Monument to the Rubble of the Future by matthew ashton

MONUMENT TO THE RUBBLE OF THE FUTURE

EDITORIAL Matthew Ashton

AFTERHUMAN Beatrice Orlandi

FIELD NOTES Peter Lang

LOST IN TRANSPOSITION Tatiana Stadnichenko

TILL ANJI’S BARN Angelica Falkeling

WINDOW Erika Henriksson

PALEOTECHNICS Matthew Ashton

EXOSKELETONS Marianne Skaruup

ELEMENTS Dick Hedlund

AFTERWORD Matthew Ashton

SKARNE 66 Sofie Tolf, Nora Yous, Luis Lanfredi, Bihter Celik

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

EDITORIAL POSTCARDS FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE

A journey traversing the periphery of Malmö is a passage through these fragmented traces of utopia, past fields of wheat and barley, neo-medieval gated communities, distribution warehouses, outlet stores, shopping malls, conference centres, sports arenas, office towers and the greying social housing estates of the welfare state. It is a landscape in perpetual transition, like the shifting sands on a beach, altered continuously by the mechanisms of speculation and the processes of late capitalist liquid modernity.2 A place of flows where everything and everyone is on the move, be it the elites of the creative class or migrants fleeing war and persecution. Yet despite this constant motion it is also a place stuck firmly in the eternal present. The past has been thoroughly erased and there is only one future on offer - the status quo.

According to Walter Benjamin we can already envision the utopia to come because it has left its traces in the now, in “thousands of configurations of life, from permanent buildings to fleeting fashions”.1

There may, however still be hope of finding traces of an alternative future hidden among these glimmering ruins of the present. Between the ever expanding neoliberal city and the infrastructural apparatus of the Öresund bridge lies a potential space of resistance in the massive exhausted landscape of a former limestone quarry. This immense void, covering over 100 hectares, is the consequence of 130 years of industrial exploitation. What was once a loud, dusty site of production and resource extraction is now an eerily tranquil place - an uncanny inverted island hidden just below the surface of the city - a landscape which could equally be contemplated as a remnant from a distant prehistoric past or a glimpse into a post apocalyptic future. If we believe cities to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements then sites such as the quarry could be regarded as the original moulds. They are the negative spaces from which our urban environments were cast. A monumental archive recording over a century of urban development and real estate speculation, where it is not only the physical scar in the earth which speaks, but equally the ghostly mass of absent material. Limestone which was crushed, processed and burnt to create cement, later mixed with sand and gravel to produce concrete, which was then combined with steel to create

products. This company would go on to become Skanska, today Swedens largest construction company and a major player in the global construction industry.

our manufactured habitats. A journey into the quarry site is one which traces the history of the modern Swedish construction industry - an indirect interrogation of the contemporary city via way of a detour into the depths of a site of its actual material production.

The Swedish appetite for cement slowly increased during first few decades of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until after the Second World War that demand really became insatiable. Although Sweden avoided the scale of destruction experienced by most European countries during the war by maintaining an (at times questionable) stance of neutrality, it was nonetheless keen to (re)build for the modern society, and this project required lots of concrete. It is interesting to contemplate the choice of concrete as the preferred building material given seventy percent of Sweden’s surface area is covered by forest - was concrete seen as more modern? Was it more suited to the politics of the ruling social democratic party, as an industrially produced material with strong associations to the workers movement? Or was it simply a masterstroke by former Swedish social democratic Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson (1932 - 1946, architect of the Swedish welfare state “Folkhemmet”) as a way of concentrating the construction industry in his home town of Malmö? There were certainly many reasons to prioritise concrete as the preferred building material of the modern Swedish welfare state4 but the decision certainly had implications on the ground in Limhamn where cement production was rapidly ramped up and industrial processes rationalised, creating a formidable construction machine able to remove raw limestone at one end and pump out prefabricated housing units at the other. This optimised system of production and construction was already well developed by the time the Million Homes Program5 was enacted by the Social Democratic government in 1965, and certainly contributed to its success.

Limestone has been quarried from the land south of Malmö since medieval times, with its significance even reflected in the areas name - Limhamn translates to ‘Lime Harbour’. In the sixteenth century the site gained the attention of the Danish Crown which was undergoing a building boom and needed a reliable source of material for its palaces and fortifications. The limestone operation was granted to a group of Dutch entrepreneurs who were tasked with ramping up production to satisfy the Crown’s needs. The quarry continued to supply the royal Danish construction industry until 1658 when Denmark was forced to cede the region of Skåne to Sweden in accordance with the Treaty of Roskilde.3 The kilns were repeatedly destroyed during the years of war that followed, and it wasn’t until the mid eighteenth century that a stable quarrying operation was re-established. The modern history of the Limestone quarry can be traced back to 1866, when fifty smaller limestone pits where consolidated into one large operation; the present quarry site. The reinvention of cement in both Great Britain and France around this time lead to a great interest in the potential of this new material, and in 1871 Skånska Cement AB was founded, taking over operation of the quarrying operation as well as building Sweden’s first Portland cement factory. As cement production began to increase toward the end of the century so too did the demand for Hydraulic lime (calcium oxide), which is the main component of portland cement, producing the chemical reaction causing it to set. The quarrying operation expanded rapidly, utilising modern industrial techniques such as steam powered machinery and dynamite to increase production and laying a vast network of railway to speed up the transportation of material between the site and the cement factory. In 1887 Skånska Cementgjuteriet was founded as a small subsidiary company to produce concrete

The oil crisis of 1973 and the subsequent heavy slump in the building industry should have come as a massive hang over to the cement industry after the frenzied activity of the decade before, but they were already looking to the horizon and the next big moneymaker - real estate. Euroc, the new incarnation of the cement company

