VERSION 4 by VERSION magazine

& PRINT, CLUJ.

VERSION 0.4 September 2003, Free Sample ISSN 1583-7440

THE VERSION ARTIST RUN MAGAZINE WAS FOUNDED IN 2001 BY GABRIELA VANGA, NICOLAE BACIU, MIRCEA CANTOR, CIPRIAN MURESAN

THIS ISSUE IS EDITED BY VERSION. WITH THE SUPPORT OF IDEA DESIGN

Address: VERSION ñ Artist Run Magazine Str. Gutinului, 19 400090 Cluj-Napoca Romania

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Version thanks to all collaborators to their contributions for this issue.

Graphic design: Mircea Cantor Printed at: IDEA Design & Print, Cluj. 2000 copies Proof reading: Virgil Leon Web-site: Ciprian Mure∫an

Editorial consultants: Ami Barak, Amiel Grumberg, Timotei N„d„∫an, Vanina Pinter, Ovidiu fiichindeleanu

VERSION 0.4 September 2003 (English edition) number coordinated by : Gabriela Vanga, Mircea Cantor and Ciprian Mure∫an

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Gabriela Vanga, Mircea Cantor, Ciprian Mure∫an, The Real Map Amiel Grumberg, Culinary convolutions Miklos Erhardt & Dominic Hislop, Re:route ñ a remapping of the city of Turin from the perspective of recent immigrants Ovidiu fiichindeleanu, Territorial pissings Jean-Yves Petiteau, The map ends where the ìworldî begins, and in order to define it, the ìworldî needs to be drawn Federico Rahola, Definitively temporary zones Andreas Fogarasi, Public Brands Federica Sossi, In the spaces of the ìoutsideî Guy Rottier, Retreat lodges to be burned after usage (1968-1969) Augustin Ioan, The (post) Communist/Monumental ìJunk Spaceî Amy Cheung, 72 hours of sound and vision made in Hong Kong (30/6/1997-2/7/1997) Adriana Lara, Ideas Anna Daneri, Italian mapping: cartographies and territories Glimpses of the Invisible City: a conversation between Toyo Ito and Hans Ulrich Obrist Laura Maritano, Walls, maps and ìroad mapsî: Israelís view of a Palestinian state Nikola Jankovic, The World Web Cam of Armin Linke Martin Koeppl, Remarks on the Aestetics of Trajectory and Nomadism: Mapping (Inter-)Faces of the World Dan Perjovschi, White chalk, dark issues Tom Mc Carthy on Roman Vasseur/The Consignment The Institute, The One-way Ticket Worldwide Travels Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain, Seoul city Hans Ulrich Obrist, interview with Peter Cook Yona Friedman, La Ville-continent

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“The imaginary moves perfectly outside reality, often contradicts it with nonchalance, in spite of any evidence. The ancient Greeks combined several representations of the globe that emerged, and it couldn’t be otherwise, from the imaginary. The most durable of them showed a continental area - just one - in the northern hemisphere and another one, perfectly similar and symmetric in the southern hemisphere. This was the “map” that Columbus used when navigating to the Far East. As we all know, he discovered America, that he fought against his entire life as his imaginarygeography wouldn’t allow him to accept it. Cuba and Haiti were for him parts of China; among the poor huts of Indians the Genovese navigator was looking for the palace of the mighty khan ! The hypothesis of some Greek scholars who had lived two thousand years before proved to be more powerful than the striking geographical reality.”1

as difficult as it is for others to get to Mars. From this point we can extend the problematization of territory as Mars is not yet a colonized planet by earthlings. MENTAL GPS - STATE OF CONFUSION In 1992 Michael Jackson came to Bucharest for a live concert. In an official speech delivered from the balcony of the House of People, the super star exclaims in front of thousands of fans: ìWelcome Budapest!î Ö (no comment)

"If the map is opposed to the tracing, it is because it turns completely towards experimentation to grasp reality. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed on itself, but builds it" Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

ìIMAGINE THEREíS NO COUNTRIESî2 The term psychogeography was familiar for the structuralists in the ë60s-ë70s: the town defined according to mental trajectories, to memory of routes we followed, to reshaping of the map determined by the need to cover a territory. The tourism industry and mass media best know how to use this thing as they create the ìimageî of a certain place (that becomes a clichÈ in time). To project yourself (in imagination) in a space you donít know can sometimes be frustrating the minute you really get there. Many people leave for a certain place or dream about it without any coherent explanation of their choice, being often ìguidedî by some universal standards (see the recent songs of Madonna referring to the ìAmerican dreamî - American Life and Hollywood). The game of imagination can also offer another perspective of rearranging the world; just as The map of the world can get you out of the world for a few minutes offering you the opportunity to affirm something which ìin realityî is not possible.

Photo © Version magazine archives

Editorial: The Real Map

The Map of the world, 2003, inkjet print on metal board, magnets.

verything started with the idea that Bucharest could be moved to France. First it was just a joke in a chat we were having in the summer of 2000. Meanwhile, the joke was taken seriously and the idea of a world map with capitals moving at ease, following political, religious or other options, was born. The map of the world is not an object with a purpose. The map of the world is just the support for shot-circuiting some aspects connected to the Gabriela Vanga is an artist and editor at Version, she works and lives in Paris and Nantes. Mircea Cantor is an artist and editor and designer at Version, he works and lives in Paris and Nantes. Ciprian Mureºan is an arist and editor at Version, he works and lives in Cluj-Napoca 2

idea of trajectory, flux, exchange, influence. It can also be a manner of destroying hierarchies and conventions connected to geographic perception. The map of the world doesnít state but questions. The map of the world can be a catalyst. What we intended with this issue of Version was to invite various collaborators coming from different fields (artists, architects, philosophers, sociologists) who have something in common (even by far) with what we thought we can induce with this ëtoolí which is The map of the world. A question we asked spontaneously was: why dealing with the map of the terrestrial globe and not that of planet Mars? And the answer was simple: because we live here, because for some people getting from Bucharest to New York is just

REAL WAR WITH IMAGINARY ENEMIES How utopian the map Marcel Broodthaers ìcreatedî in 19683 really was? What do we understand today when speaking of trajectory, time, distance as we invent the ëcontinent cityí4? What is that alters our mental perception of the world when in the same place at the same time we have at hand all the ingredients to create a double of the world? Can we still speak of the ëisolated caseí concept? What is the role of a map today in a war if we have satellites that give high accuracy images about any objective we want? How do we adapt to the emigrants waves that reshape the entire social, political, economical and cultural geography? What does exoticism mean? Can we speak of the exoticism of American culture as seen from the Balkans or the third world, or vice versa? What consequences can be predicted in a given situation when we know that only one dislocation of an element on one level brings about and determines the re-organization of the whole structure on all its levels?

Notes: 1. Lucian Boia, Pentru o istorie a imaginarului (For a History of Imaginary), Humanitas, Bucharest, 2000. 2. Excerpt from the song Imagine by John Lennon. 3. Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976). In 1968 he manipulated an official map by correcting only two letters of its title and transformed the ìCarte du Monde politiqueî into ìCarte du Monde PoÈtiqueî. 4. Yona Friedman, see page 52.

Links: http://parole.aporee.org http://reroute.c3.hu/ http://translationmap.walkerart.org/ http://wonderwalker.walkerart.org/about.html http://www.erational.org/software/traceyou/index.html http://latitudes.walkerart.org/ http://www.erational.org/software/mies4all.html http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/artistic.html http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CartographicCongress http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/TheMapRoom http://chinabone.twenteenthcentury.com/gallery/maproom http://chinabone.twenteenthcentury.com/gallery/hall_of_maps http://chinabone.twenteenthcentury.com/gallery/hall_of_maps/DSCN2990 http://www.socialfiction.org/archibobB.html http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/martin.html http://members.aol.com/bowermanb/worldgames.html http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/ http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/news/index.htm http://www.unomaha.edu/afghanistan_atlas/displace.html http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/prenlab2final/node72.html

The Map of the world, details of the map.

All images ÂŠ Version magazine archives

Play the game online and get involved in the open forum at: www.versionmagazine.com

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Culinary convolutions

he current availability of food from all over the world in a single place contributes to the general illusion of the world as a global village, a distorted image of a planet where any geographical, cultural or gustatory borders should be removed. One can easily read, through the gourmet lure, the history of the 20th century Diasporas, the spreading of culinary traditions as a result of the perpetual human movement. The cooking of a country also reflects the history of its immigration. A basic activity to preserve the link to oneís origins, the traditional cuisine has gradually become a valuable element of economic insertion. Culinary cosmopolitism has acquired a

tourist value, culinary cosmopolitism has become an in. During a few decades, some new standards have been thus imposed in the European gourmet environment. After the long-lasting fashion of US fast-foods, pseudo Italian pizzerias, Indian sushi, kebabs, what will be the new favorites of European taste in the years to come? It is actually difficult to escape today from the delights of this culinary globalization, quickly registered by the tourist industry into the catalogue of unique experiences. ìThe world in your platesî, whether you are in London, Berlin, Bangkok or Rio de Janeiro. Such a change of gourmet scenery will make you feel better, brave citizen of the world, and will satisfy your insatiable curiosity.

Exotic cuisine is indeed a good opportunity for change of scenery. Once exported, it does not escape, however, an immediate alteration caused by its uprooting, very much like the one described by Victor Segalen in his Essay on exoticism. Tasting the delights of precious faraway dishes is generally accompanied by a copious scenario, with traditional clothes and musical ambiance.

Amiel Grumberg is a free-lance curator, works and lives in Paris and Amsterdam. 6

The attraction often turns out to be less authentic than expected and traditional dishes are frequently reinterpreted by local products that reduce their taste and color. The continuous development of restaurants from all over the world in the main tourist cities in Europe and worldwide is nevertheless one of todayís colonialist stenches and proves the persistence of exotic, sexual and culinary fantasies. In his Stuff 1 performance, the American artist Coco Fusco violently blames this double thirst of sex and food of the Western tourist set out to the discovery of the Cuba Island. Inviting oneself to dinner allows taking pleasure in a form of universal tolerance, far from being as upright as it seems. Gastronomy, considered a strong identity mark, has an important geopolitical dimension. The expression and the extension of political and economic power in a country go through the spreading of its cultural outlines and culinary pattern. The ability of a country to spread its

power and its influence over the globe is also measured by its capacity to offer its co-citizens the possibility to taste its ìhome sweet homeî meals wherever they are on the planet. The cuisine makes it possible to impose oneís own pattern and, by doing this, refuse other patterns. Cooking stoves have thus already become, for years, a privileged setting for debates and bilateral clashes. Whether it is expressed by prosperous multinationals or under the auspices of a cultural exception and a secular uniqueness, the power of gastronomy always plays the same role: to define and promote an image, even if it makes use of the most widespread clichÈs and anecdotes. The

image of exponential power for Big Mac, of refinement for trout p‚tÈ in lemon jelly, of virtuous precision for the fugu2 cut, each of them extract the quintessence of a so-called national touch in their traditional cuisine. Unless artists are involved in composing their own menu, only confiding in their own creativity within any external circumstances, such as the dinner concocted by Ben Kinmont, starting from the recipes of remarkable modern and contemporary figures, like Salvador DalÌís Toffee Pine Cone or Philip Cornerís Fig Pervert3. Although part of the basic human activities, food does not escape all kinds of digressions and there is no doubt that we should consider our nutritional behavior, just as we consider our readings or our preferences in music or movies. In order to better understand the implications of a classical urban nutrition program: Monday Chinese, Tuesday Indian, Wednesday... etc., the mere reflection would have us compare the pleasure of the taste buds, the thirst of discovery and the underlying

ideological problems. Without spoiling our appetite, we could even tempt to highlight certain coincidences and consider gastronomy under its strictly economic aspects. The countries that are most present in our consumer habits are generally well represented on a culinary level, by means of restaurants and specialized shops, or by industrial dishes sold in supermarkets. Cuisine thus plays its role of added value and its often unorthodox adaptations maintain the incomplete and caricature-like nature of our vision on the rest of the world. Eventually, seeing all these wars of influence that rule the world, reflected in oneís plates, make it possible to foresee the main orientations imposed on evolution and on culinary fashion. Could this lead to a global cuisine, merger of the creativity of chefs from all over the world, synthesis of the taste of all nations united, finally the event of global peaceÖ? May 2003

One week of Parisian menu, July 2003

Notes: 1. Stuff, a performance created by the artists Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante, offers a critical look on the myths binding Latino women to food and eroticism in the imagination of Western tourists. Started in 1996, this performance made an important American tour by 1999. 2. Fugu is the famous Japanese moon-fish whose ovaries contain a lethal poison that spread all over its body unless it is prepared correctly. 3. Dinner offered for the exhibition La Vie devant soi (Life in front of you) at Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, July-September 2002, masters : Paul Ardenne, Ami Barak, Jackie Ruth Meyer.

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he Re:route project was originally conceived in response to an invitation to exhibit at the BIG Torino Biennial: ëBig Social Gameí, 2002. The curators were eager to commission projects that would connect an artistic experience with various aspects of social life in an interactive way. With Italy being the most common entry point into Europe for immigrants, and in the light of Berlusconiís acceptance of extreme right elements, hostile towards immigrants into his coalition government, the public perception of immigrants is a very contentious issue in the context of North Italy and reflects both the global and the local

short term experience they can acquire in the time they have at their disposal. During the two month development of Re:route, we could share our experience as foreigners and newcomers to Turin with the participants thus creating an atmosphere of mutual trust and connect the process of learning with the articulation of the work. A map is a cold medium which employs an apparent objectivity as a strategy. Consequently, an ëalternativeí mapping, can challenge this strategy, questioning the objectivity itself, which in most cases is simply to veil established

Re:route ñ a remapping of the city of Turin from the perspective of recent immigrants (http://reroute.c3.hu)

The mental maps, photographs and comments by each of the participants have been presented as an installation and web site at the BIG Torino Biennial in April 2002, ‘Polis: urban(e)motion’ Bologna in July 2002 and at the c3 Centre of Communication and Culture, Budapest in February 2003.

consequences of economic globalisation. In formulating our project, we wanted to avoid attempting to state some overarching conclusions about the position of immigrants from our own perspectives. Instead, we used our role as artists to listen, record and facilitate the communication of the images and experiences presented to us by those who were directly experiencing the mixed fortunes of being an immigrant in Italy. We proposed an urban mapping of the city of Torino from the viewpoint of immigrants from ëextra-communitarií countries, who had arrived in the city within the last few years. In this way, we could also reflect the problems of being artists ëparachutedí into a new environment, a situation common to artists participating in international public art events, where they often attempt to deal with, and give some relevant contribution to an existing social environment, based on only the

Miklós Erhardt is an artist and lives in Budapest. Dominic Hislop is an artist and lives in Berlin. 8

structures of domination. We wanted to create a map which depicts a specific geographical territory from unique points of view, somewhere between the provisional and the fixed ñ a feature of immigrant life, and filled with a mixture of practical and subjective, poetic information. If we assume maps to objectively depict what exists, then, following the stereotype, we can draw the naive conclusion that a reality which is questioned and veiled, can be legitimized in the form of a map. Through the exposure of ëinvisibleí perspectives of the city, the purpose of this mapping project was therefore the legitimization and acknowledgment of the realities of global migration. We approached participants through various state institutions, cultural associations, hostels and volunteer services that have contact with immigrants and began a dialogue about their subjective relation to their new living environment, their reasons for coming to Europe and how they perceive their prospects. The next step was to trace a cognitive map of the town, including their daily routes, places of work, shopping, relaxing, and places that they may not necessarily visit regularly, but provoke a particular association or memory for them. We then gave each participant a camera and invited them to take photographs of the points theyíd emphasized on their maps. When the cameras were returned and pictures processed we arranged a meeting to discuss the pictures theyíd taken, which we recorded in order to transcribe later. The presentation of the work took the form of both an installation and a web-site (reroute.c3.hu). In both cases, the photographs and related comments were grouped below a composite ëmental mapí according to the location where they were taken, creating a consequent visual density

that highlights those areas of the city that were indicated to be the most distinct for the majority of participants. Beyond this convergence of spatial and social experiences, there are many differences in subjective approaches and views, as reflected in the comments, that give an added richness to the material. When the work was first presented at the Big Torino Biennial, we encouraged the participants to come to see the exhibition as well as to attend the related discussions. Due to both their and the audienceís positive response, we are planning to develop the project through other, more accessible forms of presentation, such as a booklet and a printed map that would be distributed among the immigrant support groups in the city, offering practical and moral support to newcomers. Subsequent to the BIG Torino Biennial, the project was presented in a group show called ëPolisí in Bologna and in c3 Center of Culture and Communication in Budapest, having a positive response in both places. In our perception the success of the work has been due to its demonstration of the multiple experiences and complex reasons behind immigration, which challenge simplistic common stereotypes, and at the same time being easily accessible and understandable to a large public.

Through a series of dialogues, each participant was asked to sketch a ‘mental map', illustrating how they perceive and experience the city, then given a camera with which to represent images and locations that had become significant for them. The above map, sketched by Mahmoud from Morocco reveals his perception of the city and it’s spaces as a linear path that passes through each of the places that are significant for him in the city. Starting from Porta Nuova (PN), a central point established on each persons map, he has drawn the route he takes through the central street market, to the car park where he sleeps in an abandoned car every night. The path then leads on to show the police station where he has to register every 3 months, the river, and finally the park where he goes every Sunday. 5

Mahmoud (Morocco) This is where I sleep. It’s near the hospital car park. I don’t have a flat, or a job to pay the rent. I haven’t had a residence permit for years now. I had one before but they took it away. I can’t do anything else now so I sleep in one of the cars that are just left there. They could be stolen cars. They’re just left there. Do you always sleep in the same car? I have to change cars because they take them away, so I have to find another. Don’t the police disturb you here? They know me in fact, there’s no problem.

Nali (Kurdistan/Iraq) The markets in my country are very similar to this. The stalls. It reminds me of my country. But there are many immigrants in Porta Palazzo, some are good people, and some are bad people, but the Italians tend to see all of the immigrants as evil. I don't like this. They think that most of the people in this area are taking drugs and stealing. That's not true. Sometimes I can see it in the way that they look at me, that they discriminate against me and think that I'm bad just because they can see that I'm a foreigner. But they don't know my reasons for coming here. That I am a political refugee.

