FLASHBACK aNd
FORWARD informality Art of the Impossible
Interruption
UTOPIA Pause Imagination Spaces of sILENce Event
Unmapping
Revolution Anarchism Stammering
micro-revolution
in
SEARCH OF
UTOPIA iN the
SILENT
REBELLION
Infrastructure Architecture
Decolonization MICRO-UTOPIA Researcher Millitant Sepideh Karami- UMA- Ume책 School of Architecture- Staging the Message
Research Question
informality Art of the Impossible
Interruption
UTOPIA My research, starting from informality in urban spaces, focuses on the relation between formal and informal. I investigate what forms of emancipation emerge in the encounter of formal and informal world, and how practices of architecture enhance and mobilize the emancipating potentials that exist between the two. At the moment my research focuses on change and revolution as the extreme form of informality. I try to define Revolutionary Aesthetics and if and how it can be applied in architecture. What could be defined as devices to enhance a continuous revolution? Is architecture an answer to this question and if it is so, to what extent this enhancement is architectural? In other words what are the architectural and tactical devices to achieve this revolutionary moments and how this architecture performs and aesthetically offers to the city. What is the relation of body to this device and how it applies it, activates it, changes it and puts it into work through action?
Pause MICRO-UTOPIA
Imagination Spaces of Silence Unmapping Event
Revolution Unexpected
Anarchism Stammering micro-revolution Infrastructure Architecture
Decolonization
Researcher Millitant Situationists
Researcher Millitant
To carry out this research the question of methodology is of high importance. I believe the applied method should well predicate the research question. If informality, change and revolution are the initial key questions then how this research should be carried on in order to also question the limitation and stabilized methods of conventional academic research. The ethical question of ‘why I do this research and for whom’ that has been constantly brought up since the start of my research has been the mantra; to problematize my position in the safe island of academy and to question established knowledge and predefined results. Here the politics of referencing, research communication methods and the way being in the world and building up immediate respond to the ever-changing reality are crucial to be taken into consideration; and in fact all these is not separated from the body of research. The chosen format of the Fanzines is not only because it predicates to an informal aesthetics but also because of its possibility to be constantly modified and changed adding, erasing, tearing down etc. without any need to dismantle the initial structure. They are unfinished and are open to change.
Research Diary Notebooks
Militant research works neither from its own set of knowledges about the world nor from how things ought to be. On the contrary, the only condition for researchermilitants is a difficult one: to remain faithful to their ‘not knowing’. In this sense, it is an authentic anti-pedagogy – like what Joseph Jacotot wanted.
Unlike the political militant, for whom politics always takes place in its own separate sphere, the researcher-militant is a character made out of questions, not saturated by ideological meanings and models of the world. When we refer to commitment and to the “militant” character of research, we do so in a precise sense, connected to four conditions: (a) the character of the motivation that underpins research; (b) its practical character (elaboration of situated practical hypotheses); (c) the value of what is being researched – the product of research can only be dimensioned in its totality in situations that share as much the problematic being investigated as the constellation of conditions and preoccupations; and (d) its effective procedure – its development is already itself a result, and its result leads to an immediate intensification of the procedures that are being employed. On the Researcher-Militant/ Colectivo Situaciones/ Translated by Sebastian Touza
Footages from video-essay: 1978, The Aesthetics of Revolution
Art of The Impossible To say that good ideas are ‘ideas that work’ means that one accepts in advance the (global capitalist) constellation that determines what works. One can also put it in terms of the well-known definition of politics as the ‘art of the possible’: authentic politics is, rather, the exact opposite, that is, the art of the impossible – it changes the very parameters of what is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation (Slavoj Zizek-The Ticklish Subject)
Beyond the Zones of Impossibility
Aesthetics of Revolution
Imagination/MICRO-Utopia dEVICES FOR CHANGE
Rather I am concerned with the capacity known as “political imagination”, that is to say, the ability to imagine a political state of being that deviates significantly from the prevailing state of affairs. (Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination)
Smoke and Dreams
This paper is written together with Behzad Khosravi Noori, Artist and Researcher from Konstfack.
“Imagination is always shot through with splinters of images that have their source in the outside world and in other people”. But thousands and thousands of possibilities of putting these images and fragments together create countless new modes of hybrid imagination. As imagination decolonises the already-colonised images, by reclaiming them and composing new hybrids, it is capable of becoming the margins’ activity, the margins’ resistance and existence. Hence, it is a robust and vigorous tool for the marginal and excluded to reclaim their power. In this sense, the “margin” itself becomes the imagination required to resist the brutality and colonialism of the centre and to infiltrate it, to confront it, and to create spaces of action within that centre. The margin projects itself upon the centre by becoming imagination.
“The question,’what is that we can do together?’ –whoever and wherever that ‘we’ may exist –is largely a question of what is in-between us; what enables us to reach toward or withdraw from each other. What is the materiality of this on-between – the composition and intensity of its durability, viscosity, visibility, and so forth? What is that enable us to be held in place, to be witnessed, touched, avoided, scrutinized or secured? Infrastructure is about this in-between. AbdouMaliq Simon Infrastructure Architecture
I love the activity of noise
Pause/ Revolutionary Device/Interruption Standing Man- Turkey, Occupy Gezzi
Impossible Books, Books that cannot be closed
Pause: Unmapping Methods
Standing in the middle of plentitude of images, objects, impositions, there is a need for the explosion of silence, of emptiness where imagination finds a chance to flourish. Here architecture could become the art of erasing, liberating, decolonizing space. Design becomes a powerful method of thinking, of planning a process to understand when we should stop adding to the world and instead decolonize space, creating points of pauses, ‘creating frameworks where interesting things can happen’ and at the same time break down those very frameworks. In other words it is about creating an ‘infrastructure of pauses’; about “the architecture that leaves space for the uncertainty of the real”. That recent revolutions are mainly taking place at roundabouts, bridges, highways or in other words the ‘infrastructure of high speed’, calls us to look more deeply at the ins and outs of urban struggle and its subtle strategies. When increasing speed is the reality of today’s urban life, pause and slowing down, as a strategy to occupy infrastructure, blocks off and disturbs everyday routines and established flows. Metaphorically it makes a “stammering”4 moment that is capable of being ensued by change in speed, shift in direction or building a completely new route. This shift, change or pause could be called revolution. In this matter pause becomes a method of ‘unmapping’ the city through action.
Caracas Metro-Cable, Urban Think Tank
Law-less Line- Decolonizing Architecture
aNd
Flash Forward
Unchoreaographed Dance Body, City and Revolution
Violence
Anarchism and City Sub-Culture
Sepideh Karami- UMA- Ume책 School of Architecture- Staging the Message- Oct 2013