R LAB - Architecture, Design, Media by matthew ashton

Contents 2

Introduction

Assays

Michela Barone Lumaga

Rebecka Engvall

Anna Maria Furuland

Marta Gil

STALKER WALK STALKER

Antonie Grahamsdaughter

Johanna Jansson

Barthélémy Massot

Cecilie Meng

Beatrice Orlandi

THE MAGIC CIRCLE

Marie-Louise Richards

Valentina Santi Löw

Teres Selberg

Annika Thörn Legzdins

Anna Tullberg

Jakob Wiklander

Colaphon

Introduction By Peter Lang

This academic year, R-Lab basically became an instant fanclub of Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation here in Stockholm. Axel Wieder, the space’s director, kept a constant pace of new and exciting programs coming our way. And that’s why our initial preconceptions of how we would work together in the Fall gradually gave way to a series of adhoc responses to what we found going on there. Within the context of a post-graduate course, this would present a level of unpredictability that in the end suited perfectly our initial premise of dealing with game theory in the exploration of open form as premised by the Polish architect and artist Oskar Hansen. By the end it was evident there were no fixed points to hang on to, and our experience had in fact turned into an all-out free-for-all. R-Lab is designed to operate as a multi-disciplinary study platform for pursuing advanced individual research and collective projects, with this year’s focus on architecture, design and media. Each year, the collective project carries a sub-theme: last year it was the “alternative archive”, this year “game theory.” These sub-themes are directed towards the collective projects, so for example the assignment to discover new alternative archives aided the advancement of the group study on Frederick Kiesler, whose work was featured at the Tensta Konsthall, our partner institution for that year. The alternative archive examples presented in Take a Walk on the Wild Side, Learning from the City and Beyond, ended up insinuating themselves into both the larger group study and in the individual research projects, with impressive results when fed back into the urban centric narratives underway. The alternative archives indirectly or directly stimulated a number of individual urban based projects, highlighting just how innovative applications can shift or alter the ways we observe and interact in the city.

When it comes to this year’s collective study on Oskar Hansen, the ongoing parallel research on game theory succeeded in establishing a kind of working concept with which to tackle Oskar Hansen’s open form methodologies, without necessarily duplicating Hansen’s own procedures or results. The initial premise began with an overview of Oskar Hansen’s work, especially around the courses he conducted at the Art Academy for his students in Warsaw, and his odd but provocative countryside house, built on the principles of open form, and actualized as a kind of hands-on collaborative structure where each domestic element plugged in to a greater puzzle. We were in this manner privileged to join discussions on Hansen led by Axel Wieder, director of Index, and Aleksandra Kedziorek curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Our engagement with Oskar Hansen, through his exhibition Pedagogies of Space didn’t go exactly as we expected. For scheduling reasons, the Hansen show was installed in August, and already down by the time R-Lab assembled in September. What we had to work with were the photos of the installation, and clearly the books, interviews and outside sources. As the course participants developed strategies to create a politicized gaming response, Index introduced their next novelty, an exhibition on Simone Forti, Here it Comes, Works and Collaborations. Shifting gears, the collective project morphed into something that could in fact take excellent advantage of the new installation. The ensuing project, Game Time remained essentially a ludic exercise on the arbitrariness of citizenship, using the gallery space to play out a series of physical challenges that included Forte’s sloped climbing wall to be used blindfolded, a hopscotch across a grid of 50cm2s that designated the official spatial limits of homelessness; and personalized individual interactions, where members of the public were handed color coded ID cards indicating an alternative of room assignments that could either lead the 4

person to a room inexplicably filled with flowers or a closet filled with storage boxes. As is the case in the work of Oskar Hansen and similarly in the work of Simone Forti, the inherent spatial dynamics in their exhibits, or installations, are not completely meaningful without factoring in a further degree of engagement. In both the example of Hansen’s students splitting into flag waving teams in the Warsaw suburbs, or Forti choreographing banal urban spaces outside of LA, what becomes most striking is that these are not isolated moments, but rather generative processes that approximate public rituals or ceremonies. But to make spaces into places that are socially engaging is not exactly an effortless task. These two artists have each developed particular strategies that act to guide them along. Henri Lefebvre in his 1974 book The Production of Space, spoke of the difficulties of making a critique of space. According to Lefebvre there is no critique of space similar to the arts, or in literature: “Space is neither a thing or a person.” He talks about this detachment between on one hand imagining and the other the reality of the thing itself. A significant goal therefore is how to enact a criticality of space production that both deals with its imagining, that is the anticipation of something not yet there, and what actually is happening there, in the present time and space. This suggests to me that we can critique space by enacting space, through either game play, or through its physical real time mapping, diagramming, documenting. In other words to build a critical understanding of space, to set forth a pedagogy of space and spatial practices, it is critical to perform through the space itself in order to develop a sort of scale of criticalities. That’s how you can read both Hansen and Forti, as experimenting through space with their live works, and in the process actualizing something that is already inherently there. 5

Axel Wieder was once again ahead of us, as a subsequent exhibition at Index, Stephen Willats: THISWAY, billed as the first major exhibition in Sweden by the British conceptual artist, clearly demonstrated. Willats’ artistic career spanning some 50 years brings together field investigations, in some ways similar to Oskar Hansens’ outdoor exercises, with the specificity of bodily engagement, not unlike in the work of Simone Forti. But furthermore, there is Willats’ strong emphasis on tracking where things lead, conceptually something like a cultural mapping in real time and space, with the help of feedback diagrams, charts, and maps. This approach can translate initial research studies into meaningful lessons on how contemporary culture is constantly transformative, especially when we add the power of media into this dynamic equation. Take for example Willats’ observation on the use of Xerox photocopiers, in setting up a cultural revolution: Society appropriates those technologies that will reinforce its cultural ideology and certainly, in the case of communication technologies, facilitate its externalization into the social fabric. The relationship between communication technologies and the creation of culture is so inextricably bound up that innovations such as Xerox, Instant copying, can be seen actually to shape and create new culture (...) So the underlying but hidden social self-expression within society took the Xerox process out of the office into the agencying of new cultural forms, in which the encoding inherent in the Xerox process itself became a language Stephan Willats, “Xerox as an Agent of Social Change” in OE1 71/72 Mix-Up/Dig Out. Stockholm 2015. P 259

For Willats, the British Punk scene expanded rapidly thanks in part to the wide circulation of small Fanzine publications made possible by these Xerox copiers going from office spaces into neighborhood shops. What Willats points out is that it’s not enough to understand a phenomenon taking shape on the ground, in terms of a certain kind of socialization 6

and politicalization if one does not also understand the instrumentalisation of related forms of communication. You could say this is where the circle completes itself, when research becomes action, and action becomes communication. Not all the course participants were sucked up into the series of Index related events, as some were preoccupied with work they had initiated earlier in Detroit that took them outside the game theory orbit as they focused individually on issues around segregation and social justice. But overall, our ongoing relationship with Index remains pivotal to understanding R-Lab’s critical framework. The question that I put to Axel Wieder was whether institutional relationships as between public expository institutions—foundations, galleries and others, and academic institutions are increasingly becoming more intertwined, blurring distinctions, over the last couple decades, or are these relations in need of continuous renegotiations and re-positioning? Below is Wieder’s response: In my experience longer-term institutional relationships between arts organizations and academic institutions are still a relatively new form of collaboration, and there are two aspects: on the one hand, it’s supporting ambitions of arts organizations - let’s be very general for now - to become more aware and active of their role as educational facilities, making a distinction with the role of art on the market, as a commodity. In an educational setting, or with an understanding of an arts program as a tool that engages with an audience and aims to foster debate and the production of knowledge, the work of artists and other practitioners in the field has another role, providing an opportunity for diverse parts of society, which is also important in relation to an ethics of public funding, or the public sector. On the other hand, academic institutions, and especially art and design schools, are in a very direct way a very important part of the 7

audience for arts organizations in a city. It’s a vital part of the scene, and for me, in many ways, one of the most exiting parts, since here there is usually something new in the making, something that’s unexpected and not yet known. Collaborations, or longer-term institutional relationships, help to make these connections more productive, and to create a dialogue in which we are able to learn from each other. The work of institution is, in my view, always in the need of continuous re-negotiation and re-positioning, as you say. An institution is an interface between different interests and social vectors, and activities and policies are a way of negotiating these different aspects, creating relations and forming them into a practical, momentary reality. In our case, in the form of collaboration that we were able to develop, this means that we can’t be sure that we know what education, or learning, means for each of us, and at least for our part, we use this uncertainty productively to both test the concepts of pedagogy and our role as an institution. The opportunity to test this premise arrived once again via Index, in the context of a two-day conference held on the 25 and 26 of February and that revisited the themes of Oskar Hansen, “Pedagogies of Space.” R-Lab directly contributed to the production of this event, as well as staging a re-enactment of the R-Lab Game-Time workshop held earlier at Index. Organized in collaboration with Aleksandra Kedziorek, from Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, the speakers included Axel Wieder, Eva Diaz, Oscar Andrade Castro, Anna Molska, Alina Serban, Tor Lindstrand, Kristina Lindemann, Jens Evaldsson, Sam Thorne, Kuba Szreder, Alberto Iacovoni, Peter Lang, Magnus Ericsson, Florian Zeyfang and Christina Pech. The two-day event received the generous support of the Polish Institute in Stockholm. The stated purpose, was to consider “space both as a learning environment and a teaching tool, 8

