Thursday 06.03.08, 18.30

lecture/ presentation:
‘add-on, 20 meters in height’, peter fattinger, veronika orso & michael rieper

Listen to the lecture here:  add-on, 20 meters in height – Peter Fattinger, Veronika Orso & Michael Rieper – 06.03.08

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For six weeks “add on. 20 hoehenmeter” transformed Vienna’s Wallensteinplatz into a center of urban interaction: A temporary sculpture capable of communicating and interacting with the general public was temporarily set up as a usable object with its own infrastructure in the middle of an urban square.The basic structure of “add on” consisted of different platforms that rose twenty meters high. In them custom-made spatial modules interlocked with prefabricated parts that had been imaginatively altered from their original functions. As an environment accessible to the general public, the installation’s entire structure was an invitation to explore new worlds, and offered a wide range of views and vistas from various levels. The result was a fascinating diversity of perspectives of everyday life, of our surroundings in general, and more specifically of the location of the platform itself. Accommodation was available in a separate wing; here guests could stay overnight in various modules designed by architecture students.
Offering a dense program of daily events, “add on” also functioned as a venue for lectures, concerts, projects by guest artists and film screenings. “add on” was financed by Vienna’s “Fund for Public Art Vienna” and a number of sponsors.

www.add-on.at

Thursday 06/03/08, 6:30pm

The Gallery
Department of Architecture and Spatial Design
London Metropolitan University
Spring House 40 – 44 Holloway rd
London N7 8JL

www.asd-realtime.org/initiative-institution/

www.initiativeandinstitution.net

Thursday 21.02.08, 18.30

student led seminar:
‘grounds for play’ – steve mcadam & dip 5/ fluid unit

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Diploma 5 draws is in pursuit of design processes relevant to day-to-day’s urban conditions and their social and cultural landscapes, and does not believe that designers alone are able to understand, apprehend and formulate propositions offering lasting and appropriate additions to the urban landscape, nor that architecture is but a measure of its physical substance. Diploma 5 is working on a live project for the design of a new playground on the site of an abandoned space in a residential estate in the Isle of Dogs. The client is Southern Housing, a Registered Social Landlord who provide housing across England.
Though a small project it has the ambition to generate real, shared, ‘hybrid’ public space rather than a fenced-off enclave for sterilised ‘play’. The project has evolved through detailed investigations and observations of the site context in social and spatial terms and through discussions with many council departments and officers, a range of youth agencies, the police, play experts, local councillors, academic guru’s and around 800 local people, including groups of children from two local primary schools consulted through agency Bold Creative. Diploma 5 have elected three spokespersons to present the project as a work in progress.

diploma 5
www.fluidoffice.com

Saturday, 08.03.08, 12.00
‘question education‘
trigger talks:
matthew cornford (cornford & cross),
alex johnson (yoke & zoom)
sam curtis
chair: robert mull

Listen to mp3 here: Initiative & Institution – Symposium – Question Education – 08.03.08

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Initiative & Institution Thursday Lecture Series

Thursday, 14.02.08, 18.30

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Matthew Cornford and David Cross have worked together since meeting at St Martins School of Art in 1987. Since that time they have created a unique body of work made both in the public realm and for galleries. In the main, their way of working has been to respond to a particular context or situation, by examining the problems that arise out of it. Accordingly, each of their projects has been radically different, not only in form but in function. Equally, the artists have not worked in a single media, but produced sculpture and installations, worked with video and photography, and created one-off events and sound works. One particular focus for the artists has been creating site-specific and commissioned projects for public spaces.

www.cornfordandcross.com

Thursday 14/02/08, 6:30pm
Gallery
Department of Architecture and Spatial Design
London Metropolitan University
Spring House 40 – 44 Holloway rd
London N7 8JL
www.asd-realtime.org/initiative-institution/

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Questions:

Is it possible to work within an institution, without becoming institutionalised?

Could institutional buildings and systems of management be designed to disrupt institutional thinking?

Can large institutions be encouraged to deconstruct themselves?

Friday, 07.03.08, 17.30

‘negotiate‘
trigger talks and discussion:
petra marguc (polimorph)
barbara holub & paul rajakovics (transparadiso)
chair: celine condorelli

Listen to mp3 here: Initiative & Institution – Symposium – Negotiate – 07.03.08

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Polimorph is a pluridisciplinary practice producing research on urban space, developping strategies for complex environments and proposings specific projects designed as tools to orchestrate a dynamic equilibrium between the environment, natural resources, economy, society and the individual. The response to a particular program is never designed as an isolated product, but as a stepping stone in conversation with the context and those who will use, manage and realise the project.Polimorph considers product and process as inherent parts in the formation of collective meaning and identity. We therefore define our field of action for the production of space along two movements implying an on-going back-and-forth between initiative and institution:- designing objects in order to initiate communication spaces;- designing negotiation processes in a way to generate poducts as a momentary resolution of forces.This is also reflected in the complementary management of our work between two partner bodies – a laboratory responsable for applied reseach and a structure in charge of building projects.Driven by a desire to investigate space at large, the common denominator of all projects produced by polimorph is to consider space as a dynamic system to be maintained alive and lived in, be it on the scale of the individual, the city or a territory.The range of projects developed by polimorph span from furniture (urban pillow, waste bins, public benches), buildings (industrial kitchen, restaurant, regeneration of towerblocks, housing), urban planning schemes (morecambe, sarajevo) to cultural events (collective design tools, set design, community consultation).

www.polimorph.net

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Questions:

Where is the expertise for the production of space located?
What gives it legitimacy and value?

