Staking Claims

thresholds 41 Spring 2013, 6-11

STAKING CLAIMS ANA MARÍA LEÓN Resist whatever seems inevitable.

Resist people who seem invincible.

Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) No quiero cambiar la arquitectura, lo que quiero cambiar es esa sociedad de mierda.

Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012)

What actions are prompted by revolution in the space of the city? Which publics take part in this struggle, and who are the agents that mobilize it? And after a revolution has subsided, how is it remembered, represented and memorialized? thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! turns to the history, design, and cultural production of the public realm as a site of dissensus. Rather than focusing on a specific revolutionary time and place, we have strived to include different periods and regions, organizing contributions in terms of the relations they establish between sites, actors, and contexts. In the essays and designs featured in these pages, political struggle often shifts established roles—agitators create new types of public space, designers become activists and fundraisers, individual figures fade in favor of collectives or groups, and actions are best remembered through misrepresentation. How do we write revolution, who writes it and for whom? And, in turn, how does urban conflict inform writing, design, and cultural production at large? Our authors, designers, and artists open up revolution as subject, as event, and as historiographical problem—a problem complicated by discrete actions, multiple publics, critical practices, and the politics of display and remembrance.

As a prologue to our conversation, David Gissen proposes commemorating the events of the 1871 Paris Commune by rebuilding the mound of Vendôme, originally built by the Communards to preserve some elements of the city while destroying others. Through images of the reconstructed mound encased in glass, Gissen suggests a paradoxical relationship between destruction and preservation. With this proposal to lift the paving stones of Paris one more time, we introduce a first group of authors focused on actions on the ground: street performances and political protests take the streets of Mexico City, London, Sahibabad, and Cairo. These disparate geographies are brought into contact by virtue of their shared site, the public commons, and their desire to occupy it to voice political protest.

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Robin Adèle Greeley disentangles the assumed relationship between democracy and civic space in Mexico City by weighing how civic movements were alternately repressed, reactivated, or mobilized in three key instances: the Tlatelolco Massacre (1968), Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s piece Voz Alta (2008) and the work of #YoSoy132 during the 2012 presidential elections. Lozano-Hemmer opposes the dominance of the Mexican state in the public sphere, Greeley explains, by literally giving latent political communities the opportunity to speak en voz alta. Britt Eversole historicizes a very different kind of street performance in his study of King Mob’s activities in 1970s London. Describing the group’s aggressive, deliberately offensive posters mocking depiction of the supposedly revolutionary architecture of Cedric Price and Archigram, Eversole reminds us disciplinary boundaries might limit political engagement, but critical practices can transcend these constraints.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book Sahmat 1989-2009: The Liberal Arts in the Liberalized Public Sphere, Arindam Dutta assembles events that occurred between the 1st and the 5th of January 1989: the murder of theatrical performer and activist Safdar Hashmi in Sahibabad, India, and the subsequent formation of Sahmat, a platform of cultural activists and producers. Dutta’s microhistory shifts focus from the individual figure and singular event to the multiplicity of collective actions and their expanded reach. This is not to say, however, that resolution is attained—rather, the excerpt ends with the start of a new dispute, a contradictory outcome and a surprise guest. If Dutta’s historiographical momentum leads away from the individual as agent, it also hints to the role of the historian as witness. Also focusing on collective action, Diane E. Davis and Prassanna Raman’s essay examines the urban sites of recent struggle, including Cairo, Tripoli, Manama, and New York. Their piece claims the physical presence of crowds in both planned and improvised spaces of assembly is an important form of citizenship. Media coverage, they point out, tends to favor planned spaces such as squares and plazas over the improvised character of streets and thoroughfares as sites for struggle. While focusing on the possibility for citizens to create new spaces through occupation, Davis and Raman also call attention to the role of urban designers in the creation of more equitable societies.

With this reflection on the interaction between citizens and the built environment, we shift focus from event to audience—what is this much-vaunted notion of the public, what are its origins, and how is it changing in our networked society? Furthermore, how can the design professions, inevitably linked to the forces of capital, serve the posited by Immanuel Kant in his 1790 Critique of Judgement to deliver society into enlightenment: to think for oneself, to think in the mindset of others, and to think consistently. In examining the implications of these principles, Jarzombek finds the notion of ‘the public’—a term that we might think to be relatively obvious in its meanings—is surprisingly absent in Kant’s speculations. He envisions the unexpected repercussions of this absence by illustrating what a Kantian city might look like (with

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needs of publics outside these forces? Mark Jarzombek outlines the three principles

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thresholds 41 Spring 2013, 6-11 the help of a thresholds friend). Our present condition, Jarzombek proposes, might be closer to Kant’s figurations than much of the modern discourse misled by this discursive absence.