the seminar gathered postwar and contemporary examples of pedagogical practices that question and reshape established sites and modes of creative education.” It would turn out to be an optimal premise on which to peg these two semesters. The Exhibition In keeping with the provisional nature of our course, the design for the final exhibition came about with a great deal of unexpected luck. Traditionally all the Architecture courses’ final exhibitions occupy the Mejan Gallery space just across from the Moderna Museet. R-Lab however has meandered around, last year the course projects were installed in the Mindedepartmentet, on the other side of Skesppsholmen island. This year we were offered an additional space, “off-site:” the Passagen that connects to the famed department store in Stockholm, NK. This permitted a certain luxury of choice, allowing course participants to choose the space best suited for their works. The high ceilings of the Mejan space appealed to those who wanted to suspend their projects from the beams above, and the 300 m2 shopping space, a segment of the former System Bolaget, provided a special challenge that necessitated the need to respond to the high traffic, commercial character of the Passagen. This left us with the question of the exhibition’s name. Again, as luck would have it the Passagen had itself just been renamed the Beta Passagen. Given that we were to occupy two spaces, it became evident we should call the first Alpha and the second Beta. Then a debate broke out. As instructor, I fed the group my obsessions with AlphaVille, the 1965 film by Jean-Luc Goddard and Colonel Bleep, the first color cartoon to run on US television between 1957 and 1960. I thought channeling these two surreal adventures might help define the mood for 9

our exhibition, and consequently its title, something like AlphaBeta ville, or whatever... Cecilie Meng made these remarks: “I like Alpha Beta Bolaget, it has a nice ring to it. Fitting in relation to the fact that there are multiple locations, owned by the government, and translated to English it is the system company, if that doesn’t sound Orwellian I don’t know what does. Alpha Beta Store becomes too mercantile. I think Bolaget as, dare I say an institution, is a very interesting concept.” Cecilie Meng suggested this quote from the AlphaVille movie: “Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.” She then qualified her observation: “since alpha and beta has an embedded logic of chronology, and the plus part relating to the two - perhaps separate location - being a whole and that the two location together makes another meaning than the two entities separately.” Michela Barone Lumaga liked the name: Alpha Beta Store, noting: “as I see nothing wrong in embracing the commercial side of what the space at NK was.” Another proposal for Alpha Beta Ville could be Alpha Beta Island? As to really strengthen the character of opposition that the 2 spaces have? One in a shopping mall the other on a museum island? As of the writing of this text, the name has not yet been determined. But then again we might not have to reach a consensus, as the neighboring stores will have had to do. They might not have realized that their fate is equally tied to chance and uncertainty. 10

Assays By Peter Lang

Michele Barone Lumaga At the beginning of this course Michela Barone Lumaga introduced a couple key concepts on the investigation of organic form and architectural structures, and the human body and its primordial relationship with the environment. The key to her research was to bring these worlds together, a biomimetic process that resulted in her developing “Synthosphaera.” This was a sort of natural evolution, not least of which would be the increasing feminization of the project, given the nurturing function and vessel like shapes that were increasingly emerging from her studies. The breakthrough moment was to invert the structure, detaching it from the ground, with the potential of making a floating overhead canopy, Yona Friedman-like. The prototype, suspended from the roof rafters in the Alpha space, is a trial in synthetic materials and form. Rebecka Engvall Reflecting on a Romani community’s distressing living conditions in Malmö and the unjust eviction from their camp on the outskirts of the city, Rebecka Engvall introduces her exegesis on emotions and relations as the means of productions in space. Engvall plays on this theme in her project Emotional Production of Space through a series of intentionally awkward juxtapositions, dropping top down bureaucratic regulations designed for the evacuated areas conceived by Malmö’s city planning office on actual and virtual scenes from the Romani camp. What is at stake is the future of this hybrid common space which risks to become transformed into an essential space that exploits all temporary activities. But it is precisely this contentious planning strategy that Engvall seeks to problematize, reaffirming in her work the currency of spontaneous and informal social relations that act to bind people and spaces together. Anna Maria Furuland Cities are never benign constructs, from their formation on, they stand as legible infrastructures of political and economic disparities and social divisions. Anna Maria Furuland worked primarily on issues of urban segregation, taking however a broader historical perspective, in an effort to understand the range of urban typologies and variant social identities and their impact on city form. Taking her cue from the work of Carl C. Nightingale, Furuland interpreted his thesis into a set of sound diagrams, that she calls Dividing Lines, and created a set of copper plates representing 8 different city plans compiled in a classification related to different forms of urban segregation. Furuland assembled these copper plates and turned them into a curiously low tech surround sound installation in the Alpha space.

Marta Gil From early on in the year Marta Gil studied and experimented with different aspects of constricted vision, from blindness to blind spots. She was drawn to the double portrait by Piero della Francesca’s the Duke of Urbino and his wife at the Uffizzi gallery in Florence. What intrigued MG was the missing bridge from the Duke’s nose, surgically removed to expand his vision with his one good eye. Her fascination grew to include fortified bastions in her investigations on sight lines. Gil went on to pursue a hybrid condition where lines of sight marked the limitations of personal space, projections of power and affirmations of resistance citing in her work Deleuze and Guattari’s AntiOedipus. Gil’s project will be performed with mirrors and a mask at the Beta space. Antonie Grahamsdaughter Two years ago Antonie Grahamsdaughter enrolled in Urban Remix—an earlier edition of this course—producing for her final project a video report on EU migrants in Sollentuna, Stockholm. Her documentation depicted the numerous acts of aggression promulgated by local gangs and hooligans and the longstanding social injustices this community experienced. This year, inspired by her work with refugee children, building Kites and flown in the wind across boundaries, Grahamsdaughter chose to make a video on the vagaries of borders, but in doing so she set aside tools of video reportage in favor of more poetic forms of animation and visual narrative. Using a map depicting escape routes and corridors through Europe based on actual accounts told to her by the children she worked with, Grahamsdaughter experimented with toys and musical scores. Titled “The Tour” the video will be presented at the Beta space. Johanna Jansson It won’t be much longer before Johanna Jansson has crisscrossed every patch of land on this elongated island of Öland that runs along the eastern coast of Sweden, in her quest to fully capture this landscape’s very unique aura. This is Jansson’s second year entrenched in her studies on Öland, which began with an investigation on how this narrow sea bound flatland received UNESCO’s recognition as a World Heritage Site in 2000. The advantage of this long term investigation is of course cumulative and evolutionary. In her first year’s final project the notes and documentation were evidently gestural, unprocessed and in many cases really first trials. What is now apparent is that specifically the audio-notational system of denoting territory has entered a more reflective phase, as the power of the etchings redouble the initial audio essays. As one of the few people working to document this site in detail, Jansson’s contribution should help to mitigate the current debates flaring up over the preservation of the landscape and the island’s future.

Barthélémy Massot Barthélémy Massot continues to study the means of urban survival, a subject he explored last year in the previous course when he worked on the condition of homelessness in Stockholm. This year Massot shifted his research to more utopian constructs, specifically cooperative markets and communal housing. As his study progressed he began to define optimal strategies developed for the shared housing movement with its long tradition in Sweden in an attempt to blend these features with the participatory driven food collectives originating in New York. When the location of the final exhibition in the Beta Space was announced Massot opted to channel his research into a kind of essay on pattern language, through the use of the elemental tent, based on recycled manufacture. Cecilie Meng Cecilie Meng’s work, Around or About a Perfect Geography, is about desire and ungroundedness where motivation and destination become essentially acts of faith. Throughout the year Meng focused on parking structures, time travel, cyclical thought, DeLoreans, and the construction of landscapes both physical and mental. It was never clear what direction Meng was heading, backwards or forwards, rather it was her working tactics that were continuously addressed and readdressed. In effect Meng constructs a deep archive of discontinuous geographical experiences that are made accessible by means of the hanging Google Pegman, a clumsy avatar who mediates the known world. Odysseus’ desire to go home remained a powerful inspiration to Meng, but the Homeric figure left his Kingdom soon after he returned. He would be off again vowing to find a place where no one had heard of the sea. Beatrice Orlandi In Cryptoflora, States of Exception and the Ecology of the Missing Girl, Beatrice Orlandi digs deep into the hidden identities of gender, through the vehicle of camouflage, a sort of art of making oneself disappear and reappear, referencing in the process mythology, literature and artificial intelligence. The quilt Orlandi weaves embraces the image of young girls, whose unpronounced childish features appears to morph between classical pre-Raphaelite innocence and the un-squeamishness of Tai, the AI bot that degraded rapidly into a reflection of the vulgar audience that flocked to her. The feminine state of metamorphosis, as Orlandi notes, its “plasticity” of form, is for the final exhibition coopted into the public realm where it emerges as a consumer good in anticipation of purchase inside the Beta space.

