Emerging arctic Landscape
Ecotope
Arctic Landscape trajectory Trajectory
Complexity/ Multiplicities
Tipping Point
Arctic Tipping points
Murmansk
Hammerfest
Vardø
Small-scale fishing industry -supports lomg term sustainable fish stock -distributes wealth equally along the coast
Large-scale fishing industry -whaling and the industrialization of the fishing industry -distributes wealth less equally along the coast
Largest-scale oil and gas industry -monoeconomy - vulnerable
Alta
Nikel
Kirkenes
information overload
Torvald was a source of inspiration in Vardø. A former BAS student, bird watcher and general bird enthusiast, he moved to Vardø to establish a framework for aviary tourism and information infrastructure based around arctic species of birds. The appropriation of the landscape for bird sanctuaries is a clever way of labelling the landscape as a biological heritage site, hence giving it more economic ‘value’.
Murmansk
RHIZOME MAP For the reflection and observations exercise, I mapped our experience and extensive information gathered on the trip on a rhizomatic map extending as a section through the study trip from Hammerfest to Murmansk. The diagrammatic graphs represent the rise and fall of populations in towns lying on the trajectory of our trip. The overall outcome of this mapping exercise was the organic nature of the lives of cities and towns, going through cycles of growth, decay, collapse, boom, and death. I ended up focusing my research on Murmansk which I found most fascinating.
Observations research article
military Industrial complex Murmansk is an artificial city built from the central bureau in Moscow as a strategic outpost for industrial, military and navy purposes. During the cold war it functioned as Russia’s main harbour with most of the Soviet Submarine fleet stationed there. trend
1989
2010
Murmansk’s shrinking Population: from 450,000 to 307,664
The human is represented in obscure and paradoxical ways - from a 40m tall soldier to an estranged gestalt that fits into the mould of repeating blocks that were erected in masses.
It is a city planned around notions and nodes of the military and the industry.
Military Architecture
‘The evidence, as is always the case, is in the drawing. It is by investi- gating the working methods and tools of architects — the lines drawn on plans, 'master plans', maps and aerial photographs — that the equation setting material organisation against the abuse of power begins to unravel. Formal manipulations and programmatic organisations are the very stuff of architec- ture and planning, and it is in the drawings that their effects are stated. “ 1 Rafi Segal andEyal Weizman, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics o f Israeli Architecture
Control Architecture Murmansk reminds me of an architecture of control. The central planners of the Soviet Union designed the Dwellings of Murmansk in a rough and massive scale, where finer details of the design quickly faded into the background. In my view the project of Murmansk is one of the clearer examples of the brutality of such an approach to housing. From a sociological point of view, housing is an issue that depends on specific economic and social realities and needs to be understood in its full dynamics and complexity. What are the expressions of an architecture of ideology? What are the typologies of architectural control? How does society battle the hardness of this space? How does public space function in these massive concrete blocks? How does the forgotten human intervene? Murmansk is the newest city built by the Russian empire, a city built in haste. Having sprung up so quickly it seems many qualities of the design seem to have been overlooked.
trend
2010
1973 Nikel’s shrinking Population:
12,771
Mikhail Gorbachev Boris Yeltsin
Nikita Khrushchev Stalin
Leonid Brezhnev
Vulnerability
Driving maps
New Hiearchies a short film
L'absent De l'histoire This 5 minute film is a research by-product composed of many stills taken at 3 different sites in Berlin and many spots on our trip through the Arctic. The investigation in Berlin delves into city spaces reappropriated in different ways. First, the Soviet Memorial in Treptower park as a space of commemoration. Second, the now abandoned CIA reconnaissance base on Teufelsberg. Third, the converted Tempelhof airport that now serves as a park and centre of recreation. The concepts of undoing and unworking and of creating flexible networks, play a central role in the film. Research broadly covers philosophers and architects: Michel Decertau, Guy Debord, Bernard Tschumi, Simon Sadler, Walter Benjamin, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Doreen Massey.
Flexibility
research Article
Semiotics
Democracy
Paralogy
Culture Metanarrative
Identity
Sign
Logos
Myth Community Historiography
Polis
Icon
Mythos
Symbol Nature
Habitus
Nomos Doxa
Metaphor
The real becomes a social construction.
