibit something.

Timea however was able find out a lot about the stories and the dreams of the people she worked with. What she presents I think is a model of this somewhat displaced life of former East German Vietnamese people making themselves at home in the concrete jungle of Marzahn. Listening to three generations of Vietnamese woman singing to a communist karaoke DVD at the opening certainly displaced me in space and time.

Although rather figurative, the work was interesting in how Timea had engaged with a heterogeneous immigrant community and been able to put together a series of works with their help, on the ground floor of a tower-block. This raised the question of how the work might travel, even if it was ‘only’ to the centre of Berlin. One suggestion was to have a round-way bus service as part of the artwork, which would ferry people from Berlin city-centre out to Galerie M, but also allow those who live in Marzahn to travel in to visit exhibitions or galleries that they might not otherwise get the chance to see.

One of the videos, part of the show, was a split-screen story where you would see the same room on both sides, but on one side it would be inhabited and lively, and the other bare and empty (except for some hidden traces, a theme which animated another work in the gallery). The camera would pan around the room before moving on to another room and the next and so on. However, the empty rooms started to appear on the other side after a while, and vice versa, and it was no longer clear whether the people we could see were moving in or out of the accommodation: pure transition. The slightly different speeds of the panning cameras created a rather unsettling perception that the split in the screen was moving from its central point to both the left and the right, but also seemed to indicate the different sorts of rhythms that create and produce a space. Upstairs from the gallery was an exhibition on Marzahn and art in large-scale housing projects which was also well worth a visit.

The trip to Marzahn, it had been hoped, would serve not only as a chance to see and respond to a student’s work but also as an opportunity to discuss various issues which had been raised at the transparency talk the week before, in preparation for the following day’s round-table discussion with Olafur. This did not materialise quite as planned, with the group disbanding before any decisions were made…

Bernauer Strasse U-Bahn, Berlin

I arrived in Berlin at the beginning of April for the first stint of two month-long trips.  I’m staying in a small but nice flat along a quiet street, situated between Mitte (city centre) and Prenzlauer Berg (trendy 19th century apartment buildings). I have a pleasant walk to work and enjoy varying my route, exploring different streets and pathways. My travel pass is valid for a month and so I’ve also been trying to visit some of the tourist sites in my spare time.

The semester started on the week beginnging the 12 April and will run until mid-July. My plan is to stay here for the opening and then return towards the end. Unfortunately, up until just recently I have had trouble getting online which has been frustrating; I had hoped to provide more regular updates on my research but it just hasn’t been possible. The following posts are an attempt at ‘cathcing up’ and sharing some parts of the last few weeks.

Harvie, J. (2009) theatre & the city / Ridout, M. (2009) theatre & ethics. Palgrave MacMillan: Basingstoke

A new series of books simply called ‘theatre & …’ has been launched, with the series’ editors – Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato – looking to explore the “restless interdisciplinary energy of theatre and performance” and yet be short enough to be read in one sitting. The collection includes audience, the city, politics, education, human rights, globalization and ethics, with more forthcoming: museums, sexuality, nation, feeling, interculturalism, Ireland and architecture¹. This review looks at just two books in the series, the city and ethics, and how they speak both to each other and some of the work which is on-going in cultural geography. Both books are short: even with a section on ‘further reading’ and a useful index, they are around 80 pages and are small enough to fit in your back pocket. Necessarily selective (as is this review), the structure of both books is straightforward and the arguments are maintained throughout. Nicholas Ridout explores theatre as a practice through which we experiment with ethical action and Jen Harvie investigates the relationships between theatre, performance and the city. Whilst both are eminently readable and very informative, this review tries to open up new lines of enquiry which are neglected.

Ridout’s volume is split into three sections – ancient, modern and post-modern – and attends to theatre as an ethical practice; put differently, what is theatre for, and how do audiences interact with it? He begins by opening up the space of ethics (12)², by asking the reader what ethics is: ‘how shall I act?’ (1). Early on, we are alerted that theatre and performance are valued for their ethical stance, or the ethical responses it can generate from audiences, and an argument takes shape: is there a risk that performances are only valued for what they might offer ethics?  Do we instead need an unethical or anti-ethical theatre (9)? Theatre dramatises ethical situations; the role of the spectator is one of observer and participant. Ethical dilemmas are deployed to resonate, or perhaps produce, ethico-political concerns of a public. As with Bertold Brecht’s (1898-1956) plays – one of Ridout’s examples – they serve to provoke discussion, for the issues to be debated. Here, the theatrical text resembles a musical score, with its focus on “processes of improvisation, rewriting and discussion”; the practice of theatre becomes “a collective labour of political and ethical exploration” (48).