Katerina Antonaki studied Graphic Design in Greece, new media and printing techniques at University of Art and Design of Helsinki and holds an MA in Design – Critical Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London, funded by IKY and supported by many cups of coffee.

As co-owner and art director of a boutique design studio in Greece, she worked in several projects from pitch to completion in the public and private sector; in culture, non profit organizations also in editions and branding. She has taught in design institutions at Greece and was involved in the educational program of the Museum of Children’s Art in Athens. The last year is working as freelancer in selected projects.

Katerina is exploring the space that emerges. Based on spatial theories, philosophical analysis, sociological observations and visual research she is investigating the context of void. How does information exist, transform and/or vanish(?) Research interests include design methodologies and process, mapping, urban practice and communication and the role of spontaneity in design process. Purpose: to find potential links, motifs and interferences between graphic design and spatial terrain.

Abstract_Ready

Ready Not

Abstract Citywalk

Friday, 07.03.08, 11.00

‘exercise’
trigger talks and discussion:
jens brandt (supertanker)
maurice mitchell & annika grafweg
chair: jeremy till

Listen to the mp3 here: Initiative & Institution – Symposium – Exercise – 07.03.08

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Maurice Mitchell

Maurice Mitchell is Reader in the Department of Architecture and
Spatial Design at London Metropolitan University where he runs a Diploma Studio. He has also taught at the Architectural Association, Oxford Brookes University and the Development Planning Unit, University College London. He combines working as a partner in Dwyer Mitchell Architects with academic work. His area of interest lies in the narrative interplay between technical and everyday cultural factors in the production and sustainability of the built environment, particularly in situations of rapid change and scarce resources where new identities are forged in the process of remaking.

Educated at the Architectural Association, his early career included extended periods of work in the shanty towns of Ghana and as Regional Building Materials Advisor to the Southern Regional Government of Sudan. His first book Culture, Cash and Housing (1992) explores the lessons learned from the experience of Voluntary Service Overseas in the field of building for development. He has been involved with and published on typhoon resistant construction in Vietnam.

Ideas relating the building process to education are explored in his second book The Lemonade Stand: Exploring the unfamiliar by building large scale models (1998) which highlights the importance of the culture of making within architectural education by drawing on the exploratory work produced during hands on courses which he has run over many years at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Wales.

His Diploma studio undertakes an annual field trip in which students engage proactively with a local situation devising imaginative responses to specific cultural and technical issues. Work undertaken by the studio in Kosovo is recorded and discussed in his third book Rebuilding Community in Kosovo (2003). For the last six years the studio’s focus has centred on design for situations of rapid change and scarce resources in India (Gujarat 2002, Meerut 2003, Delhi 2004, 2005, 2007 and Agra 2006). He is Course Leader for the MA Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources and guest editor of a special edition (forthcoming June 2008) of the international journal Open House International on the subject: Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources.

Other recent publications include:
2005, ‘The school’s we’d like: young people’s participation in architecture’ with Ben Koralek in Dudek, M. (ed.) Children’s Spaces Elsevier/Architectural Press.

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Annika Grafweg, IF [ untitled ] Architects

IF [ untitled ] Architects is a London and Athens based studio established in 2003.

We aspire towards creating a working method in which collaborations with other people are central. We set-up participatory design methods at different stages in each project allowing the project to grow and evolve in unpredictable dimensions. To aid the design development we employ contextual “tools of engagement” which are project specific and actively engage our clients and users; seeking their contributions and expertise. These tools take different shapes according to the nature and ambition of the project and their appropriateness is determined by that specific situation – people, site, history, emotional context and politics; In the house design in London it was a postcard, In the school and village design in India it was a series of workshops, in the factories conversions in Athens it is a website and a film engaging people’s minds.

As a practice we are engaged and interested in the process and method in which a ”sense of place” is created – how a space is formed, how it adapts and how it lives on and evolves. We try to expand our scope of engagement outside the traditional remit of an architect as we believe that the construction of the building is only a part of architectural practice.

www.if-untitled.com

(Click here, or on image to download Kalyanpuri Settlement plan as a .pdf)

Friday, 07.03.08, 13.00

‘take place’
trigger talks and discussion:
can altay
townley & bradby
chair: andreas lang

Listen to mp3 here: Initiative & Institution – Symposium – Take Place – 07.03.08

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SPATIAL PRACTICES:
from “unpredictable reconfiguration” to “setting a setting”

This talk will focus on Can Altay’s research and practice in art and architecture. Altay will present his work through observations on urban phenomena, such as the nocturnal practices of youths in Ankara’s street gatherings called mini-bars, and the operations of unofficial garbage collectors, known as papermen, common to many big cities in Turkey. In these activities he identifies an unpredictable reconfiguration of spaces and systems. Altay will present his installation works produced as spatial constructs, which both document and reflect on the research issues. The talk will outline Altay’s ideas on “setting a setting”; as constructing open structures that aim to produce social and spatial situations through events and exchange, looking at a series of recent projects that he has developed.