Production of Meaning The culture industry forges an alliance of art and advertising and political propaganda. It involves the colonization of the psyche as the unconscious is manipulated for purposes of seduction and dreams are appropriated for profit (Arato 1987). Thus there is a stimulation of a desire producing a market that is never satisfied: ‘The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises ... the diner must be satisfied with the menu’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993:35) The aesthetic task is not the production of harmony but of dissonance, utopian visions that meet audiences desires are seen as complicit with the dominant order( Heynen 1999:186-188).
the gaze
image screen
subject of representation
Jacque Lacan Diagram of the Gaze From The Four Fundamental Concets of Psychoanalysis
reorientations intervention
The Invisible Monument Superstudio saw our world obsessed with objects and monumental architecture and created a series of collages to critique this crazed obsession.1 They argued for the construction of objects through metamorphosis. The object as a vehicle of social communication. Through the psychological rethinking of an object we can try for its “reconstruction� and through this discontinuous and illogical action, refusing guarantees of value aspiring to identify with life and total reality.2 Continous Monument (Superstudio 1969)
Can the monuments of Russia be hijacked? Can we corrupt them, embezzle their beauty, misappropriate their technology of ideals?
Lang(2003)
1
How do these monuments fit into the patterns of everyday life? The monuments are re-dedicated, transformed, reinvented by everyone that sees them. Their meaning is reconstructed with every glance. Monuments change their names, their histories, their faces. Even the engravings are erased and re-written. They are absorbed by the language of the city. Some monuments sit anonymously, abandoned by time.
Or is the monument irretrievable in its ugliness ?
Can they exist as pure sculptures or do they hold deep symbolic power? Are they somehow holding onto an invisible system from the past - anchors to a time long gone by? Or are they places to lock up your memories, to forget? Are they just stumbling blocks in the landscape? Is there a way to free them from their historical significance? And should we?
Désoeuvrement Furthermore, how do these monumental giants measure up against the superficial spectacle of ideology in today’s everyday - against the thin layers of advertisement plastered around our modern cities of seduction? What is the overall pattern in such a city plastered with images, banners and ads?
‘Nothing is as as invisible as the monument - only the sign makes it visible. ‘2 Murmansk as Continous Monument
Time vs Prevalence graph for the occurence of the word sign(red) and monumentblue) from 1800 to present in popular literature (Google Ngram)
Pattern
It’s not the flux of matter passing incessantly through the pattern of the city, but rather, the pattern’s newly acquired status as “message”. The inhabitant’s self-identity, therefore, is not based on objects, but it is based on the transmissible body of information.
But how can an architecture which makes a strategic allegiance with the market even if at the same time disavowing the market’s practices, critiquing it be progressive or advanced, in other ways than just in advancing the cause of the market itself? How can the architect serve the interest of the greater good, rather than just the greater good of the market economy? 2
Huyssen (2006)
‘I would prefer Not to’ The use of Melville’s story of Bartelby is useful to illustrate the pure act in its impotentiality. His utterance “I would prefer not to” is the formal gesture of refusal -a political act. A “signifier-turned-object” , it brings about the collapse of the symbolic order. Bartelby’s gesture is one of pure violence that has no violent quality in it. The violence stems in it’s very immobile, inert, insistent, impassive being. The ‘I would prefer not to’ does not negate a system but rather affirms an a possibility 4 for new framework. ‘Bartelby (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the politics of resistance or protestation which parasitizes on what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and it’s negation.’3 It is a radical passivity that acts through the nonactualizable reserve of desoueuvrement which 5 lies outside all power.
Older layer of ideology in Murmansk
The Arctic Hotel in Murmansk entirely covered in Advertising
In this landscape of the eye, we need to make the architecture visible. We must strive to create an ‘authentic’ experience. Zizek (2006) Hugill (2011) 5 Dovey(1999) 3 4
FABRIC AS GENERATOR Can the language of advertisement be re-routed to create a new implication, can it be mapped onto the monument to embezzle it with a new meaning? In a public context, Christo’s veiling actually functioned to reveal what was hidden when the Reichstag was visible. 6 The canvas in the public realm - not as an advertisement for a market good but as a catalyst for social change. The language of public art/street art. Instead of building another monument in 2016, why not celebrate and ‘reconstruct’ the already existing monument? Aliosha is the icon of Murmansk. He looks over the city, and the city looks at him. In the daily drift through the streets of Murmansk, inhabitants get confronted by numerous things on the skyline. Smokestacks, cranes, housing slabs, and dominantly Aliosha. This visual connection to the city makes Aliosha the perfect site to celebrate the centennial.