The relationship between theatre and ethics, Ridout notes, is one of form rather than content: how you make theatre and the relationships you establish in the making of it. This focus on form and processes “goes hand in hand with an openness to the future and the unpredictable rather than a closure around a specific ethical position” and establishes a “space for the unknown, the unpredictable … typical of a reorientation of ethical thought which started to take shape in the middle of the twentieth century” (49). Here, performance can be understood as an ethical practice (54). Drawing on the work of Hans-Thies Lehmann, Ridout highlights the concept of ‘response-ability’, a capacity to respond which is ethical and political, or ethico-political. This foregrounds how in the act of responding to something, we are also taking responsibility for it (59). The performance group Goat Island are a useful example through which to think this concept: their “work is an always open process, and performances are instances of a further opening of the process towards a public rather than moments of conclusion or accomplishment” (61-62). The performances call upon “its audience to think about their own engagements and responsibilities” (65) and although Ridout is not making a call for shock tactics, he does advocate the “possibility of surprise, challenge or affront” (70).

Jen Harvie’s contribution to the series is equally adroit in her attempt to work together material conditions and performative practices. The book opens with a foreword (following the Series Editors’ Preface) from Tim Etchells, with a refrain of ‘why city?’ This style somewhat clashed with the rest of the text but worked well, as a means of drawing the reader in. By exploring the relationship between theatre and the city, the book looks to redistribute “some of cultural materialism’s caution and performativity’s hope” (69). Cultural materialism has been influential in theatre analysis, Harvie argues, and understands cultural practices as inseparable from the conditions of their production and reception in history, as well as involved in the production of cultural meaning which is always political. These cultural practices include “play texts and theatre events, but also working in the theatre, funding it, situating it in the city” (24). She makes a case for cultural materialism being a useful approach as it investigates the political and social consequences of our cultural practices. For all the mention of space and place, it is thus disappointing to read that space is understood as a material condition, space as a container or already made. This tendency to treat space, or geography, as a ‘factor’ comes in for similar criticism from Steven Shapin when talking about work done in science studies ³. Further, there is a tendency to deconstruct: ““some meaning is immediately readable in a theatre’s urban location” (26). Looking for a meaning; imposing meaning? Harvie does, however, offer some critique, noting that this approach “focuses on material conditions, perhaps to the exclusion of other relevant conditions such as how theatre makes us feel and behave” (43).  It is perhaps for these reasons that Harvie is keen to draw attention to performative writings and practices.

Performative analysis “concentrates overwhelmingly on the ways people can and do act with freedom to self-author, exercising agency, control and power through everyday acts of self-articulation and self-creation” (45). But what might this mean? Harvie provides many examples, both historical and contemporary and these help to investigate the utopian potentials for challenging hegemonic oppression (48); some of this work resonates with recent papers on psychogeography⁴. The flâneur of Paris in the 1930s confounded “dominant uses of the city by casually strolling through it” making his or her own pathways, his or her own version of it through this performance (49).  The dérive, or drifting, would follow the walker’s desire paths and can be understood as a sort of intervention: “acts meant to be seen and to see things differently – aimed at transforming capitalist society” (50). The ‘happenings’ of 1960s “eschewed theatrical and fine art conventions, avoided linear plotting and realistic characterisation, could appear illogical and collage-like, and usually involved a handful of performers, as themselves, executing a variety of tasks derived from the everyday and not intended to appear fictional” (54). This notion of a happening is both performance and event, situation and art, and arguably opens up the prospect of surprise, as mentioned in Ridout’s book. These happenings challenged audience and performer separation and were not restricted to set texts, tended to be temporary and were difficult to commodify. More recent examples of performances include site-specific artists’ walks⁵, urban protest, Critical Mass and ‘highly visible performative interventions’ which are all parts of alternative culture. Although restricted for space, it is a shame that there is no link made between these guerrilla activities and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, specifically on micropolitics⁶.

Harvie’s argument to hybridise cultural materialist and performative analytic strategies and use them to think across theatre and performance practices together comes late on in the book and is perhaps not as strong as the rest of the text. Along with her call for us to redistribute caution (cultural materialism) and hope (performative analysis), she argues that theatre and performance practices are part of the same ‘ecology’, that instead of looking at different practices separately we should consider how they relate to each other. So far, so good. Yet she goes on to claim that a hybrid approach provides “complexity to understand the complex cultural effects of contemporary urban life” (70). Harvie admits that the “[t]he story told by this book so far is one of ambivalence” (70) but the conclusion does not seem to alter this.

Although a somewhat arbitrary selection of theatre studies and everything else, these seem to be productive encounters. The books provide a good overview of key debates and concepts and develop an argument. Geography’s interest in thinking the event, performance and performativity, as well as its continued concern with ethics means that these books are certainly of much interest to geographers.