Born in Ankara, Turkey. Altay received his PhD in Art, Design, and Architecture from Bilkent University in 2004. He has a post-graduate degree in Critical Studies from Malmö Art Academy and Lund University, Sweden, and a background in Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, with an M.F.A. and a B.F.A. from Bilkent University. Although Altay continues to teach and move in architectural circles, he is better known as an artist. His installations of videos, mappings, textbooks and photographs incorporate different forms of research on human interaction in urban environments. To create these dense works Altay studies symptoms of ‘mis-use’, or improvised spatial architectures in the city, as well as hidden structures of support, unauthorised systems of organisation and models of co-habitation. He has had solo exhibitions in Sala Rekalde, Spain (2006) and Spike Island, U.K. (2007). His work has been included in exhibitions such as the Istanbul Biennial (2003), Havana Biennial (2003), Busan Biennial (2006); and in museums and galleries such as the Walker Art Center (USA), VanAbbe Museum (Netherlands), ZKM (Germany), P.S.1 MoMA (USA), and Platform Garanti (Turkey). His work has been featured in periodicals such as contemporary, Frieze, Spike and in books including the [un]common place (ed.Pietromarchi). Besides his installation based work he is currently working on his ongoing publication project “Ahali: a journal for setting a setting”, collecting texts from various authors as well as continuing to write on art, architecture and urbanity.

The atelier d’architecture autogérée / studio of self-managed architecture (aaa) is a collective platform, which conducts actions and research concerning urban mutations and cultural, social and political emerging practices in the contemporary city.

The interdisciplinary network was founded in 2001 in Paris by architects, artists, students, researchers, unemployed persons, activists and residents.

We develop urban tactics to accompany micro-processes and enable rifts within the standardised urban contexts, which are regulated by private economic interests or centralised policies. These policies are incompatible with the global, informal and multicultural mobilities that characterise the present-day metropolis.

We encourage the re-appropriation of derelict spaces and the creation of new forms of urbanity by local residents through reversible designs and lived everyday practices, which make use of their skills and knowledge. These spaces conserve a potential of accessibility and experimentation by resisting the increasing control of the urban context. Our approach involves not only critical analysis but also the process of making and acting through shared competencies and collaborations. We valorise the position of the resident/user as political condition and develop tools cooperatively to re-territorialise their spaces of proximity and empower their decisions and actions within the city. These tools include among others trans-local networks, catalyst processes, nomad architectures, ‘agencements jardiniers’ / gardening assemblages, self-managed spaces and platforms for cultural production.

A ‘self-managed architecture’ provokes assemblages and networks of individuals, desires and different manners of making. It is a relational practice, which is not always consensual but at times conflictual, and it is the role of the architect to locate confrontations and accompany subjective productions. Such an architecture does not correspond to a liberal practice but asks for new forms of association and collaboration, based on exchange and reciprocity.

Our architecture is simultaneously political and poetic as it aims above all to ‘create relationships between worlds’.

http://ecoboxvirtuel.free.fr/

To download Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu’s text ‘Acting Space‘ click the link or to read it see below

acting-space.pdf

Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu
Acting Space

Transversal notes, on-the-ground observations
and concrete questions for us all.

The crisis of the capitalist space
Capitalist means of production and of spatial-territorial management are more than ever undergoing a crisis. Global capitalist space is polarised between the North and the South, furrowed with unprecedented flows (of money, resources, people, etc.) for the most part in one direction. Certain cities are undergoing uncontrolled growth or decline, whether they are globalised under the control of mafias or obscure interest groups (religious, economic, political) in the South, or under pressure from economic mutations such as ‘shrinking cities’ in the North. From an ecological standpoint, the modes of territorial occupation and exploitation are evolving into a planetary stalemate: every day the surfaces of natural land diminish, making way for concrete and tarmac, implicitly contributing to the decrease of biodiversity. After years of study of the ‘planetary garden’, landscape architect Gilles Clement, overtly criticizes the modes of space anthropisation and underlines how unspoilt spaces play a role of protector. In this line of thought, he specifies how revealing it is that the IFLA (International Foundation of Landscape Architecture) assimilates industrial wastelands to ‘endangered landscape’(1).

In the same way, sociologists and political scientists are trying to understand the major changes linked to this global territorial management: changes in the modes and temporality of labour, dislocation of traditional sociability forms, trivialization of violence in an urban setting and, by counter-reaction, privatisation of public spaces and the drive towards a multiplication of gated communities. For Arjun Appadurai, it is due to a gap between contemporary cultural realities and the shapes that must insure an acceptable level of social cohesion: the failure of the nation-state to bear and define the lives of its citizens is perceptible through the increase in parallel economies, private and semi-private police armies, secessionist nationalisms and non-governmental organizations that offer alternatives to the national control of subsistence and justice’(2).

At a micro scale, capitalist space is drowned under promotional pressure that is continually carried out by all communication means and media (mail, telephone, television, internet) transforming the home into an absolute centre of a consumerist culture of the ephemeral. All objects are disposable; they are no longer recycled or repaired by oneself. Marketing studies perfectly include family temporalities in order to reach their different targets, at very specific hours, in their specific vulnerability (greedy children, solitary unemployed, beloved animals, curious students, retired people in good health, couples in love, etc.).