Marie-Louise Richards Marie-Louise Richards has kept a constant eye focused on what is missing, not what seems to vanish in front of our eyes but rather that which stares straight back at us, and yet remains completely ignored. This is the second year Richards is continuing her research on invisibility, that began by studying how race shaped the geography in several US cities, red-lining, the novel ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison leading to her work last year on “hypervisible invisibility.” This year a relatively innocuous document that Richards discovered published from the archives of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, the IAUS in NY, a photo of the staff and faculty at a dinner table, included the telltale unidentified woman in position no. 14. These subtle but nonetheless significant messages go mostly unheeded confirming the intractability of these harmless daily messages. Valentina Santi Löw With a background in architecture and hospital care Valentina Santi Löw chose to focus her research on a very specific condition afflicting a growing number of people traumatized by the ravages of war and exodus. The project developed into a individualized architecture of healing or a “Decompression Chamber” that would provide the user a safe protected womb like environment with a specifically composed sound track. Santi Löw’s experiment can also be read as a means of moving beyond the basic forms of architectural exploration by rigging up a one to one scale device with materials and technologies easily available off the shelf. Tackling the immeasurable experience of human suffering Santi Löw is attempting in this suspended structure to make a simple gesture of contact, together with a sound track she developed specifically for this immersive experience. Teres Selberg In “No Other Than You,” Teres Selberg ponders the meaning of body in space, specifically her body in the space of what could be understood as the space of the other. But it’s not quite that easy, as Selberg points out, she experiences multiple changes to her own identity, depending on the human nature of her surroundings. As both an architect and dancer, Selberg repeatedly tested her grit in a multitude of circumstances, joining collective sports training exercises, dances, and other kinds of active performances ranging across some highly unusual public spaces, when she recently took up residence in the West African state of Guinea Bissau. But the unexpected afterglow was gradually recognizing the way these activities spread through the informal city, occupying traffic roundabouts, highway interchanges, and small parks with political monuments, bringing together in close proximity gymnastic crowds and endless streams of bystanders. Selberg intimately experiences these urban fragments both as an outsider and an insider, but ultimately sweat is the glue and shared space the equaliser. 16

Annika Thörn Legzdins Anika Thörn Legzdins has been compiling an unusual set of archives on Detroit initiated when she visited the city last year as part of a research trip organized by the Royal Institute of Art. One is about her concern with the growing size of abandoned and cleared blocks in the center city Thörn Legzdins began studying issues of local soil contamination and the efforts of the organization the “Greening of Detroit” to develop pilot projects based on dendroremediation. In particular one plant, the White Willow, is both used for soil cleaning and is an ingredient in treating headaches. Thörn Legzdins is also compiling an archive made of a growing collection of historic postcards she is tracking down depicting Detroit’s botanical gardens and their greenhouses. These postcard images help to ground a series of “soft ground etchings”, that Thörn Legzdins has developed representing the leaves of the White Willow tree. The etchings serve to mediate a cross historical dialogue with Detroit’s past and present. Anna Tullberg Anna Tullberg’s project The Library, based on her exploration of Detroit, comes across at first as tale about a declining city and its fading memories. The object in question is the Mark Twain branch of the Detroit Public Library, a once majestic structure whose only remaining traces are the open ground on which it stood and the recollections of those who live around it. A professional radio broadcaster, Tullberg took on this subject as a way of investigating alternative modes of representing oral history. She chose to transgress her preferred medium by producing instead very physical handmade etchings depicting the extreme locality of her experiences, achieving in the process an inversion of scales-reaching a new level of intimacy. Jakob Wiklander The mirror is one of those paradigms that have no real depth, yet represent an infinite space that can easily absorb the world around it. Jakob Wiklander has investigated how increasingly our homes, our streets, our cities have become reflected, and frozen into the realms of Google and the common on-line realestate websites like the English language Realtor.com, or the Swedish Hemnet. Wiklander has delved into the world of on-line training simulators, revealing the most normal examples, from games about farm tractors plowing fields to transit bus operators pulling up to curbside to let “people” board, demonstrating that whole aspects of our daily lives exist in these banal parallel universes. As a consequence, Wiklander has been working to create just such a paradigm, a simple domestic room of mirrors in virtual, while simultaneously in the real world servicing the deep cravings of today’s contemporary society for mobile devices, providing an “infinite” amount of electric outlets for recharging that will conveniently be located in the Beta space.

Synthosphaera: towards a synthetic biosphere Michela Barone Lumagaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sculptural investigations weave together organic form, architectural structure and the human bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s primordial relationship to the environment. A speculative exploration of a future which is becoming increasingly synthetic.

“I was, I believed, ecologically bored.” George Monbiot, “Feral” Synthosphaera questions our understanding of nature by exploring the relationship between perception and reality. Synthosphaera illustrates a possible scenario that materializes the concept of Antropocene, a theory debated among scientists that drastic soil exploitation has caused the emergence of a new geological era. This installation demystifies nature as a lost Eden and embraces a new type of ecology in which the animal and vegetal become intertwined with man’s inhabitation processes. As nature adapts, mutations become more extreme, and biodiversity decreases, will synthetic systems gradually substitute for natural ones? In 50 years from now will we consider a soft plastic habitat to be as sincere as a vegetal one? Synthosphaera negotiates new boundaries for this interpretation of the natural realm, providing an artificial solution to the ecological depletion of future human life. Speculating on a dystopian future in which nature that surrounds us might be synthetic, Synthosphaera displays a polyurethane skin whose form is reminiscent of a weeping willow. The shape of Synthosphaera’s upside-down topography alludes to the sensorial, Mannerist grottoes of Florence’s Boboli Gardens, while also referencing inverted architectural maquettes such as the Gaudy’s gravity pulled strings model for the Sagrada Familia. Assembled from 2mm polyurethane sheets, this milky, rubbery material recalls lab created tissue. Mimicking the structure of a hanging garden or a cave, this suspended biomorphic structure invites audience participation through physical interaction and tactile exploration. 19

Emotional Production of Space Rebecka Engvall delves into an ongoing urban struggle taking place on the contested site of a Romani camp in the southern Swedish city of Malmรถ, revealing the deep disparities between the imagined future urban environment envisioned by municipal planning officials and the actual lived space produced collectively by the people.

“It is, indeed, a meeting place. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local.”1 Doreen Massey Place travelling time. In the light of a conflict that sparked between the municipality of Malmö and the collective of a Romani camp in Norra Sorgenfri in Malmö, I explore the ideas of urbanity that was expressed in the struggle/conflict. Emotional Production of Space is a research work in and a juxtopositioning of official documents and the reality. In my movie I project the architectural visions created by the planning office, against the space that was created in the solidarity work. Inspired by the two fixed points in the work of Human Geographer Sara Westin, I juxtapose the eye of the planner and the body of the flaneur. But instead of limiting myself to the seemingly aimless flaneur, I set the planner against the collective urban body as the agent of a revolutionary struggle. A revolutionary body that collectively produces the space of the city, consciously driven forward by an aimed conflict What appears is a cynical discrepancy between words and deeds. Their true intentions seep through the badly chosen words of municipal officials, which is to exploit workers, i. e. the inhabitants that make the city. This, in turn, reflects a conflict of interests, between what the planners want, and what the people need. As Sara Westin points out; “the will of the planner and the flaneur differ. The conceived space of the planner is to be treated as a tool of power as it comes to dominate the social and lived space since the thought room is beeing materialized into buildings.”2 The planner deals with the representation of space. In the planning process, space is an absolute framework for events, a clearly defined and static area of land with assessed value. It is regulated and mapped by law. The room of the workers in this factory of space is real and lived, their will cannot be governed nor interpreted and planned into visions. Marxist geographer David Harvey defines urbanity as our common production: urbanity is the added value that people produce with their social relations. 23

In the case of the camp, the value created among people in the shape of solidarity work, meetings, new friendships and artistic expressions is extracted and appropriated in a planning process. A planning process which itself is the main reason for the eviction of the camp. David Harvey presents space as the common production of emotions and relations which allows us a progressive and dynamic understanding of space, that lets us deal with the distribution of space according to something other than the logics of the market: “The relational view of space holds that there is no such thing as space outside of the processes that define it. Processes do not occur in space, but define their own spatial frame. The concept of space is embedded in or internal to process. This very formulation implies that, as in the case of relative space, it is impossible to disentangle space from time.”3 We can also, according to radical geographer and social scientist Doreen Massey, understand space as a meeting place and joint production of social relations that extends far beyond its geographical limitations. This also makes it easier to dismiss essentialist tendencies in planning, in which the qualities of a place are bound to the land. The site for the camp is being planned and envisioned as attractive and seen as the locus of certain values, that during the planning process is being defined with words like spontaneity, temporal activity (paradoxically being permanently written into law), free zone, urban expressions. The area is described with values that seems to be bound to the soil. The planning documents describe a static quality, a product but what the planners have missed is that what Massey expresses in a global sense of place: “What gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.”4 And just as people and relationships, places are therefore not static. The room is actively produced and at the same time an active element in the social process. When planning tries to dominate space by legal means, binds these properties to earth, the free zone emerges somewhere else. 1. Doreen Massey,“A global sense of place” Marxism Today (38) 1991, 24-29, p 28. 2. Sara Westin, Planerat, alltför planerat, (Uppsala Universitet:Uppsala, 2010) p. 36 (my translation) 3. David Harvey, Den globala kapitalismens rum: på väg mot en teori om ojämn geografisk utveckling, (Tankekraft Förlag: Stockholm, 2009) p. 121 4. Massey Doreen, Space, Place and Gender, (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis,1994)

Dividing Lines Anna Maria Furlund explores the history of socio-spatial segregation, translating concepts developed by Carl. C Nightingale into a series of diagrams which she further interprets into a low tech sound installation, transmitted through a set of copper plates. Each of the eight copper plates represents a different city plan, constituting a genealogy of urban segregation.