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Table-top Theatre, TML

‘Experimental Phenomenology: Memory, Identity and Place’ is the name of a collaborative project between Xin Wei and the philsopher David Morris (whose hand you can see in the photo above, pointing his finger). The aim of the work is get a sense of the connections between memory, identity and place by developing experiments.

The development of these experiments involves two axes of exploration: a substantive one, concerned with place, memory, identity, especially in relation to the body, movement and things; a methodological one, concerned with how to go about doing phenomenological experiments. Here we might note two things about phenomenological experiments: first, they would be more focused on enabling precise descriptions of experiences, from a first person point of view and tracking the dynamics of the individual experience, rather than quantifying over populations according to variables already specified by the experimenter; second, they would be more focused on arriving at the conceptual framework proper to the experience generated in the experiment, vs. constructing an experiment to fit an already given conceptual framework—or at least they would keep open this arrival.

To prepare for these explorations there are a series of orienting seminars, or reading groups. The set readings provided introductions to phenomenology (which focuses on the experiencing subject) and looked to facilitate discussion about how to engage with these ideas in a tangible manner. Experiments, David argued, disrupt the usual in order to describe differently. So here, the aim is to set up situations that complicate our usual relations. It was fascinating to see how the group (including students from both Concordia and McGill) went from the texts to something which could be done in practice. In fact, before we started talking about the readings, one of the students demonstrated an experiment-in-progress: the table-top theatre.

Above a simple white oval table was a camera, linked to a computer and a program which could modify and project on to the floor, just to the side of the table, what was happening on the table. Using a combination of time-delays and other alterations there were some really surprising effects. Everybody crowded round the table, eager to see themselves projected onto the floor. What was interesting was the remarkable difference between watching others do it, and trying yourself. I was a little bit self-conscious but I moved a pen around and watched my hand appear in two different parts of the table on the projection: the program had been changed yet again and was displaying a different time-delay for each half of the table!

I had to leave before the end of the meeting as I wanted to attend the talk that Chris Salter (whom I had met at the colloquium) had invited me along to a to: ‘Architecture, Urbanity and the Temporary’, the first public forum of a project called ‘The Ephemeral City‘.

IRHA Public Forum #1, October 8, 2009
Maison Shaughnessy
6:00PM

Architecture, Urbanity and the Temporary

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, McGill University
Chris Salter, Concordia University
Cecile Martin, Independent Artist, Architect and Curator

The 21st century city that was formerly dictated and constructed chiefly by architecture and planning models is increasingly being shaped anew daily by temporal forces: the dynamics of unstable financial markets and fluctuating economic patterns of consumption and leisure, the rise of ecological processes and practices, the transformation of public space by the methods of branding and multi-sensory design and last, but certainly not least, the dissemination of new ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and monitoring.

The first IRHA forum will investigate the ethical, political and ecological stakes in this new urban theater of temporariness, instability and transformation.

Chris and Alberto Pérez-Gómez talked about Frederick Kiesler (a really interesting figure, not least for his laboratory at Columbia University) and how we might conceive of architecture as potential new ways on inhabiting the world. Cecile Martin’s talk was equally fascinating: she discussed the work of champ libre, a nomadic organisation interested in ephemeral works. I spoke with her at the end of the evening and although she’s no longer involved with the group encouraged me to make contact with group… watch this space!

Walking-planting the city, London

The Sense Lab, a laboratory for thought in motion, is composed of artists, academics, researchers, dancers and writers who work together to explore the active passage between research and creation.

As a member by proxy (one of my supervisors has attended various Sense Lab events), I’ve been involved in this year’s project, titled ‘Society of Molecules‘. Each molecule is challenged to set up an aesthetico-political action of some kind; the molecule that I was part of was interested in ‘Diagramming Movements between the cartographic and the choreographic’ and was co-located at Oxford, Chichester and London.

Movement profile
We want to facilitate a distributed field of movement and experiment between two techniques of thinking-space, two technologies of lived abstraction – geography and dance.

As part of this distributed event, the molecule gathered in London on 04.04.09 to meet one another, to talk about what we’d been reading (mainly Chaosmosis, by Guattari) and to be involved in some sort of ethico-aesthetic action. A walk was planned as part of an attempt to link two gallery spaces which were both part of the same exhibition (The Collection). Movement artist Simon Whitehead created a postcard ‘score’ to guide people along a pre-determined route. But walking was only part of it: all those involved were also encouraged to make seed balls and take them on the walk, with the view to introducing them to ‘latent spaces’. Guerilla gardening! SCATTER.

Score of the walk

The collage shows some of the encounters, trails and seeds planted on the walk. Please get in touch with me if you’d like a copy of the collage at full-size (4.4 MB).