(previously called Cementa) owned a massive slice of land to the south of Malmö encompassing the quarry site, cement factory, harbour and a large stretch of coastline, which it had bought for a song in the mid 1800s. The heavy downturn in the economy led to huge job losses in the city, decimating the shipyards and textile industries, but the Euroc concern were more optimistic, building a decadent new corporate headquarters just to the north of the quarry, designed by renowned local architect Sten Samuelson. Politicians were searching for a solution to the city’s woes and Euroc had the answer - The Öresund bridge. The idea of a bridge between Denmark and Sweden had been floated many times before with a very detailed proposal drawn up in 1936, but the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s provided the right political climate for the project to finally gain support. The company sold a portion of its land to the government for the road and rail corridor, won the lucrative contract to provide cement for the project and gained development rights (worth several billion SEK) to develop their remaining land around the quarry, which was subsequently decommissioned in 1994, just before construction of the bridge was due to commence.

quarry, which would have been inundated with water to become a glistering lake. The visions came within a whisker of becoming reality, but the grand plans were halted by the newly elected social democratic government in 1994 which prefered instead to revitalise the former dockyards. After considering every conceivable use for the quarry site, including a golf course, theme park, shopping centre and motocross racetrack, the cement company decided instead to ‘donate’ the land to the Municipality to be preserved as a nature reserve, in return for increased development rights on their remaining land. You win some, you loose some. Pablo Picasso once famously stated that “every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” The quarry could be considered to be the collective accumulation of destruction required for the production of a certain amount of urban space. The same could be said of alternative places of material extraction, usually situated on the periphery of our perception, and concealed from our day to day lives, be it the large monocultural timber plantations spread throughout Scandinavia or the massive open cut iron ore mine of Kiruna. The effects of the construction industry are not limited to our urban environments, but permeate across the landscape leaving deep, lasting scars in the earth. The rise of a collective environmental consciousness and a focus on sustainability has led to many significant improvements, but progress now seems stalled, with the rhetorics of sustainability now so thoroughly integrated into the neoliberal system. We seem completely incapable of steering ourselves clear of inevitable ecological catastrophe, despite the green labels we stick to our products and our buildings.

Today the former Euroc corporate headquarters has been transformed into a luxury residential complex called Victoria Park; the first gated community in Sweden. It sounds completely absurd that a suburban office building on the edge of a loud dusty quarry would one day become an exclusive apartment complex marketed for its ‘urban lifestyle’ and ‘unique natural environment’, but it’s a transformation that was seemingly anticipated by the cement company. A smooth transition from industrial modernism to late capitalism (or postmodernism) - “All that is solid melts into air” - or as Mark Fisher has recently put it, “All that is solid melts into PR.”6 Victoria Park is not alone, and there is a steadily expanding ensemble of new development creeping up around the rim of the quarry, with alluring names such as “Grand Canyon”, “The Coral” and “The Chalk House”. The cement company originally had much grander ambitions for the site, proposing to build a visionary new city centred around the former

A possible way beyond this impasse may be to reconsider the processes of destruction inherent in the formation of our urban landscapes. To understand these manufactured and corrupted environments as pieces of architecture with their own distinctive design logic; the unintended result of human decisions. Donna Haraway would call these places cyborg landscapes -“a creature of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”.7 This realisation that everything (and everywhere)

uselessness which invigorates this place as a site of resistance - an island refuge surrounded by the turbulent seas of liquid modernity. A site of subtle resistance to use, value, function, profit, management and organisation demanded of the neoliberal capitalist regime where everyone and everything is put to work.

is contaminated, manipulated and constructed by humans may break our naive conception that nature can still (if ever) exist as a separate entity, and allow us to embrace the uncertain potential that a cyborg conception of space may offer. ***

We descended cautiously into this uncanny territory, curious to uncover its secrets, its mysteries, its treasures. We were explorers, adventurers, cyber archaeologists excited to encounter this new land for the first time, to map its unknown contours and make discoveries which we could take back to the surface, back to our work, our practices, our studios, our real life. But we soon became disoriented, confused, hesitant…The world of the quarry was also ‘real’, and suddenly the city above appeared to us as a strange fiction, an imaginary construction of artificial borders, rules and constraints which we abide by unquestioningly. We were not entering a new world, escape is impossible, but rather we had arrived at a point where we could view our reality from a different vantage point. In the stillness of the quarry our thoughts became focused and our perception was intensified as we came to realise that the future still exists.

During the summer of 2015 a diverse group of architects, artists, researchers and filmmakers from varying parts of the world gathered on the site of this exhausted limestone quarry to take part in the workshop “Monument to the Rubble of the Future”. For a brief moment they escaped the (de)pressing reality of life here in the overdeveloped north and explored the possibility of an alternative world. A world existing parallel to our own just below the threshold of perception, hidden among the glistening ruins of the present. The group set up a temporary campsite on a small grassy meadow wedged between the precipice of this vast manufactured crater and an encroaching mass of polite Swedish suburbia. A tentative nomadic occupation which would function as a transitory space between these two worlds, like the base camp of Mount Everest or a research station in Antarctica. A liminal space almost completely detached from its mundane urban surroundings save for one lengthy electrical cable thirsting after the comfort of the grid (and the ubiquitous invisible radio waves feeding our telephones) . Yet this camp was not of the other world of the quarry either; the vast depleted landscape lay below us like a returned garden of eden. Twenty years had passed since the site was last ravaged by machines, and a thick organic blanket now shrouded the pit, rustled occasionally by the trajectory of a fleeing deer or wild hare. This is their world now and even though humans and their machines were responsible for creating this unintended sunken oasis through over a century of exploitation and material extraction, it seemed we had also somehow lost our claim to be there, to occupy, to inhabit this emerging fragile landscape. A paradise not lost, but regenerated from the rubble and debris we left behind after moving our machines onward toward new frontiers to be put to use. Yet it is precisely this perceived

The works published in this volume are merely small fragments of a collective experience which took place at a specific location at a specific time, whose totality can never be represented or recreated. This is a book of translations, interpretations, stutters and partial accounts which are continuously in play, gaining new meanings and insights as they merge with other idea’s and experiences. Angelica Falkeling’s exquisitely crafted floral tent seems to grow from the barren soil of the quarry like a rare species of orchid, a delicate sanctuary which could so easily be crushed by a runaway boulder. The accompanying text “To Anji’s Children” recalls a dialogue between the artist and the children of Palestinian refugees living in Sweden which in turn enters into its own dialogue with images of the tent, creating new layer of meaning and opening up new possibilities of interpretation.