I am exploring especially three aspects of of socio-spatial segregation: history, causes/consequences/tools and examples of counterstrategies.For the historic part, the book “Segregation - a Global History of Divided Cities” by Carl H. Nightingale has been a great source of knowledge. Cities and societies everywhere have been deformed by segregation in the past and still continue being deformed and divided. Segregation makes cities less economic, cultural and political equal, less democratic, less livable and less safe. “Segregation never comes about because it just is. Segregation has always involved some form of institutionally organized human intentionality,” writes Carl H. Nightingale. Urban division serves as a tool to reinforce political and economic inequality. The three institutions involved in filtering out diversity or spreading segregationist ideas throughout the world are authoritarian governments, certain intellectual networks and the real estate industry. Visible and invisible tools of exclusion and inclusion can be geographical, physical or legal. Examples are monuments, walls, quarters/enclaves, railroads, highways, canals/rivers, fences, guards, buffer zones, urban renewal, forced removals, sanitation-driven building clearences, landuse zoning, segregated private and public housing, working camp, gated communities, fiscal systems, credit rules, access to transport, attitudes etc Filter and Divide Many human differences have been used to justify city-splitting throughout history and many tools have been in use. I have translated some important historic examples into diagrams, and then turned them into copper circuits transmitting sound in a low-tech multi-channel sound installation. Gods and mortals Eridu, Mesopotamia, (4000 BC) was the birthplace of separated districts for gods and mortals. Sacropolitical districts was divided from the city by walls or monuments, like ziggurats. City and countryside Uruk , Mesopotamia, (3000 BC). Here started a spatial division of city dwellers and country dwellers. The king Gilgamesh built the giant city walls, as a way of demonizing the countryside compared to the divine city.

Locals and foreign merchants Isfahan, Persia, (1600 AD) was an early example of separated urban colonies for foreign merchants. Armenian merchants lived outside Isfahan in the christian New Julfa. At nighttime a semiprison, a gated quarter. Scapegoat ghettos Venice, Italy (1400 AD) included the first Jewish ghetto. A quarter separated by canals and at nighttime locked with gates and guards. Crafts, clans, castes, sexes Yorubaland, West Africa, an example of spatial division of clans. Wedgeshaped compounds radiating from the king’s central palace with wealthy clan memebers closer to the centre. High class and low class London, (1600-1700 AD) was the site for the world’s first use of government protected legal instruments, obligations to build in an exclusive style, to divide neigbourhoods for the rich, West End, and the poor, East End. London was probably the most important cradle of modern urban segregation. It served as a model for colour lines in Calcutta, and former colonial cities in Africa and Asia have today transformed into megacities sharply divided by class. Race and ethnicity Madras, India, (1700 AD) was the first city split into White City and Black City. Ideas of race-based segregation first developed in the late 1700s. 200 years later colour lines were used aggressively as whole cities was rearranged. State-sponsored as in Johannesburg or by real estate markets and housing policy as in Chicago. Nations and religions Belfast, (1300-2000 AD) The medieval Britain had a harsh grip on Ireland, with sharp physical and cultural separation and displacements of the Irish. The conflict between catholics/protestants or separatists/unionist goes on in Northern Ireland. The so called peace walls built in the 60s still keep the population largely separated.

1. Carl H. Nightingale , “Segregation - a Global History of Divided Cities” (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 2012)

Key to copper urban segregation sound diagrams. Upper plates: 1. Eridu 2. Uruk 3. Isfahan 4. Venice Lower plates: 1. Yorubaland 2. London 3. Madras 4. Belfast

Blind Spot Marta Gill is interested in finding possible lines of escape from our current reality through an intentional repudiation of frontal vision, revealing the hidden emancipatory potential already present in the blind spots on the edge of our perception.

“In the Edge of the Eye” I was in the blindspot, let´s say today. And for what it concerns me, not so much more. Keep on looking from the corner of my eye. In the periphery of the eye new fires burst. Through the out of focus area enters what has no name. In the periphery of the eye there are suspended bodies that disappears if you try to focus them. In the periphery of the eye you can see what is about to materialise. In the periphery of the eye is where there is no watchmen. in the periphery of the eye is where we are most vulnerable. From the periphery of the eye the world is renewed A poem by Eva Lootz’s from “Lo visible es un metal inestable.” 30

This is an investigation about the blind spot, understood as a sensorial concept that disrupts, modifies and alters the frontal vision, the so called bastion vision.The bastions are the elements in the fortifications that ensure the defense of the interest of the local elites, overriding any blindspot.The blind spot in this research becomes a “line of escape”, a line that defines a space where you let yourself be affected and discover the power of vulnerability and empathy. The cornea of the city. The contemporary city is becoming more and more the “city of the eye” (“The eyes of the skin”, Juhani Pallasma 2005). What had already started in the beginning of the big megalopolis during the modern era is now becoming more noticeable. The urban space that we inhabit is fundamentally built under the hegemony of the sight.We see a world more and more virtualized, disconnected from the body and its other sensorial capacities, blinded by the sense of sight and dominated by the visual control of what we see and what is watching us. If we understand the city as an eye, to find the cornea, that is to say, the border of the city, has made me think in the models of medieval and renaissance fortified towns. I have focused in the renaissance fortifications of Italian cities in which the bastion achieves its perfection as antiblindspot element ensuring the maximum safety in the city. In this field, I find fundamental the figure of Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502 ) who served as an architect and engineer from 1470 for the duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro, building city walls as the one the one in Iesi and early examples of star-shaped fortifications. Martini developed the idea of the “ideal” city as constrained within star-shaped polygonal geometries reminiscent of the star fort, whose wedge-shaped bastions are said to have been his innovation. (“Third book of “Trattato di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare”, Martini). Post-Modern Bastion and Blindspot Nowadays, the postmodern bastions provide a sensation of security and control, becoming mobile devices that locate you in the virtual space and let you gain control over it. Thus, if the post modern bastion is a symbolic or virtual space and the blind spot resembles the idea of a line of escape. As Deleuze points out, inside a symbolic system that is closed, lines of escape are needed so that the flow of thought runs its course. “The escape line is an act of affirmation and a resistance, is an escape from the totalitarianism that the gubernamental bodies applies” (“Anti-Oedipus”, Deleuze and Guattari, 1972).

These blind spots integrate us in the space as they also activate all our sensorial capacities, while the standard frontal vision to the contrary pushes us out of the space interaction and free thinking, converting us into mere spectators. However, the postmodern bastions continue to be a residue of the old ones. They are also physical, on site and very real, as we see them in the walls of the borders of “Fortress Europe”, or in the discriminating urban planning of the big megalopolis such a highways and transport infrastructures. The Performance In the film “Wings of desire” two angels sit on a car seat in the showcase of a car shop and speak about their longings of having a body and imagining for a moment to inhabit them. During the conversation the descriptions that the angels made of their need to feel, smell and touch catches us. Both of them create a universe of their own, a universe made of stories not of atoms. The walker of the passage, finds himself behind a strange body that invites him to mask and trust, going out of its “standard way” from home to work, to the gym or to the shopping mall. Something unexpected, the blind spot, is ready to be materialized. The bastion mask that is part of the performance exaggerates and forces the use of the frontal sight, named “bastion-sight”. Yet, who is this person next to me? Who is this experience mediator? What is being told from this corner of the eye? Should I trust in this reflection? What am I doing inside a window display? The blind spot is here and now.

STALKER WALK STALKER

TALLINN - MAARDU - JÃ&#x201E;GALA 30-31 OCTOBER 2015 35

on the Doppelgänger Effect Text by Peter Lang, Photographs by Matthew Ashton

It might appear obvious that Stalker Walk Stalker calls into question the doppelganger effect, where things or beings enter a double state of existence, becoming mirrored, reversed, or cloned. The Roman group Stalker came to Tallinn to re-open a condition that lay deep within a mystical territory, known as the Zone, a place that Andre Tarkovskij depicted as the mysterious extra-temporal and extra-spatial landscape in his 1979 film Stalker. Hence this oddity, Stalker in the footsteps of Stalker, yet this action was not going to be some kind of reenactment, like a summer carnival reenacts a Medieval joust. Stalker’s visit to Estonia was timed to coincide with the group’s 20th anniversary Crossing of Actual Territories, a walk that had originally encircled Rome, revealing for the first time the full extent of the abandoned landscapes that surrounded the Italian capital. Stalker reminded the audience that had crowded into the Estonian Academy School of Architecture during the preparatory talk, that what Stalker engages in is by nature entropic. Stalker referred specifically to Robert Smithson’s observation on children spinning around in a sandbox containing two different colors of sand: Stalker reiterated that the children’s movement eventually turns the sand grey, and this process was irreversible. Stalker Walk Stalker, the two day walk from Tallinn to Jagala Falls, was therefore not conceived as an act of mimicry, but rather as it was an act of collusion, an attempt by the group to lose itself in the sublime transformation that Tarkovskij had first perceived. 36

In effect, the sixty odd people taking to the streets, paths, and stretches of non-traversable lands were not “sight” seeing, but rather they were discovering how territory could become resistant to standard readings: that when one plotted one’s own road through lengths of territory nothing would remain predictable anymore. The dead ends in full sight of highway entrances, the storm ditches making unpassable archipelagos, the high tension wires stretching kilometers establishing impossible visual corridors would together appear to create a maze of incomprehensible spatial temporal relationships. Yet it is precisely walking inside this wave of people, this entourage that rolls across these territories that provide a myriad of glimpses of what is “actual,” what is happening, what is becoming here and now in these spaces. Its what I consider to be three dimensional research, where a compendium of walkers reveals the deep complexity of a territory’s DNA. Tarkovskij’s Stalker can see what others don’t see, he can experience what others are numb to, while he struggles not to give in to what he cannot understand. The doppelganger in this case is not repetitive --Stalker Walk Stalker is not duplicative. Rather it is about the real challenge of placing oneself unprepared in a context without regard to predetermined narratives, and then letting oneself go, allowing the surroundings, people, place, entropy, and future to simply happen. The tormented Stalker represents all of us, we all are all a bit like him, too curious for our own good, and too aware of what we cannot ignore any longer. ***