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Evelyn (Nigeria) People that work by the road here. They are working on the streets. You can only see the people there at night. Most of them, if they could get a job, they would leave the streets. This is a place where, if it is cold during the night, she can make a fire. They collect bits of wood paper or clothes that they find lying around and try to burn it to make a fire. She can stay there to warm up. A lot of the prostitutes back home in my country, work in hotels, and not outside like this. I don’t know why it’s like this here. Just imagine, somebody who comes from a hot country and they have to stand outside like this. She could stay in a house that is warm instead of standing outside like this. Apart from this, the work is dangerous. Sometimes the girls get serious burns on their legs on these fires, just so they can stay warm. I saw that they made a fire here and I asked the girl, ‘why did you make a fire here, why don’t you wear more clothes?’, she said that you have to show your legs to get the customers. Some of them have some wounds, bad injuries because they stand by the fire with bare legs, because this country is very cold in winter. One day we were coming from outside Turin and we saw this place full of girls. I asked one Nigerian girl why she does this job, why she doesn’t go looking for another job. She told me that she didn’t have documents. She was crying. I told her that there is a place where there are some sisters who are helping people. I gave her the address so that if she decides to leave that job she can go there and ask for help. I asked her ‘why don’t you go to the sisters and ask for help’, she said ‘no, if I don’t pay back the money, the madama will give me problems’. I met her some time later and she had got a bad injury, because of the fire, so she tried to leave the streets. Now she’s moving from one hospital to another trying to cure the burns that she has on her legs.

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Jefferson (Democratic Republic of Congo) This is the garden of Sermig (dormitory). If foreigners leave in the morning, then they come here. You have to leave at 7 am, even if it’s raining, if it’s snowing or it’s sunny, for them it doesn’t matter. At seven there’s the alarm, at seven thirty you’re out already. You can only come back at 7 pm. I had spent two months like this. This is the park where foreigners gather in the morning; there’s nothing to do, so, you may as well just walk. What did you do with so much free time? What could I do? I was walking around, that’s it. Then you must know Turin well? I was walking withouth noticing what’s there around me, just like that. You know, when you have problems, then you can only think about them. They throw you out at seven and immediately you start thinking about what kind of life you’re living here, and that you would never have expected to do anything like that. Before I had never had such a heavy situation.

Composite Mental Map 1- Gringo (Bosnia) 2- Ismael (Somalia) 3- Liuda (Moldova), 4- Mergyan (Roma/Bosnia) 5- Mahmoud (Morocco) 6- Mohamed (Morocco) 7- Larry (Sierra Leone)

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Territorial pissings aps are, usually, media that blend visual and M scriptural semiotical fluxes. They build up a certain species of meaning that has to do with subjective processes of territorialization. Maps privilege an iconic thinking, namely a way of thinking which is determined in its investments by non-abstract, territorialized symbols. (The simplest example of what I call here non-abstract or real symbol, one that defines behaviour within a certain territory, are traffic signs. A virtual symbol is, in contrast, for example, the image of a unicorn). The visual or graphical elements and the scriptural ones are not equal in map assemblages, they donít affect in the same manner the consciousness. Often, the visual matter tends to be taken as signifier, whereas only the scriptural matter tends to be understood as the signified of the whole assemblage. The iconic thinking can be thus subjected to falsely assign a necessary link between the two kind of elements; for example, between the written notion of the ìWorldî and an image putting Europe in its centre. Equally often, the image comes to stabilize the vagueness or to simplify the complexness implied by a scriptural notion, refreshing ìitsî meaning and giving it a sort of plenary or ìoriginalî consistence. One could understand the way subjects are molded by iconical thinking, by means of analyzing the differential rapports between the semiotical fluxes that constitute and determine the limits of their expressions. With the help of a methodology rooted in FÈlix Guattariís works, Iíll offer two short examples of messing around with icons. Firstly, Iíll bring up the glamorous Heino, the unforgettable german schlager star, and his song from 1972, Blue blooms the gentian. The phonetical theme that could be reffered to as Holla-dia-dia-holladi-holladi-ho comes to conclude a series of lyrics that are clustering step by step towards a non-articulated meaning. Namely, we are informed by Heino that they sat in the first hut, they ate later in the second hut and they kissed in the third one. We are said only that ìnobody knows what happened nextî. A territory is assigned to each stage of the story, rigorously counted, and identified with the exotical choice of Ovidiu Þichindeleanu BA in Philosophy. BA in Computer Science Applied in Economics. MA in Philosophy (Strasbourg-Cluj), currently PhD Candidate at SUNY Binghamton.

the ìhutî. However, although itís not too difficult to get the meaning of the last culminating phase, this meaning is deprived in Heinoís lyrics of its hut; we could wonder, together with J¸rgen Menck, if they needed a forth hut ñ or did they stay in the third one? The temporary meanings are coupled with territorialities, each one is identified through an icon, but precisely when it matters, when the meaning of the whole scene is to be carried through, we are left only with the reflection that plenar meanings cannot be territorialized ñ if not only by Heinoís fans. We cannot draw a complete map of the moments of the story, hut by hut, we donít dispose of a location to set in the meaning we already possess. ñ Why Heino, why ? ñ Well, we are rescued from this difficult situation by the lightheartedly Holla-

dia-dia-etc. as we detain an excess of meaning, non-territorialized, non-mapped, non-semiotized, Heino hurries to offer us a non-syntagmatical linguistic matter, an essential sonic one, one that could be ìexplainedî only by casting around subjective animal-like processes of expression, beyond any scriptural or visual signified. The result: wobbling from left to right and again, we solve our problem with the expressionless meaningfullness by howling together with Heino, by sharing meaningfull glances with our tablemates, by getting thus together our expressive identity as subjects with full rights in a community. Provided that I didnít dispose of a signifier to stick to the meaning I already possesed in my inner consciousness, I territorialized it in my own being, offering it instead of a ìhutî my own body and particularly my face. An in-significant sonic flux mated with the excess of meaning that bothered me ñ and nobody knows what happened nextÖ Every table mate in this Heino orgy carries,

somewhere in its mind, three huts, and on its face a grin and two sparkling eyes. As if to offer a tutorial to us, his spectators, the face of Heino himself, right from the second as he begins to sing, morphes like programmed into showing a huge smile, incredibly steady throughout the performance, and very shiny eyes. (Heinoís later black glasses can only enforce the power of his teethfull smile.) By echoing Heinoís -dia-dia etc, each spectator transforms itself into a living icon. The way of thinking we deal with is exclusively iconical: each meaning has its own ìhutî, or elsewhere each meaning has its own colour, something like: the gentian was blue/ the forrest was green/ and we ñ so happy! This makes impossible for a certain meaning to be enounced in Heinoís world: he will never say ìand then we fuckedî; instead, he will summon, nostalgically, exotical elements (the hut, the wigwam) or pearls of nature (the gentian), beyond any possible doubt, untouched by the imperfection of the ìcivilizedî communication. This elements are casted and function as a sort of pure signs, able to ground a new kind of communication and thus ñ why not? ñ a new kind of human community. If you ponder now together with me the simple yet deep beauty of the title of our song, we already understand each other in a special way, beyond words, right? Finally, to round up the equation, a sonic phrase, devoid of meaning, marks the semiotical critical point wherefrom the new communication already begun, and with it a community of more purity, in which the redundant facial expressions are making an icon out of each subject. A fullfilled and pure expression is anew possible, thanks to an integral of nature, faciality and yodel ñ and in the same

movement expressions of a different type are silently eliminated. One can substitute of course the yodel for a hymn, or any repetitive motive (like the tv-news theme), and the natural elements for any other signs of purity ñ so as to notice how and where are the possibilities of expression directed and limited. The second example Iíll bring up is the crying tree, theme that is common to a whole series of novels with Japanese motives: situated somewhere on the top of a mound that guards a small village, the tree is the place where people pull out, when they had too much. A mythical territory, worshiped by all the inhabitants of the village ñ at least as much as by the thrilled readers, excited by the exotism of this different culture ñ is designated as shelter for both the unarticulated and articulated sounds, an unexpected entwining of sonic syntagmatic and non-syntagmatic fluxes. Under the tree crown, the men of the village throw every unbearable excess out of themselves, they gush the most troubling screams, in the same ìspeechî act. The excess of meaning snarls with the unarticulated bursts owing to a territory with a special status, a hypertropy with an existential function. The territory that hosts this unique subjective expression is outside the inhabited common space, outside the village. Although is essentially exterior, the tree determines the social stability of the in-common territory, where adult subjects are not allowed to burst into uncontrolled irruptions. The villager can keep his dignity even when a samurai urinates on him; he will later express his nuisance, hindered from nobody and nothing, under the welcoming crown of the tree. The villagers know, are aware and they can hear

what happens under the tree, but they donít speak publicly about it; what has been uttered last night under the tree is reflected in the village only by means of silence and meaningfull glances. This time, in contrast to Heinoís factory, we donít dispose of a whole series of icons, we donít have a discrete number of huts. There is only one element, a single majestic icon, that coagulates the whole assemblage. The surplus of enounces, of

meaning, and the non-syntagmatic sonic expression blend in a process of subjectivation which is as inaugural as in the case of the beaming fans of Heino. This time, the process itís not materialized only on the face of the people, but also in an outside teritory, a natural one, untouched by the hand of man ñ only by its cries. The nature plays here as well a decisive part, this time in its physical being: it offers the space for a purer and thruthful communication, impossible in the decadent society of men. This engenders of course the profligacy of all kinds of deep pastoral reflections, inspired by this type of parables, centered on the inexhaustable sense of nature and maybe on the profound beauty of Japanese landscapes... Nature, faciality and screams make possible anew a pure and fulfilled expression. The crying tree offers pretty much the same roof as Heinoís huts; it serves also as a model for what would be a sort of an ideal, truthful communication, for an iconic thinking that affirms itself by eliminating other possibilities of expression. The difference lies

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in that whereas Heinoís thinking is a rather continental one, forded by expansionist tendencies (series of icons), the iconic thinking reflected in our second fable is rather an insular one, tending to condense (one central icon). I presented thus two assemblages that integrate the same type of component parts: surplus of enunciable meaning, sonic non-syntagmatic expressions, elements of nature and existential territorialization. Both systems articulate an iconic thinking, that develops fixed maps, inaugural ones, that are delimiting very strictly the possibilities of expression of their subjects. Both function as if they propose an originary communication, of a superior order. The direction took by semiotical fluxes is different: in the first case, it goes in an expansive manner, producing more and more icons but never crossing or watching beyond the forbidden frontier, assimilating each subject as an icon with a prescribed function (and an easy to recognize Fresse, Geule). In the second case, it goes on condensing all the expressions, and each event can only magnify and solidify the legitimity of the main icon; the subjects are a sort of dispensable attachments with fixed physiognomy. In both situations, the main care of this type of thinking, in spite of its apparent generosity (it holds together semiotical fluxes that are apparently incompatible with each other), is to exclude other possibilities of expression (with Heino, we do not say anything about the forth meaning; in the village, we do not speak publicly about what we heard last night, coming from under the crying tree). I guess this is what I was thinking while playing with the Map of the World. Far from bringing together and integrating, this map differentiates the semiotical fluxes: the west-european image of the world is structuraly set apart from the scriptural names of the cities. The names are deterritorialized and momentarily reterritorialized through the intervention of the subjects, who can only upsurge the dispersion of media and insinuate the constitutive arbitrariness of signs. Giggles, commentaries, hummings are accompanying from the side of the players the various movements on the map, but no originary meaning is formed, only non-imperative complicities. The abstractness of the map and its uniform cromatics hinder me from anchoring myself to some territorial meaning, invested through pearls of nature or a handful of colours. The iconic thinking is rather disassemblaged by the allegorical operation in which I move Paris near Baghdad ñ but is neither condemned nor anihilated, it hosts rather a playground favorable to non-finished, not sedimented, fluid multiplicities of expression. Heino fans and other heros go piss elsewhere. 13

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A map may still be, for children, a ìtreasure mapî, hiding an enigma.

The map ends where the ìworldî begins, and in order to define it, the ìworldî needs to be drawn

he map appears as a representative image of objectivity. Its interpretation is considered universal, it implies the elimination of any subjective projection. Ch. Jacob1 highlights, in his overview of history, the cultural relativity of each period. He deconstructs in his analysis the positivist foundations of this ìuniversalî reading; objectivity does not come from an equivalent manifestation of the objective references to reality, but from an agreement upon the interpretation of signs and codes. The map, from its very beginning, is the result of a movement. That of the traveler, the tradesman, the explorer or the conqueror. It proves: the existence of a real space? the existence of an imaginary space? The space never precedes the route or the way? The form is invented by the look of he who moves forward. Movement puts the real in stand-by. As if its invention depended on a utopian prefiguring. Does the map prove the reality of a space? or its resemblance to imaginary? First, that of the adventurer, in order to become a symbol of ìadventureî. Is it objective representation of reality? or objectivity of the imaginary? The map makes the connection between the borders of a potential travel. It defines the route of an enigma; it defines expectations and creates the potential reality of a desire. As compared to language, the map plays a projective role: as the ground for action, it assigns each interrogation related to a limited choice of ways and destinations. The map defines and limits the possibility of an Jean-Yves Petiteau sociologue at C.N.R.S. National College of Scientific Research; CRESSON - Research Centrer on sound landscape and urban environment, Ecole d’Architecture de Grenoble. 14

action, as opposed to language, which, preserving the memory of the possible, can be reflexive and evoke doubt or the irreducible difference. In any period, the map was simultaneously a scientific object and a game. It reminds the ambiguity according to which FranÁois Hartog considers Herodotus2: the father of history, in other words, the father of historic truth and inventor of histories; the ones that need to be invented besides, or in order to disguise reality. These two features may not be the opposed faces of the map. It is likely to wonder if the map is not a privileged place where ìrealityî as defined by ìscientistî and ìrealityî used by common sense clash; the scientific bases of these notions relying on ìreproductionî and imaginary. The map, being today, a stop upon an image, makes the future become a dream, as something coming from the unconscious; or a utopia, if any explanation needed. The map is always a projection of the present. It rules the order of representations. History can be invented as a reproduction, or a declination of history, a diversion, or a falsification of ìtruthî. The map draws up the fact file of both a crossed space and of a representation order. It is the guide of a route, of an itinerary; it is the threshold to cross in order to be able to invent (a world or a sense); it represents a logic to deconstruct in order to have a new approach of ìthe spaceî (territory or environment), in order to invent another dimension of ìrealityî or another relationship between the places where the shared representations are founded. The map ends where the ìworldî begins, and in order to define it, the ìworldî needs to be drawn (drafted). It is obviously not by hazard that, at the very beginning, the map was secret. It only reveals the stakes of travel to the princes who pay for exploration and to the accomplices to adventure.

It reverses the traditional opposition of any academic culture, between ìthought and actionî. The analysis included in the map does not precede the movement, but it reveals its sense, along its progress. In this sense, the included analysis does not precede the project, but it offers its sense and dynamism. The map symbolizes to any heir of European, African or Asian culture the discovery of the world. It becomes today the place of reflection, of a different look: (that of everyday life, of dexterity or that of a new layout of landmarks and places, such as the psycho geographic cartography of the situationists). This new point of view destabilizes any unambiguous or ìexclusively objectiveî reading of the map. Its objectivity always depends on the cultural transfer of a formal and rhetoric logic of a period. This transfer-oriented dimension destabilizes the actors of a cultural objectivity, more often than not, contemporary artists who act upon the register of an analogical production. Today, the map gives less information on what it contains and rather on what it overshadows, omits or hides. The meaning of what it reveals is decrypted according to the context. The mapís outline raises questions concerning the world it contains beyond itself, and just like a body, the map, as it moves, reveals or awakes the sensitive world that borders it. ìSomething clear, closer to us : the world, no longer as an itinerary to ceaselessly cover again and again, not as an endless race, a challenge to face forever, not as the only pretext for a desperate accumulation, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a sense, perception of an earthly writing, of a geography we had forgotten to be the authors of 3î.

Notes: 1. Christian Jacob, líEmpire des cartes. Approche thÈorique de la cartographie à travers líhistoire, Bibliothèque Albin Michel Histoire, 1992. 2. FranÁois Hartog, Le miroir díHÈrodote. Essai sur la reprÈsentation de líautre, NRF Gallimard, 1980. 3. Georges Perec, Espèces díespaces, Ed. GalilÈe, 1974.