Thérèse F. Tierney traces the role of social media in reformulating public spheres.

The development of social networks has given rise to new, increasingly fragmented realms, allowing for both expanded networks of communication and increased surveillance and control. Tierney explores the consequences of these virtual changes, as they ultimately manifest themselves in the physical space of the city. Kenneth Ip examines some of these consequences in contemporary Hong Kong. Ip explains the mobilization of social networks in protest marches in the city, their effectiveness at the level of the street, and the possibility for architecture to dismantle them. By presenting us with a theoretical project to counter popular demonstrations, Ip foregrounds the facility with which architecture may become a tool of repression. Nasser Rabbat suggests modern architecture’s complicity with the state is compounded by its dependency on the forces of capital. Architecture can be revolutionary, Rabbat states, by granting the right to architecture to publics that cannot afford it. Finding alternative ways to fund projects allows architectural practices to reclaim their political agency. Reinhold Martin expands on the nature of this agency, recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s admonition, “Reform or Revolution.” To the supposedly revolutionary architecture of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, Martin counterposes architecture’s capacity for reform, challenging us to go beyond formalist utopias. Revolution is not located in pragmatic problem-solving, he affirms, but rather in the reformulation of the system that caused these problems in the first place.

Calls for agency and reform lead to our next section, focused on practice and the architects and artists that strive to enact political change by reaffirming or reformulating their disciplines. By highlighting lack of action, documenting disobedience, or simply stepping in when the state is absent, these agents do more than question authority: they hold it accountable. Urban historian Lawrence Vale interviews Tunney Lee, one of the architects and urban planners involved in the design and implementation of Resurrection City, an occupation of the National Mall in Washington DC in 1968. Lee and Vale discuss the logistics, design strategies, and politics of the Civil Rights Movement as they developed in the months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the contribution of four architects and city planners to the Poor People’s March. Lee’s straightforward advice for young practitioners is predicated on the possibility of political agency within architectural practice.

In the aftermath of the Spanish financial crisis, there was a shift in the operation of small architecture offices, and individual figures gave way to collectives, groups, and associations that move fluidly between roles as designers, clients, fundraisers, and community activists. This shift parallels the organizational tactics of the Spanish Acampadas, suggesting political movement has informed and enriched architectural 8

practice. Two recent projects by architects-turned-activists employ these tactics.

While Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation operate by pointing out the voids and contradictions in existing legislation, Santiago Cirugeda and Recetas Urbanas propose direct, if often illegal, resistance. Jaque is interested in the reappropriation of old materials into new uses and the readymade quality of the result, offering the possibility of queer uses of available systems. Although also interested in reuse, Cirugeda emphasizes the collective nature of the construction process and frames the studio’s work as a response to the inefficiency of local authorities. In their critical posture, participatory methods, and fluid collaborations, the Office for Political Innovation and Recetas Urbanas recall the procedures of political protest while at the same time showing the diversity of these tactics, from critical project to transgressive action.

Nomedas Urbonas and Gediminas Urbonas present the Boston Chapter of the Disobedience Archive, curated with Marco Scotini. The work includes a research project, an ongoing archive, and an exhibition produced in collaboration with MIT students, held from December 2011 to April 2012, The Urbonases see the Disobedience Archive as a common space where art and activism can ally with each other in the pursuit of common goals. Developed while Occupy protest encampments were active in downtown Boston and on Harvard University’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the project brought together past and present videos, actors, and tactics of art and political action, and in so doing demonstrated the power of the archive to take a political stance. As the Urbonases bring together artists and activists as potential allies, The Yes Men occupy both roles simultaneously. Through video documentation of their media-hijacking actions and the creation of the Yes Lab—a training system and online space to organize offline action—The Yes Men expand their network of supporters into a platform to counter the influence of money in political decisions and to enable social change. Their work challenges definitions of art as action or event by presenting itself as an exclusively activist stance. In these projects, both the Urbonases and The Yes Men operate through action and its documentation. The need to document revolutionary actions takes us to our last section.