Tatiana Stadnichenko’s “Lost in Transposition” is a reflection on movement in time and space, based on the artists personal experience of moving from Russia to the Scandinavian peninsula. A series of aerial images slowly drift across a fabric screen, which is itself fluttering in the wind. Even if we try to remain stationary we are inevitably caught up in the slow drift of the world which will carry us away.

Sofie Tolf, Nora Yous, Luis Lanfredi and Bihter Celik’s “Skarne 66” is a poetic interpretation of the mass produced prefabricated concrete housing system of the same name, which was used extensively during the million homes program of the 1960s and 1970s. The ephemeral sculpture is based on the dimensions of a typical three bedroom unit commonly found throughout Sweden - a ghostly reminder of the transformation and transportation of material removed from the site into the structures of our domestic landscapes.

Erika Henriksson’s “Window”, explores the multiple viewpoints from which one can observe the landscape. The window is not only a frame which directs our gaze, but is also the eye which gazes upon us, an apparatus for vision as well as surveillance.

Dick Hedlund’s “Elements” consists of a series of vibrant textile sculptures scattered throughout the landscape. These ‘fragments’ of otherness starkly contrast with the washed out tones of the quarry reinforcing their foreignness, but in doing so also undermine the perceived ‘naturalness’ of the environment. Nature no longer exists as a separate entity, what we have instead are simply varying tones of artificiality.

***

Matthew Ashton’s “Paleotechnics” makes reference to the term coined by Luis Mumford in Technics and Civilization to describe the early period of the industrial revolution where man desired to conquer nature by force. The work explores notions of destruction and renewal, and the emancipatory potential of time.

Notes: 1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project (Cambridge: Belknip Press, 2002) 2. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) 3. An exceptionally cold winter in early 1658 allowed King X Gustav of Sweden to cross the Great Belt with his army to occupy the Island of Zealand, dealing Fredrick III of Denmark with a crushing blow and forcing him to sign the treaty of Roskilde, which ceded a third of the kingdoms territory to Sweden, including Scania (Skåne) 4. See Adrian Forty’s book “the culture of concrete” for a thorough reflection on the place of concrete within modernity: Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012) 5. The Million Programme (Swedish: Miljonprogrammet) is the common name for an ambitious public housing programme implemented in Sweden between 1965 and 1974 by the governing Swedish Social Democratic Party. 6. Mark Fischer, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (Ropley: Zero books, 2009) The original quote is from the communist manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - also essay by Marshall Berman (1982) 7. Donna Haraway “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. (New York: Routledge, 1991)

Beatrice Orlandi’s “Afterhuman” is a beautifully suggestive film, blurring the boundaries between human, animal and machine. A strange staggering figure moves toward the camera, its form merging with the landscape in the glare of a strong midday sun. Is it a parched human returning from the desert, the mutilated survivor of a nuclear catastrophe or something else less human? Marianne Skaarup’s “Exoskeletons” takes the work and writings of Robert Smithson as a point of departure, recording an entropic landscape of decaying concrete structures through series of photographs and collages. The structures exude an eerily organic resemblance as their rusting steel skeletons protrude from their smooth concrete skin, reminding us that even concrete and steel return to the earth eventually.

FIELD NOTES PETER LANG MALMÖ, 24.06.2015: After walking across shopping mall parking lots and half built residential construction sites, the Rubble Group I was tagging along with turned towards a wide open landscape, gradually approaching a huge excavated void looming against the flat horizon. It took another half hour to reach the ‘base-camp’ a sliver of land where this odd band of explorers intended to set up some tents and unload their equipment. I had just enough time to get this far and peak around before I would have to dodge back to Stockholm. I did find a brief moment to stare over the edge down into the quarry site. It gave me a creeping sense of a deja-vu, I saw myself standing somewhere in a future pasttense, more precisely inside the lunar scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey, where a number of space suited scientists were poised in front of a rectangular manmade crater. While here in Malmö we were just meters away from fancy residences and golf clubs, I couldn’t dismiss the impression that I was facing a dark mystery. I was ready to clasp my ears.

utopian community functioned to seductively fictionalize this remote environment. They assembled ziggurats of stone and scrappy wood towers, bound together with fabric that stretched up to the cave’s upper perimeters. Their choreographed rituals resembled hard rock Phalansteries… To understand what kind of intervention took place during the week’s campout in Malmö, one needs to imagine this kind of clash of contexts, thick with future histories and past memories. Monument to the Rubble of the Future unwinds itself deep within these abandoned crevices and pits, burrowing tightly into this lost environment’s underbelly. You get the sense that something is getting released up into the atmosphere. Could it be the shrouded ghosts of that gravity-less dark obelisk? ***

There might have been something similarly visceral when Robert Smithson decided, back in 1969, to bring a dump truck filled with asphalt to an old gravel quarry just outside Rome. Smithson’s obsession with natural entropic processes inspired him to create an act of recycling, reintroducing the primary elements to their origins. I eventually visited this site with the Rome based urban arts group Stalker some 25 years after the “flow” took place. There I got the strong sense that the American artist’s action was still ongoing, still spilling ever so slowly into the newest layers of modern day Rome, as the city grew ever denser all around. I also was reminded of the outdoor seminars— the “Culturally Impossible Architectures” staged in an open excavation planned in the hills of Monselice, by the group Cavart, whose use of an abandoned quarry to build a temporary

Cavart’s Seminar “For a Culturally Impossible Architecture” Cava Montericco, Monselice (Padova),1975. (Cavart are Pier Paola Bortolami, Piero Brombin, Michele De Lucchi, Boris Pastrovicchio, Valerio Tridenti)