On a larger scale, capitalist space is ever more limited and controlled: by a permanent decrease in the field of possible actions within an urban space, by the superimposition of numerous regulations and norms. In his attempt to imagine the possibility of an ecological balance between environment, social issues and subjectivity, Felix Guattari denounces the impoverishment and homogenisation produced by the capitalistic control of the media and of public space: ‘productions of “primary” subjectivity (…) are spreading on a truly industrial scale, especially by media and infrastructure’(3). This impoverishment of urban space can be seen via the gradual disappearance of space devoted to public uses and that of space likely to be appropriated for informal uses based on responsibility and reciprocal trust.

Referring to Jane Jacobs’ analysis, and singling out the inherent contradictions that capitalism creates on space, in his book devoted to the production of space, Henri Lefebvre underlines the abstract character of capitalistic space ‘which acts as a tool or domination’.(4) The methods and scenarios which try to be ‘creative’ and ‘attractive’ (by offering Theme Parcs, Urban Renewal programmes, ‘City Branding’ operations etc.) are often a failure because space is above all considered in terms of financial yield and its subjects are manipulated to accomplish just that. Capitalist economy continues to create desubjectivated, consumerist and abstract urban spaces.

How is it possible to regain ownership, to resubjectivate the city? How does one act being a professional of space issues; by what approach and by what political measure? How is it possible to act being a regular inhabitant?
Desubjectivated space
For most of us, we react by simply following the same lifestyle since we lack instruments to act; and by waiting for decisions to be made by high decision-making bodies, decisions which are difficult to materialise because of the divergent interests put into play and the macro-economic, geo-political unbalances which overlap evermore at all levels.
What some of us, the most politically active, are able to do, is to react by criticizing, by organizing demonstrations, signing petitions and publishing alarming information on internet. But these reactions stay at an abstract and discursive level even if the discourse sometimes ‘takes to the streets’. Acting « in the streets », in public space and on a large scale is important and necessary, but sometimes leads to no outcome and to no constructive proposals. And when there is an outcome, it is recovered by the dominating power, often excluding those who, being concerned, articulated and asked for those changes.

On the actual daily level, this barrier is due, among other things, to individuals being reduced to roles which are void of any critical and active social position. Georgio Agamben points at the contemporary state which acts like some kind of « desubjectivating machine, like a machine which blurs all classical identities and at the same time, and Foucault states it very well, like a machine which recodes, juridically speaking especially, dissolved identities’(5). Agamben goes on to underline that the ground for this resubjectivation ‘is the same which exposes us to the subservient process of biopower. Thus there is ambiguity and risk. Foucault demonstrates: the risk is that we re-identify ourselves, that we invest this situation with a new identity, that we produce a new subject, very well, but a subject subservient to the state, and from there we carry on, despite ourselves, with this infinite process of subjectivation and subservience which is precisely the definition of
Biopower‘. (6) The crisis related to space is doubled by the crisis of individual and collective subjectivity.

If in our action we limit ourselves to a criticism of the institutions, that of the state and of Capitalism, there is little hope for change. Acting to build « another world » will continue to have limited impact as long as we don’t give ourselves the means, individually within our reach, to reinvest urban space collectively, ecologically and politically; as long as this space stays desubjectivated by our absence.

For the past few years and through a series of practical experiments begun with the atelier d’archietcture autogérée, we’ve been trying to develop, without ado, with the means at our disposal and by associating anyone wishing to get involved, an approach, which starting at the micro level, is able to provide another vision of the city(7).

Acting in the interstices
When new people come to these spaces we’ve initiated, very often they ask if they can do such and such activity. And, before answering, we ask ourselves if this activity could be done again by others later on, insofar as not to hinder the project. We’ve come to understand, together with the users of these spaces, that the freedom of each person to act in a mutual space is conditioned by the necessity to not hider someone else’s freedom nor that of the whole project as a collective one. This way of acting allows for the spatial coexistence of a ‘multitude in movement’(8). It’s a way that gives the most autonomy and at the same time spatial coexistence of subjects, which can manifest their differences in a ‘permanent heterogenesis’ (9). By the human complexity put into play, ‘spatial acting’ teaches us to manage the contradictions that space contains. Inevitably these spaces will be contradictory by their content.

Acting spatial takes time. It is necessary to allow enough time for actively reinvesting space; to spend time on location, to meet other people, to reinvent uses of free time, to give oneself more and more time to share with others. Common desires can thus emerge from these « shared moments », collective dynamics and projects to come. Patiently, we had to rebuild practices in spaces void of use, which are no longer suited to anyone. Lefebvre clearly distinguishes the difference in nature between space produced by a bottom-up process, set-up by concerned users and space decided by domineering mechanisms: ‘the user’s space is experienced, not represented (conceived). Referring to the abstract space of skills (architects, urban planners,
designers), the space of tasks that users accomplish on a daily level is a tangible space. Which means subjective. ‘It is a space of “subjects” and not of calculations…’ (10). Therefore, we are looking to set the conditions of a non-predetermined experience, of a subjective experience which produces a collective narration of urban space through daily activity.
In the space smoothed over by capitalism, we must imagine other spaces to invest: grooves, cracks, breaches, loop-holes. We must multiply the modalities to act on the edge, the margins, the borders. In permaculture, we refer to the ‘border effect’; the ‘margin effect’ and Clement reminds us that there is more life where environments meet and overlap: ‘limits -interfaces, canopies, borders, thresholds, outskirts- in themselves comprise biological layers. Their wealth is often superior to the environments that they divide’(11). In the spaces of ‘biological depth’, energy is concentrated and intensified by difference, by the encounter with other species. Likewise, in his quest for a definition of democratic space where we are not just tolerant, indifferent of difference, but precisely where ‘you do care about things or people who are different from you’, Richard Sennett refers to the multi-functional margin of the agora (Stoas, Heliaia, etc.) (12). He also talks about the difference between limited space and fringed space, between ‘boundary’ and ‘border’, defining the border as something simultaneously resistant and porous. This double and contradictory characteristic ‘resistant and porous’ mirrors the intensity and contradiction that characterize the paradoxical condition of the edge.