After a revolution has past, how is it remembered or restaged? Our final section examines the choices involved in the use of images, texts, and narratives of conflict, including analysis of the curatorial choices involved in their exhibition and display.

This group of authors problematizes the ways different instances of representation Sikander Bagh, Ateya Khorakiwala maps the confrontation of colony and empire in the India uprising of 1857 onto the picturesque aesthetics of the image. This fabricated documentation of ruin and decay, Khorakiwala argues, is an ultimately modern representation. Simone Brott deals with a different kind of modern fabrication. She traces the origins of Le Corbusier’s dictum “Architecture or Revolution,” and proposes it has been misinterpreted. Le Corbusier’s thoughts on revolution, she finds,

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inevitably imply political choices. In her analysis of Felice Beato’s photograph of

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thresholds 41 Spring 2013, 6-11 linked to ideas of creative destruction and purification in close connection to Italian fascism. These links lend a completely different meaning to the canonical phrase, highlighting modernism’s links to authoritarian states.

Andrés Estefane points out the ways these connections become operative in his analysis of the exhibitions, architecture, and art installations of Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, opened in 2010 to remember the victims of the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Estefane argues that the design and curatorial strategies deployed in the work ultimately link political expression with violence, suggesting the idea of the liberal state as a safe, protective cocoon. Thus the exhibition of resistance becomes a tool to appease revolt. But can we ever properly remember these traumatic events? Kelly Presutti reflects on the task of the historian in her study of Irina Botea’s video Auditions for a Revolution (2006), a piece that reenacts video taken of the 1989 Romanian revolution. In its engagement with its own making, Botea’s work reveals the inaccuracies of representation, a procedure Presutti finds similar to a literary technique historian Hayden White termed the middle voice.

With this strategy, Presutti proposes, the historian is forced to recognize her inability to understand trauma: she acknowledges uncertainty. Presutti both analyzes and performs the middle voice in this historiographical meditation on the impossible yet imperative task of representing revolution. Mechtild Widrich reviews two recent exhibitions framing design as political action—the United States Pavilion contribution to the Venice Biennial and the 9+1 Ways of Being Political exhibition at MoMA, both opened in 2012. In both exhibitions, Widrich perceives an unresolved tension between their institutional support—the state, the museum—and the political activism they catalogue. It is in the brief instances of institutional critique, she suggests, that these exhibitions made their most compelling curatorial choices, signaling potential avenues for future exploration.

Since we began by lifting the paving stones of Paris, we finish by exploring the beach underneath—the promised utopia. Authorial collective Montenegro Airways flies us to this beach in the form of a redesigned Tahiti, where ornament, morality, cleanliness, and pharmaceuticals are strictly regulated. These undercover historians suggest revolutions sometimes lead to unexpected places, and if we’re not careful we might end up stranded in the wrong destination.

Revolution as topic presents unexpected challenges to designers, artists, historians, and curators, and this interaction between the political and the spatial realms must constantly be reevaluated. Street performances, political protests, and design interventions share tactics and reveal unexpected alliances. New publics surface, and we discover old ones never existed. In urban struggle, spectators turn into participants, appropriating sites of assembly or subverting them by creating new ones. Designers and artists involved in protest actions adapt to new and expanded roles, opening themselves to increased collaboration. The afterimages of revolt become new politi10

cal stages, as curators and historians negotiate between critical distance and political choices. Ultimately each of these narratives—in their critical analysis of the interaction between citizens, governments, and the space of the city—can be read as powerful political gestures in themselves. In the ongoing struggle for social justice, thoughtful analysis and historical revision are necessary endeavors—but they necessarily take on some of the qualities of that struggle. Revolution creates increased awareness of our own political position as historians, designers, artists, and curators. It compels us to leave the safety of neutrality and stake our claims, hold our ground, and place our bets.

We introduce this issue with quotations from two revolutionary architects who passed away in 2012: Lebbeus Woods arguing for resistance, and Oscar Niemeyer advocating for change—in society, rather than in architecture. Thus situated between resistance (to the power of the few) and action (the proactive stance of enacting change at structural levels) thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! stands for the enduring capacity of architects, historians, designers, and cultural producers to take a critical stance in the

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constant reformulation of the commons.

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