TILL ANJI’S BARN ANGELICA FALKELING Vid Årsta torg finns Stockholms bästa falafel. Det är en av sönernas födelsedag. Han fyller åtta år. Han sitter tyst och fnissig vid andra sidan utav bordet. Vi träffas för att Anjis och Amjads barn ska få fråga allt de vill om Palestina. Barnen har nämligen aldrig varir där. De tror inte på föräldrarnas berättelser. Maryam, deras 13-åriga dotter frågar sin pappa om jag är rasist. Jag vill tänka att hon får fråga, att det är legitimt. Han ser skamset ner i bordet. Jag ler försiktigt. Jag försöker säga att det är okej, att hon visst får fråga, men förmår inte säga något. Jag sitter tyst. Amjad svarar att hon är lite för orädd och stor i mun. Jag säger att det är en bra egenskap. Yahya, en av sönerna drar mig i armen och frågar om de är krig, om en hör bomber och om de går bra att bo där. Det är krig säger jag, men jag hörde inga bomber, men vet att de när som helst skulle kunna falla. Det går bra att bo där, men det är också världens största fängesle. Jag hörde många skott. “Är du rädd” frågar jag. “Nä” svarar han. Amjad berättar om hur Yahya är en av Sveriges bästa shackspelare för sin ålder. Han har även fått alla rätt på provet rörande Sveriges landskap. Yahya säger att han tycker om skolan. Jag ler och ber honom att lära sig världens alla huvudstäder istället, säger att inga vuxna pratar om landskap och att jag inte förstår varför de fortfarande lär sig dem. Ingen av oss vid bordet vet i vilket landskap Stockholm ligger. Vi gissar på Södermanland. Uppland. Yahya fortsätter att berätta att de kanske kommer tvinga att stänga deras skola i Bagarmossen dit föräldrarna dagligen kör sina barn tidigt på morgonen från deras lägenhet i utkanten av Södertälje. “Varför kan den komma att stängas?” frågar jag. “Nazisterna kommer dit och förstör,” säger han. “Är de där på dagen också, när ni är där, slår dem er?” “Nä, inte än,” säger han.

‫إىل أبناء انجي‬ ‫ قيس عسايل‬:‫ترجمة‬

TO ANJI’S CHILDREN Translated by Matthew Ashton

‫ يف عيد مولد‬.‫يف أوشتا ويف داخل أفضل مكان للفالفل يف ستوكهومل‬ ‫ هو يجلس صامتا‬.‫ سيبلغ الثامنية أعوام‬،‫أحد أبناء انجي وأمجد‬ ‫ يسألني األبناء خالل لقاءنا عن كل ما‬،‫ يتحرك مبكانه بخجل‬،‫بقريب‬ ‫ وهذا‬.ً‫ التي مل يزورونها مطلقا‬.‫لديهم من تساؤوالت حول فلسطني‬ .‫بالرغم من استيائهم ومللهم لالستامع واالصغاء لقصص والديهم‬

Just by Årsta square is a place that makes Stockholm’s best falafel. It’s one of the sons birthday. He’s turning eight. He sits quietly, giggling on the other side of the table. We meet so that Anji and Amjad’s children can ask everything they want to know about Palestine. They have in fact never been there. They don’t believe their parents stories.

‫ كم‬.‫ تسأل والدها ان كنت عنرصية‬،ً‫ ابنة الثالثة عرش عاما‬،‫مريم‬ ‫ وأنه سؤال‬.‫أود أن تعلم مريم أن من حقها أن تسأل هذا السؤال‬ .‫ حيث أمجد ينظر لتحت الطاولة بخزي لسؤالها‬.‫مرشوع لها‬

Maryam, their thirteen year old daughter, asks her father if I’m a racist. I want to think that she can ask, that its a legitimate question. He looks ashamedly down at the table. I smile cautiously. I want to tell her that its ok, that of course she can ask, but I’m unable to say anything. I sit in silence. Amjad cuts in and says she is a little too bold and has a big mouth. I say that’s a good characteristic to have.

‫ أنه بالطبع‬،‫ أريد أن أقول لها أنه يشء طبيعي‬.‫أنا أبتسم بحذر‬ .‫ أجلس بصمت‬.‫ ولكني غري قادرة لقول يشء‬،‫من حقها أن تسأل‬ ‫ حيث أقول‬.‫يقاطعني أمجد ويقول أن مريم جريئة جدا وفمها كبري‬ .‫أن هذه صفة جيدة لديها‬ .‫ليسأل ان كان هناك حرب‬ ‫ يسحبني من ذراعي‬،‫ أحد األبناء‬،‫يحيى‬ ‫ان كنت أستطيع سامع انفجارات وان كان من املمكن العيش‬ ‫ بالرغم‬،‫ ولكن مل أسمع صوت أي انفجارات‬،‫ أرد‬،‫هناك؟ انها حرب‬ ‫ من املمكن‬.‫من أين علمت أنها ممكن أن تسقط هناك بأي لحظة‬ ‫ سمعت العديد من‬.ً ‫ إنها أشبه بسجن كبري جدا‬.‫العيش هناك‬ .‫الطلقات النارية‬

Yahya, one of the sons, pulls me by the arm and asks if there is war, if you can hear bombs and if its really possible to live there? It is war, I answer, but I didn’t hear any bombs, although I knew that they could fall at any time. It’s possible to live there, but it’s also the worlds largest prison. I heard many gun shots. “Are you afraid” I ask. “Naah”, he replys

”‫أسأل “هل أنت خائف‬ ”‫يرد “ال‬

Amjad tells me that Yahya is one of Sweden’s best chess players for his age. He even got all the right answers in a quiz on Sweden’s provinces. Yahya tells me he likes school. I smile and tell him to learn the capital cities of the world instead, say that no grown-ups ever talk about Swedish provinces and that I don’t understand why they still teach them at school. None of us there at the table know which province Stockholm belongs to. We guess Södermanland. Uppland. Yahya continues to tell us that they might be forced to close their school in Bagarmossen, where their parents drive them daily early each morning from their apartment on the outskirts of Södertälje.