Like a metonymy of what happens inside, the limits and the enclosures of shared spaces that we’ve built to this day always find another function, parallel and contradictory: to let the view go through, to let the plants grow over, to expose, to play, etc. In this way, a limit between two spaces is transformed into a space of exchange; the separation is transformed into an interface for dialogue. We’ve replaced existing opaque enclosures with neighbourhood enclosures, library enclosures, pierced enclosures, gardened, soft…
Alterotopical spaces
By looking for urban spaces available for ‘acting’, we’ve invested cracks and ‘in-betweens’ that are also spaces that concentrate energy, are contradictory and porous. Clement describes them as spaces that allow a stronger ecological wealth than well-defined landscapes. In an urban setting, the ‘in-between’ is most often a neglected area between two buildings, a hollow between two wholes. Clement tells us that these cracks form a ‘tiers paysage’ – ‘third landscape’ which comprises ‘a territory for the multiple species which find nowhere else to be’(13). It is the model of space to be shared with others: alterotopy. Foucault spoke of ‘heterotopias’ as spaces that have ‘the power to juxtapose in one real place many spaces and locations which are by themselves incompatible’, ‘spaces of the other’(14). But the spaces we’re interested in, alterotopias, are other spaces as much as spaces of ‘the other’, and spaces built and shared ‘with others’ with those ‘you do care about, who are different from you’.

Acting spaces become spaces to question daily life, its potential, its barriers, its imposed temporalities. By blaming the stereotypical mechanisms of conformed spaces, these acting spaces can become spaces to dis-learn uses that are subservient to capitalism and to relearn singular uses, by producing a collective and spatial subjectivity proper to those involved. Through the daily weaving of desires, these micro-spatial practices introduce other temporalities, other dynamics (longer, random, collective and sometimes self-managed) thus comprising spaces, which undergo continual transformation, ‘auto-poietical’ (15).

By investing the ‘on our doorsteps’, we create interstices, differences, in a homogenised and abstract city. By overcoming the anonymous condition that we usually find as soon as we leave the house, we can contribute to resubjectivate space. From these spaces, proximity can acquire a familiar character; we meet familiar faces, we say hello to some passers-by, we exchange words and phrases with neighbours. Acting ‘at one’s doorstep’ allows one to find a local anchorage. At a certain moment, there is the risk to settle for this rediscovered social dimension and to limit oneself to a local and closed-in social circle. Indeed, the acting spaces that we develop stay open to transit, to intersecting with other subjectivities and dynamics from elsewhere; stemming from the local, we work to set up spatial trans-local networks and make them operational (16).

This functional and pragmatic mixture of spaces that would ‘normally’ not intersect, this neighbourhood community that is active and permanent with ‘the other’, this weaving of scales and trans-local positions enable a spatial alterotopic production. It is a realistic utopia, such as Jacques Rancière describes it in his analysis of the political project: ‘not the dazzling utopia of the distant island, of the nowhere land, but the imperceptible utopia which consists in having two separate spaces coincide’(17). Through this practice of trans-local alterotopias, we can reintroduce ‘the political dimension’ in everyday space.
‘agencement jardinier’/ gardening assemblage
For years, the children of families of African origin who regularly frequent ECObox named the garden ‘gardening’. At first we thought it was some kind of infantile slang or a linguistic error. Listening to them speak about the project as a place where they can play, ride their bikes, garden, draw, play music…where they can do anything, we came to understand their term. They had grasped the active character of space, the permanent transformation of the project according to those who invest in it. It was their way of defining acting in an auto-poietical space. The ‘acting’ is always an assemblage. What is important is the quality of this organisation, its ‘how’. Gardening offers a model for a certain type of organisation, which takes into account the singularities, implies patience, availability and the unexpected.

Auto-poïetical ‘acting’ enables the setting up of a daily ecology via ‘agencement jardinier’ (gardening assemblage): organisational dynamics by neighbourhood communities, conducting to exchanges, mobile, tolerant and cyclic. These are schemes that come close to ecological dynamics whilst being adapted to an urban environment, to small scales, to daily uses and practices. This mode of action by ‘agencement jardinier’ can, in time, produce a constituent space for modes of collective processes and for a local political acting.

‘Gardened space’ contrasts to ‘modern space’ produced by and experienced through a pragmatic cut-out, which separates all heterogeneous elements: functions, users, scales, etc. Because of these cut-outs, which bring about homogeneous, monovalent spaces, without contradiction, when superimpositions of heterogeneous environments and functions do occur, they are accidental and lead to conflict.