Definitively temporary zones

he present, and the disrupted dimension of territory that accompanies it, can be represented in the sign of borders continuously crossed, on the basis of an increasingly marked deterritorialization and an absolute condition of ìtrespassî. ìAll that is solid melts into airî: the words with which Marx described the revolutionary movement of capital, which overwhelms everything and abstracts from everything, become timely once again in forms that become paroxysmal. What appeared solid until yesterday (industrial production, the borders of states, the forms of belonging) becomes more and more evanescent, dematerialized, losing any roots to the territory. All this can be summed up by saying that ìpersons and things more frequently appear out of placeî, as James Clifford suggests. And once we have underlined the decisive, absolutely political aspect, that this shared condition of displacement does not correspond at all to a similar facility of circulation in the crossing of borders, which are removed for merchandise but remain (even when crossed) for labor, the resulting image is not only effective but also correct. It describes the objective trespass that forms the basis for contemporary experience: of languages, ìculturesî, lifestyles, but also and above all of circuits of production, along with specific devices of control and practices of exploitation. Trespass that gives commodities per se, and that very particular commodity that is the work force, a specific character of excess. In the case of goods we can mention their progressive redundancy, the increasingly immaterial and ìspectralî character of their object-ivity (what Rifkin defines as ìcultural capitalismî, i.e. the fact that experience and merchandise become the same thing: that we wind up purchasing our lifetime ñ someone constructs it

for us, and we consume it). In the case of persons, on the other hand, this excess is represented in stylized form, in terms of a ìstructural unemploymentî, and more generally of a widespread condition of non-belonging. In short, today, to an increasing extent, ìpersons (and things) do not belongî. And ñ this may seem like a nuance, but it isnít ñ such non-belonging does not assume the form of an ìoutsideî with respect to given borders, but as something beyond, that appears to be definitively over and above the question of borders. This is the sense of the particular dimension of excess that emerges from a totally delocalized production that has less and less need of live labor. Above all, this is the excess directly produced by more or less ìnaturalî disasters and global wars (humanitarian, preventive) that are transformed one by one into humanitarian catastrophes, leaving behind a displaced population of one kind or another ñ refugees, internal or external shelter-seekers ñ that seems to have forever lost the possibility of belonging to a place. The question I ask myself is a simple one: can we still imagine a territory for this ìexcessî humanity? The answer, at least in part, is right under our noses: for many of these individuals there exist ìplacesî that seem to be their inevitable destiny. These places are camps: refugee camps, humanitarian camps, camps that concentrate human masses in flight and are scattered across the globe, north and south. Emergency structures ñ the epitome of the temporary ñ that in different ways make up for the absence of recognition of all those forced to inhabit them: they are indefinitely fixed in more or less enclosed spaces that are first of all the materialization of borders that are increasingly hard to locate, that do not lie inside

or outside, that mark off a void and, in some way, enclose it. The camps, in fact, in any form or place they appear in the present (for internally displaced persons, temporary refugees, illegal aliens) respond to a general need for territorialization that turns out, for the most part, to be impossible. Precisely this impossibility is reflected in the terms utilized to indicate the camps, with their significant, obsessive accent on their provisional nature: Emergency temporary location, Temporary protected areas, zones díattente, ìcenters of temporary permanence (sojourn)î. The impression is that the temporary character evoked by the names of the camps, like the provisional condition (quite a different matter) they materially enforce, creates a short circuit with their indefinite persistence in time and their widespread existence on the deterritorialized, apparently smooth surface of the present, reflecting in an evident way the conclusive, definitive character of the political confines they impose. We might call them ìdefinitively temporary zonesî. An implicit allusion to a book that was quite famous about ten years ago: TAZ, the acronym for Temporary Autonomous Zones, i.e. a specific spatial dimension ìbeyond the sense of placeî, whose advent Hakim Bey, Sufi guru of the net generation, celebrated as the utopian horizon of liberation from any regulated, constricting form of power over the body and over space. With respect to that image of absolute deterritorialization, which I take as true, the camps represent the complementary, material, distopian flipside, or the dialectical opposite, if you will. And it becomes essential to put them into focus, in order to define a political cartography of the present.

Federico Rahola Sociologist, researcher at the Università di Genova, lives in Milan www.versionmagazine.com

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ublic Brands is an ongoing project that tries to map new visual representations of the public sector. Logos and claims form an important part of a recent re-orientation towards a more corporate behavior of governmental organisations or whole nation states. The first step in this shift of cultural, infrastructural and economical politics towards image-politics has been the development of tourism brands, but this branding is also applied to other sectors, e.g. in the attempt to strengthen ìregional identityî of the population.

Public Brands

Andreas Fogarasi is an artist and lives in Vienna. 16

Public Brands Secrétariat d'Etat, Candy, Caleidoscope, 2003 1-Ministère de l'Equipement des Transports, du Logement, du Tourisme et de la Mer – Secrétariat d'Etat au Tourisme (Ministry of Tourism), Paris 2-Logo of “Metropolregion Hamburg” 3-Candy distributed by Andorran Tourist Office

ìC

enters of temporary permanence (sojourn) and assistanceî: this is the misleading name of the facilities created in Italy starting in 1998, by an article in the Turco-Napolitano Act, to provide spaces of detention for foreigners found on Italian soil without a visa or residence permit. Spaces of detention, some surrounded by high walls, others by barbed wire, guarded by police inside and out. Places one cannot leave, designed to hold detained immigrants for a maximum of thirty days, according to the legislation passed in í98, now sixty days under the present immigration law, the Bossi-Fini Act. These spaces have a history, both recent and less so. The recent history is made up of the thousand

lies spoken about them in official and less official speechmaking, starting with the lie contained in their name, whose euphemistic reference to assistance has made it possible to always discuss these places in terms of ìhospitalityî. This is no minor falsehood, as it has led to the secrecy generated by all euphemisms, permitting the institution and true function of these places to remain concealed from view. According to a document issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs there are ten of these places of administrative detention, outside the normal legal system in which detention follows a crime committed, a trial, with the right to legal defense. But if we look at a map of Italy we notice that

Credit: Federica Sossi

In the spaces of the ìoutsideî there are many more such facilities, and that the word ìassistanceî or the more bureaucratic term of ìaccoglienzaî (literally ìwelcomeî, ìreceptionî) have permitted, in the confusion of names, former barracks, gymnasiums, airport zones to be hastily modified for the same function: to lock up people who have just reached Italy or have already been here for years. The recent history is also made up of a number of events. Uprisings, escape attempts, cases of selfinflicted injury, deaths. Infinite cases of rebellion ñ of groups or individuals, including solitary cases where the only space for its expression is the body of that individual ñ through which the women and men held in the Centers have manifested their attempts to reject a live reduced to waiting for the identity of a name and surname, a place of origin to which to finally be shipped back. This history has also been made possible by compromises between the agencies responsible for the internal management of the Centers ñ the Red Cross, in most cases ñ and the law enforcement agencies. Control over the life of the places of assistance ñ the rooms with beds, the containers, cages or tents with foam rubber mattresses, depending on the Center, a bit of food and lots of pharmaceuticals ñ in exchange for security. The security that after any rejection of that ìassistanceî order will be restored. How can these spaces be indicated? We might say that they are the places of an absolute ìoutsideî, utopian and, in ideal terms, a-topian, placeless. Only to the extent that it cannot be materialized, since the absolute outside doesnít exist, it still requires closure, in its defective realization. It is the absolute outside because it is also outside any system of law or rights, apart from ìspecial legislationî; outside of politics, if by political space we also mean the space of visibility in which subjects talk and act; outside of the individual, of that biographical space that provides and produces narrative, processes of subjectivization and singularization. In all these aspects the history of the centers is not so recent. Not only because in other states of Europe and the world the attempt to exercise economic and security control over migratory flow created policies of detention before the same process happened in Italy, but also because this policy is a reproduction, with up-to-date variations, of a political practice that marked the history of the 20th century: that of prison camps. Federica Sossi Philosopher, researcher of the Università di Bergamo, lives in Milan. www.versionmagazine.com

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Retreat lodges to be burned after usage (1968-1969)

Guy Rottier, engineer/architect, lives in Belvédère, France. He was working with Le Corbusier from 1947-1949. He was teaching at University of Damascus, Syria, 1970-1978, Ecole Nationale d’Architecture de Rabat, Marocco 1979-1987. www.versionmagazine.com

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DERISION, SLUM, POSTMODERNISM

he notion of gentleman-architect is used, in the history of architecture, to designate a character who belongs to the upper social classes, whose education endowed him with aesthetic taste, as fits someone of his status, and who has enough wealth to be a founder. He is the one who hires a team of master-masons and has them raise a building that will suit the models/types fashionable at that time, which he and the master modify so as to adapt to the site, to his social status and his personality. This architecture without an architect (if we take the term in its contemporary meaning) belongs to the top area of

certain cases, local adaptations of French neoclassic architecture, inspired from the catalogues of the time, built with quality materials and ? what do you know! - designed in almost humble fidelity, for the sake of a successful pastiche. In his surrealist Hermes Land, at Slobozia, Mr. Ilie Alexandru copied Southfork Ranch of the 1970ís American soap opera Dallas Ewing Company, but also a medieval castle of sort and a (smaller and less detailed) Eiffel Tour. The music of the slum is no longer a degraded form of autochthonous folklore, but a variant of Oriental song ñ Yemenite or Bengali, for instance.

The (post) Communist/Monumental "Junk Space"

Southfork Dallas in Hermes Land, Slobozia, Romania

the vernacular and has always been assimilated to high-class architecture. The predilection this type of vernacular architecture shows towards the architecture of power (palaces, as well as religious buildings) should be no surprise. The city ñ center of power and prestige ñ irradiates its models towards the periphery. The "cultured" culture of the Èlites leaves frequent traces in popular culture, even though in hardly recognizable guises. At the inter-face between the two, the vernacular borrows, assimilates and invents models. In other words, the contact between two cultures may lead not only to direct contamination but also to contamination by means of an "intermediary", such as the (kitsch) dislocation of mentalities, aesthetic taste and dress style that has taken place in the rural area over the last decades due to the intervention of the "suburban culture" of the slum. It is the latter that will concern us in the following. The agents of this intermediary culture generally come from the "copy" culture within which they are as looked up to, if not more so, as the actual carriers of the "higher" culture. But the kitsch inter-face, i.e. the deconstructing agent, gradually becomes autonomous. The Gypsy houses bear no more resemblance to the House of the People, but are closer to the Chinese pagodas or, represent, in Augustin Ioan Ph.D, teaches theory and philosophy of architecture at the Institute of Architecture in Bucharest. 20

Actually, we should make it clear that the whole architecture of the "civic center" of Bucharest is a "ruse" by means of which the slum from the outskirts of the city and the "junk space" of the social outlaws and outcasted made its way into the heart of the center. I use "junk space" in an obviously different way than its author Rem Koolhas did: I use it in the most literal sense possible. By destroying both the historical centers (the urban culture) and the villages (the folk culture), the slum forwarded a unique, alternative reality which drew upon neither of the cultural forms it had undermined. The way the House of the People appears as a huge, unreal scale model relative to the surrounding urban network is perfectly comparable ñ proportions preserved ñ with the discrepancy between the "blocks for commuters" built in the center of the villages or the one inherent in the "agro-industrial" towns of the ?80. The signs of what was to come were already visible in the first "houses of the agronomist" or the first attempts at rural systematization that were undertaken (as few still know today) in the 70s. In fact, the very "concept" of a civic center was first tested in the "county residence cities" after 1968. The peri-urban vernacular is parasite upon prestigious models and overtaxes what it takes as "essential" in that type of architecture, be it lay or sacred. For instance, what is left of eclecticism is

what seems, at a first and superficial sight, mere random play. The gothic inspires the neo-gothic of the last century only in terms of "mystery", giving birth to somber, pointed-angled houses or cottages which would make a truly ridiculous sight without the ivy or pelargonia at the windows; moreover, the neo-gothic, like any parvenu, is "more Catholic than the Pope", i.e. excessive. Many medieval cathedrals had their spire attached only in the nineteenth century, since, as Viollet Le Duc, author of an "ideal" gothic cathedral, maintained, the spire had to be there. The houses of the Bucharest slum of the last century, where tenants changed ñ as we learn from our playwright Ion Luca Caragiale ñ on St. Dimitriosí Day, are more "eclectic" than the "originals". Built with stucco and bad plaster, the slum of Bucharest at the end of the previous century offered a carnivalesque reflection of the French style fashionable in the center. The vernacular of the slum emphasizes dimensions and unbalances its own architecture by disfiguring proportions: tours become too tall or too many. It imitates "expensive" materials ñ molding or, more recently, plastic wallpaper instead of marble, granite or gritstone: Ersatz. If it uses the originals, it does it improperly. Inadequacy is actually the defining feature of this type of architectural discourse. Always careful to give an emphatic proof of some denied belonging, always ready to show off, this vernacular wants to be acknowledged yet knowingly manages to miss this chance. The solution to the inferiority complex is, in this case, a severe superiority complex. In the modern period, source circulation is no longer unidirectional ñ from the center of power to the masses. It is often the case that leaders who made their way up out of non-noble strata by means of force or popular vote, set the tune of imitation ñ not of originals but of the copies and interpretations of the original made by this lousy vernacular. Inferior models are thus brought from the periphery of culture and authentic art into the architecture of power. The House of the People is such an expression of slum eclecticism, a huge tawdry insult. Hitler was fascinated not with imperial Rome, but with the buildings on Ringstrasse, from nineteenth-century Vienna. The same goes for Stalinist architecture, which often copies "Russified" variants of consecrated styles, and refuses the high-class classical-oriented ideas of a Joltovski or Fomin. As a matter of fact, this kinship line linking the vernacular and the kitsch, the official architecture of the Ceausescu regime and the style of the Lipscani neighborhood might have been the salutary urban combination for the ensemble of the "new civic center". Scale aside, the Lipscani street and the "Victory of Socialism" boulevard are of the same nature. Today, the balconies roofed up by the new owners, the parabolic aerials, the huge, dynamic, flickering adverts and firms are a still timid sketch of my project. This is, ultimately, a cynical project ñ but cynicism here regards a hybristic architecture, growing on the ruins of the real center. The vernacular resurrection already adds a human touch to this cardboard architecture ñ an unreal species, as Peter Eisenman wanted it to be: a type of architecture that freezes at design stage, unable to ever become real (i.e. built). Even the attempts the officials made to make solemn use of the place are subject to ridicule, since the place itself is rather idiotic. Had it not been built on crime, but on some outside city waste ground, the place would

have been no more than a midget. Or, the solution is to push the kitsch beyond the limit of its intrinsic aggressiveness into the space where it becomes inoffensive Disneyland, a kind of architecture that exhibits the Down syndrome.

CASE STUDY: THE BLOCK OF FLATS After decades of uniformity imposed upon architectural expression by means of stockprojects, of standardization and prefabrication, the

time has come for individualization to take place. Dwellings are the primary spaces for the affirmation of difference: each family expresses itself by means of its interior arrangements, even in a block of flats, although the range of identities is not too large. The serially produced furniture and the several archaic types of furniture arrangement made choice considerably scarce. My parentsí generation is the one that was high up on the wave of change. Enthusiastic about the idea of "progress" in the í60s and í70s, they abandoned their houses in order to move and live in a block of flats. Considered retrospectively, their arguments seem hilarious: they would no longer bother about stove heating (central heating would save them the trouble of wood and coal provisions, of managing the ashes). They would be true townsfolk. They would finally live a "civilized" life. This is how a massive migration to the block of flats occurred and the families

Image delivered by The Ministry of Transport, Construction and Tourism, Bucharest

As a comparison, the 1998 project of Americaís Partners ñ an Israeli/Arab/(Native) American & Michael Jackson investment group to build a Transylvania/Dracula Theme Park on one side of the House of the People, casinos and commercial galleries was less radical than my original idea of turning the House into an enormous casino: the former variant keeps the dome of national disgrace intact, it even preserves its presumably solemn function, as it has it now. Few of those who listened to the representative of Americaís Partners seem to realize that one cannot yet and still (despite the actual state of things after the 2000 legislative and presidential elections in Romania) perform parliamentary acts in the very

circus arena. I do appreciate the postmodern cast of mind of the elected few of the nation, who, if it could be their way, would have approved the theme park within the Parliament itself, probably. In a way, when I saw about to become real my 1991 proposal for a "Communist Disneyland" having the House of the Republic at its core as the amplest casino/entertainment edifice in the world, I rather tended to believe that we might well resuscitate urban life in that dead place. Yet there are, even at the heart of postmodernism, and of the derision that is in-built in its genes, limits of common sense. At least the appearances of a state life need to be still preserved. Or do they?

The House of the People, Bucharest, Romania www.versionmagazine.com

Credit Version magazine Archives ©

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Block of flats along the Criº River, Oradea

deputed degrees of dwelling freedom to the state: sewerage, district heating plants, electric light. Also, they were being heavily influenced by state propaganda which, in a "modernizing" drive, qualified the block as good/progressive, and the house as bad/retrograde. It goes without saying that the nomenklature, immune to its own propagandistic secretions, was willing to make the sacrifice of living in "out-dated" luxury villas. Then my parents bought furniture by instalments. They bought a radio set. A TV set: first a Russian type (Rubin) and then an autochthonous one (Diamant). Still in instalments. Then a refrigerator. They still have them: the same old pieces. Most people arranged their interiors by merely transposing the traditional type of dwelling into spaces that were not suited to it. The flats were conceived of, in the architectís mind and in the designs he submitted for approval, in accordance with certain types of "optimal" furnishing schemes. In fact, they allowed for less flexibility than the peasant house, because of the numberless doors (opening ways through the parting walls or to the balcony) and because of the rigid functional scheme, which made possible only one way of usage. Yet the schemes of the moderns were not observed. No one arranged their living room in "functional areas". The Romanians turned the living into the "good" room of the peasant house: the place where they kept the more valuable furniture, fit for the "dining room" (one table-and-chairs in the middle, sideboards, glass cases), which was practically unused when there were no guests. The luster of the wood surface was conscientiously polished, macramÈs and kitsch framed landscapes were used as ornaments all over the place. So were the family photos, black-and-white, also framed: christening, wedding, the army, the beloved. There were also the bibelots. Many of them. Maybe some stuffed birds too. Well in sight, the few electronic apparatuses: a radio set in a wooden carcass or, later on, a TV set of white plastic, with round screen borders. In the hall, master over a pile of lace, the telephone. This is what the Romanian block of flats looks like even to this day: a country house, moved up a number of stories; yet, in the process of this "ascent", the country house has become a monumental slum. One walk along the "Victory of Socialism" boulevard is bound to unnerve the political, moral or architectural authors of its blocks. The "Victory" never got to belong to "socialism", but is now an asset of the vernacular. The new owners roofed up their balconies and thus covered the columns, cable moldings and girdles. Blasphemy! Not long ago they would have been made to pay fierce fines by some comrade inspector and take away all the ironwork that spoiled the wondrous and majestic faÁade. Yet, especially after 1989 and almost everywhere, the new owners took over and used to their liking this residual space of their collective dwellings. The pickles, brine cabbage 22

and potatoes for the winter (you never know when there is going to be another depression!) go well with the warm clothes, in summer time, and the other way round. More business-minded and, thanks to finally good odds, better situated, those who live on the ground floor have opened boutiques and barberís shops in their livings, to which clients have access through the balcony. In case there were no balconies on the ground floor, such storage spaces have been invented. The ground floor flat my sister lives in had been extended by the former owner ñ a true husbandman! - to lead to a wine cellar, under the pavement in front of the block! A neighbor of mine, who lived on the ground floor of a block I used to live in, on the top floor, took under private ownership the whole verdure spot adjacent to his flat and turned it into a private yard: garage, vine bower, chicken, a pig and a dog (no pedigree, but quite a hero). The man had even devised his own sewerage system: he used to water the vine and swear at us when we would wash our own balconies, for thus we defiled his yard! Before allowing ourselves to laugh at the poor wits of those who were dragged from the countryside into the towns and mounted on their flats, let us use our minds and think. The balconies are, in the Romanian blocks, the farthest and less visible space as compared to the entrance/public space. The equivalent of this space in a traditional household is precisely the back yard, with its storage places, summer kitchens, and stables. If the post-war Romanian architects had given it some thought when they took over Western modern architecture and gulped it unswallowed, instead of studying the type of dwelling of the peasants, whom they transplanted in a completely alien environment, they would have noticed that the space meant for relaxation and rest hours (the verandah or porch) is cosubstantial with the entrance to the house. If the balcony were to be such a space, it should have preceded, or be joined to, the entrance to the flat, not to the kitchen. If any spoiling of the urban faÁade by laundry and household things exhibition were to be avoided, then the utility spaces should not have been built close to the entrance, but at the other end of the flat, with separate access stairs and opening to the back of the block, not to the main street. It would not have been a big deal and no novelty either: a run-on balcony with access to each flat (at most two on each floor) would have solved the problem of a porchbalcony. An organization of the dwelling spaces, function of entrance, from the more public/clean to the more private/utilitarian, would have solved the problem of joint property. One could have looked at the inter-war examples, true masterpieces in their attempt to create a life standard similar to the villa. But it would probably have been too simple. The space arrangement of the traditional dwelling ñ function of entrance (public/private); light/darkness and cardinal points; warmth/coldness; pure/impure ñ is endowed with a greater degree of generality and, therefore, of stability (suggested by the positioning towards extremities of that which is not alike, during the khoric sifting in Timaios, for instance). What today we call a passive system of energy conservation or, in more sophisticated terms, ecotecture, is simply the purely common-sensical placing of the barely used spaces or of those only punctually needed (storage, stairs, bathrooms, kitchens) towards the north in order to ensure light for those spaces of frequent use, the dwelling space proper.