‫يقول يل أمجد بأن يحيى أحد أفضل العبي الشطرنج يف السويد يف‬ ‫ يعرب يل‬.‫ وقد أجاب عن جميع أسئلة امتحان أقاليم السويد‬.‫عمره‬ ‫ أبتسم وأقول له أن يدرس ويحفظ عواصم‬.‫يحيى عن حبه للمدرسة‬ ‫ حيث مل أجد أي أحد يتحدث عن أقاليم السويد‬.‫العامل باملقابل‬ ‫ مل يعرف‬.‫وال أفهم ملاذا ال يزالون يقومون بتعليم هذا باملدرسة‬ ‫ نتكهن بأن تكون‬.‫أحد منا عىل الطاولة ألي مقاطعة تتبع ستوكهومل‬ ‫ يكمل يحيى‬.‫ مثال أو أبالند‬.‫سوديرمانالند‬ ،‫ليخربنا أنه من املمكن أن يقوموا بإغالق مدرستهم يف باجارموسني‬ ‫وهو املكان الذي يوصلهم إليه أمجد وانجي من مكان سكنهم يف‬ .‫سوديرتاليا‬

“Why would it be shut down?” I ask. “The Nazi’s come there and mess it up” he says. “Are they also there during the day when you’re there? Do they hit you?” “Naah, not yet,” he replies.

”‫أسأل “ملاذا من املمكن أن يتم اغالق املدرسة؟‬ ”‫يرد “جاء النازيون وقاموا بتخريبها‬ ”‫“هل يتواجدون أثناء دوامك املدريس؟ هل يعتدون عليك؟‬ ”‫ ليس بعد‬،‫يرد “ال‬ 15

PALEOTECHNICS MATTHEW ASHTON The end of the world has already happened Countless times before

But as one world ends another is forged A constant process of destruction and production The possibility of another world haunts us Stalking in the shadows of reality

It ended just before midday yesterday And some 65 million years earlier It ended on October 10, 1492 It ended on January 26, 1788 It ended on April 10, 1815 It ended on August 6, 1945 It ended on January 12, 2010

Sometimes we encounter it in dreams Wandering the plains of the unconscious Or glimpse it while awake A ghostly presence A glitch in the program A peek behind the drapes of our lived fictions

Sometimes its occurrence goes by unnoticed A gentle breeze from an unfamiliar origin A slight drop in air pressure An increase in temperature A birdsong out of season The cries of an unsettled cat And the world ends in loneliness Somewhere

A moment of intense clarity A moment of total confusion A moment of escape A second, a minute, an hour, a day A week, a month, a year, a millennium A lifetime Time does not stand still, time is restored Replenished, released, emancipated From the shackles of civilization Free to cascade forth

At other times it comes like a tempest A ravaging gale, a vengeful sea A violent geologic force Brutally rupturing the earth Remaking it anew

Unhindered Unorganized Unmanaged Unplanned Uncalculated

The end is a place, a time, an event Recorded in absence In emptiness In nonexistence Of Life Of People Of Language

Time endowed once more with mystery With ambivalence,imagination and possibility Like before when the future still existed And the world was made of water and stone.

The end is a rift, a void, a cavity A space reinforced by its own lack A negated city An empire of nothing

ELEMENTS DICK HEDLUND I had still to contemplate this as we walked, I was more concerned with PL’s waining energy, I kept feeding him nuts and berries while he was leaning against the hay bale, the little salsiccia’s furious barking still ringing in our ears, the woman either yelling at us or the little shit is unclear. I never felt tired or I did, but not in that sense.

An article cited that a horrifying amount of students at a university in the south of Sweden sought help for their addiction to a certain VOD service. Enough of the smut, lets talk collective joy, yes let’s celebrate, because when you are crossing streams and building bridges, snapping twigs and climbing fences you are affected by your surroundings, and we need to be affected. In society we affect our surroundings, turn on the light, play with the app, drive there, do this.

Nowadays tiredness comes in a different form, the over explosion of the blue blue light, the midday, the 7 inch screen, the carryon luggage and our perpetual noise machine chugging away at a constant pace. Drone.

As we walk through the terrain vague we affect our self, we fill our senses with the other, the constant, the decay, the rebirth and some might find their place in this and others don’t.

J, we never met but fuck you and your waterfall we were purists and stuck to the narrative. Cheeks burning red while waiting in the chartered bus, we were too fatigued, the joy we felt for seeing the big sillouette roll up, and the snarky guy with all the gear.

My energy was waining, the blue light strong. I found beauty in the plastic casings of copper cable, scattered about, stomped into the dirt outside the city, the randomness became pattern, remnant of other time, other socioeconomic class, other intent, other drive. Ours to survey, to prospect, to finish, our academia to be inspired maybe.

J, it was too dark anyways, and I was just longing for a nice shower and meal. The ruins were a construct, they played on our immediate love for the desolate, for the seemingly post-apocalyptic, but the people who mill about there, to them it is all but romantic, we are the aliens in this scene, we collect and prod, climb up the highest stairs to survey what strange place we have landed in. Measure and document, collecting samples.

The others shaved those cables where we stood, we were happy and fatigued as the sun set over the soviet era block housing and the bunker we stood upon, sun in our eyes, passing the life-water between us. This halfway mark an achievement for us, a bleak everyday to the other.

Is here a possible place for rest or restitution, can we make something out of it?

“hey hey, just 10 km left everybody up in five!”

Academia, no, anthropology, we are scouring the post USSR chemical factory, in search for where the light hits just right, #nofilter.

The others not the others. Could be us, but are not.

I’m not cynical, but a hypocrite, I too fancy the derelict, and find the concrete arousing. Now the ground is covered and time past, geological necrophilia is not a term, but somehow fitting.

This diary except was written while tracing the spaces of Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, accompanying a diverse group of walkers on a gruelling 50 km trek from Tallinn to the Jägala falls, via the heavy industrial city of Maardu in October 2015.

SKARNE 66 SOFIE TOLF. NORA YOUS, LUIS LANFREDI BIHTER ÇELIK

A fenced off nature reserve in an old mine is a strange combination. Who is claiming the space besides the 1400 species that has returned since the mining stopped? The view of it is surely gained by the inhabitants of Sweden’s first gatedcommunity. Perhaps the place could belong to everyone living in the homes constructed by the cement produced by the extracts from the mine. Or is it reserved for a future tribe?

and create a variation of flats. It has an inherent flexibility where all inner walls can be moved. The grid was assembled to resemble a 3 bedroom apartment of 90m2 in the Skarne 66 system. Östberga, Orminge, Tensta, Flen, Säter, Ålidhem, Kälvesta, Åmål, Rosengård, just a few of the many areas built during the Million Homes Programme. Almost everyone in Sweden has, or knows someone who is (or has) lived in one of the many apartments built during this time. The 90m2 grid, made up out of vaguely recognisable space was carried home.