The gardening assemblage teaches us, via the different environments, to go from one space to another, to change locations and to come back. Little by little, we were able to link the heterogeneous spaces that we were building, together with their users, by bringing about unusual encounters, bits of dialogue, doing and making together, letting contradictions arise gently, learning about politics via heterogeneous temporalities, dynamics and content. More than verbal and deliberative forms, gardening assemblage encourages physical, visual, non-verbal practices; an incorporated democracy, living together as a common body(18).

Nevertheless, investing in spatial acting must enable one to stay free in his/her action, free to change, to stop, to pass on. To be free of his/her acting can also mean to hand over (a project, an action, a movement…) but also the possibility to interrupt, to suspend, to introduce a (self)critical interval in his/her subjective journey.

Some of our projects introduce continuous temporary assemblages, based on the mobility of the architectural devices (palette garden, mobile modules, constructions which can be disassembled), that can move and be reinstalled many times, depending on the spatial opportunities. They demonstrate that we can forge durability with the temporary, from repetition and ritornellos that allow for a certain continuity (therefore a reinforcement) and at the same time for a reinstitution. Each time, it is just as much the space that reinstitutes itself as it is the subjects that resubjectivise in gardens, debates, exchanges, parties, political projects formulated collectively.
Synaptic subjectivity
Rancière noted that the group enables the appearance of a subject that thinks itself in relationship to others, ‘the formation of a one that is not a oneself but a relationship of a oneself with someone else’(19). The relationship with the other, the multiple possible relationships within the group, enable the appearance of a multiple and differential subjectivity.
The investment in a group project always goes through a strong initial motivation; group spaces and projects that we’ve experienced ‘from within and by way of the inside’(20), allow transversal and hybrid activities (a fluidness of spaces and a mobility in the organisation, that by parallel uses makes it possible to cook and to participate just after a debate or to do handy work and listen, in the same space, to a concert, etc.). To frequent a diversity of activities and skills allows, at a certain moment, for a shift towards other implications, something unexpected, brought about by collective dynamics; people who at first come to garden can, little by little, get involved in political dynamics.

These heterogeneous and porous subjectivities, specific to interstitial environments allow each person to have multiple transits and successive and temporary adherences within different cultural, professional and social contexts (21). Thus, as Rancière states, ‘the possibility, which is always open, of a new emergence from this ecliptic subject’, which by ‘the renewal of actors and of forms of their actions’ constitutes the guarantee of democratic permanence (22). The social assimilation of this intermittent condition must generate subjectivity that is continually organising itself through multiple transversalities; constituting a ‘synaptic subject’, one that can function like a synapse: a body that receives and transmits flow (23).

Synaptic subjectivities adapt to and manage interstices that comprise situations conducive to practicing the permanent negotiation of the ‘democratic undetermined’ (24). The undetermined character of these interstices is structural, by including each person’s specific differences and availabilities and by allowing anyone to actually get involved in democratic territoriality projects. These places can become the catalysers of ‘local democracy’ rebuilt and updated; then they can initiate connexions with other local projects, introducing networks that carry a ‘trans-local democracy’ and the birth of a large scale collective subjectivity, while staying locally anchored; ‘a rhizomatic collective subjectivity’. The construction of this rhizomatic subjectivity demands spatial micro-devices that can be inserted in sterilized metropolitan contexts thus initiating the resubjectivation processes. At the same time, these devices can contribute to rewriting a different urban and political discourse.

Guattari pertinently noted the role of architecture among other instruments of Integrated World Capitalism (25). Our tangible experiments showed us that any initiative to adopt these devices by their users is essential for any political or societal project. ‘Architecture is not only the walls, but especially the people that act within and between these walls’, said a local participant in the ECObox project as he commented on City Hall’s initiative to renovate the Halle Pajol in order to put forward a ‘beacon’ project at the same time as the administrative services wished to evict, without discussion, the collective practices that had developed there. (26)
Biopolitical creativity
If the metropolis has lately become, simply because it is ‘inhabited’, the privileged place for biopolitical production (27), it is ‘on one’s doorstep’ that should be the new ‘factory’s cafeteria’, the interstice within the space of production from whence a political reconstruction can begin. But once started, this reconstruction is not void of conditions. Just like any ecological space, these places are reversible; by loss of interest, insufficient investment, they can quickly disappear, be adopted in unfair or discretionary ways, become counter examples, and carry false discourses. In order to preserve them, we must invent an ecological, molecular, collective and daily political policy.

The metropolis is also, according to Negri, ‘biopolitical creativity’ ‘s ground, acting at all levels: social, cultural, and political. It is not necessarily visible because, being modest in means and appearance, biopolitical creation swarms at the border of the capitalist city in industrial wastelands, squats, ‘Centri Sociali’, encounters on the street corner and street parties, temporary occupations, ‘TAZ’, ‘participative platforms’ and syndications. New practices are being invented in the cracks of existing practices and skills, organisational forms, lifestyles and ways of doing…(28) Biopolitical creativity is at everyone’s reach. As Appadurai said: ‘Even the poorest of the poor should have the privilege and the ability to take part in the works of the imagination’. The question, he underlines, is if ‘we are able to create political policy that acknowledges that’ (29).