The poor, restrictive schemes of functionalism undermine this common sense that is intrinsic to any dwelling. I myself live in a flat that is, to my mind, the best example I know of the complete failure of functionalism in its Romanian understanding. The entire block is an oblong razor blade (not as long, though, as the OD blocks of Drumul Taberei in the 70s), defying thus any elementary rule of anti-seismic design. The staircase lacks light and air circulation, so that it can host four crammed flats on the same floor; the problem is that the litter bin is accessed from the same stair-case hall and is equally unventilated and so narrow that you cannot use litter bags. The mixed structure of diaphragms and pillars follows a pattern that is beyond my comprehension: the big openings are in the pillars, while those linking the bedrooms are in the diaphragms. Almost any attempt to change the space disposition function of the dweller?s needs is thus baffled. The entire flat is oriented towards the north and obeys a strict day/night functional repartition. Yet, monsieur the architect decided that the flat was to be accessed through the very middle of the night area and that, in order to reach the living, you had to cross the whole range of the other rooms. Obviously, I had to transform it into a place I could live in, if not into a fully logical space: the bedroom opposite to the entrance became a guest room/living. I had the hall "pierced" to allow two joint doors that could thus isolate one room and its bathroom on the right of the entrance and, on the left, a two-room suit. If the diaphragms had not separated the kitchen from the living and the bedroom and then bedrooms among themselves, the possibilities of indoor re-organization would have been greater. It would have been fairly easy to plan the space of the flat so as to allow future developments by various types of partitioning. But this surely was not the concern of the architect who designed it. I feel more than entitled to call my trade fellow a complete blockhead. THE END? This is the end of my fragmentary excursion into the urban realm of contemporary Bucharest and indeed Romania. There are, however, several cities in the country that do fare a lot better now than the capital city. Not so long ago (March 2000), in my weekly column in Contemporanul, I made a proposal for the dismantling of the "municipium" of Bucharest into a core city and several peripheral localities. The idea is to finally break the vicious circle of the highly centralized, unmanageable and undemocratic sprawl structure called Bucharest. Until this is to be achieved, with the decentralization of the local administration and the privatization of public services, there is no chance to solve the suffocating problems of the city. But that requires political will, openmindedness and a coherent program for the future of Bucharest based on subsidiarity, liberalism, decentralization, wise public works, empowerment of the smallest communities (condominium associations) and so on. My feeling though is that such a program requires a new breed of politicians and public social workers. Who is going to train them for the foreseeable future?

Published in March 2000

his is a work that depends entirely on the socio-political climate of its time. In 1997, I Invited 72 Individuals to photograph with a 35mm slide film and made a sound recording for an hour of their choice during the 3 days when HK was handed over from Britain to China. Meanwhile, I was continuously blind-folded for these 72 hours.

Amy Cheung 72 hours of sound and vision made in HK (30/6/1997 - 2/7/1997) Mixed media installation 72 hour blind-folded performance, photographs, video documentation and sound 72 candles embedded with slide Dimension: The additional audio-visual territory in documenting Hong Kong’s hand-over Media. Art. Project, Amos Anderson Museum, Helsinki, Finland, 1997.

The project aims at creating an alternative, and yet intimate audio-visual documentation of personal signification during the historical moment. These moments recorded audio-visually, pierce through

The task provides an acknowledgement of the process in which everyone has equal right to see and record ëfor the otherí and oneself. The exhibition part of this project is an archive of audio records, a visual documentation of my blind-folded encounters, and an installation of 72 candles along a narrow corridor. Each candle has been embedded with a 35 mm slide recorded by each participant. The viewers are encouraged to light up the candles, if they want to see the recorded activities. By burning the candle to view a personal moment of historical significance, the viewer participated in consuming, hence

72 hours of sound and vision made in Honk-Kong (30/6/1997 - 2/7/1997) the ëGrandí, and the ëofficialí, opening up a particular territorial narrative as if to protest against that ONE global media spectacle. HK should not have to be viewed as ñ becoming the tragic metropolis (by the Western media), or a festival stage (by the Chinese media). I am interested to know how a private person (72 in total = friends and family connections) perceive such a historical event.

Using the analogy of void / opening up, I gained through my blindness another 72 precious records of historical moment and trustful friendship. The symbolic TV ceremony of political power transfer, in the age of global media spectacle appeared to be empty by comparison, an image of a real and yet a ëvoidí of surfaces, and of meanings, giving minimal (claiming maximum) information with blinding effects. The one-line official presentation of the political change over had indeed ripped off the complex conflicting feeling and emotional ambivalence experienced by every citizen in Hong Kong.

Credit: Amy Cheung ©

What is important to all of us off-stage? A call for wider reflection in the ways how a public (nonartistic, non political Hong Konger) responds to such a highly politicized moment, when Hong Kongerís apolitical stance otherwise is famous.

destroying the documentation itself.

Amy Cheung born in Hong Kong, lives 75 km in a small village next to Planet Mars. Professional sleep walker. Haven’t won any prize in this life, hope to do better in the next.

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Ideas Doug Aitken, Stefano Boeri, T.C. Boyle, Christoph Buchel, Nathan Carter, Czam, Jason Dodge, Trisha Donelly, Rainer Ganahl, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Jens Haaning, Swetlana Heger, Pierre Joseph, Emma Kay, Rem Koolhaas, David Lamelas, Adriana Lara, Matthieu Laurette, Felix Madrazo, Raimundas Malasauskas, Lucas Mancione, Derrick May, Julie Mehretu, John Menick, Christian Merlhiot, Jonathan Monk, Kyong Park, Philippe Parreno, Marjetica Potrc, Syndicat Potentiel, Maroussia Rebecq, Pia Ronicke, Martha Rosler, Jiri Skala, Bruce Springsteen, Stalker, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gabriela Vanga, Wang Du.

Ideas 2003 Work in progress, phase no.1 These persons participate in a worldwide network consisting of a series of coincidences in the parallel-developing of ideas. This is a â&#x20AC;&#x153;collective projectâ&#x20AC;?: an unaware co-realization of different ideas that throughout time and by different channels of communication result in a worldwide system of thought processing.

Adriana Lara is an artist. She lives and works in Mexico City. She has spent this year in Paris working in Le Pavillon, art residence of Palais de Tokyo where she started and presented this project for the GNS exhibition. 24

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arte atopiche is the title of a project developed between 1988 and 1992 by Luca Vitone consisting in geographic maps deprived of their toponyms, or just (un)readable because shown from the reverse side: mapping is a perpetual approximation, either you get lost in details or you get blinded by abstraction, in both cases loosing the relation with the object you should ëcaptureí, the territory. Part of the project is a book by geographer Massimo Quaini, Il mondo come rappresentazione (The world as representation), where this dichotomy is embodied by the reference to Lewis Carrollís ëfull mapí (an earth map 1:1) and to his ëempty mapí (a map of

I would try to suggest a sampling of these relations to the territory, as experienced and/or conceptualized ñ between the full and empty map of Lewis Carrol ñ in researches of artists and architects operating in Italy. Alighiero Boetti started to work with maps in 1967: ìWith Dodici forme I started to consider the present in my work. The ëformeí were the borderlines of the areas occupied by IsraelÖ It was 1967, the year of the war. I took the first page of the ëStampaí with the reproduction of this map, deleted everything except the date and the map and engraved it on a copper plate. I had realised that whenever such a form appears on a

Italian mapping: cartographies and territories

Luca Vittone Carta atopica, 1988-92

the sea without any sort of signs). Two paradoxes representing the two extremes of representation: the territory as a map and the map as a territory. Quoting Italo Calvino (ìevery approach course should include the farthest pointî), Quaini affirms that ìwe should return to the territory in its materiality and concreteness consisting in things, as the ´storage of materials that humanity has accumulatedª ñ to what is the ´furthest pointª, because of the interference and the thickness of maps, of images, these simulacres of the territory. So that we begin describing bit by bit what is outside maps and consolidated historical interpretations, Ö in order to get closer to the understanding of things and therefore explain our present and ourselves.î Artists made several attempts on this direction in the last decades, proposing new geographies through a different perception of the territory, and even a different use of maps, going beyond the coded interpretations.

newspaper title page something important must have happenedÖ In this way I followed the ups and downs of politics through till 1971, the year when Bangladesh was founded. What interested me in these drawings was the fact that they were not spawned by imagination, but prompted by artillery attacks, air raids and diplomatic negotiationsî . His famous Mappa del mondo (Map of the World), a series of works realised by Afghan embroiderers from 1971 to 1992, recorded geo-political transformations through the immediate impact of the flags colours covering the

Anna Daneri Professor of Phenomenology of contemporary art at Accademia di Bergamo, coordinator for the Advanced Course of Visual Art by Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, she lives in Milano Grazia Toderi Empire, 2002 26

different countries. These maps reveal the power structures ruling the world by mean of aesthetic highlighting: ìTo my mind, the work of the embroidered map represents the supreme beauty. For these works I made nothing in the sense that the world is made the way it is and I have not drawn itÖî. A holistic vision of harmony and dialogue among populations emerges from some texts embroidered on edges, consisting of a language mix (often Italian and Farsi) and of a blend of East and West made of saying, names, data, congratulations from the calligraphers and craftspeople who worked with Boetti, their poetical and even political statements (on the right border of the Mappa dating 1983: ìMay you spread luck and embrace the peopleî). Through the large presence of blue in the maps, Boetti highlights the contrast between anthropic and natural geographies; oceans, seas and lakes ëholeí the maps, connecting earth to the sky, in a sort of indistinction and dumb cartography similar to the Carrol ëempty mapí. The same impossibility of recording the nature appears in I mille fiumi piu lunghi del mondo, a project developed between 1970 and 1977 together with Anne-Marie Sauzeau. They collected different and often incongruent data about length of rivers given in atlas or lexica, and confronted them with information accumulated through a thick correspondence with international universities, geographic institutes, scientists. The result of this research is a 1,000 pages book entitled CLASSIFING the thousand longest rivers in the world and two embroidered works: ìThe partial information available regarding rivers, the linguistic problems connected to their identity, and the very exclusive nature of the waters, mean that the present classification ñ like all preceding or following ones ñ will always be provisional and illusoryî. In the same years Luigi Ghirri realised another book, Atlante (1973), based on visual information taken from a school atlas. Selecting portions of illustrations, focusing on certain details, enlarging maps with the camera means for Ghirri the chance to make an experience of the world, which ñ only at a first sight ñ betrays it. ìThe only possible journey now seems to be within the sphere of signs and images; that is, in the destruction of direct experience. If ëOceaní immediately elicits the infinite possible images we have in our minds, as the writing gradually disappears, so, too, the meridians and parallels and numbers. The landscape becomes ënaturalí, no longer evoked but expressed there before us, as if some mysterious hand had substituted the book with a real landscape, right before our eyes. In this case, it is photography, with its potential to always vary the relationships with what is real, that shifts the terms of the problem by evoking an ëillusoryí naturalnessî.

Photo: Andrea Martiradonna

Alighiero Boetti Mappa, 1983

Photo: Hugo Glendinning

Enzo Umbacca, Campo mimetico, 2000

Paola Pivi Alicudi Project, 2001

Luigi Ghirri Atlante, 1973 www.versionmagazine.com

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From a similar position, even if getting more distant to the object of reconnaissance, Grazia Toderi has been depicting our urban and historical landscape, with her video-projections of theatres, towns and stadiums from aerial perspectives. In a recent work entitled Empire, a tribute to Warhol, she seems to combine the ëmediatedí experience of the territory envisaged in Ghirri, with the Boetti political representation of it (thus closer to the homonymous book by Hardt and Negri). ìMy Empire is seen from very far, so far that you canít even find it anymore. Empire is a diptych: on the left projection a floating image of United States designed in the darkness by town

and street lights and seen from a satellite. An image that nobody has ever seen in reality. Shining flash emissions reflect themselves into the black ground of the right image, as a reflection of earth and sky, at each action corresponds a reaction. Over both images is drawn an objective, just to try to keep a centreî.*(The objective in this case reminds very strongly to a foresight). Another paradox of representation is unfolded by Paola Pivi, in the work-in-progress entitled Alicudi project, which is a literal translation into images of Lewis Carrolís ëfull mapí: ìit is a photograph of Alicudi printed in real scaleÖ The final photograph, printed in sections on separate

rolls, will measure 500 ◊ 1818, 75 metres. It will be possible to put the whole print together only on a very large plane, where it will be visible by walking on it or from an airplaneî*. For dimensions and visionary strength, Alicudi project can be related to Land Art, except that the experience of perceiving the island, of exploring it is made through a reproduction of nature, a ëperfectí clone. Following Carrol, the ëxeroxí map could bring again to territory: ìÖ farmers opposed it (to unfold the map): they said that it would have covered completely the country and darkened the sky. So we now use the territory itself as map and we assure that it works as wellî.

Stalker Along the Egnatia, 2003

Luigi Ghirri Atlante, 1973

Giancarlo Norese The Idea of Europe, 1996

Antonio Scarponi Political Population World Maps

Using directly the territory is a practice chosen by Enzo Umbaca for several works. In Fuorigioco he realised a soccer field on a hill, mirage and projection of the needs and desires of the community of Caulonia (his home-town in Calabria). After accurate relieves and with the help of the inhabitants, Umbaca drew with lime the lines of a soccer field following the anamorphosis, so that you could actually see the field only from a unique spot in town. ìThe optical shot works as a kind of space-and-time screen: as long as weíre too near (thatís to say too involved) we canít possibly have an overall sight, which may be reached only by keeping at a

distanceÖî. Another field, Campo mimetico, is an extended camouflage realised in the country with the natural materials found by the artist on place. If Boetti, with his works made with camouflage cloth, intended questioning the mimetic role of art; Umbaca transposes the discourse to the problems of geographic representation and of relations with nature. ìIt is a work conceived in a whole day, from dawn to sunset, the sun movement records at intervals traces of the treesí shadows, creating the coloured zones of the entire map. A minimal intervention, where you donít take nor you add, conceived according to the rules of the farmer, working with the elements on the ground.î*

The exploration of marginal territories, of human and natural landscapes at cityís (and empireís) margins is the field of action of Stalker, a collective based in Rome, which mapped in different ways these territories. Together with ON/Osservatorio Nomade, Stalker is developing a project on the ancient road connecting Rome to Constantinople across the Otranto Canal, the Appia-Egnatia, a route which has been covered by millions of refugees and migrants. Along the Egnatia. A path of displaced memories ìproposes to collect stories of displacement, from the real voice of people who has moved or has been forced to move along the Egnatia ëbridgeí on the

Photo: Sergio Tornaghi

Adrian Paci Behind the wall, 2001

Photo: Sergio Tornaghi

Enzo Umbaca Fuorigioco, 2000

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Courtesy: Galleria Massimo Minini _ Italy

Lucia Prandi Islands Connections/Spaces, 2003

Bernardo Giorg Between Dresden and Prague, 2002

Deborah Ligorio Emptiness, 2001, video-still

Marco Bruzzone Border-friendly, 2003

Alighiero Boetti I mille fiumi più lunghi del mondo,1970-77 30

fragmentated border between East and WestÖ Each story will be related to a stone that will testimony the story tellingÖ With the story that we are collecting we will start paving the Egnatia road with its forgotten memoriesî*. The most direct experience of a territory is in fact the one of migrants, forced by different reasons to crash into economic, geographic, political asperities. Adrian Paci recorded symbolically the memories of these ñ often tragic ñ experiences by collecting water from the Otranto Canal and building a wall of plastic container. This wall of water becomes a screen for the video documenting the action, reflecting the personal experience of the artist ñ who also migrated from Albania ñ into that one of thousand and thousand people crossing this sea, and the memory of water is there to witness them. In this perspective borders are not only coded signs on maps but complex systems of exclusions absorbing the entire territory. On the contrary, Bernardo Giorgi has been working on the inclusive meanings and manifestations of borders in a long term project entitled Borders Project, a network of collaborations between people, institutions, associations. The most recent development was an experience of travelling, working and exploring relationships Between Dresden and Prague which involved a group of artists, the local inhabitants, art critics and intellectuals. ìIt may be meaningful that in my works maps and models often appear, created by lines and connections, that beyond the superficial chaotic appearance, are representation of real cartographies of identities.î Nevertheless, the action of borders can be violent even on the apparent freedom of movement reserved to ëcitizensí. This was very clear in Genoa during G8, cut in different zones of limited mobility, and is evident as soon as ësecurityí borders are touched. As in Marco Bruzzone action Border-friendly in which the artist travelled from Berlin to Venice with a sculpture very similar to a bomb, a box containing electric cables, a LED watch, a minidisc recorder and other objects, and has been stopped at check-in control of the airport. How borders affect individualities is revealed by our perception of zoning, fairly precise if we think of our country and becoming more and more vague as we think of distant territories. This was the core of the project The Idea of Europe, where Giancarlo Norese asked some artists of different generation to draw by hart a map of Europe. Cartography is never objective, in this case the evident falsification is linked to personal memory, experience, knowledge. As it is in Deborah Ligorio multiplications, abstract reconstructions of spaces following intimate rhythms. In Emptiness ìall I see are the perimeters, one beside the other. Lines become marked and the perimeter feel closer. Well, emptiness also exists. Spaces where anything can be placed but nothing can be replaced. No one remembers what was there. Could be there was a big highway, or different districts, maybe a few blocks of the same neighbourhood.î* Mapping becomes a sort of diary, connecting different visions and communities, creating networks, accumulating volumes in fictional landscapes. But in the case of the ëofficialí codification of the world, this is still depending of a ënortherncentricí vision going back to the Mercatorís map (1595). Antonio Scarponi is working on an atlas built up in considering people as the worldís unit of measurement. In Political Population World Map, referring to Boettiís mappings, ìeach state is

represented by its national flag, but their dimensions are depending to population, and not to actual geographical borders. This model allows us to display information using demographic and geopolitical parameters ñ access to resources and infrastructures, consumption, and per capita production, to name a few.î* Reading a territory starting from the inhabitants is the assumption of Paola Di Bello. In Mirafiori 2002, a project curated by a.titolo for ëNuovi Committentií a model of intervention of art in specific territories, Di Bello gave a representation of this historical working class neighbourhood with a photographic campaign in two sections: ìwhat Mirafiori seesî, images realised with the superimposition of a day and night shot taken from the windows of private flats and ìwhat you can see at Mirafioriî, documenting the historical signs present in landscape (workers will become soon memoriesÖ). A place is made of the people who live there. Living models, as well as working places, build different geographies. Invited in Kitakyushu, A12 group and Francisca Insulza planned to realise a map of the town, using a GPS device to orient themselves and the camera to make a map of houses, buildings, industries, aerial views.ì We registered a crucial moment of passage between the cartography imagined and programmed as an allegory, a mythological narration. Maps became tools for movement, discovery and exploration. Ö Our map today is an ambiguous object, a subjective narration of disorientation, but also a record of a manifest reality ñ a collection of curiosities, like a cabinet des merveilles, or a heterogeneous atlas of distinct representationsî .