We carried the structure down to the bottom of the quarry. Violet lupines were growing in straight lines, cutting through the asphalt. If you would perceive the temperature through vision, you would assume that the pale bright reflection of the limestone belonged to a warmer climate. The full depth of the 55 meter deep quarry was excavated over 78 years. The limestone was created in a warm ocean 65-62 million years ago out of outwash from algae and coral. In many layers you find coprolite from extinct species. Sharks teeth and crocodiles. The wooden frames were prepared at the campsite. The light structure constructed out of wood and fabric was built on the same grid as the construction system Skane 66. The construction system is a concrete panel system based on ready - to - install floor sections. The width is 270 cm with load-bearing external walls, and centrally placed columns. It is a grid that can be combined in several different typologies

AFTERHUMAN BEATRICE ORLANDI The camera captures a post-apocalyptic ground. A virgin site.Â Searching for humanity after the end of the contemporary. A state easily colonized by human after-acts. The focus wanders over forms that seem to live outside familiar categorizations.Â Do we see a human? An animal? A machine? A girl? A piece of rock? The video is shot at a time when the one expected to answer is absent. Otherworldliness is a new a geological era, an environmental transcendence.

LOST IN TRANSPOSITION TATIANA STADNICHENKO The same wind that creates resistance also gives a lift.

They were full of empty zones. He could see around hollow corners. As soon as she handled the ground it disappeared or floated around. It had no borders no race, but there had been a lot of space.

Their hand lines were synchronized with the pattern of the land of their grandma. Rivers had been flowing, waterfalls had been falling, and clouds had covered the top of that local hill for thousands years.

They were able to see gaps between their fingers and broken threads between memories and feelings. She came here to show them flights of houses and they could teach her how to get rid of the mouse. They could take the piece of land and grow unknown plants on it, but instead they cultivated the metaphysical halls in their minds.

They could walk with water, the same time as he could have a monologue with walls. She could hook an Island. Together they could make it roll around. Social gossip taught him to keep the silence. Cold countries improved their solitude. They took an internal train to the next level, where itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still possible to get lost; to discover the new planet.

There was no way back, no way back, no way back.

WINDOW ERIKA HENRIKSSON M/ So there we have it, it’s not easy.

I was drawn to the tension in the dual perspective of the place. On one hand concrete facts about its materialisation, but at the same time the visual summons the imagination; daydreams which inscribe another story into the quarry. what people created this place? how did they live their lives? how did they relate to each other?

E/ No. But what did you say to each other at Christmas? M/ you know, he was like, junked-up, so it was impossible to have a normal conversation. I thought he was a little, like, detached, you know, like you put a coin in the machine and then it just babbles on. Anyway, he was like that, and they hadn’t really done anything, you know. He hardly even has a family, and anyway, they don’t even celebrate holidays and birthdays and all that.

Perhaps they simply dug to dig, searching inwards, downwards, to constantly examine existence through action. They lived in provisional hollows they dug out, levels and surfaces where they ate and slept, before digging further. But I already knew the reason this place was created…. Standardised houses, standardised elements, standardised windows. The triumph of efficiency, powers which easily dominate weakness, uncertainty, searching.

His parents are separated, so him and his mum usually go to some christmas dinner in the Old Town and then go to see a christmas concert. They had gone and picked up his grandma, because she’s moved into a home, but they still have her apartment. So they went there, to the apartment, even though no one was actually living there. Anyway, they went there and celebrated christmas for like two hours, and then she got picked up and taken back to the home, and then they went back to his mums place, and who knows what they did there, and then they went someplace else. You know, I’ve no idea really, he mostly just talked about traveling back and forth between different places. But I don’t know, like I said, he was just babbling on last we spoke, and he wasn’t really there, or how should I say... E/ Well, isn’t it common for people to be a little like that? M/ So we didn’t say anything in particular to each other really. E/ Do you miss him?

EXOSKELETONS MARIANNE SKAARUP “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.” - Robert Smithson

Notes: 1. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 54. 2. Ron Graziani, Robert Smithson and the American Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 19. 3. Ibid.

Robert Smithson’s essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (1967) has its basis in the picturesque-sublime—a category and a praxis organised around strategies of experiencing a landscape. According to Ron Graziani, “The modern theory of the picturesque revolves around how a natural setting is ‘staged’ in artistic terms—that is, the (art)ificial mimicking the natural, yet as if the chosen latter had imitated the former.”1 In this experience, what transpires is an objectification of the physical environment, which is experienced here as a painting or a drawing. The landscape’s immediacy is distanced; by this means, it is perceived as a form of aesthetic experience with predefined standards: “Before long, the aesthetic category of the picturesque-sublime had become a series of artistic practices that gave visual shape to a kind of dialectical nonplace, wedged as it was between a nostalgia for Edenic pasts and the fears of what that meant in futuristic terms.”2

It’s easy to lose one’s temporal orientation. Is this place under construction or under demolition? Are we in a ruin or are we standing in the middle of a construction site for the future? Or has everything been frozen at the point just prior to a collapse?

AFTER THE END MATTHEW ASHTON Amid the wilderness stood an engineer - not an old man, but grey from the calculation of nature. He pictured the whole world as a dead body, judging it from those parts of it that he had already converted into structures: the world had always yeilded to his attentitive, imagining mind that was limited only by the inertness of nature; if material always gave in to precision and patience, then it must be deserted and dead.

We drift further and further into uncertainty, edging closer to the point beyond which there is no return. We stare solemnly ahead toward some impossible point on the horizon; searching desperately for the faint outline of land, an island of refuge, the promise of sustainability, green growth and the post fossil fuel economy. The promise of a return to the comfort of the normal, the predictable, the planned, the rational. A return to business as usual without the pesky threat of total global destruction hanging over our heads. But as the seas swell and the heat rises we still cling helplessly to this hope of somehow preserving this meticulously crafted world we have constructed for ourselves - a world ruled by the incontestable logic of the market and the infinite horizon of growth, fuelled by the consumption, exploitation and dislocation of life forms, both living bodies and their long dead hydrocarbon remains. A world we seem so determined to preserve to the exclusion of all others.

- Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit.1

Today we are living through the times of the end. First we witnessed the end of history, so famously proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama following the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, with Liberal democracy since triumphing in all but a handful of rouge holdout states. Then we experienced the end of memory following the digital turn. The swift rise and ubiquity of the internet and computing technologies has had a profound effect on how we access and disseminate information, facilitating a process of mental outsourcing as we shift our knowledge storage from the brain to the database, knowing everything is only ever a google search away. Social networking platforms have also radically altered our memories, recording our life events in high definition, before replaying them back to us wrapped in targeted advertising. In a world where everything is recorded, saved and stored, nothing is remembered. Now we are coming to terms with the end of nature. The now undisputed

acceptance that human actions have brought about a radical change to the earths atmosphere, not to mention the biosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere has destroyed the perceived image of the earth as a natural harmonious whole. Nature as an ideal state distinctly separate from that which is human can no longer be sustained.

build, build, build - bigger, faster, better. Today’s problems are often blamed on modernism, utopian ambitions and the unfulfilled promises of welfare state urbanism, yet we fail to see the hypocrisy of our own conceited attitude. As the end of the world looms on the horizon we barricade ourselves behind the solemn facades of the nostalgia of the present, reassured by our polite surroundings and curated cosmopolitan diversity. Maybe it’s time for architects to move away briefly from their urban microscopes and re-engage once again with the world outside.

Have we now also reached the end of the future? In the times of the end, the future has become an event that we cannot allow to happen, a moment that must be postponed for eternity. We must sustain ourselves, our present, our lifestyles, our economies, our wealth, our privilege. The future is a storm brewing on the horizon, threatening to wash all this away. Our current commitment to sustainability now appears as a faithful dedication to the perpetuation of the status quo, no longer holding any aspirations for the possibility of creating another world. Sustainability has become a mechanism of defence intended to hold the end at bay for as long as possible, an admirable endeavour for sure, but if this also dissolves the possibility of a future in the process then maybe it’s time to start thinking about another approach - one which is capable of moving beyond the stifling paralysis of the eternal present and begin to imagine the possibility of other worlds after the end.

The end of nature has unexpectedly brought with it the return of history - Not the classical chronological history of kings and empires, people and events, but another history, indifferent to the greatness of individuals and the feats of human civilisation. The slow creep of geologic time is suddenly upon us, revealing an alternative history of human endeavours compressed in the striated layers of the earth. The return of history does not resemble the heroic excavations carried out in the past, the discovery of buried cities and ancient civilisations. It instead announces itself in the mundane fossilised elements of the present - concrete, plastic, steel and aluminium. The pulverised remains of our consumerist suburban lifestyles now marking a distinctive band in the earths geology, a thin yet all-pervasive layer of debris signalling that we have well and truly departed from the Holocene and entered a new geological time period manifest in human contamination at the level of rocks.

Architecture as a discipline deeply concerned with the spatial and temporal constructions of our environment should be at the forefront of exploring alternative paths beyond the present, imaging new worlds yet to emerge as it has done in past heroic epochs, yet we seem daunted by the task. Instead we have been seduced by the cult of the city, mesmerised by the incomprehensible beauty of datascapes, and drawn to the god like powers promised with biomimicry. Each sub culture preaches sustainability, salvation, a solution to the ecological crisis, the economic crisis, the social crisis… all we have to do is

This new period of geological time we are entering is now commonly referred to as the ‘Anthropocene’, a term coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermerand and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen back in the 1980’s. Others have suggested alternative names such as Jason Moore’s ‘Capitalocene’ and Donna Haraways evocative ‘ Chthulucene’ referring to the octopoid monster of H. P. Lovecrafts stories. It could

also be called the ‘Urbanocene’ as the defining features of this new period are invariably linked to our built environments and the rapid global rise in urbanisation starting with the industrial revolution. Just at the moment we feel resigned to a dull existence in the eternal present the anthropocene emerges,thrusting forth a powerful ambiguous historical force capable reshaping the future, and rousing us from our current stasis. This intense geologic force has also brought with it the re-emergence of a type of built structure not seen in recent times - the return of the monument.

impotence, but our omnipotence, we do not even know the scope of our omnipotence”2. Suddenly traces of human agency are everywhere, floating in the stratosphere above our heads and slowly sifting through the layers of rock beneath our feet, as well as located within the very cellular tissues composing our organic bodies. It is in this context that a new form of monument begins to emerge - manmade structures embodying history but capable of warning us of the dangers ahead. These monuments are generally not found among the towering icons of capital rising above our cities, or even within sight of the urban agglomerations most of us now call home, even though they are inseparably related to these manufactured habitats. Instead they litter the peripheral edge of our predominately urban world, not hidden from view but intentionally forgotten, somehow erased from our conscience in the same way the stain of sweatshop labour is cleansed from our new clothes and the trace of delicate fingers wiped clean from our electronic equipment. The monuments of the future do not announce themselves in glorious mass and imposing edifices, in grand gestures and regal elegance, in public pride and patriotic hues. The monuments of the future speak in profound silence, claim no allegiance to a people or country and assert themselves in an overpowering emptiness, an absolute absence.

The origin of the word “monument” comes from the Latin (mono, monere) which means to remind, to advise, to warn. A monument had a function to recall, to animate the past, whether an event, person or other significant occurrence, in order to visualise the future. A monument was not simply a passive artefact to commemorate the dead of war or a significant poet or statesman, but had a much more operative function to project the events of the past into the future in order to guide the present. Today with the exhaustion of history, memory and nature the prescient function of the monument in our urban environments has been made redundant and replaced by that of the icon, which incidentally comes from the greek word for image. The icon does not embody past events in order to influence future decisions, it has no interest in such concerns. The icon functions as representation, not projection. In the past the most profuse user of the icon was the church, mass producing images of christ and other heavenly figures in order to ensure devotion and compliance. Today that role has been replaced by global capitalism, with the Icon becoming the embodiment of capital itself, the representation of monetary value.