Today, occupying an empty and unused space to live in under certain conditions, is acknowledged as a legal priority over other criteria of spatial lawfulness; it is the winter truce. We also feel that it is a priority for the metropolitan inhabitant to have access to abandoned spaces for the length of their availability and open them for collective uses that reinvest territory, which is ever more desubjectivated. With this conviction, over the years, we’ve opened a series of spaces that have been used by a large number of people: inhabitants, artists, unemployed, students, architects, retired men and women, researchers, activists, friends and neighbours. After two years of operation, 80 families from the La Chapelle quarter had the keys to ECObox; a few hundred people could therefore have access to a 2000m2 plot at any time of the day and of the week, arranged in part as a garden and in part as a workshop. These projects show the necessity of a legal acknowledgment, to open private and public spaces for collective uses, and of a political recognition for the social priorities in the management of metropolitan space, which is ever more subject to market laws.

Acting space requires opening, working out, using spaces with ‘the other’ as refuges for social and political (bio)diversity, as well as the ecological care to keep fallow spaces and practices, to spot and preserve territories for the dreams of tomorrow, for us-others.
Translated from French by Nicole Klein

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Endnotes

(1) Gilles Clément, (1985), ‘La friche apprivoisée’, in Où en est l’herbe ? – Réflexions sur le Jardin Planétaire, (Paris : Actes Sud, 2006) p. 24.

(2) Arjun Appadurai, (1996), Après le colonialisme – Les conséquences culturelles de la globalisation, (Paris : Payot, 2001) p. 261.

(3) ‘ F.Guattari, The Three Ecologies,(trans.) Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, (London : The Athlone Press, 2000) p.53

(4) Henri Lefebvre, (1974), La production de l’espace, 4th edition, (Paris: Anthropos, 2000) p. 427

(5) Giorgio Agamben, Une biopolitique mineure, interview by Stany Grelet and Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Vacarme n° 10 (Paris: 2000)

(6) G.Agamben, ibid.
Foucault denounces the State power which ‘aims for governing over a multiplicity of people’ through bio-power techniques: ‘a sum of processes including demographic grow, reproduction rates, population fecundity, etc.’.
in Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société – Cours au Collège de France. 1976, (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil,1997) p. 216.

(7) With l’atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) we develop an alternative practice of mico-urbanism which initates self-managed spaces run by their users. aaa is a collective platform which conducts actions and research concerning urban mutations and cultural, social and political emerging practices in the contemporary city. The interdiscilinary netwok was funded in Paris by architects, artists, students, researchers, unemployed persons, activists and residents.
See also our article on the project ECObox, run as both architects and inhabitants of La Chapelle area, in the North of Paris, ‘Au réz-de-chaussée de la ville’, in Multitude n° 20, (Paris: 2005).

(8) Speaking about the project of the multitude, Hardt and Negri notice that such a project is only possible by the creation of ‘relational and social forms based on co-operative work’. Michael Hardt et Antonio Negri, Multitude – Guerre et démocratie à l’âge de l’Empire, La Découverte, Paris, 2004, p. 121.

(9) In his analysis of ‘existential territories’, Guattari states that the praxis of the context can be constructed only through a discourse which include ‘heterogeneous elements that take on a mutual consistancy and persistence as they cross the thresholds that constitute one world at the expense of another’. in F.Guattari, o.c. p. 54.
(10) Henri Lefebvre, (1974), o.c. p. 418.

(11) Gilles Clément, Manifeste du Tiers paysage, (Paris: Sujet/Objet, 2004) p. 48.

(12) Richard Sennett, Democratic Spaces, in Hunch N° 9 (Amsterdam : Berlage Institute, 2005) p. 40.

(13) G. Clément, o.c., p.19.

(14) Cf. M. Foucault (1967), ‘Les espaces autres’, in M. Foucault, Dits et Ecrits, Vol. 2, (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) pp.1577-1578.

(15) The notion of autopoïesis has been developed by H. Maturana et F. Varela in the 197Os. It names the qualities of a system which generates and continually specifies the production of its components. See also Francisco Varela (1979), Autonomie et connaissance, (Paris: Seuil, 1989).

(16) ‘Translocal’ is a central notion for Appadurai: ‘in the contemporary world, the production of neighbourhood tends to be realised within the conditions of the system of State-nations which is exerting normative control on local and translocal activities’ cf. A.Appadurai, o.c. p.259.

(17) Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique, éd. La Fabrique, Paris, 1998, p.30.

(18) R. Sennett, parallels the idea of ‘deliberative democracy’ and that of ‘associative democracy’, by comparing the functioning of two kind of public space in the ancient Greece : the Pnyx and the Agora. o.c. pp 40-45.

(19) Jacques Rancière, o.c. p.87.

(20) About the idea of interstitial reconstruction of the city ‘from within and by way of the inside’ see Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat’s contribution to the research project initiated together with aaa on Temporary Urban Interstices. See his article published in this book and also: www.inter-stices.org and www.iscra.fr

(21) The interstitial practices need, by their nature, to continually negociate with possibly contradictory physical and subjective data. These constitute, according to Rancière, the fundamentals of any political exercise, as ” the true nature of the political is supported by disensual modes of subjectivation’. J. Rancière, o.c. p.184.

(22) J. Rancière, o.c. p.82.

