"in the sugar-cane plantations of the Cauca Valley and in the tin mines of highland Bolivia it is clear that the devil is intrinsic to the process of the proletarization of the peasant and to the commoditization of the peasant's world. (...) The neophyte proletarians and their surrounding peasant kinsman understand the world of market relations as intimately associated with the spirit of evil. Despite all possibilities of increasing their cash incomes, they still seem to view this mode of production as productive of barrenness and death as well.

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"Hence, it’s the political break that is decisive, and not the economic transformation. The true revolution in man’s history is not the Neolithic, since it may very well leave the previously existing social organization intact; it is the political revolution, that mysterious emergence – irreversible, fatal to primitive societies – of the thing we know by the name of the State. And if one wants to preserve the Marxist infrastructure and superstructure, then perhaps one must acknowledge that the infrastructure is the political, and the superstructure is the economic.

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"Hence, it’s the political break that is decisive, and not the economic transformation. The true revolution in man’s history is not the Neolithic, since it may very well leave the previously existing social organization intact; it is the political revolution, that mysterious emergence – irreversible, fatal to primitive societies – of the thing we know by the name of the State. And if one wants to preserve the Marxist infrastructure and superstructure, then perhaps one must acknowledge that the infrastructure is the political, and the superstructure is the economic.

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Against Architecture (notes on the Amazon Frontier): By 1989, the rampant destruction of the rain forest in the Amazon basin had reached international media attention and became one of the paradigmatic questions that forced the introduction of environmental issues into the official agenda of global politics.

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Against Architecture (notes on the Amazon Frontier): By 1989, the rampant destruction of the rain forest in the Amazon basin had reached international media attention and became one of the paradigmatic questions that forced the introduction of environmental issues into the official agenda of global politics.

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Netz.Oekologien

Symposium 2.-3. Juli 2010
Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, Handwerkergasse Völklingen

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Policy

Let's get together, get some land
Raise our food, like the man
Save our money like the mob
Put up the factory on the job

James Brown, “Funky President”

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Law comprises a particularly important part of the social construction of territory and region. This function of the law is often obscured by an enduring emphasis on the study of legal systems that appear more or less coterminous with political jurisdictions. But legal practices crossed boundaries and helped to constitute legal cultures of unruly dimensions. In empire, law traveled with legal officials and also with merchants, sailors, soldiers, sojourners, and settlers.

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This is a five week series of films that were selected due to a research on how cinematic space is constructed and with
which means the filmic space relates and correlates with the construction of social space. This selection of films wants to
draw attention to architecture‘s performative aspect and the space that is constructed in visual media. „The space that
appears in the image (…) is concrete and not abstract or purely mathematical space. And it is (…) to a certain degree,

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This friday at the roundtable I will present a 15-20 min presentation on my recent project. This new body of research develops out of a two year practice based project titled the Museum of Non Participation launched in London in 2009. My research question asks 'What might a collection be for The Museum of Non participation'. I will also be screening my new film The Exception and the Rule, 37min 2009, alongside extracts of Godard's Ici et Ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere) 1967.

by Henriette Gunkel and Christiane König for darkmatter

When District 9 (D9) by Neill Blomkamp was released in August 2009, the film was an immediate box office hit in several countries. This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished by the fact that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa. Internet forum discussions and an E-Symposium emerged as a response to the film, which continues to be the subject of controversial discussion. [1] While many celebrate the film in relation to the ‘generic’ genre of Science Fiction as a promising representative of a thriving African Cinema, others reject the film on the basis of its socio-political message, as yet another racist movie about Africa – with reference to the depiction of both ‘the Nigerians’ and the aliens. [2] In this article, we would like to move beyond a crudely metaphorical reading of representation (‘the aliens stand for X in reality’), and explore the degree to which the film foregrounds its own mediality. This focus moves us beyond a polarizing position that immediately rejects the film as racist, and allows us to engage with a complex and original text unlike so many other films that take ‘Africa’ as their subject.

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Dear All,
This Friday the roundtable will be hosting a conversation on Terrorism and Urban Space to be published in Detritos (www.revistadetritos.com)

The topic of terrorism is extremely vast, so perhaps we could focus on 3 main directions:
1) A definition of terrorism: who has the right to define what is inside or outside the scope of terrorism, and the politics behind it, etc.
2) Terrorism and the politics of exception: allowing us to connect to contemporary policy-making, population control and internal security (war on terror; war on narcotrafic; war on illegal immigration; etc).

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Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor.

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Lecture by Clare Davies “The connoisseurs of fine living often look back fondly on old downtown Cairo in the 1920s. Everything about life was so French. The pace, the architecture, the settings. Life was unhurried, untouched by pollution and congestion and marked by quaint buildings, café boulevards and premium arcades." So begins an advertisement for the Rivoli compound at Centre Ville, New Cairo, a real estate project of development giant, DAMAC, designed to capitalise on nostalgia for the old city's downtown, an area which now represents to many some of the prime reasons for urban flight: pollution, high population density, and dilapidation. While areas of medieval Cairo are being restored or reconstructed to recapture something of their supposed original appearance, new versions of the city's early "modern" quarters are being rebuilt at its outskirts. As the expansion of the Greater Cairo Region continues apace, the old city offers parallel models for imagining a future Cairo. The newness of New Cairo and the oldness of the old city are shown to be relative, the products of intersecting projects. Clare Davies is a Ph.D. candidate in art history and Erwin Panofsky Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts. She divides her time between Cairo and New York.