The monuments of the future are the exhausted sites of production and extraction which now sprinkle the surface of the earth, The mines, quarries, excavated mountains and felled forests which represent our expended collective labour and dissipated consumption. Places where the thin organic carpet we generally refer to as ‘nature’ have been pulled back, revealing the dead body of the earth below, calculatingly removed in small segments by our hands and our machines to feed our unquenchable appetite. If there was such a deity as ‘mother earth’ then we are devouring her slowly in a form of geologic

As the implications of this return of history begin to dawn on us we are struck by a terrifying revelation, which Slavoj Zizek remarks as “ Not our

complex factors, but they have a form which is fluid and evolving, challenge the fixed gaze of the architect. What is the relationship between the form of a limestone quarry and the city of concrete it produces, as every new additional structure above produces a space of subtraction below?

cannibalism. But the presence of these sites has the potential to rupture our belief that the end of the world lies suspended on the horizon, when in fact it is situated right here in the present. The end of the world is localised, fragmented, phased, occurring at different places at varying times. While a catastrophic apocalyptic event such as the meteor impact which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is possible, it is unlikely. The end of the world is already happening, small fragments of destruction at a time - a depleted mine, an evaporated lake, a drowned atoll, a toxic river.

Monuments of the anthropocene are sites of resistance, providing a detour around the shimmering accumulations of capital which currently constitute our cities, opening up points of contact with the political geologies below - a position from which we may be able to contest neoliberal urbanism, undermining its unwavering fidelity to the prolongation of the status quo. An engagement with these exhausted sites of extraction opens up a dialogue with the end of the world beyond the current limits of sustainability, introducing once again the emancipatory power of an unmade future, a force which is necessary to bring about the possibility of the creation of alternative worlds.

While the emergence of the anthropocene has given us a new vantage point from which to view our substantial collective impact on the earth, we must resist the seductions of rocks. The anthropocene shouldn’t lure as away from the human perspective toward an abstract fascination in non human phenomena, but should instead compel us to weave new human relationships into geologic histories. The anthropocene is after all a political geology - not a neutral layer of sedimentation, but a contested site of power. If architecture can be understood as the embodiment of power structures and the reification of decision making processes, then the layer of human debris making up the anthropocene also represents ideology frozen in geology.

***

1. Andrey Platonov, The Foundation Pit (London: Vintage, 2010) 2. Lecture by Slavoj Zizek “ Nature does not Exist” viewable online here: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=DIGeDAZ6-q4

The potential for an architectural interest in the anthopocene is that it may lead the profession away from the grip of the ‘god trick’ - what Donna Haraway describes as the “conquering gaze from nowhere”3 personified in the figure of the architect as the creative genius producing meticulous plans for buildings, neighbourhoods, entire cities even, from the all seeing vantage point of his computer screen. The exhausted spaces of material extraction and production are also landscapes of intent with their own specific design logic, influenced by a myriad of

3. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” in Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Fall 1988) pgs. 575-599.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Project Co-ordinators:

Marianne Skaarup is an artist based in Copenhagen, primarily working with sculpture. Her work has a strong architectural quality, freezing objects and materials in a position between destruction and construction, ruination and rising.

Matthew Ashton is an architect and researcher based in Malmö, and co-founder of the Architectural collective SPARC. Matthew holds a Master of Fine Arts (Architecture) from the University of Umeå, a Bachelor of Architecture from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and has recently undertaken post graduate studies at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Matthew’s research work often explores the hidden edges of architecture and the urban environment, investigating sites of material production and extraction, the politics of speculative development and the large scale spatial consequences of our excessive consumption and production of real estate.

Tatiana Stadnichenko is a Russian artisit currently completing her M.F.A at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Sofie Tolf is an architect based in Malmö, and cofounder of the architectural collective SPARC. Nora Yous is currently completing her architectural studies at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Dick Hedlund is an artist based in Malmö, currently completing his M.F.A at the Malmö Art Academy. Dick’s work is often situated somewhere between sculpture and painting, exploring the boundaries separating the image from the object. His work is characterised by a depth and materiality, producing pieces which appear to extend beyond the bounds of the canvass, seemingly connected to another world of which we can only glimpse as fragments.

Other participants who took some part in the workshop include Johan Österholm, Henrique Pavão, and Peter Lang. Acknowledgements This Project was made possible by an artistic research and development grant from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm and we would like to thank the Institute for their generous financial support. We would also like the thank the Malmö Art Acadamy for generously loaning us equipment during the workshop held during the summer. Special thanks to Mats Wirén and the Department of Roads and Traffic at Malmö City Council for guiding us through the permit process and enabling the project to ‘legally’ go ahead. Thank you Peter and Lena Tolf for loaning us their car during the period of the workshop. Thank you to Almedahls in Kinna and F.O.V in Borås for donating fabric. Also a very special thank you to Professor Peter Lang, whose support and guidance throughout the entire project has been immensely appreciated.

Participants: Bihter Çelik is an architect based in Istanbul. She is co-founder of the architectural studio TRAK. Angelica Falkeling is a practicing artist, teacher and writer. Her work focuses on the quiet, soft, introverted and mute materials present within what is commonly considered to be verbal political arenas. Erika Henriksson is an architect and researcher, currently completing her PhD at NTNU, Trondheim. Her work explores the ‘process’ of building, investigating how the participation and engagement of ‘end users’ throughout the entire building process could inform an alternative approach to architectural design methods.

All images are copyright of workshop participants, except for the image on page 9 which is from the archive of Cavart and copyright of Michele De Lucchi.

Luis Lanfredi is a Brazilian architect currently working an architectural office in Stockholm.

Designed and Edited by Matthew Ashton.

Beatrice Orlandi is an artist working predominately with film and video. Originally trained as an architect, Orlandi’s work explores the relationship of the body to space, especially the strange new cyber spaces of our digital world.

MATTHEW ASHTON BIHTER ÇELIK ANGELICA FALKELING DICK HEDLUND ERIKA HENRIKSSON LUIS LANFREDI BEATRICE ORLANDI MARIANNE SKAARUP TATIANA STADNICHENKO SOFIE TOLF NORA YOUS