As explained in the same text, GPS uses three points of measurement given from three satellites to determine a position. We need to go to the ëfarthest pointí to know where we are. And exploring the outer space allows a more and more detailed vision of the world. The frontiers of cartography became boundless after space discoveries. In Islands/Connections Spaces 2003 Lucia Prandi uses flying discs to explore new geographies, building new relations between planets and space objects. ìCreating a web of possible and impossible connections between celestial objects, creating changing maps of the universe or maps of imaginary universes means investigating the existing field and the unexisting one or the possible oneÖ The new mappa mundi in the centre of modern labyrinths, is the map of the universeî.*

Notes: * statement of the artists

Paola di Bello Mirafiori, 2002

1. Massimo Quaini, Il mondo come rappresentazione, 1992, Ed. Galleria Paolo Vitolo, p. 12. 2.AAVV, Alighiero Boetti. Mettere al mondo il mondo, exhibition cat. MMK Frankfurt, January 30 ñ May 10, 1998, Cantz ed., p. 65. 3. Ibidem, p.69. 4. Ibidem, p.187. 5. Luigi Ghirri, Atlante (1973), ed Charta, Milano 1999 6. Massimo Quaini, cit., p.7 7. Emanuela De Cecco, Iuol never uolc alon, exhibition cat. Galleria Artopia Milano March 7 ñ May 4, 2002 8. Bernardo Giorgi in AAVV, Between Dresden and Prague, Maschietto ed., Firenze, 2003, p. 58 9. A12 and Francisca Insulza, N 33∞ 51í E 130∞ 47í, CCA Kitakyushu, 2002.

A12 and Francisca Insulza, N 33° 51’ E 130° 47’, 2002

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TI: Yes. That's why everyone proceeded without knowing what was what. Which was very fortunate for me. From now on, I think maybe I can use that method quite avantageously.

A conversation between Toyo Ito and Hans Ulrich Obrist Hans Ulrich Obrist: Before we get started, perhaps I should say something about the Rumor City and Sonic City projects, which were originally part of Cities on the Move. Thematically, the question was ìhow to exhibit city culture?î : the city in its ìunseen stateî the sheer diversity and flux, the impossibility to have a synthetic image of a city, particularly in media and flows of information. Anything and everything invisible ñ rumors included ñ was our subject. Things in constant evolution, all exchanges and transitions... I believe you also brought up something similar about architecture in transition? Toyo Ito: Well, first let me say that I find myself very much in tune with both your choice of the Invisible City exhibition theme and the way you go about creating an exhibition. Looking at the question of ways and means, this open-ended stance when planning an exhibition without clear idea of what to show or how translates into architectural terms as a breaking down of the program and all that comes with it. In a sense, deciding everything before the exhibition starts is to decide on one "optimumî out of all the many possibilities. Likewise in architecture, the biggest issue today is whether to decide at the very beginning that there should even be an ìoptimumî program, which then gets built just like that. As a result, working that way, buildings become cut off from the city. They become self-contained, extremely self-isolated entities. Iíd rather see these buildings better connected with the city. HUO: Rem (Koolhaas) was talking in his lecture about the notion of ìjunk space,î where any given space is now expected to amalgamate every Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in May 1968 in Zurich, Switzerland. Currently lives and works in Paris. He is editor in chief of Point d'Ironie, published by agnes b. and curator at Musée d'Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris. Toyo Ito was born in Japan in 1941; he is one of the world's most innovative and influential architects. Ito is known for creating extreme concept buildings, in which he seeks to fuse the physical and virtual worlds. He is a leading exponent of architecture that addresses issues of the contemporary 'simulated' city.

possible program. How do you see the situation today in which the program is diminishing in meaning? Is this something to resist? And if so, how do you go about resisting ìjunk space?î TI: As I wrote in an essay Under Construction about the Sendai Mediatheque, a building is already in use from the very first moment it's planned ñ or put another way, as the building continues to be used, conversely, the architecture is never completed. Thereís absolutely no distinction in use between planning and design and construction. HUO: And that's a form of resistance: refusing to view architecture as an object. TI: Well, ideally yes, but to realize that, the entire system of competitions and the current way in which architecture is done would all have to change. With Sendai, I'd like to think we accomplished a little in that direction. That's a far greater issue than how to go about physically establishing the building as a kind of inertia. HUO: Likewise, exhibitions never stop. An exhibition is a permanent construction site. As Gilles Deleuze says: It's always on the ìdevenirî-always becoming. One can say that the Sendai Mediatheque isn't finished; it's still in the process of becoming. TI: Always ìunder constructionî ... that was my idea while working on Sendai. HUO: I guess the question for me, then, is: Was that approach very evident in the end? TI: It was one confusion after another. Typically, a library has a clear program, so the design and image come together quite clearly, but this time at the competition stage, (Arata) Isozaki, chairman of the jury, pronounced the Mediatetheque a wholly new type of undertaking, so everyone was saying, ìWhat's that supposed to mean?î HUO: Arata Isozaki threw the whole thing wide open...

HUO: But Sendai also makes me wonder, vis-avis the new information theories of Scott Lash. He talks a lot about ìflows, which he asserts mean something is working ñ that is, function, not time flows. So I wanted to ask you two questions about the Sendai Mediatheque, basically: first, do you agree that flows show work? And second, more importantly, relating to our Rumor City-Sonic City-Invisible City discussion, looking now at the Invisible City ñ Italo Calvino's or otherwise ñ in our information age as a metaphor for transforms of information, Invisible City, to what extent are these flows of information visible? TI: As to ìflowsî on an extremely concrete level, the word ìfluidityî served as a guiding principle for what we did at the Sendai Mediatheque; we tried to avoid separating rooms. Wall divisions were kept to a minimum, the only other mainstays of the design being the ìtubeî columns, so the space is unbroken and continuous. Actually, with buildings now this open, some interesting changes for expression are taking place. Inside the architecture, weíre seeing the the same conditions as when out walking in the street. Everything is now urban space. It's now possible to ìdrop inî to places, just like people strolling in the plaza thinking, ìWonder what's on now?î ìWhy don't we have us a look?î On a slightly more abstract level, in order to get a grasp on ìfluidityî, I was always comparing fluidity in nature with fluidity in information, trying to invoke images. Although to go so far as to speak of ìfluidity in informationî tended to lose me, so substituting the flow of water and flow of wind made things easier for me to picture. Thinking about the relationship of water to the human body, it seems one can say the same thing about the relationship to information. The initial images for Sendai were underwater images, but eventually... HUO: What about the flow of information and city? ... I had a long discussion with architect Yona Friedman about the ways how rumors develop in a city. Small elements, very unpredictable yet self-organized, orbit ...I was curious what you thought about rumors in relation to flows? TI: Well, if we think of whispers, they move like echoes, traveling in spaces at once channeled yet unobstructed. This idea of channels was also very

much a part of Sendai. When one has seven floors, typically they are cut off one from the other. But because of the tubes penetrating through lots of little holes, one gets not the whole picture but glimpses of what people are doing above and below, which gives an intimation of those other floors. In photographs, they look like vertical spaces, but the really interesting thing about these spaces is the ìbetweenessî of adjoining floors they create. Someone made a clever observation: ìSendai has advanced the posture of bending over and peeping.î Peeping is not quite seeing face-to-face, but this idea of people forming little groups and searching things out via glimpses on the internet seems to be emblematic of channels of communication among people living in the city today. That's where people really focus their attention in this mobile phone age. The other day, a girl was ìkilled by mobile phone.î A friend had rung her up by mobile and asked her out, but since people don't see whom they're talking to face-to-face, when a little curiousity gets too real these things can happen... Conversely, I ask myself, why can't these modes of personal communication be transposed into architecture in a more positive way? Perhaps that's closer to your idea of the Rumor City? HUO: So you would use architecture to transform? Yes! How do you regard Italo Calvino's Invisible City? And how do you view the paradox that in a city the most important things are invisible? TI: What can I say? The more invisible, or rather, the more scarcely glimpsed something is, the more it fans the fires of the imagination . . . HUO: A ìglimpsedî invisible city... In terms of information, on the one hand, you created Sendai Mediatheque, an amazing new building and also an amazing metaphor for the information age as in Scott Lashís description. On the other hand, in terms of your building, something Iíve been very fascinated by ever since your exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, or even at Hannover and your projections at the Louisiana Museum is that actually youíre not presenting information about the building; somehow you seem to be exploring the notion of an exhibition as archaeology of knowledge. So here is the big question I wanted to ask you: what position do exhibitions have in your work? A little bit, please, about the genesis of your exhibitions, most notably how you conceived your first exhibition. www.versionmagazine.com

TI: As you might expect, I have very pointed beliefs about architecture. Each time I make something Iíve always seem to fall short; each time itís been ìThere Iíve gone and made architecture again . . . !î (laughs) For me, Sendai has been the most exciting project, yet even there I was assailed with this sense of ìgone and done the same thing over again.î At times like that, ideas for exhibitions expand with a vengeance, giving me license to express my frustrations at things that architecture canít do, which in turn provide me with a basic image for my next project. Such, for example, was the impetus for reflecting upon things that came to be transposed into reality in Sendai. Isozaki, at the time I found him most interesting, was extremely adept at gauging a proper sense of distance between his words and his works. Obviously thereís a profound gap between words or writings and architectual works, but there something in those writings that made one feel, ìAh, maybe thatís what was behind the realization of this building.î And then that work would give rise to the next piece of writing, and so on back and forth. With me, itís exhibition installations more than writings that set up this pendular motion with actual architecture. HUO: What was the first exhibition you designed? The installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum?

marked the very last year or so of Japanís ìbubble economy,î so I donít expect Iíll see that costly an exhibition again. After that came Hannover and Achen. Hannover was ten times bigger than Visions of Japan. HUO: My question now is: what you think about notions of the body in the age of information? And conversely, for you as an architect, what is behind how you use information in your installations? Are you consciously retrieving an archaeology of knowledge? TI: Well, as graphic designer Tsutomu Toda would have it, ìIn these times, itís becoming impossible to tell whether the image on the computer monitor came from oneís own mind or from the world at large.î Thatís when he knows his ìfeet are barely wading into the waterî--thatís the expression he uses. Which I think puts it extremely beautifully. In other words, whereas humans used to be just another part of nature, at some point weíve since broken away on our own, but now itís information thatís somehow once again bringing out the most primitive in us. So when you mention an ìarchaeology of knowledgeî, I canít help feeling that the deeper we go into this information age, the further we go into the virtual realm, the further weíll be returning to primitive experience. Translated (Toyo Ito s part) and edited by Alfred Birnbaum

TI: Iíd done my own solo shows prior to that, but my first real objective expression was that Visions of Japan exhibition. Isozaki was the commissioner for that exhibition, and he commissioned three architects of the same generation to portray Japan past, present and future. But of course, since one canít really envision much of the ìfutureî, I opted to show present-day Tokyo, that is, the cyber-reality of the city as a way of showing how we might envision the ìinvisible aspects.î So most of the images presented there were really just everyday urban images. HUO: How did you go about gathering those images? TI: Some picture were taken in my office, along with a few professional shots, but I guess most were our own ìhandmadeî images. There was a bit of additional manipulation done with the everyday images. As for the projection system, well, there was more on-site testing than with architecture itself, which added an unpredictable element of fun. Visions of Japan, however, 33

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ooking at these two maps is probably the best way to understand the destiny of the road map and to talk about an issue quite neglected by mainstream media, the Apartheid wall that Israel is building in the West Bank. The first map, produced by the Israeli human rights organisation BíTselem, describes the situation of the West Bank after the Oslo agreements. All the areas in blue and light blue, 60% of the West Bank, are the areas of the settlements, main roads and of the land totally that the Oslo agreements put under complete Israeli

armoured vehicles for a width between 60 and 100 metres. In other parts the fence is pure concrete wall, 8 metres high, surrounded by barbed wire and control towers. The Northern wall de-facto incorporates into Israel 10 settlements with a total of 19,000 residents. For the construction of the first phase of the wall Israel is annexing 10% of the West Bank. This annexed part contains 40% of the best agricultural land of the West Bank and about 30 wells. The wall de-facto incorporates into Israel 13 villages and about 12,000 people, which will be separated from the rest of the West Bank and from each

Walls, maps and "road maps": Israel's view of a Palestinian state control; the light brown areas, 21.8% of the West Bank are those where Palestinians had civil control and the Israeli army security control; and only the dark brown areas ñ Palestinian villages and town ñ 18.2% of the West Bank, were under the control of the Palestinian authority. The existing roads were put under the complete control of the Israeli army and the Palestinian population was prevented from using them and forced to travel on dirt roads. New bypass roads were built for exclusive use of the settlers. In other words, after the Oslo Agreements about 80% of the West bank has been controlled also by the Israeli army. In this area of the West Bank live about 400,000 settlers in about 150 settlements, illegal by international law. 2,000,000 Palestinians live in the remaining 20% split into enclaves completely disconnected from each other. It is worth noticing that between 1993 and 1996 the population of the settlements in the West Bank almost doubled in flagrant violation of the Oslo agreements. Since April 2002, Israel is again in total control both of the West bank and Gaza. A viable Palestinian state would be possible only if Israel accepted to withdraw completely from the West Bank to the 1967 borders and evacuated the 400,000 illegal settlers. What is happening on the ground seems to prelude to a different scenario. The Sharon government is steadily building in the West Bank a so called ìsecurity fenceî, in reality an ìapartheid wallî. Sharonís plan for the wall envisages the construction of fences and walls in the Northern, in the Southern and in the Eastern West Bank. In the Northern West Bank, a barrier of 150 km is expected to be complete and operational by July 2003. The Apartheid barrier is constituted by an electronic fence surrounded by barbed-wire fences, trenches, trace roads and roads for Laura Maritano has recently completely a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex with a thesis on racism and nationalism in Italy. In 1993 she co-authored with Salwa Salem's the latter's biography, Con il vento nei capelli. Vita di una donna palestinese (Firenze: Giunti, 1993). 34

other. 19 towns and villages with a total of about 129,000 residents will be completely surrounded by the electric fence or by a concrete wall 8 metres high. Qalqilya, a town of 38,000 people, is now almost completely surrounded by an eight metres high concrete wall. The wall, with its control towers and barbed wire, runs a few metres away from the houses. 36 villages and their approximately 72,000 residents will be deprived of the access to their land that will remain behind the barrier. On the way, hundreds of Palestinian houses have also been demolished. In March 2003 Sharon has announced the implementation of the second phase. The Western Fence will reach an extension of about 350 km. The wall will continue south of Qalqilya in such a way that it would incorporate settlements such as Elkana, Revava, Immanuel, Kedumim and Ariel digging more than 20 kilometres into the West Bank, separating one village from another. On the way, Jerusalem, its 370,000 Palestinian inhabitants and the about 180.000 settlers living in13 settlements will be de-facto incorporated into Israel. In the Southern West Bank a wall will completely encircle the Palestinian regions of Bethlehem and Hebron. In the Eastern West Bank an Eastern wall, running for 300 km along the Jordan Valley is aimed at completely encircling Palestinian territories in this area, taking away access to the Jordan Valley and water. When it is finished, the whole West Bank will become an island surrounded by Israeli territory (in yellow on Map 2), cut off on all sides. In this way about 48% of the West Bank (in dark and light brown on Map 2) will be de facto annexed to Israel. If we compare the map of Sharonís plan to that of the settlements it is evident that Israel has no intention of giving up the settlements. Unless an improbable US pressure on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders, to completely dismantle the settlements and to stop the construction of the wall, Sharonís plan will go on and the ìroad mapî will not lead to peace. Brighton, 10 June 2003