About Stalker In October of 1995, a small band of Romans, artists, architects, and others with great knowledge of the sprawling Italian capital embarked on a trip around Rome, walking only the areas in abandonment. Struck by the similarity to the film Stalker, a reporter, as legend has it, mentioned that their trip circling the Italian capital reminded him of the 1979 Tarkovsky film, “Stalker.” From then on the collective assumed this name, walking cities in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Americas, while returning time and again back to Rome. Stalker proposes experimental strategies for intervention founded on exploratory spatial practices, using playful, convivial, and interactive tactics that relate to an environment, its inhabitants and their local culture. Such practices and methods are conceived to catalyze and develop evolutionary and self-organizing processes through the social and environmental fabric specifically in the areas where through abandonment or impoverishment basic necessities are lacking. The traces of these interventions constitute a sensible mapping on the complexity and dynamics of the territory, realized through the collective contribution of individuals from different backgrounds and disciplines, who together investigate, document and participate in transformations taking place on the ground. 20 years after Stalker’s historic walk around Rome, “Stalker Walk Stalker” traces Tarkovsky’s historic scenes shot in Tallinn and in the surrounding countryside. The walk is the first of a series of Topo-mythic walks conducted by members of the original Roman group through the Baltic region. Not just a homage to the filmmaker, but more like visitation: an introspective, spiritual immersion into a world, “outside the contemporary.” Participants of the Stalker Walk from Tallinn to Jägala included: Coordinators: Peter Lang (Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm) Frances Hsu (Aalto University, Helsinki) Maroš Krivý (Estonian Academy of Art, Tallinn) Nicholas Boyarsky (Oxford Brookes School of Architecture, UK) Stalker Rome / Osservatorio Nomade: Francesco Careri, Aldo Innocenzi, Lorenzo Romito, Pia Livia Di Tardo & Giulia Fiocca. Stockholm / Malmö: Matthew Ashton, Marta Gil, Juanma González, Dick Hedlund Leire Mesa, Henrique Pavão, Marianne Skaarup & Sofie Tolf. Students of Architecture from: The Estonian Art Academy, Tallinn Aalto University, Helsinki Oxford Brookes University, UK As well as Jason Coleman (Oxford Brookes) & Alessandro Floris (Photographer)

The Route Antonie Grahamsdaughterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s short film explores the vagaries of borders; those visible and invisible lines partitioning the globe into segmented territories, and the difficulties faced by migrants attempting to traverse many of these lines on the perilous journey to Europe.

The Tour is a visual interpretation of the issues that revolve around contemporary migration and movement of people across borders. States and territories create border situations full of violence, conflict. For humans, it becomes increasingly difficult to move between the territories, between the visible and invisible borders. Many are looking to new areas to then have to force the limits physically as barbed wire, fence and sea. People take on foot from countries in southeast Africa to go through Sudan by Libya and then by boat to Lampedusa in Italy. Afghan refugee youth have migrated from Afghanistan in the months through mountain passes and inaccessible terrain to Turkey. Many of the young people I have met tell of deadly boat passages overcrowded boats from the Turkish coast to the Greek island of Lesbos. A perilous journey to reach EU territory, and the borderline.

Audio Sketches of Öland Experimental Etching Johanna Jansson’s series of etchings are an attempt to visually capture the ever changing soundscapes of Öland. Silent audio postcards depicting the dramatic sonic landscape of this elongated windswept island in the Baltic Sea.

The southern part of Öland was designated a UNESCO cultural World Heritage Site in 2000. The decision to make it a World Heritage Site was based on the unique geology and topography of Öland that helped shape living conditions for those living there. This geography has resulted in a truly singular agricultural landscape. A limestone plateau covers a major part of southern Öland making it neither very suitable for farming nor for forestry. These areas have been used as pastures instead. This very special part of the landscape is called ’Alvaret’, which translates to ’bare limestone soil’, and stretches over a massive 260 km2 area. The resulting landscape is unique and richly filled with rare flora and fauna. The wild birdlife is also very varied, especially on the meadows which lie close to the sea. Between the ’Alvaret’ and the sea lie areas with ample soil for farming. Here we find the small villages called ‘Radbyar’ (linear villages), where the farmers lived. The reasoning for the formation of these ‘Radbyar’ is, that according to a 13th century law, each farmer should have plot of land along the road proportional to the amount of land that the farmer owned. As a result the farm buildings are placed in a line one after the other. Today you can find these types of villages only on Öland. In other parts of Sweden the villages were split up following land reforms in the early 19th century.

I have been fascinated by Öland since the first time I visited. It has an open landscape which is barren, flat and dramatic. The landscape touches my soul. It reminds me more of parts of South Africa I have visited rather than Sweden. It is a unique landscape. You are close to both nature and the everpresent wind. You are constantly reminded of Oland’s rich history by the ancient relics. It’s breath taking to listen to the sound from the rich variety of migrating birds that pass Öland in spring. My objective is to make the soundscape of the southern part of Öland and the Alvaret visible through this art project. I began this project last year and have developed it through experimenting with different etching techniques. In this project I wanted to produce an audio-visual description capturing the sounds of Oland’s unique landscape. I began by making site-specific sketches, drawn in just a few minutes. The sounds of nature and the ambient sound from selected sites will also be documented. The surroundings of Öland will be my guide or music box, as my ears and mind freely interpret these spaces. I plan to visit a number of places typical of southern Öland and the main objective is to listen to the soundscape at each location and do field recording drawings. These drawings will form initial visual abstract interpretations of sound. These drawings have been my starting point, as I explore the emotional soundscape of southern Öland. Working from the sketches, I chose to capture the fleeting nature of what I had recorded in a more permanent form. I chose etching as it allows the freedom I enjoyed through drawing to produce an enduring image. The flat etching plate resonates with the flat open Öland landscape. I experimented with various etching techniques and different acids. Using intaglio combined with Aquatint, Spitbrite, Aceton print and Gelatin press. I have tried to mirror the freedoms and constraints the landscape of southern Oland presents. I took a playful approach to the mark making techniques etching employs experimenting with different tools. I have tried to maintain a free flowing lightness of touch with contrasting rigid crisp line. Photographic documentation, film and maps, will be added in order to investigate the connections between them. I would like to leave the project with a deeper knowledge of the use of sound as a tool with which to explore ever - changing landscapes - a tool which I can use to interpret and better comprehend complex environments.

Habitat BarthĂŠlĂŠmy Massotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is a study into the means of urban survival, developing research undertaken on cooperative markets and communal housing into an architectural essay, hypothesizing the single person tent as the optimal urban typology of our age.

The installation takes place in a pop up space of NK, a department store in the centre of Stockholm.The Royal Institute of Art got the opportunity to let different classes show their works in the summer as a pop up store open in the NK pasagen for the same period. It is made of 10 tent-looking objects placed following an orthographic grid. Each object looks like a ridge tent and is made of a rigid structure covered by a plastic sheeting. The dimensions of each of them is about 200 cm by 110 cm on the floor with a ridge height around 96 cm. For the most part, the plastic sheeting material is taken from the trash container standing at the small Eriksdal Marina, in SĂśdermalm, Stockholm. The summer is coming back and a lot of boat owners uncover their boats. The plastic sheeting that canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be used the next year is thrown away. Most of the rigid structure of the tents is made of wood taken from the the trash container in the basement of the NK department store. The new stores used a lot of material to move in and part of this material is thrown away.

Around or About a Perfect Geography Cecilie Meng takes us on a digital dĂŠrive through the infinite urban maze of google street view, navigating desert highways and suburban parking lots under the capricious gaze of a sun that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know time.

I set out. First in mind, then in letters, and without any delay the eye have delineated a body, a way farer, as the sea farer has breached the coast and taken the color of the sun as his insignia. Realms are aligning our attention along glowing boundaries. We see and move through him, and he lawfully abides his masters, Google and I. He doesn’t mind, Pegman has no mind. Pegman doesn’t want honor. Pegman only wants to serve. He is a peg with a man attached. He has no face: There are no eyes to tell him where the sun is. There are no ears to tell him if the road or the ocean is nearby. There is no mouth to tell you anything. Pegman is born into a world of absolute silence, the sights are not for him to use, what should he use it for? Pegman has no mission in life. Pegman has no life. I’m not far from Knowledge Village. Names do indeed designate places. Tension stretches my fingers, my head and my sight. How much is 4 centimeters on a trackpad in Google Maps? I can’t trust the sun, the sun will move like I do, lopsided and irregular. Daytime here doesn’t imply a chronological succession of time. It’s noon a couple of clicks away. I want to go towards a group of highrises at the end of this road. I want to go to the horizon. I wrestle myself forward on the warm asphalt and the motion shunts the skyline out of sight. A four centimeter push into an interchange that makes me lose sight of where I am and where the highrises went. I drift around in the shallow waters. The currents of interchanges spit you out of them like a small boat pops out of a whirlpool. And when the motion subsides, you recognize the inconspicuous shaped plane of parking spaces. Parking spaces bathed in a forgiving afternoon light. Planes layered and pushed together closely, dwelling between the pillars of yet another road bridge. Who travels here to see the parking lot of Knowledge Village? The siren song of the lonely parking lots shine through the high streets, they spread out barren underneath the posters with blurred faces. They want some of that Pegman too, the hungry eyes from far away. How long is a day’s journey when the sun never sets? If a day’s journey is a measurement of distance and estimated to be somewhere between 32 and 40 kilometers, then how much is one kilometer in these tilted jolts forward? How far can I thrust myself? What makes us set out? What longing can we possibly hope to cure by suspending ourselves in this correct geography? Will there ever be any resolution here other than the one we 57