6
Huyssen (2003)
There are a lot of plans for the development of Murmansk. Over the next few years there are plans to renovate Arctica Hotel, several sports facilities, garbage processing complex, a four lane road south and more. There is also a deal for the construction of a number of new dwellings. However, there aren’t any plans for the promotion of creativity in Murmansk. There is realistically a dire need for a creative outlet in the city. And there are already many actors working towards the goal. The main obstacle is the lack of infrastructure and support from above. One such actor is Evegny, who is building a youth art centre with the help of some friends. He has been working on it for years, with little or no support from the municipality.
CATALYST Murmansk is about to celebrate it’s 100 year anniversary. It has been a quarter century since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Yet, although the Soviet Union has dissipated 25 years ago, it’s legacy still lives on. There is a need to celebrate the future of the city, but without forgetting its past.
The culmination at ‘Aliosha’
The intervention for the city of Murmansk is based on a collective social experiment on the city scale. By using the rhizomatic nature of today’s social networks it is possible to organize and mobilize a city wide intervention for the hundred year anniversary of Murmansk. This event calls for the participation across the entire city of Murmansk to weave together a quilt to cover up the monument of Alyosha.
STRATIFIED PLACES The kind of differences that define a place are not the ordering or juxtaposition of subjects and objects on the surface- a field where bodies are arranged. The elements spread out on the surface can be enumerated, they are available for analysis instead it’s what lies underneath, hidden by history, the invisible. The job of the monument is not to lock away history forever, or to let us forget, but it’s job is to confront us, to keep our past on our minds. Currently, Alisoha still functions as a State apparatus showing military power, and the only way to show one’s respect is in an official ritual of bringing flowers. Everyday practices , based on their relationship to an occasion, that is, on casual time, are thus, scattered all along duration, in the situation of acts of thought. Casual time is what narrated in the actual discourse of the city: an indeterminate fable , better articulated on the metaphorical practices and stratified places than on the empire of the evident in functionalist technocracy.7
This project seeks to act as a catalyst for the creativity underlying the surface of Murmansk. Hal(1983)
7
RHIZOME MAP The centennial provides an opportunity for the re-invention of the monument and a reflection of the trajectory of Murmansk. A collective action organized between different agents in the city makes the monument momentarily disappear under a veil, freeing Murmansk from the gaze of it’s military history. The covering up of Aliosha, however, is only temporary, and after the celebration he is unveiled and revealed. When the monument is revealed everything seems unchanged, but the event has transformed the participants and the city. The monument itself is the framework of the change, and the fabric becomes the visual technology of it’s transformation. The same technology used to plaster ideological advertisements all over the city is here used to create a moment of pause. By blankly covering up Aliosha, the fabric seems out of place, out of time, transporting the monument to an unseen dimension. What lies under the textile is obvious, but momentarily the imagination is free to wander, and it is allowed to dream.
The pattern: a rhizomatic assembly of the map of Murmansk after Guy Debord’s 1959 “The Naked City”
Aliosha overlooking the city
Constructing Situations
the 2016 Centennial
The event creates a platform for a free exchange of ideas. The actors in the space are the people of Murmansk. If the event is used for protest or carnival, if it is used as a forum for the exchanging of skills and ideas is only determined by the participants, by what is called for.
TRAJECTORY CARNIVAL
The question of the connection between action and reorientation has links to the work of Arendt, who defines power as a communicative agreement on collective action: ‘ Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group’7. Thus power is defined as a collective capacity, asserting the primacy of ‘power to’ while socializing it. The notion of communication about action unites issues of action and representation:
‘ Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. ‘7
Arendt 1958
7
Event Plan For the duration of the event, a number of workshops, talks, concerts, film nights and social events will raise money for a youth centre. There is a lack of support infrastructure from the government for the funding of creative outlets for the youth
Car Access
Booth
Film Screen
Aliosha
Foot ACess workshops
Seating
Stage
The concept is to engage young artist and creatives of Murmansk in order to create an event-intervention at the Aliosha Monument to coincide with the 100 year anniversary of the city. The intervention involves the mapping of the city, in fabric, on the 35 meter tall Soldier.
Event Section 1:500
Seating
Aliosha
Film Screen
lift
Assembly tent
workshop
Stage
Mapping Aliosha Prototype surfaces 33 surfaces making up one side of Aliosha
Aliosha
The youth of the city of Murmansk need a creative outlet. Unfortunately, there is no existing framework in place to support a youth center in Murmansk. This project proposes a new hierarchy to create room in the municipality of Murmansk to fund a space within a short timeframe.
budgeting Concept:
Government Banks
Military Security
Infrastructure
Environent Private Investors
Mining Fishing
Social
Oil NGOs
Youth Center Fundraiser
40m 30m 20m
ticket booth
10m 0m Dan dorocic