Bibliography: 1. Avnery, U., 2003, The Evil Wall, www.gushshalom.org/archives/article248.html 2. Policy in the West Bank, www.btselem.org 3. BíTselem, April 2003, Behind the Barrier. Human Rights Violations As a Result of Israelís Separation Barrier, www.btselem.org 4. Hass, A., 2003, The State Sharon is talking about, Haíaretz, 28 May 2003, www.haaretz.com

Map 1: Jewish Settlements in the West Bank, May 2002. Map by Bâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Tselem, on: www.btselem.org

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Map 2: Sharon's plan for the wall, March 2003. Map by Palestinian Hydrology Group, on: www.gush-shalom.org/english/index.html

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The World Web Cam of Armin Linke

ince contemporary and globalized, trying to depict the transformations in the urban area and in the general aspect of the planet should normally derive from illusion: too large, too long, too expensive. Or, as opposed to the inconsequent patchwork of the Italian groups Stalker, gruppo A12 or MultipliCity (Stefan Boeri), their fellow citizen Armin Linke made of this new global setting the panoramic background of his photographic report. We all know the icons imported for over ten years from the Global Village (Saskia Sassen) or from the megacity (Manuel Castells). Crystal traps wrapped in highways and optic fibres in the air pollution, the entire world ìseesî the shanty towns of Lagos or Sao Paulo, without necessarily having been there ñ but also the boom towns affected by atypical pneumonia, build within a few months, between the maritime terminals and the international airports, on former paddy fields of the Pearl Rivers Delta. Coming mostly from the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, these images and the ëfuck contextí doctrine focus mainly on the ìmutationsî (CAPC, Rem Koolhaas & al. comm., 2000) produced in the ëcities on the moveí (CAPC and al., H.U. Obrist & H. Hanrou, comm., 1998) in Asia as well as on other continents. As globalized and neo-liberals, we still think in these images when drawing up the map of the disenchanted world in gigawatts, millions of passengers, tons of freight, billions of dollars ñ a film or an exhibition such as ìGNSî (Global Navigation System, Tokyo Palace, N. Bourriaud, comm., 2003) discover late that ìtopography is a major stake in artistic creationî to represent the world of our days. This icono-graphy is mainly based on photography; but not due to the fact that the latter captures reality hic et nunc, that photograph representation is exempt of fantasies and theatric scenes reported in the media. The future of the public space will certainly pass through these images of the entire world broadcasted over the entire world, where the planning of the global setting looks as if everything had been, more or less, genetically manipulated, digitally redesigned: the fauna, the flora, the territory; the animal, the vegetal and the biosphere; the air, the water or the earth. The proof, if necessary, should be the Nikola Jankovic (b.1969) lives in Paris. Architect and exhibition master, he is completing his PhD thesis in geography of the contemporary world setting (1968-2001). 36

anthropological field that is being restructured today. The latter is no longer meant to understand the primitive exoticism by a positive colonialism. These are the reasons why Claude LÈvi-Straussí successors think today an ì anthropology of natureî (Philippe Descola), an ìanthropology of the contemporary worldsî (Marc AugÈ), a ìsymmetric anthropologyî (Bruno Latour) or an ìonto-anthropologyî (Peter Sloterdijk). By observing the combination of an agglomeration of autistic minorities and a fictionalization of the world, the observatory built in Armin Linkeís work leaves a bad taste on Rem Koolhaasí urbanization, according to which ìThe World = Cityî. By the ìpointilliste saturationî of the points of view and images which statistically the main attraction in Armin Linkeís digital photos rather then their esthetic quality, the question of the planetís systematic criss-cross pattern is, in my opinion, brought forth again: what is the design for the ìhuman parcî? What Armin Linkeís obsessive/ fetishist succession of the real time image bank from all over the world tends to highlight is this photographic difference between, on the one hand, the objectivity of what is statistically captured by LCD or by photosensitive emulsion and, on the other hand, the interpretative subjectivity of projection or direction ñ spectacular in this case ñ forever applied by the spectator. From the poorest to the most industrialized countries, as well as from the cruelest reality reflected in photography to the most megalomaniac and fictional utopian projection that can be imagined through these gigantesque Chinese dams, these Promethean Japanese bridges, these spatial training centres or these post-Soviet launching bases lost in the middle of the Kazakh desertÖ What Armin Linke captures from reality, as a collector, is his obvious part of fiction. What is really important here is not the ësizeí of the color image, in pixels or cms and in Mbs or tons, requesting this archiving work in real time; it is rather what this panorama reproduces about the world as a whole! The worldwide nature of this imaginary trip is actually its restitution as globalization. The magic of Armin Linkeís ìmultifaceted ballî is comparable to that of a ìgeoramaî of the universal exhibitions in the 19th century. It confounds the spherical screen of its imaginary geode with its planet-sized subject. The Earth is a planet-sized sphere. Descending from Christopher Columbus, Alberti or Brunelleschi, Armin Linkeís

Renaissance is not linked to the discovery of a single New World, subject to the unique point of view of Prince Perspective. Although it is flat, rectangular and formatted to fixed dimensions once and for all, the photographic set is meant to be seen and mentally associated to a sphere of Earth-like dimensions. On the contrary, such a work as Four flights requires the training of a panoptic and media look, in the same time original, immediately global and globally original ñ the look of an instant and sudden nomad nature, that gave the name of his latest work: ìtransientî, that is, fleeting, lasting only for a very short momentÖ Armin Linkeís photographs are not valuable for maintaining an economy of the art market ìin shortageî (few works, limited edition), but exactly for the contrary ñ hence the interest of his participation with Andrea Zittel and Superflex in the Utopia Station exhibition project (http://www.e-flux.com/projects/utopia/more.html) proposed by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija (2003). What is relevant of his attitude is the intelligence of this speed in taking snapshots all over the planet and the digital inconsequence of any fetishist process upon the rare image. Hence the attraction and the richness of his regularly updated web site (http://www. arminlinke.com).Even if they also have a high selling value, exhibited inside a white cube, Armin Linkeís photos are first of all made for this televisual support: that of a ìwindow upon the worldî. To rephrase Marshall McLuhanís earlier analogy, one of Armin Linkeís messages is to show a digital convergence between his camera, plane or train ticket booking and their online publication. The photographic medium is digitally the same as the internet medium ñ just as the world subject of Armin Linkeís first remarkable work is analogically similar to the second one, with its third-world-like holes, its injustices, etc. Between the photo-documentary and the turntable photography for his friend Vanessa Beecroft, Armin Linkeís online world web cam rewrites in most real time the virtual reality ìparadeî of the globalized world, symmetric to the virtual reality that he presents later on. The work of the solitary Armin Linke gives way to reflection in the mirror of all these planetary transhumances.

To read: Armin Linke: transient, Skira, catalogue of the exhibition at Galleria Civica Modena, 24 January-23 March 2003, Milan, 2003. To see: “GNS” exhibition (Global Navigation System), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Till 7th of September 2003.

Photo © Linke Photo © Linke

Armin Linke G8 Summit, Genova, Italy, 2001

Photo © Linke

Armin Linke Favela Viaduto Grande, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2001

Armin Linke Oosterschelde Dam, Neeltje Jans, Holland, 1998 www.versionmagazine.com

Photo © Linke

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Photo © Linke

Armin Linke Maha Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, India, 2001

Photo © Linke

Armin Linke Star City ZPK, MIR simulator, Moscow, Russia, 1998

Armin Linke Ghazi Barotha, hydroelectric scheme, supply canal, Hattian, Pakistan, 1999 38

Photo © Linke Photo © Linke

Armin Linke Ski Dome, Tokyo, Japan, 1998

Photo © Linke

Armin Linke Three Gorges Dam, construction of a lift for ships, Yichang (Hupeh), China, 1998

Armin Linke Oshodi market, Lagos, Nigeria, 2000 www.versionmagazine.com

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Remarks on the Aestetics of Trajectory and Nomadism: Mapping (Inter-)Faces of the World ÑJachin-Boaz traded in maps. He bought and sold maps, and some, of certain kinds for special uses, he made or had others made for him. That had been his fatherís trade, and the walls of the shop that had been his fatherís were hung with glazed blue oceans, green swamps and grasslands, brown and orange mountains delicately shaded. Maps of towns and plains he sold, and other maps to order. He would sell a young man a map that showed where a particular girl might be found at different hours of the day. He sold husband maps and wife maps. He sold maps to poets that showed where thoughts of power and clarity had come to other poets. He sold well-digging maps. He sold vision-and-miracle maps to holy men, sicknessand-accident maps to physicians, money-andjewel maps to thieves, and thief maps to the police.î (Hoban 1973, p. 10)

aps represent objective as well as expressive-experiential qualities of the world. Thus, aesthetics supplies important clues for appreciating the art of map making and the reception of its products. It provides also clues for understanding the inquiring imagination that is bound up with the spirit of an age, for instance of discoveries and exploration or of present-time globalization. It is the analytic vs. aesthetic tastes of their times and places, I shall argue, that contain some significant cues for the construction and deconstruction of maps. The VERSION Map of the World was designed to reflect the contemporary experience of ñ in the words its makers ñÑbeing in a continuous movement, ... of changing places all the time. . . we are confronted with events which happen to us, different cultures, languages, mentalities; all these factors influence our existence and our ways of working, thinking, acting.î It is a political map without nationalism, a world map based on pure proximity and shape and on reference to experienced and imagined attributes of major central places (one per country, usually

Martin Koeppl Environmental and Information Designer, Media Artist. He studied Media and Fine Arts, Environmental Design, Urbanism and Philosphy in Germany and U.S.A.

the capital) via the names of these places. These place names are movable, and it is here that the experience of the age of globalization is intended to intersect symbolically in the categories of space and place, of navigational trajectory and the tacit sensibilities of the nomadic stroll. In order to illuminate the relevance and limitations of the direct analytical reference (which IS the map) as a carrier of deep associations that can only be mediately, nevertheless conclusively, inferred, I shall step back about 400 years: I shall discuss and explicate the world map ÑNova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrologica Tabulaî of Willem Blaeu (1571-1638), as a paradigm of analytic vs. aesthetic tastes of his time 1. Thus we shall infer back to contemporary mapping and its struggles to gain some distance from its modernist tendencies of being a tool primarily for the increased rationalization of lifeworlds. To go back 400 years to the beginnings of the Dutch East India Company (which had its, quite controversial, anniversary celebration in 2002) means to look at one of the first taste, pleasure and luxury based commercial globalization initiatives of the modern age. Aesthetics in the sense of Aristotlesí use of íaisthesaisí as the pleasure humans derive from sensory stimulation was accordingly one of the suppliers of that great telos or ultimate cause that drove peopleís imaginational as well as practical efforts to explore uncharted lands. The desire to gain easy access to the paradise of spices in the Far East, arguably more so than the desire for gold, drove the geographic imagination into geopolitical enterprises of outfitting commercial, military, scientific, and other expeditions for exploration. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a comparison between a mathematical and geographical expedition, points out the status of space in such an undertaking: ìHow strange would it be if a geographical expedition were uncertain whether it had a goal, and so whether it had any route whatsoever. We canít imagine such a thing, itís nonsense. But this is precisely what it is like in a mathematical expedition... By íspaceí I mean what one can be certain of while searching.î (1974, p. 365)

Of course, Wittgenstein talks about our contemporary quarrels with scholarly certainty, however before Columbus a person venturing into a geographical expedition was in quite a similar situation as being in an expedition geared towards mathematical discovery or, by implication, being in an artistic expedition. Willem Blaeuís map stands as a culminating scientific and artistic document of a period of mathematical cartographic and geographic exploration, at the end of which we find ourselves with revolutionary levels of certainty with respect to cartographic space (Mercator projection) and to the ability to reach the spicy objects that human tastes desire. The names Mercator, Blaeu, and others stand for this process, which I will discuss now in a little more detail. Ever since Marco Poloís travels through Asia (1271-95), the occident regarded the orient as the land of miraculous and fairy-tale riches, especially treasures catering to the sense of taste became favorite objects of desire. The craving for spices, especially pepper, became a base for displaying wealth and for developing geopolitical strategies for insuring continued access to these prized commodities. ìAfter the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, the trade routes to the riches and spices of the East became increasingly impassable. There was then a shift in commercial activity to the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic.î (Koenig 1992, p.103). In their attempts to find a sea route to India, Columbus made his well-known discovery in 1492, and Vasco da Gama succeeded in finding his way to Asia around the southern tip of Africa in 1498. About one century later, a Dutch trading company got itself ready to take over the Portuguese inheritance in the Indian Ocean, and to become, during its 200 years of ìreignî, the largest, most powerful monopoly trading company of its time which not only traded, but also explored world regions and waged war on other countries. This was the Dutch East India Company (VOC ñ Vereinigde Oost-Indie. Compagnie), founded in 1602 (Schmitt, et al. 1988). The pre-history and the inception and blooming of this company are significantly interwoven with the propelling of Dutch cartography into a world leadership position during the last third of the 16th century (pp.91-96). Blaeuís map marks a high point of parallel developments in scientific cartography associated with the incipient rationalization of world power through commercial and market principles.

Dutch expansion to Asia was preceded by an intense interest of professional circles and the general public in the characteristics of the surface of the earth, the distribution of land and water, and possible sea routes from Northwestern Europe to ìlas especieriasî, the famous spice trading places of the orient (pp. 91, 92). The ìLow Landsî belonged to Spain (part of the possessions of Emperor Karl V., from 1555 on part of the gigantic Spanish world empire under King Philipp II, who also became head of the Portuguese Empire from 1580 onwards), therefore practically unlimited news from overseas reached the Dutch trading cities, primarily Antwerp, after 1580/90 Amsterdam. Dutch cartography assumed world leadership during the last third of the 1500s, which coincided with the period after the Protestant north provincesí splitting off, in 1568, from the South www.versionmagazine.com

which remained aligned with Spain. Map makers put their skills into the service of their city statesí united trade activities against their Iberian foes, and from 1595 on the Dutch picked up trade engagements in Southeast Asia via the Cape of Good Hope. Such a practically oriented cartography moved away rapidly from the cosmographic speculations of the Ptolemian tradition. Gerardus Mercator (1512-94), whose name and whose map projection may be the most widely known in the field of cartography, is of central importance for the mathematical geography of the 1606 Blaeu world map. Mercator strove for highest possible, scientifically grounded exactness, and solved the problem of a conformal projection in his most famous world map of 1569.

ìHe... appreciatedî, says John Noble Wilford, ì ...that maps were made not only to record discoveries but to be used in commerce with the new lands and for making other discoveries. For Mercator had future navigators in mind when he set out to develop the map projection that won him lasting fame.î (1981, p. 73 John Campbell explains this in more technical terms: ìConformality... allows the accurate recording of direction. The requirements for a conformal map are that the lines of latitude and longitude must cross one another at right angles and that the scale must be the same in all directions at any given point. Both of these conditions exist on a globe... The Mercator [projection] is not obtained by geometrical construction. Instead, it is mathematically designed so that the north-south scale changes at the same rate as the east-west scale. This means that the scale on the Mercator is 41

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the same in all directions at any given point on the map.î [However size of areas increases dramatically towards polar regions.] (1991, p. 44) For the purpose of navigation this implies that any straight line between two points on the map is a constant-azimuth line (rhumb line), i.e., it crosses meridans at a constant angle off true north and thus indicates a single, precise bearing to follow in order to move between these same two points on the real surface of the earth. The use of such a navigational map for world trading and commerce is that places once mapped and established can be reached with precision again and again. The cartographic heirs of Mercator were substantial contributors to the success of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and vice versa ñ Incidentally, the meaning of the Latin íMercatorí,which is ímerchantí, is a global-scale upgrade from the original name íKraemerí, which is a ívillage grocerí, at most a ígeneral store traderíñ Petrus Plancius (1552-1622), a direct student of Mercator, became the VOCís first official cartographer after its founding in 1602. Other cartographers working for the company were Willem Blaeu, who later became the VOCís third official cartographer, and probably also Pieter van den Keere, whose brother-in-law, Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612), had bought Mercatorís copper plates (in 1604) and made his Atlas famous, after Mercatorís death. Later (1629) Blaeu acquired the Mercator plates. (Shirley 1983, pp. xxviii - xxxviii; Schmitt et al. 1988, pp. 91-96) The pervasive presence of Mercatorís achievement is striking in Blaeuís Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrographica Tabula: ìThe Atlantic Ocean occupies the center of cartographic space, which is also the center of navigational space (sailing down the Atlantic from the North to the far South presented quite a challenge, more so than the westward journey to America). The operational space of the VOC for its trade was staked out by a monopoly granted by its government for the area east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Strait of Magellanî (Schmitt et al. 1988, p. 41-44). There was also a Dutch West India Company operating on the western edge of the Atlantic and Caribbean, but it was much smaller in volume and influence (p.92). The VOC route prescribed by the company to its ships marks the extent of Dutch navigational space. Through the British Channel or the North Sea (especially in war times) the ships ventured out into the Atlantic, went south till their course led them along the Eastern edge of the coast of South America; then they swung a big arc towards the Cape of Good Hope and stayed on an easterly course along the 40th parallel. Finally they took the SE trade winds towards the Strait of Sunda 2. The most important destination for the VOC, however, was Batavia and later on also Ceylon as a close runner-up. The return journeys to Holland took the direct route accross the Indian Ocean (pp.42). Another axis, along east-west direction, denotes the trading areas within a relatively narrow band around the equator, including the West Indies. It is that area where a Mercator projection works best for portraiting the earth surface without much distortion, i.e., in other areas it works ìonlyî well for navigation. The trading area mostly consists of islands; it does not require large-scale territorial control through military operations (though the 42

VOC did have its own fighting equipment and arms), but control of market centers and their hinterlands through market forces. The colonial presence then was not as obvious as with some other powers. Islands demand an emphasis on navigation, instrumental and scientific precision, and rational decision making ideally comes with this. VOC management relied on and emphasized the ìlogical application of theoretical principles for solving management problems. [It was intended as functioning on a]... rational basis, uncoupled from personal preferences or individual actionsî(Schmitt et al., 1988, p.57).

What remains today is a globalizing culture of taste, which attempts to merge the trajectories of navigation and jet travel with the appropriation of the spiritual silence of deserts and the wabbering sounds of didjeridoos. What remains also, in a constructively subversive mode of inquiry, is the fine art of map making which transcends the analytical aspect of geographic exploration with no physically delineable terrae incognitae left on this earth. Such a fine art of map making tackles the realms of mathematical expeditions with its spatial uncertainties through placebound aesthetic rigor.