are looking at? The longing like our eyes and our bodies and the roads are curbed. The landfalls are occurring continuously in invisible yet harmless assaults. Zergs of Pegmans flares across a suspended sky like comets skids a couple of times on the asphalt only to disappear, called back into the cloud moments later. The protracted day retains the time, buildings may very well have been completed by now. Yet it is wrong to think of this place as frozen in time. Nothing here is frozen. The boundaries are humming and the correct geography is leaking. The difference between the world on the virtual side is leaking out. The deathless mortality of the flaneur spurs on a restless barrage on the dashboard. Palms and sky are pulled over a canvas, which now and again exposes its seams. virtually invisible, but still there. The lens bends the sky inwards concave to match our eyes. This great world, like all the other great worlds that we will ever know, bears the scarring of cultivated sequences. That is how we know what is real, that is how we know authenticity is sealed in. A warped world stands strong with spoils gleaming off of smooth surfaces. The glare of the past like the stars in the sky is outshined by the light of the perpetual day, making the transitions almost unnoticeable. Almost. The only night that will ever fall upon this place will fall so that the lightshow from the city can be seen from the moon and my home. I can see my house from here. In the light of the future, currents, even discursive ones, will have changed, our lenses will have improved. The great narrative’s sublation into virtual sequences will make us, will allow us to do re- deand construct simultaneously. The composites sat in motion by exigency, allowing the paradox of the present to go on, evolve with or without us, against us or with us, around or about us. The blue light from the screen and the sky will be as tangible as the warm asphalt on a clear day. On the edge of the land, the cultivated space ends, as it always has. But the wilderness we are seeing is merely virtual. No Pegman has gone there before. We have stopped on a highway that stretches from here to my home, where the only way to continue onwards is to let time pass. The realtime here will for a little while longer be the past, our present the future. The courage felt throughout the ages when one has gazed into the horizon is just as tangible here in the desert as anywhere else. I feel the stranglehold released ever so slightly, let’s all hope time will pass in a timely manner into this virtual future. And as this will evolve in accordance with our epic traditions, we will back into ourselves, like the shadow finding its body. And we will weep with joy when we finally are able to ask our stretched-out self with the blurred face, how it is, and we believe us to be smiling as we answer “It is divine”. 58

Cryptoflora, States of Exception and the Ecology of the Missing Girl Beatrice Orlandiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intricate floral quilts become investigations into the subversive potential of camouflage, where explosive secrets lie concealed behind an unsuspecting veil of perceived innocence.

Annie vanished in the landscape. In an interview a witness describes Annie’s hairstyle at the time of their accidental meeting as a meticulous arrangement of braids freeing her neck, contrasting an otherwise anonymous choice of clothes. In this account Mélange Gray seems to describe both the girl’s outfit and her personality. Y states that whoever is looking for Annie shouldn’t forget to pay attention to hairpins left in the snow. Annie is the twin of Tiqqun’s “Young Girl” gone missing. In the descriptions that accompany the investigation, Annie is evoked by flowery wallpapers, sweatshirts, chocolate bars. The Missing Girl is embodied by her surroundings; she is materialized in everyday, insignificant objects. Like these object, her presence passes unnoticed, her agency is lost in misinterpretation. Annie endures a metamorphic behavior. As the ermine turns white against the snow of the arctic winter, she morphs into her belongings. Her bedroom is full of things, yet there is no decodable trace of her intentions. The Missing Girl’s ecology resembles the ecology of animals surviving extreme conditions. The ermine turns white to vanish in the winter landscape, turns candid by tradition, turns finally into a cloak tailored to adorn power with purity. Daphne, one of the “missing girls” described in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, turns into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s lust. A tree whose leaves are later weaved into wreaths as a sign of victory and a crown around Apollo’s head. As the English translation of the Greek text suggests, her face was lost in the canopy. Daphne vanishes in the foliage; Annie is incorporated in the flowery wallpaper of her background, dissolves against the generic scenery on her desktop. To disappear is the Missing Girls’ way to respond to extreme conditions, to escape its laws. Giorgio Agamben’s “State of Exception” is a zone of indifference at the border between opposites in the juridical system. In an analogue way, girlhood, adolescence, mental illness, as apocalyptic states are states where the dominant paradigms fail, states under the other’s flag: States of Exception. Here a subversive ecology can foster, concealed behind the curtains of 62

insignificance and innocence and protected by the preconceptions and the arrogance of the viewer. As Mona in Agnes Varda â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sans toit ni loiâ&#x20AC;?, alienated from society, the Missing Girls survive unseen in a frank zone where the sheer laws are suspended. In this state of vacancy they are able to install their own ecology. If the Annies of this trope had to leave a note, they would very likely hide it behind those speechless insignificant elements that replaced their presence. Flowers have been exchanged during history, carrying very intimate messages, not at all far from the way secrets have been compressed into codes during wars. A pillow, a bag of candies, a bracelet, everything that was close enough to Annie is a potential piece of a cryptogram. No tulip printed on a cup or patterning a skirt is lacking secrets, their agency is well encoded behind innocence. The ecology of the missing girl infects the ruling paradigm with its vegetation, it fills shopping mall shelves, it takes over online stores and DIY blogs: itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a strong and highly adaptable Cryptoflora.

THE MAGIC CIRCLE

PEDAGOGIES OF SPACE: OSKAR HANSEN & OPEN FORM 25-26 FEBRUARY 2016 INDEX STOCKHOLM 65

Text by Peter Lang, Photographs From R-Lab Archive.

This year’s Royal Institute of the Arts architectural theory and history course, R-Lab, contributed to Index gallery’s exhibition on Oskar Hansen with a series of studies about games and game theory culminating in a two day workshop. The workshop “Game Time” was held on the 10th and 11th November, and was principally intended to reflect on the controversy over immigration, by playing through issues of human rights, restrictions on personal movement and expulsion. Participants in the workshop established three particular game situations that would confront each visitor to Index. These themes were presented for the upcoming seminar “Pedagogies of Space,” providing considerations on how game play can deal with some of the more protracted issues of our time. As visitors entered the gallery, they picked a ‘passport’ printed with one of three colors, green, red and yellow, and marked with a series of letters and numbers. They would then be blindfolded, and led into the space blindfolded accompanied by two guides. Unbeknownst to each visitor, the color coded passport would determine whether they were led to a room filled with flowers or the storage room. The visitors would be given earphones and listen to a single song. Then they would be brought out to the Simone Forti’s Sloped Wall with ropes, and still blindfolded they would be accompanied up the ramp by the guides and fetch a colored ribbon. From there they would have the blindfolds removed, and proceed to the Squares, 60cm x 60cm rectangles mimicking the limits homeless people in Malmö are allowed to occupy. The master of ceremonies would then start a musical track, and the visitors would have to move from square to square until the 66

music abruptly stopped. those not on an empty square would be â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;deportedâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; from the playground, while the person who remained in an empty square would be given a prize: a tourist postcard with an image of Stockholm, with a welcoming note on the back. The difficulty to this playground game is that the squares were filled with red markers, representing other occupants, thus reducing the space each player could jump into.

More striking even then the limitation as to time is the limitation as to space. All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off before and materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the â&#x20AC;&#x153;consecrated spotâ&#x20AC;? cannot be formally distinguished from the playground. The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, this stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function playgrounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, and dedicated to the performance of an act apart. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, A Study of the Play Element in Culture. (London, Routledge, 1949) 68

No 14, Unidentified Woman Marie-Louise Richardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s investigation of an innocuous archive photograph reveals the disruptive force inherent in that which is missing, absent, or invisible, yet has the potential to throw the whole composition into disarray.

Clockwise from lower left; 1) Bill Ellis, 2) Rich Wolkowitz 3) Peter Eisenman 4) Liz Eisenman 5) Mario Gandelsonas 6) Mandelon Vrisendorp 7) Rem Koolhaas 8) Julia Bloomfield 9) Randal Korman 10) Stuart Wrede 11) Andrew Macnair 12) Antony Vidler 13) Richard Meier 14) Unidentified woman 15) Kenneth Frampton 16) Diana Agrest 17) Caroline â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Cotyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Sidnam 18) Jane Ellis 19) Susanne Frank 20) Alexander Gorlin.

In these pictures of a dinner at the IAUS in 1974, one aspect fails to blend in, and in not doing so sticks out.

The first picture show twenty people seated at a dinner table. The complementing picture is almost identical, except it marks each person with an outline and a number. Below each outline list a name.

While reading the list, what sticks out is number 14. Listed as ‘Unidentified woman’

This presence marks an absence.

The outline that marks no 14. As that which is unidentified, seeks to trace the alignment of such outlines.

The individuals seated at the table are of various backgrounds. The context could be positioned by where it takes place, and who’s the host. The place is the Institute of Architecture and Urbans Studies in Manhattan in the early 1970’s. The host is the founder and director of the Institute, architect Peter Eisenman. About half of the dinner guests could be described as architects. Trained as such. One of them is an artist. Others, writers. Some of history. Today. Many of them superstars.

The presence of ‘no 14 unidentified woman’ marks an absence. “The trace is not a presence but rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking no place.”

The implicit hierarchies” by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate and hide the various potential meanings”.1 76

Her ‘present absence’ marks “the contradiction of a coherent agenda for the future”.2

10.

Present absence.

11.

Trace. Reveals itself as the presence of absence. Not an absence of something dialectically opposed to presence, but rather something that goes beyond the dialectic itself.

12.

By placing that, which is unidentified at the center. Her body and the absence of her name, marks this center as the point of departure, in tracing intersecting lines.

13.

The spatial function of lines marks the edge of belonging.

14.