(23) The synapsis (in Greek syn = together; haptein = touching; so ‘connexion’) is the pairing of two homologous chromosomes that occurs during the cellular division. It converses a potential action into a signal. (wikipedia.org)

(24) Cf. J.Rancière, o.c. p.80.

(25) ‘I would propose grouping together four main semiotic regimes, the mechanisms on which IWC is founded : (1) Economic semiotics (monetary, financial, accounting and decision-making mechanisms); (2) Juridical semiotics, (title deeds, legislation and regulations of all kinds) ; (3) techno-scientific semiotics (plans, diagrams, programmes, studies, research, etc.) ; (4) Semiotcs of subjectification, of which some coincide with those already mentioned, but to which we should add many others, such as those relating to architecture, town planning, public facilities, etc.).’ F.Guattari, o.c.,p.48

(26) The projects of ECObox (Paris 18e) and 56, St. Blaise Street (Paris 20e) propose an architecture which, constructs relationships rather than walls. The pallets and the mobile modules of ECObox move and produce space according to people’s uses. At St. Blaise the construction phase has been transformed into a social and cultural experience. The construction time has been stretched to include time of socialisation, during which groups and uses are formed. The spatial construction accompanies the construction of the collective subject. In this type of projects, the spatial, social and political creativities are supporting each other.
(27) Notes on the seminary Métropole et Multitude directed by Antonio Negri, Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, 2005/2007.

(28) During the last decade, a big numer of alternative urban practices were initiated by activists, artists, architects, interventionists, urban hackers, tactical media, intermitent workers, immigrants, resident groups who claim space in the city.

(29) Arjun Appadurai, The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination, in Arjen Mulder (ed), TransUrbanism, ( Rotterdam: V2 / NAI Publishers, 2002) p.46.

Friday, 07.03.08, 17.30

‘negotiate‘
trigger talks and discussion:
petra marguc (polimorph)
barbara holub & paul rajakovics (transparadiso)
chair: celine condorelli

Listen to mp3 here: Initiative & Institution – Symposium – Negotiate – 07.03.08

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Support Structure is an architectural interface. Support Structure aims to create a space which is continuously reinvented by its users in relation to its context. Support Structure houses artefacts as well as activities and aids reconsideration of existing spaces as an impulse for future change. Support Structure is an evolving collaborative project between architect Celine Condorelli and artist-curator Gavin Wade. Our aim is to design and create a universally adaptable support structure that approaches the specific rather than the generic. To achieve this we are putting Support Structure through a learning process.

Celine Condorelli is a London-based architect, whose practice is concerned with architecture as support and interface, developing critical models towards exhibition making and public space.She is Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University, has worked with institutions working with local government such as in Space Syntax, UCL 2002, or culture and education such as London Open House and Architectural Dialogue 2001/2002, and is currently architect-curator, Eastside Projects, Birmingham. Recent work focuses on art and architecture collaborations and exhibitions, including GIL biennial (Ghuang Zhou, Shanghai, Beijing, 2007), 4’33” (Magazin 4 Bregenzer Kunstverein, Austria 2007), ‘Revisits’ (Architecture Forum Linz, Austria, 2007) ‘theatre pieces’ (Tate Triennial of British Art 2006)’Alterity Display’ (Lawrence O’Hana gallery, london 2004). Recent projects include developing Support Structure, an RSA Art for Architecture and Arts Council England project with Artist-Curator Gavin Wade, (Chisenhale Gallery, London 2003, The Economist, London 2004, Portsmouth 2004, Greenham Common 2004, Essex University 2005, Birmingham Eastside 2007, and published in Two Minds: Art for Architecture, Black Dog 2006) as well as taxi_onomy with artist Beatrice Gibson, supported by Arts Council England, the British Council and V2 Rotterdam (‘Subcontingency’, Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo, Italy 2006, Turin, ‘Public Structures’, GuangZhou Triennial, China 2005, and ‘the thin line’ PEAM and and Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Italy 2005, and published in ‘did someone say participate’, MIT press 2006). Celine Condorelli is one half of Support Band. She is currently phd candidate in Research Architecture, Goldsmith London.

www.supportstructure.org

Friday, 07.03.08, 14.00

‘emancipate‘
trigger talks and discussion:
juan linares (arzt&linares)
marko sancanin (platforma 9.81)
nil uzun
susanne tusch (erect architecture)
chair: marianne mueller

Listen to the mp3 here: Initiative & Institution – Symposium – Emancipate – 07.03.08

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Erika Arzt (Austria, 1969) and Juan Linares (Spain, 1972) live and work in Berlin and have been collaborating since 2005. Their projects explore strategies of relating to a given place or context and further seek to engage with a given plurality by means of interactive processes that remain open to transformation and influence. Having lived and worked in different places has shaped a more fluid idea of relation, not finding themselves encapsulated by a situation or a place, in other words not finding themselves either in or outside of it. Developing an individual or collective position they investigate forms of interaction, of presence, of attention, of creation, not only using institutional channels, but also initiating projects independently from institutional drive.

http://www.intermediae.es/project/estructura_animada

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Questions:

What are the implications of conceiving authorship as the initiation of a given process or the drive behind an initiative rather than the signature of a given outcome?

How can issues of empowerment and collaboration between the individual, the public, professionals and the institution be articulated?

How can one develop a project formally when the project is developed through shared authorship or is open to influence?