In the light of this, America seems less important, in spite of the big plaque over the northern half of the continent. North America, North Asia, Australia are, at the time of the map, the remaining large unexplored areas which are de facto left to the large military powers.

ìWhen an Aborignal depicts a stretch of country he generally incorporates its mythical with its physical features, so stressing the inseparable interrelation between the two. Such paintings cannot be interpreted without inside knowledge, yet their emphasis on on the spiritual attributes of places makes them doubly memorable to the initiated. If such an abstraction seems strange, it is well to remember that Western maps, too, are often stylised. Neither contour lines nor soundings on a chart are physical realities. Again, the mapdiagrams on Sydney suburban trains are quite as abstract as anything drawn by Aborigines.î (Turnbull 1983, p. 52)

The graphic, visual decentering within the map from the Atlantic out to the world periphery to the graphic periphery of the map layout implies a validation of the periphery of the mapped space and its pictorial commentary. The fabled beings and monsters of the Middle Ages are largely gone, replaced by allegorical and decorative elements of the times (art history). One cannot help but sense a certain level of premonition built into this construction. Maybe this is some kind of peripheral commentary that anticipates a crisis of the powers that were in power during the 1600s ñ an anticipation of the rediscovery of Allegory in the post-modern age along with discussions of mathematical foundational certainty as contained in the Wittgenstein quote at the beginning of this essay? Or is it an anticipation of new economic centers shifting towards the Pacific rim? There is also a sense of irony, when the maker of this, one of the technically and rationally most advanced maps of its time puts the sun in the place of the earth within the sequence of planets, and puts the mysterious moon at the beginning of the sequence. Is in the end everything turning around the earth again, with humans (and/or other animals who by then may have invented some form of cognition) making history with the help of mega technology, yet still reacting to some basic aesthetic of taste which acts as a causa finalis of their world views? World is map, and it is picture. And it is at least imaginable that the Dutch with their emphasis on the overlap of the concepts of ìmapî and ìpictureî (Alpers 1983) have some profound secrets of cultural ecology hidden in their marvellous map productions that are worth redeeming for far more than ìjustî their analytic and ornamental value.

Notes: 1. References in this essay are made to the Willem Blaeu map of 1606, while the figure used for illustration actually pictures a Blaeu map of 1635 which is however a very exact copy of the 1608 map. 2. There was a constant danger of running aground off the Australian west coast, which did happen a few times and had possibly effects on initial claims to Australian soil by the Dutch (some later maps indicated Australia as "Hollandia Nova").

It is easy to be in touch with the ground while walking, and the map helps as a conceptual interface.

Bibliographic references: 1. Svetlana. 1983. Chapter ìThe Mapping Impulse in Dutch Artî, in The Art of Describing. Chicago: Univ.of Chicago Press. 2. Campbell, John. 1991. Map Use and Analysis. Dubuque, Iowa: Wm.C.Brown Publishers. 3. Hoban, Russel. 1973. The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz. London: Pan Books. 4. Koenig, Hans-Joachim. 1992. ìNewly Discovered Islands, Regions, and Peoplesî, pp. 103-108, in Hans Wolff (ed.), America. Early Maps of the New World. Munich, Germany: Prestel. 5. Schmitt, Eberhard, Thomas Schleich, and Thomas Beck (eds.). 1988. Kaufleute als Kolonialherren: Die Handelswelt der Niederlaender vom Kap der Guten Hoffnung bis Nagasaki, 1600 - 1800. Bamberg, Germany: C.C. Buchners Verlag. 6. Shirley, Rodney. 1983. The Mapping of the World. (Holland Press Cartographica, Volume Nine). London, U.K.: Holland Pr. 7. Turnbull, David. 1983. Maps are Territories. Science is an Atlas, Victoria, Australia: Deakon University. Wilford, John Noble. 1981. The Mapmakers. New York, N.Y.: Random House. 8. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1974. Philosophical Grammar. Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell.

White chalk, dark issues*

*Dan Perjovschi "white chalk, dark issues" in the frame of Open CityModels for Use, Kokerei Zollverein, Zeitgenossische Kunst und Kritik, Essen May - September 2003 www.versionmagazine.com

Dan Perjovschi is an artist and journalist based in Bucharest, Romania. Editor at 22 Magazine Bucharest, guest editor at Idea art+society Cluj and Lezebuerger Land Luxembourg. 2002 Henkel CEE prize for drawing and 2000 â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ursuâ&#x20AC;? Human Rights Foundation award. 43

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500 Pounds of Common Earth

Roman Vasseur ‘The Consignment’ being delivered to Centre for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) high desert storage facility, Boron, Mojave Desert, California. September, 2002.

SHIPPING THE DISASTER HOME by Tom McCarthy

ëMLa DÈpense, is ëthe nonlogical difference atter,í writes Georges Bataille in

that represents in relation to the economy of the universe what crime represents in relation to the economy of the law.í What better corroborator could Batailleís claim have than Roman Vasseurís common earth? This is matter in its most nonlogical, its most recidivist state: silent, dirty and recalcitrantly meaningless. A looped video shows Vasseur at the Borgo Pass ñ an ugly fissure in the Ur-European landscape, scene of catastrophic fires, famine and sieges ñ directing peasants as they shovel earth onto a truck. They look like not-quite archaeologists, not-quite

Tom McCarthy is a novelist and writer living and working in London. He has written on art and literature for various magazines and publications including the Times Literary Supplement, The Observer and Mute. McCarthy is also instigator and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS). Roman Vasseur is an artist, lives in London.

surveyors, not-quite grave-robbers: illegal and undesignatable at the same time, just like the earth itself, which, through a set of dÈcalages between shippers, border security and customs offices, managed to enter Europe ëproperí (the EU) both as contraband and without status. Meanings ñ legal, allegorical and aesthetic ñ have been chasing after it ever since, trying to plant themselves but never taking root in its resistant soil. Not that sowing meaning into soil is new to Europe. Goethe and Wagner fertilised their earth with Teutonic symbolism; Rilke urged it to arise invisibly within us; Celan, who had seen his parents disappear into the earth-grave in the sky that German culture gifted them (ëDig this earth deeper!í, the blue-eyed death-master of Todesfuge tells the Jews), spat it out as tortured words. Beuys connected it to telephones; Kiefer filled books and aeroplanes with it. The earth of Europe is rich to the point of toxicity with associations ñ and with terror. ëWhy,í Stokerís Dracula tells Harker, ëthere is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men.í

ëEvery attempt will be made,í writes Vasseur, ëto avoid direct reference to myths and fictions commonly associated with this region.í What a wonderful stroke of disingenuousness. In its inception, execution and documentation the earth project positively grafts itself onto Dracula, and vice versa. Stokerís epistemological-cumconfessional mode unfolds across the emails Vasseur sends to London and the bureaucratic statements they contain, just as the correspondence between Stokerís solicitors Billington and Carter-Patterson unfolds across the invoices for goods and details of delivery Vasseur meticulously keeps. The shifting ethnic tectonics of Stokerís Mitteleuropa, in which Saxons, Wallachs, Dacians, Magyars, Szekelys, Slovaks, Servians and Carpathians (Andrei Warhola, ëDrellaí to his friends, the pale master of death, artifice and self-invention, hails from this last grouping) jostle for position, are replayed as Vasseurís box negotiates its way across a troubled modern zone whose contours are continually realigning ñ a fleeing migrant bound, like so many before it, for the new, free land, the country history has not yet contaminated: America. But scratch all that and entertain for one moment this proposition: that the earth never left America, that it was always and already there. Or rather, that it left only to detour en route back to its place of origin. Who put Dracula in Transylvania? Hollywood did ñ with a little help from an English writer. And what is Transylvania, essentially ñ this ethnic melting pot, this place of autotransformation, real estate contracts and death? It is America, or at least a mirror in which America, vampire-like, can look at itself without seeing itself reflected back as itself. Transylvania serves as an index of Americaís paranoid fear that the very processes that nurture it might be corrosive: fear of immigration, fear of sex, of tainted blood (a fear shared by East Coast socialites and West Coast homosexuals alike), fear of the very land itself: Baudrillard may have told us that the most real thing about America is Hollywood, but the superior minds of Burroughs and de Tocqueville knew that even before Hollywood was soil, and it was evil. Maybe Bush is right: the US is, like Stokerís Bistritz, under siege from evil, enemies without and enemies concealed within. Vasseurís earth, then, bearing down on New York, banking over the harbour as it aims straight for Manhattan, is evil coming home to roost: death in a box, a vehicle, like Stokerís Demeter (which, shunning the designated port, rams Whitby itself), driven by a man who knows he is going to die, who is effectively already dead. The earthís final destination is Los Angeles. LA is the real Borgo pass: a torrid, smoggy place built on a crack, a faultline, what Mike Davis calls ëan abstraction of dirt and desert signsí. The great architect of its sustainability (undeadness),

William Mulholland, is a kind of inverse Dracula: where the engineer brought water to the desert, the Count insulates himself against the multitudinous, free-flowing seas (the waters on which, as Yeats had it, ëcommon thingsí are pitched about) by laying earth across the water. Hatred of the masses: isnít all LA a kind of feudal Draculaville? Davis describes its ëfortressí architecture, its division into ëplaces of terrorí and ëfortified cellsí from which banked rows of cameras stare out ñ creating, he might have added, zones of vampire-like invisibility around their occupants. Then again, LA could be read as a mirror of Vasseurís earth, the screen through which it finally reveals itself: a delicate ecosystem (as Davis tells us) full of embedded information in the form of disastrous environmental history, earth in which networked associations are residual in ëa hugely complicated system of feedback loopsí. Residents of LAís middle class neighbourhoods are constantly trying to have their own patch of earth designated in the most valuable way, like so many self-serving critics hoping to advance their stock by staking a fashionable patch of Vasseurís project ñ or like the people who bought shares in it, hoping that its future value as art would return

Roman Vasseur Share Certificate in ‘the work’ Dublin share issue. (see: http://www.earthconsignment.org)

them profit. LA has drawn so many oil prospectors that its surface has more holes drilled into it than anywhere else on earth: so many peepholes in a coffinís lid, openings through which the black matter beneath the surface breathes and inarticulately gurgles. This endless speculation, in all senses of the word. That is what Pynchon sees in the Watts Towers: an attempt to generate some profitable meaning out of rubble. Rubble is, of course, the flip side of all architectural projects, just as ruin is the spectre haunting speculation. LA may be a boom town, but it is also a place of abject poverty, of bankruptcy, of riot, fire and flood. If the seismologists are to be believed, though, all LAís

legion previous disasters are as nothing compared to the enormous, catastrophic earthquake that is now long overdue. When it comes, warns Davis, loss of life will be incalculably huge; damage costs will run into the trillions. Speculative value, like the cityís vampire fortresses, will crash back to earth when the earth really moves. The stray dogs beneath the freeway know this: if the traffic stopped you would hear them howling like the wolves of Borgo. You would also, if you listened, hear the bums and schizos, like a thousand unleashed incarnations of Stokerís lunatic Renfield, muttering as they push their trolleys: ëIt is coming ñ coming ñ coming!í

Roman Vasseur Map of ‘consignments’ route from Borgo Pass to New York. (see: http://www.earthconsignment.org) www.versionmagazine.com

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The One-way Ticket Worldwide Travels

The Construction & Deconstruction Institute One way ticket, installation, Frankfurt, 2002

he One-way Ticket Worldwide Travels is a brainchild of The Construction & Deconstruction Institute. Both have an institutional structure, which is continuously diversifying itself. Both have solid corporate identities and both are encouraging people to subscribe for membership. Nevertheless, The One-way Ticket Worldwide Travels has the ability to offer something real. It also shows a few highly attractive features: it is highly mobile, very adaptable to any special need(s) or desire(s) a customer might come up with and most important, it is able to operate across national borders at great ease. Even if it is expected to operate illegally and it is supposed have a hidden existence like all other ìcriminal organizationsî, our agency does not have the intention to respect any of these rules. You know that saying about criminals always returning to the crime scene. It seems to be something that we also couldnít keep from doing. But The One Way Ticket Worldwide Travels seems to have found the best solution for advertising without endangering its existence or exposing its members. We decided to use the support provided by a well-established art biennial hosted by the city of Frankfurt am Main in order to launch our program officially. It was not an The Construction & Deconstruction Institute http://www.theinstitute.ro/ 46

easy job, but we finally succeeded in transforming the vehicle used for our first business trip (the parachuted container) into something considered to be an artwork. Everybody is talking about it in terms of an art project, a so-called installation and no one is suspecting its real function or the organization hiding behind (it). By linking our business to the contemporary art scene we succeeded to develop a business within a free system. Visual art is a field where borders are no longer visible and where no one dares to be very strict or very precise in telling art from non-art. The whole society is highly tolerant and supports even a growing number of contemporary art projects. Generally people are afraid to be labeled as ignorant, rigid or outdated, so they like to leave the impression they understand and agree on things that they sincerely actually despise. This was also the case with our project. Everybody sees it as an elaborate idea, a political statement, a very ironical social-criticism, an actual issue, etc.

THE ONE WAY TICKET WORLDWIDE TRAVELS DISCLAIMER Before taking any serious decisions that are going to affect your entire existence from now on, please read these few lines. This is a warning about what you are going to get yourself involved into. Our

business is focused on human-traffic. You should know there are four types of traffickers to be distinguished: First, there are the so called amateur smugglers, who earn money by providing transportation to irregular migrants taking them across an international border or providing transportation within a country. These activities usually take place in border regions. The traffickers are often local owners of almost all kind of conceivable transportation devices from mule to airplane. They see traffic only as a source of income. Sometimes they are acting also like double agents and they might take you directly to the border police or authorities. This is a business involving a serious risk. Secondly, there are small groups of well organized people specialized in a number of specific routes by which they smuggle migrants from one country to another. They get often caught and this method involves also a few other dangers as well. The third group of migrant traffickers, according to the definition given by the International Organization for Migration, is formed by ìwell-organized criminal groups that form international trafficking networksî. These international criminal groups are more complex and better organized than the ones mentioned earlier, but there is not much evidence or proof of their actual involvement in the migrant trafficking. It is said, however, that those international groups are often also involved in various other criminal activities, such as drug traffic, money laundering, document forgeries and therefore, the routes used for migrant trafficking may have already been tested by trafficking other illegal goods. Anyway by entrusting yourself to them, youíll never know how or where youíll end up. Think about it and try to stay away from them. Even if they say they are able to provide valuable services, such as stolen or altered identity documents, to supply housing during the trip and support the irregular migrants in the countries of destination, donít go for it. It can be a trap. Choose the latest, most simple, and most efficient and most revolutionary cross-border transportation technology, established and developed by The One Way Ticket Worldwide Travels. Because we are very flexible, we are also particularly difficult to control. Your personal safety is our main concern. The time to grasp this unique opportunity offered by us and go for a better future has come. If you are disappointed with every aspect of your life so far, if you are desperate because you are not succeeding in anything, if your girlfriend /boyfriend, family, relatives, all your friends, coworkers, neighbors, everyone is constantly reminding you youíre a loser, your only choice left is to contact us. All you can do is blame the system for your situation and that you are entitled to do. You are lucky we are here to help. The time to get rid of everything and everyone has finally come. Itís time to go. Time to start a new

life. If you are truly determined to go for it, you know how to reach us. However you must consider a few basic things that will help you a lot upon arrival at you destination. As you already know it only too well, new members or ìwannabeî members of the EU, the former communist block countries, are forced to accept migration regulations set by the EU countries. These regulations are currently known under the name of Schengen agreements. Apart from insuring their eastern borders, as well as the acceptation of a deportation system, the politics of issuing visas has taken a special significance in most of the EU countries. This happened because many refugees and migrants travel quite legally as tourists to foreign countries and become ìillegalî only when they set foot on EU territory. All EU citizens are requested to report suspicious people; in some regions up to 70% of the capturing of refugees takes place due to their denunciation by the local people. In some places THEY EVEN HAVE a free phone number to do it. An atmosphere of denunciation prevails now everywhere. This is even encouraged by the system. Not the transport across the border, which was condemned in court, was considered essential, but the transport from the border to the closest city! Taxi drivers are now requested to send a special message containing a password for all ìsuspicious peopleî to the police. This is a signal that enables the authorities to locate and intercept everybody. As a result of this, as shown in television reports, it is now almost impossible for people who do not look OK to be picked up at all by taxi drivers along the border region(s). The One Way Ticket Worldwide Travels agency is concerned with the circumstances surrounding the entry and residence, as well as all attempts of selforganization of foreigners. We are also involved in developing various support projects. Our intention is not to provide information on how to become an ìillegalî. We are just trying to develop our business and to help our customers to come to terms with the problem. We decided to provide you with some more useful information on everything you will need to know before and after your arrival in any foreign country.