“When things are aligned, we have a straight line. An alignment is often what you do not see. Thing of tracing paper: when the paper is lined up you only see one set of lines. It is all clear, Move one piece of paper, just a bit, a tiny bit: the whole picture is thrown into disarray.3

Notes: 1. “..by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings.” (Lamont ‘87, pp. 590, 602–606 (Michele Lamont, How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 93, No. 3 [Nov., 1987]) 2. Tafuri identified the problem of modern architecture with its impossibility to contain and direct the development of the modern city became the starting point for ‘Theories and History in Architecture’. Here he puts forward a fundamental critique of how modern architectural historiography consistently mystifies the contradictions of architecture by rendering architectural history as a progressive narrative. Manfredo Tafuri, ‘Theories and History in Architecture’ (1968) 3. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology; Orientations, Objects, Others (2006)

Diving Chamber Valentina Santi Lรถw explores different ways to create healing environments, where movement and sound become a common language used to communicate feelings and memories.

While traveling by boat among the Greek and Turkish islands in the Mediterranean sea, I felt the presence of something, like a giant squid or a sort of a very big essence...getting closer to it, I started to realize it was a raft, torn in pieces by the energy of the sea. Then, not far from there, I spotted a number of floating truck tires floating to nowhere. They were abandoned, carried by the current of the sea...so many...I felt an immense emptiness; the idea of having in front of my eyes what I hear in the news was overwhelming; My mind was torn by the doubt if these people had been rescued or not. Water...More than half of our body is made of it. Sea...We dive into it searching for suspension, calm and timelessness. The same playful sea with its jingles, its muffled and plashy sounds. In it, if one really listens, may hear the sound of his own heart. What does it mean to travel without knowing what to expect? Is there really something better than what we are escaping from? My project is dedicated to all those situations where people are missing a common language; it is devoted to the people that need to leave their home, travel and reach other places, but also to the people that lost their way to communicate through words.

My ambition was to create a space of welcoming hospitality. In my imagination, it was going to be a real tiny room, where you should enter and sit, lie down and relax. In order to shape this initial concept, I needed to find a common background where people, whatever the kind of culture they belong to and their personal course of life, despite their individual beliefs and ethnicity, could recognize themselves and leave traces of their own story. My research explored the primordial sounds of Pygmies and Bushmen, from whom we can recall the birth of music and the sounds that not-yetborn babies hear while they are in their mother’ s womb and how they sense the world that surrounds them.While searching for a language that could enhance the power of a healing environment, I realized that the freedom of the utopian languages (first of all the utopian alphabet described by Thomas More and Peter Giles in 1516) was an efficient way to express emotions. Considering several disciplines, including the theatrical one, I also was inspired from an acting device used by medieval jesters and actors in the “Commedia dell’arte”, called Grammelot. This is a good tool to assemble onomatopoeic sounds together in a way where words have no meanings but the message is clear. This utopian form of theatre, used later on also by Chaplin and by Dario Fo, is able to create a very emotional and musical expressivity. Each level of my research pushed towards the value of playful moments as tools for the healing process and promoting fantasy and imagination vs attachment to reality. So, lastly, the project moved from a welcoming room to a swinging chair where you can sit, close yourself in and be lulled as you were in your mother’s womb, while listening to the sound composition that had been created. This project promotes a new level of interaction. The next step of it would be the recording of sounds directly by the people that participate in the project, through verbal or non-verbal story telling. But this phase will take place far from an exhibition space, and its participants would be the ones who are already traveling.

No Other Than You Teres Selberg contemplates the relationship between the human body and the city after partaking in a sweaty urban performance in the dynamic city of Bissau in West Africa. Could it be possible to imagine urban growth as an organic extention of our own bodies, thrusting to fill the void?

Experiencing my body with a strong third person consciousness doing sit-ups in the middle of a busy traffic junction, I wonder why we are all there. Choreographed by the instructor, inhaling the exhaust of the minibuses. It must be about identity. This is the perfect spot to be seen. We are sportive. We are together. We are strong. We are us. The others are just “the other”. “Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought. Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself.” (Simone de Beauvoir)1 I am there. I am us. But I am also “the other”. Right behind me there are a dozen boys playing football in the middle of the roundabout next to a statue of Amílcar Cabral, the man who led the independence movement against Portugal in the early 1970’s. Through theories around colonization and orientalism the concept of “the other” as developed by Edward Said came to symbolize the group or person under oppression of the colonizers.2 After only a little more than 40 years of independence Guinea Bissau is struggling with political corruption, economical dependence on international aid and a continuous presence of imperialism through unfair agreements. At 6 o´clock my class is over, the sun is setting and people are heading back the 7 kilometre walk or run in-between the lanes to the city centre. At the end of the road I find another monument. This one representing the other side in the colonial war, a symbol of the Portuguese forces. A young man suggests I join the group trainings here in the early mornings, but I never manage to wake up in time. Sport activities are happening in infrastructural spaces with political monuments of colonization and liberation. Spaces of power and control became spaces for youth, change and free interpretations. In Bissau more than 80% of the urban population are living in informal settlements3, which actually makes informal the normal way of life. Could it be so that a city’s informal, un-existing planning is creating an informal open-minded use of all spaces in the city? Not to mention the informal economy and the informal political power relations. Everything and nothing is possible at the same time. Hoping that there will be water in the tap when I get home I press myself through the crowd at the late market, leaving traces of my sweat on everyone I pass. It is already dark so I pass smoothly, but some still comment my 83

different skin color in a hope to get my attention to what they are selling. Outside my door, I step into the small grocery store located in a container. Knowing exactly what I want, the salesman hands me two large bottles of water, Here I am already one of the locals. No one is “the other” where people know each other. In “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” Sara Ahmed argues that “to be black in ‘the white world’ is to turn back towards itself, to become an object, which means not only not being extended by the contours of the world, but being diminished as an effect of the bodily extensions of others”.4 She further describes that if the expectations put on a body to perform is not existing they will not find the space or possibility to do so. And in contrast, if space is given, the body extends “by the contours of the world” and fills up that gap. A long shot, but I wonder if it might be possible to put this theory to city growth. Could people’s personalities and abilities to create space and habitat represent a part of the expected growth instead of an illegal but necessary phenomenon happening where governments fail to provide affordable housing to its’ inhabitants? A promising example is the history of Tokyo, partly built on these type of premises. When big parts of the city were demolished in the second world war, the state in crises relied on the inhabitants memories and labor to build it up again. Space was given and people filled it with what was needed, what was expected of them. Today’s super modern infrastructure was later adopted to the incrementally built environment.5 Finishing the first bottle of water on my doorstep, I look at my new neighborhood and find qualities such as lively streets, a rich diversity of people and housing typologies, a mix of functions, interesting well used in-between spaces, urban agriculture, neighborhood watch etc. All this built up by people’s initiatives with no help from the state. Edward Said would say I am romanticizing. And yes, he might be right, there is a risk in the attraction of “the other”. Franz Fanon on the contrary would respond “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?” And so I do.

Notes: 1. Edward Said, Orientalism, (Pantheon Books: New York, 1978) 2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949 3. UN Habitat, The State of African Cities 2014 4. Sara Ahmed, A Phenomenology of Whiteness, Feminist Theory, 2007 5. https://nextcity.org/informalcity/entry/when-tokyo-was-a-slum

The Trees that Make the Horizon Annika ThĂśrn Legzdins developed an interest in the process of using trees to decontaminate toxic soil, also known as dendroremediation, while on a trip to Detroit. Her research gradually led her beyond the trees, raising questions about peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s destinies, environmental destruction and the ongoing economic crisis.

From urbanisation to urban desertion. Vacant lots and negative space. Detroit, a city having lost more than half its population since 1950. Many streets are emptied, buildings and new processes are in motion. The process of dendroremediation gives people and the vacant lots hope. Hope of a greener and more healthy environment. ”I suspect no landscape, vernacular or otherwise, can be comprehended unless we perceive it as an organization of space; unless we ask ourselves who owns or uses the spaces, how they were created and how they change.” J.B. Jackson1 In Detroit that I visited last year I have been exploring the process of dendroremediation, a method of using trees to clean up toxic soil. Soil contamination—also known as soil pollution—is caused by the presence of manmade chemicals in the natural soil environment. It is often caused by some form of industrial activity, agricultural chemicals or improper disposal of waste. The most common chemicals involved in soil pollution are petroleum hydrocarbons, pesticides and lead and other heavy metals. Soil contamination can also happen as a result of underground storage tanks rupturing or the leaching of waste from landfills. Mining, fertilizer application, oil and fuel dumping and a multitude of other environmental issues can also cause pollution of the soil.

The organisation The Greening of Detroit work with dendroremediation as a pilot project. They have planted thousands of trees on former industrial properties throughout the city as part of this research initiative. Specific trees such as, willlows and poplar species are planted to remove toxins from contaminated soil. These sites will be maintained and monitored over a number of years to measure and help determine the effectiveness of using trees to clean up polluted land. There are other initiatives working with the vacant lots in other ways such as Hantz Woodlands and the recovery farming project. There are also a lot of community gardens created in the city. Carolyn Merchant argues that “The drivers of change are material ( bacteria, insects,plants, animals–including humans) and economic (explorations, colonizations, markets, and capital), new ideas can support and legitimate new directions and actions taken by groups of people, societies, and nations.”2 While looking into the dendroremediation process i learned that the White Willow (Salix Alba), that is used in the soil cleaning process also is known for killing pain. Willow bark has been used throughout the centuries, and continues to be used today for the treatment of pain, headache, and inflammatory conditions. The bark contains salicin, which is a chemical similar to aspirin. The Greening of Detroit completed the final tree installation last fall. This year they will be collecting data on tree growth rates and survivability, as well as monitoring the trees for any pests. They will also be uploading all of the dendroremediation trees to OpenTree Map, an open source interactive platform that allows everyone to see the ecosystem services the trees provide beyond cleaning the soil.3 “Whatever its aestetic merits, every representation of landscape is also a record of human values and actions imposed on the land over time.”4 As part of this year’s research I have been working with material from the dendroremediation process, transforming and reproducing leafs of the Salix Alba or white willow with a soft ground etching technique, an action.