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1. FIRST POINT: COUNT The duration of the 4,000-count corresponds to the approximate time the main parachute(s) needs to fully deploy. Start the 4,000-count at ONE THOUSAND and snap your feet and legs together, locking your knees. Lower your head and place your chin firmly against your chest. At the same time continue to count, TWO THOUSAND, THREE THOUSAND, FOUR THOUSAND, at a normal pace. (Try to keep your eyes open in order to be able to react to situations occurring around you.) WARNING IF AT THE END OF THE 4000-COUNT YOU FEEL NO OPENING SHOCK, YOU SHOULD KNOW YOU ARE EXPERIENCING A SEVERE MALFUNCTION OF YOUR PARACHUTE (S). 2. SECOND POINT: CANOPY After finishing the 4,000-count, you should usually feel a shock when the parachute opens. You must be aware you cannot see or control the parachute, so you can only hope it has not suffered any malfunction(s)/damage(s). WARNING THE MAIN PARACHUTE (S) MAY HAVE TWISTED SUSPENSIONS LINES, RISERS OR BOTH. THIS MAY BE CAUSED BY A SINGLE ACTION OR BY A COMBINATION OF ACTIONS AND THERE IS NOT A THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. 3. THIRD POINT: DESCENT The ability to hit a specific landing spot and to avoid other obstacles during descent is essential to successful airborne operations. WARNING ON CONTAINER-PARACHUTING MISSIONS THE CANOPY CANNOT BE CONTROLLED AT ALL. 4. FOURTH POINT: PREPARE TO LAND A proper landing attitude is necessary to lessen the risk of injury when hitting the ground. Keep your head erect. Maintain a moderate muscular tension in your legs, which absorb a significant portion of the landing impact. If obstacles such as trees, water, or high wires cannot be avoided: a. Tree landings. Once you are sure you cannot avoid them, immediately assume a normal prepare-to-land attitude. b. Water landing: abandon all equipment. Try to get out and try to swim. Containers are not fitted with any kind of life preserving equipment. In this situation your survival chances are considerably diminished. c. High-tension wire landing: try to slip away from the wires and then prepare to either jump or climb down depending on the situation. 5. FIFTH POINT: LAND Most jump injuries occur because of improper landing techniques. To reduce the possibility of injuries, try to absorb the landing impact. In order to achieve this the following five fleshy body portions must contact the ground in sequence: the balls of your feet, your calf, thigh, buttock, and pull-up muscle(s). WARNING TRY TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM ANY INJURIES, SHOCKS OR IMPACTS WITH OTHER PEOPLE OR ANY OBJECTS. YOU NEED TO PRESERVE A GOOD PHYSICAL CONDITION IN ORDER TO GO TO THE SIXTH AND MOST IMPORTANT POINT OF THE PERFORMANCE. 6. SIXTH POINT: CLEAR THE DZ ASAP The ability of clearing the DZ and running away ASAP and AFAP (As Far As Possible) is a factor of major importance at this stage. WARNING AFTER LANDING GET UP, GET OUT OF THE CONTAINER AND CLEAR THE DZ AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. TRY NOT TO LEAVE ANY TRACES. THIS IS VITAL FOR THE SUCCES OF THIS MISSION. WITH EACH LOST SECOND THE RISK OF GETTING CAUGHT IS INCREASING CONSIDERABLY.

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Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are designers and artists, they live and work in Sao Paolo and Paris. http://www.femur.com.br/ 48

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Hans Ulrich Obrist: Katherine Findlay remembers when you came back from your first visit to Japan in the late 1970ís, full of excitement. Can you tell me about your time there? Peter Cook: My first visit was in 1979. I think it's very important how one first hits a country or a city, and two of my favorite places are Tokyo and Los Angeles. The characteristic in relation to both of them is the same. I wasn't going to them early on; most people I knew had already been to them. I went when the circumstances were good, and

there she has become a close friend of Hasegawa, and Hasegawa comes frequently to lectures at our school, and Ito also... Despite the language difficulty, it somehow works. HUO: I suppose that your dialogue with Japan started before you went to Japan in 79. PC: The dialogue started way back, when Archigramme was still (almost) alive. When I got to Japan, I found a few really key things: a small damp island with it's own perverse culture, with a mixture of being in love with the past and

interview with Peter Cook that's when you get a high quality view of a place, when your well networked ñ benefit from initial networking, as opposed to arriving in a place poor and bewildered, or having to work or to backpack, and having this angst. I didn't have angst. Arata Isozaki had set up a Japan Foundation visit for three weeks; I was judging the Shinkenjuku competition which I'd set. This gave me a task, and I'm the sort of person who likes a central task. I don't like just being a tourist. A key thing that Arata did was that he made it very much his business to introduce me to a group of architects like younger than himself: the group of Itsuko Hasegawa, RikenYamamoto, Toyo Ito and others. HUO: Was this first revelation followed by regular trips afterwards? PC: One or two years later I went again to Japan; Christine Harley and I had an exhibition there; she also came. We again, with Arata, set up another party with the same people, two years later. He really made it his business for me to meet the people other than himself. HUO: Could you tell me about this younger generation of architects you met then who are now all world famous? PC: And this younger generation was in turn very good about introducing me to their project. And then they started coming out of Japan ñ it might have been in the States, or in London, occasionally it's been in Paris, but I've met them again and again. Whenever I've been back to Japan I've made it my business to meet up with as many of them as I can. In one case, I brought my students to their offices. HUO: So there has been an ongoing dialogue, a ping pong, back and forth. PC: Yes, an ongoing thing, and now we contrive it. While Christine has been building her building Peter Cook (b.1936) studied architecture at the Bournemouth College of Art from 1953 till 1958 and from 1958 at the Architectural Association in London. 50

tradition but at the same time liking toys and videos and fun and jokes and silly stories, a lot of gossiping... and you drive on the left hand side, in a damp country and the culture is a deliberately transposed version of the mainland culture from whence it came. If you extrapolate that directly to England, also a damp country, etc. with the European culture is always distorted by the time it lands in England, I found it very familiar in a curious way. One understands the sort of vicious humor and the silliness of Japan because the English are silly too. I've actually been out with those same guys in those sing-a-along bars having silly conversations, gossip and stories, despite the language. Then if you come back and say ìthereís a building which is sort of half a proper building, but it looks like a robot but it has a thing sticking out that looks like a bush but itís actually made of plastic, but actually itís an air conditioner, but actually itís a ... Then the whole issue that half the buildings youíre looking at arenít real... this whole uptight tradition of architecture begins and ends with the corners. You look at some Japanese buildings and actually half the building is a tarpaulin, and behind the tarpaulin there might be an air conditioning shaft or a tank or something, but the tarpaulin is the thing you look at because itís styled-up to look like architecture. Underneath it you might get the spandrel panel that suddenly turns and becomes a vertical; anything is possible, and in a sense coming out of the Archigramme tradition that anything is possible, the rules are there only to be broken.î The first area I stayed in, the Yoshima district, was full of Love Hotels. I couldnít figure out what they were, I kept asking ìwhatís that building?î First of all they would nervously giggle, then just say, ìAh, thatís a love hotelî. I thought it was hilarious, this sort of layered society of pretense and silliness and naughtiness, and then certain disciplines from the past and a certain sort politeness... not exactly the same as England, but many many overtones. HUO: This idea of ìthe rules are made to be brokenî is interesting as regards Asia, and I think the flux of ideas from Asia to Europe and vice versa is like a red thread throughout this century. Hou Hanru conceived Cities on the Move originally for the 100th birthday of the Secession

in Vienna and the Secession was very strongly influenced by Asia at the beginning of its history in the late 19th century when Japonism was the key influence on Klimt and his colleagues, a few decades later the Secession idea triggered the Japanese Secession the first movement of modern architecture in Japan which actually marks the very beginning of the idea of a different modernity in Asia. Modernization unequals Westernization. In terms of this long story of crosspolination it might be interesting if you tell me about the AA and its role as a rotating platform between Asia and Europe. PC: Thatís another connection. Over a period of time, when we were all teaching, the late Ron Herron, Christine Harley, Cedric Price and myself, we between us had a lot of Malaysian students. Ron in particular had Malaysian students and employed them. There is a direct connection with what you might call a ìpost-Archigrammeî circuit which particularly attracted South-East Asians, I suspect because of its ìjokinessî, itís late-20th-century-ness, whereas other things they may or may not have discovered in London were less of the late 20th century, were more ìcorrectî, taught in a different way, more similar to things they could find elsewhere. I mean why go to Yale to do what you could do at Harvard or Princeton; there wouldnít be any point. If you wanted to do that why not go to Harvard anyway? I think the relationship between invention, and toys, and the media, and messing around, and cartoons..., in a sense what other cultures consider trivia, actually being part of the creative mass in which one works, is something that appealed. Gradually they begin into the second or third cycle whereby some of the former... For example, we are now regularly sending very bright graduates (the people who get the medals) to Hasegawaís office. Sheís had three or four of them now. She says, ìjust send me somebody when heís really really goodî. HUO: I met one of them, Matthew Potter. PC: Matthew Potter, who is a brilliant guy, is an example. Usually the interviews happened in Paris. I remember dragging Catherine Findlay over to Paris to meet Isozaki. Catherine was itching to go to Japan, so I said, ìIím going to his opening in Paris on Monday, come along and meet himî. She did, and that was that. I think itís one of those situations where distance is the only thing preventing the cultures from becoming more integrated. Itís two-way traffic; we learn a lot of things from observing Japan. Christine Harley and I have often talked about very particular details, more details of things than broad conceptual issues. Often we are quoting details in lectures... even in cross-referential slides, one would tend to use something that Ito or somebody has done... HUO: When you came back in 1979, I think many people were influenced by these slide shows you did. Could you tell me about these materials...? PC: I think it would be things that confirmed my prejudices (which is what everybodyís lecture

always is). There were a lot of slides about gardens, the Kyoto gardens for example (which I still use in my lectures), which have so many layers of reference, have this kind of mythology of references, certain objects are to be seen as simple objects, certain to be seen as symbolic objects, certain as hidden or almost provocative, come-on objects, certain things as layers of space. Then you take the English tradition, somewhere like Starhead (?), and cross reference the Imperial Gardens in Kyoto, and you say, ìMy God, these guys were almost playing the same game!î Again, Tokyo (as in L.A., which for me is the other city that is a propos), you get to know one generation of people, then you begin to know their progeny, friends and students, people who work in their office, then you begin to re-export, as in Matthew Potterís case, until at a certain point you canít remember where the lines of connection began. HUO: Cities on the Move in London will be very different from its previous venues, as an exhibition on the move it always changes, is in permanent transformation and always adapts to different local contexts. PC: Itís so interesting that it started in Vienna! I often find myself, in a curious way, intrigued by the Jugendstil, not so much for the florid aspect, but for itís attitude of breaking down the boundaries of what is correct architectural format, that it melted into screens and vegetation and..., pulling its material from other territories. That to me is the attraction of Jugendstil Even if you think of Mackintosh, there has to be a Japanese connotation. Itís intriguing that when we were involved in Archigramme, where were the allies to be found? They were to be found in Japan. We started corresponding with people like Kurokawa and Isozaki very early. I think it started in 1968, because we were in a Milan for the Triennial and so was Isozaki. We stayed in the same hotel and got to know him. Then he would visit us in London at the time when we had a formalized Archigramme office in 1970-71. Then we all taught together at UCLA: Ron Herron, Wonchaw, Isozaki and myself. Banham was teaching at the drawing University, a special entree into the scenery. There was a strange West Coast Japanese connection which you could say also exists overlaid with the English connection. There was also an Austrian connection with Hans Hollein, whom weíve know since 1966, and with Coop Himmelbau, since 1968. It was Austria and Japan where there was at least two-way traffic. There were also Austrians teaching at UCLA at the same time, not any of the key ones but certainly a lot of people from Graz. We found most of our allies in Austria and Japan, not in Germany, France, Spain or the States particularly. There were Italians who came into it a bit later. HUO: In earlier interviews, you often talked about similarities and differences between Archigramme and Metabolism. Youíve expressed things like that Archigramme is more individual or selfish than Metabolism, and that Metabolism would have more this sense of an all controlling implantation.

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PC: The individualism thing is also a personal issue. What one enjoys about the favorite Japanese things is the tack-on quality, which is why I suppose, even now, my taste attracts me more to the accumulated work of Toyo Ito than it does to Sajima. I find Kazuyo Sejima just a little bit too elegant, a little bit too cold, a little bit too Swiss. HUO: The architecture in Japan that it has reached such a high degree of refinement that it is often very slick. But there is a young generation of ten or twelve architects between China, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore who are not necessarily connected to London but have their own network between them. You mentioned yesterday that you donít see this in the young generation in Europe. PC: And you think they are more concerned with the degree of completeness of their work, the total package? HUO: Yes. PC: Because whatís interesting for example about this thing thatís recording me now, this microphone, is that in a sense itís a throw back to the expressionist tack-on world: a microphone looking like a camera and taking a delight in itís toy-like quality, whereas I would have thought the current expression of the group you refer to would be that it would be kind of a non-visible objet, a complete, even-spread object. HUO: Metabolism basis itís almost like an implementation. Kurokawa, Le Corbusier... if you ask younger architects why they are interested in Archigramme or in Shinohara, for example, they are interesting in ìfinding foothold into a place, burrowing or infiltrating into something.î (K. Findlay) Could you talk about this in terms of the differences with Metabolism? PC: The differences were more obvious when you actually went there. Seeing Isozakiís early work, one of the building in Oita, was seeing how much it came out of the Le Corbusier early Japanese connection. At that time, in a way, the early work (some of the work of Kikutake and some of the work of Maki also) stood in counter distinction to this rather relaxed quality that one enjoys in oneís selected aspects of Japan. Itís always a personal selection. I realize more and more that when you go somewhere you see what you want to see. If I want to say that Tokyo is becoming more and more like Milan, or wherever, or if I wanted to say that all cities have such and such characteristics... no, itís also the attitude to time and to play. You watch people on the subway, the way they react. This has been amplified gradually over the years more and more Japanese students, as you get to know the Japanese quite well then it sort of clarifies things. We were fascinated by the relative sophistication of Metabolism, letís say Kurokawaís early capsules; they probably got further than we have. The patronage of Tange must be an interesting for a doctoral student to investigate. I know from talking to him that he set up within the office an internal competition between Kurokawa and Isozaki. He set one up

against another so that they would both work incredibly hard. In some way Tange must have set up the Tokyo Bay project, the office and whatever else was going on, so as to give them a certain amount of individual mandate; Iím not sure how it would work but... In the same way Isisaki was conscious when he lead the jury of the Hong Kong competition to give it to Zaha Hadid, and Hasegawa Shonandai, etc. Heís a key figure in this, even though much of his work in not liked (laughs). Heís a key figure in terms of the setting up of the network. Itís a curious thing for those of us who like him get worried about some of his works, yet when you think of his catalytic effect, in a way very generous, even at the last biennial here. He actually empowered those guy to do something radical. Heís a genuine radical locked in a formalist suit. To digress, he became far too enamored of the Americans and being recognized by America. Had he chosen to be recognized more by Europe, had for example Isozaki befriended the young Liebskind (laughs)... I mean he is a friend, but maybe had he befriended him rather than Michael Graves, the story could have been different. Maybe thatís a digression. Iím not a historian, Iím just picking up on nerve endings like you are. Iíve inherited students who were working for Shinohara. He is a consistently key figure also. His own work is very peculiar and difficult because it seems to exist project to project, but clearly a very important teacher and studio influence. HUO: How do you see these issues in the present? How do you see the issue of typology and blurring typologies in the present Asian city? PC: It makes sense now more than it did at the time. I get irritated with the insistence upon the tradition of typologies. A lot of teaching in the stiffer academies is about making sure you all understand and can reproduce or reinterpret typologies: the typology of the house, the saloon, the pavilion, etc. Whatís interesting about these things is that itís an attitude toward architecture and life as theater. This corner of this room [the breakfast room at Hotel Monaco for ours purposes, acts as a film studio once you have the camera switched on, or itís a picture once you face the other way, or a recital room, or a bar, or a corridor, or it may be a pick-up joint, or a conference space...Yes. Itís all of these things, but none of these things very perfectly. As far as typologies is concerned, itís hardly really a salon. Itís not a very good corridor. It works best as a picture because there is a superb view through the window. Itís whatever we want it to be at that moment. Perhaps if by tacking something on to the end of this window you could make it even better as a concert room-bar-studio-conference place, then why not? Instead of a topological approach. Once you have this free-wheeling, what the hell anyway letís tack-it-on-and-see-if-it works attitude, it works. It is an attitude of mine. I found that, for example, the building called the Culture Factory in Tokyo, by Hasegawa, I was skeptical at first, but as I went round it and as I photographed it, I realized it was a very successful building, pick up the sense of these spaces that are multiply interpretive. 51

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La Ville-continent

I am living in my town: there is my home.

All these places are quite near to my home:

I go sometimes out of town, for example, at weekends, to the countryside.

The name of my town, as written on the map, is for me something abstract.

stores, the market, the commons, the bank and the drugstore.

But the countryside I visit is not farther than 30 miles. Farther than that would be uncomfortable to go.

Yona Friedman (b. 1923 in Hungary) settled in Paris in 1957. Architect and urban designer, he also works in the fields of sociology, economics, mathematics, philosophy and art; and for many years he has been involved in the issue of housing in the Third World. 52

The town where I live, are the streets, the places where I usually go.

None of these places is more than ten minutes away by walking.

And it would be expensive.

There are other places too which do mean something for me.

Obviously, I am going sometimes farther than this but not too often.

Thus I prefer to stay near home.

The products I buy at the market and services I eventually do use

When I was looking for job I did prefer one near to my home.

I am sometimes daydreaming about another kind of city:

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have often their origine in other towns, far away.

As for myself, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t care about wherefrom do things come, as far as I can find them in my neighbourhood.

without looking for them elsewhere.

If I would not find such a job, I would prefer to move in order to be near to it.

My job is with a firm assembling electronic components for manufacturing instruments.

Those components were manufactured in another city far away from here.

it would consist of a bunch of towns, and have a high speed subway (take 200 miles an hour)

and there would be a train every 5 minutes.

Like the subway we have now.

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This city would be a collection of towns: I would feel as my city the whole.

It could be marvellous to live in this kind of a very large city.

I was talking about ideas of a “city at the countryside”

Travel time in my dream city would be less than a quarter of an hour for 60 miles at the other end of the city.

It’s neighbourhoods will be regluar medium towns.

to a professor, a friend of mine.

My subway would not be really “subway” as it would circulate under the open sky across the landscape.

Between them stretching intact countryside with farms furnishing us fresh food not getting stale during transportation.

He explained me that this idea is very old and it is familiar to him. One of his friends, an architect, gave it the name of “continent city”.

Taking the subway would thus be always a scenic ride.

For my weekends to the countryside I could simply take the subway.

As it could consist of all the cities on a continent linked through a rapid transit network.

All cities in Europe form already a sort of a â&#x20AC;&#x153;continent cityâ&#x20AC;?.

It will work better once all the rapid transit will be already materialized.

Travel time between cities would not be longer than that necessary today to go across a city.

Going from town to town with the subway we would travel across the countryside.

The continent city is a web of local economies

where the countryside is the hinterland of the city

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and circulates with frequency of every ten minutes.

A countryside integrated into the city economy, producind goods to the city needs

and the city the hinterland of the countryside.

The network could be a web of motorways having no outlets between cities.

and acting as a market for goods made in the city.

They can be well to do together but they can not be so separately.