Notes: 1. J.B. Jackson, “Concluding with Landscape,” Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 150. 2. Carolyn Merchant, ”The Scientific Revolution and the Death of Nature (Focus-Isis 97,The History of Science, 2006) originally published in Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1989). 3. Wade Rose,Vacant Land Manager, The Greening of Detroit, (https://www.opentreemap.org/ thegreeningofdetroitstreemap/map/). 4. Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings of Landscape Photography”, in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1989), p. 126; originally published in Exposure 23 (Fall 1985)

The Library Anna Tullberg is haunted by the memory of a lost library, its empty presence still lingering amongst the litter on an empty lot in Detroit. A chance encounter with an old man who also senses this civic ghost leads the radio producer to make a recording of this negative space. The painful memory of the vanished books crave to be carved in wood.

The Library Corner of Gratiot Ave and Seneca, Detroit Michigan. March; cold, ugly, colorless. Quiet. A few cars passing by at high speed. Gratiot Avenue cuts through Detroit’s entire poor east side on the diagonal. Litter is everywhere. The trees are naked. Plastic bags stuck in their crowns. Two large empty lots in front of me on each side of the street. Brown grass. A shivering sensibility arises out of this space. Which lot is it? Where was the Mark Twain Branch of Detroit’s Public Library? I need to know. I’ve been thinking about this place and the library ever since I first saw the photos taken inside, when the damage was already done. In my head; pictures of a structure open to the skies, books swimming in total disorder on the floor. For almost a hundred years, there stood a library here. The financial problems began in the 1980s and lead to deferred maintenance. The Mark Twain Branch closed due to budget shortfalls in the summer of 1990. A leaking roof. The building began to deteriorate rapidly. Several millages were passed that were supposed to include money for the work on the building, but the work was never done. I’ve read somewhere that the neighbors are still angry about what they feel was a deliberate effort by the Detroit Public Library to mislead them into voting for a millage that they promised would restore the library. By the end of October 2011; demolition completed. Is there somebody here to ask about this? A library is a space that contains countless worlds, not visible. They are there to be revealed by each and every one. Once discovered, they remain. A man in his seventies is fixing a jalousie outside a worn out house. I approach him: “Excuse me, do you know on which of those empty lots the Mark Twain Branch used to be?” He looks at me: “The library is there. Don’t you see it?” 91

Karma Carving My thumb web is aching. The tool I’m using is something I never held in my hand before. We are not friends. The knife is sharp and pointed. I’m concentrating very hard to follow the lines of the reversed drawing I made on the piece of wood in front of me. I’m lousy at this, my technique is really bad and I’m scared I will slip and cut myself. The man I met. And me; in a coat with a hood. (I had to find a way to cover my head at some times, to find shelter in a city landscape that made me think of a fucked up hard drive.) The empty lot and the trees, still standing. “We used to go there every day. My son loved the place. But now he has moved to Tennessee.” What happened to all the books? “I don’t know, maybe in the soil...” Thousands of books made of paper pulp. Dissolved under a leaking roof. Where did all the letters go? My knife follow the lines and there, I’m done. Time to start carving. Wood chips everywhere. I have no idea what it will look like when I’m ready. The unpredictability of this process, it’s impossible for me to be in control over the material. But this memory craves to be captured in wood. Very, very slowly I’m carving the negative space away. The patience I have to bring into this process, it’s an effort for me. And for the first time since I was a child and got lost in time while reading a book, I lose track of time again, completely. Karma carving. I hear his voice in my head. I see his eyes before me. “The library is there. Don’t you see it?” The building was demolished. The lot where it used to be has turned into negative space. The empty lot is negative space.To be able to print my picture, I have to carve the negative space away.

*Special thanks to Patrick Wagner at the lithography workshop for guidance and patience.

Infinite Intimacy Jakob Wiklanderâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work investigates the gradual mirroring of our actual and virtual worlds, as we now convert our lives most intimate spaces - our homes - into data to be stored, circulated and consumed. Yet this process is not simply a one way upload, as digital spaces now begin to escape our screens, influencing the ways we inhabit the physical world .

How the parallel spatiality of the digital world relates to the physical world? It is certainly referencing our physical world, creating a mirrored reality, rendered in equal detail. The process of translating the physical world into data requires some kind of filter, at present day the algorithm. How does this process distort the mirrored image of the physical world, and how does it mirror it back? At present the spaces that have been mapped the most and translated into data are the street and the home, through platforms like Google maps and Airbnb. The streetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s receptiveness to being mapped can be understood by its public nature of easy access, but the home, as the traditional representative of the private sphere, is harder to understand, but also it is the typology that is most transformed by its digital representational counterpart. The home may vary in shape and in materiality, but yet it remains a very clear concept. It is the place of our comfort zone, it has a permanence which creates both psychological tranquility and physical protection. It is a clearly identifiable entity through its long history and distinct codes, norms and aesthetics. It is the signifiers of the home that are universally readable, at least to the users of platforms such as Airbnb, that make the home suitable for mapping and computation, and thus comparable and can act as a currency. These signifiers, such as bathtub, balcony, clean sheets, cozy neighborhood, can easily be computable into data, but by that process they can also be quantified, and start to work the other way around, placing themselves into the physical world. Refurbishment of our homes starts to be governed by the selection of tick-boxes, and materials previously proved to be photogenic at the online realtor site Hemnet. Tendencies spurred by these platforms seem to dissolve the typology of the house-home, from being a stable program into something more blurred, part time temporary hotel or office, or pure income, but at the same time this tendency seems to strengthen the imagery of the home. But maybe the home is not vanishing, but just cutting loose from its physical contents. Much like the home, your smartphone provides you with a feeling of comfort zone, no matter also being an obvious tool of surveillance. It is hard to feel completely lost or alone, when maps and messenger always at hand. It has become more important to have your phone or your laptop than your bed. In that sense your house-home can rather be quantified, like your iCloud-account. 95

It is just these devices and the platforms that now reshape and bend the physical infrastructure. It is these that bring the public sphere into the interior, and bring your comfort zone to the exterior. They create a strange feeling of both comfort and control, in a combination very much alike that of the home. They attempt to mirror the whole physical reality with an equally detailed virtual reality, in a process where every aspect has to be translated into manageable data. They map the world in a scale one-to-one, just as in the novel by Jorge Luis Borges.1 Examples like Google maps and Airbnb have taken on the project of the cartographer to strike a map that reference, and archive everything, but doing so through algorithms. Borges’ idea was that when the map became equally detailed as reality, the map would lose its purpose and vanish. Baudrillard on the other hand claimed that the map would prevail, and reality would vanish. The virtual reality works like a mirror-in-mirror in the sense that it seeks to mirror ourselves, our home or the street in a fashion that may by calculable, and hence quantified. But if some spaces seem to be more indexable than others, does it mean that we can design a space that could resist such biopolitical control? These images surely will walk off the screen, still operate offline, and slowly create a post-edited society, as rendered in after effects.

1 ”. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless . . .” ”On Exactitude of Science”, J. L. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin Books, London, 1975

Colophon R-Lab: Architecture - Media - Design. Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm Course Run by Professor Peter Lang Edited by Peter Lang and Matthew Ashton. Design by Matthew Ashton www.sp-arc.se Cover artwork is a print inspired by the architecture of the HT Structure, designed by Oskar Hansen and Lech Tomaszewski for the Izmir International Fair in Turkey (1955). Printed by Holmberg’s Tryckeri Malmö www.holmbergs.com Cover printed by (3) Screen tryck Malmö www.3screen.nu Acknowledgements: Jens Evaldsson Installations director whose broad artistic talents are critical to making these exhibitions happen. Matthew Ashton and Sofie Tolf, who together produced, designed and edited this R-Lab publication, and steadfastly nurtured its development. Magnus Ericson, whose course Organising Discourse was at the centre of many of our discussions. At Index, Axel Wieder, director and the staff at Index, Joanna Nordin and Max Ronnersjö at the Polska Institute, Malgorzata HejdukGromek,Katarzyna. Syty and former staff Anna Tomaszewska for their generous assistance and funding support. At the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, curator Aleksandra Kedziorek, who provided much needed background on Oskar Hansen. Eva-Pi Johansson at Newsec for generously providing space at the Beta Passegen for R-Lab’s year-end exhibition, and Lars Hammarström and Peter Geschwind for making this pop-up happen.

Course Participants: Michela Barone Lumaga www.michelabaronelumaga.com Rebecka Engvall www.roxyengvall.tumblr.com Anna Maria Furuland www.marylandstudio.wordpress.com Marta Gil www.mekonee.tumblr.com Antonie Grahamsdaughter www.antoniefrank.se Johanna Jansson www.sodraoland.tumblr.com Barthélémy Massot www.rlab15.wordpress.com Cecilie Meng www.heavypresents.wordpress.com Beatrice Orlandi www.exoreality.com Marie-Louise Richards www.no14unidentifiedwoman.tumblr.com Valentina Santi Löw www.researchlabkkh1516.tumblr.com Teres Selberg www.teres.se Annika Thörn Legzdins www.atlegzdins.tumblr.com Anna Tullberg www.annatuniverse.tumblr.com Jakob Wiklander www.jakobwiklander.se

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