For the Ground Floor space of the new Cooper Union’s building on Cooper Square, the Berlin-based architectural practice nOffice/Studio Miessen have been commissioned by RoseLee Goldberg/ Performa to design and construct a symbiosis of Performa’s central hub and a pavilion in which nOffice will broadcast an architectural statement.

Acknowledging that they are not performance artists, nOffice explore the thin line between being understood as architects rather than service providers. The practice interprets architecture as providing and enhancing the performance of matter, but still maintain autonomy of production.

The space at the Cooper Union was designed as a coherent environment and embodies a multiplicity of diverse voice, a democratic archipelago in which hidden structures expose subliminal yet intended narratives. Amongst a general information counter about the Biennial, Performa Hub also includes a screening space, a lecture hall, an archive, a radio and video booth, a kiosk and a small bookstore.

Chance für das Neue

Das Kunstjahr ist vorbei, aber für eine Pause ist kaum Zeit. Nach sämtlichen Biennalen, Kunstmessen, kulturellen Veranstaltungen und Ausstellungen erwartet die Art Basel als führende globale Kunstmesse die nächsten Besucherströme. Das neue Jahr hat begonnen und die Messen und Biennalen werden in diesem Jahr die globalen Kunstnomaden wieder um den Erdball führen.

Um der weltweiten Austauschbarkeit, die mittlerweile am besten auf e-flux erfahrbar ist, zu entgehen und wieder einen Schritt voraus zu sein, wird die Art Basel ihrer Rolle gerecht und erfindet das eigen kreierte Konzept der Statements neu. Da global einige Messen vor allem räumlich und strukturell nachgezogen haben, versucht das hier präsentierte Konzept aufzuzeigen, wie der zukunftsweisende Schritt der Art Basel auch räumlich erfahrbar gemacht werden kann.

Doch wie schafft man es dem globalen Status Quo von Standardzirkulation über Ausrichtung am Raster bis hin zur Verteilung über oft unübersichtliche und in sich isolierte Bereiche zu entkommen? Wie bindet man weiterhin die bekannten Besuchermassen an den Standort Basel und wie rekrutiert man potenzielle neue Besuchergruppen? Was macht den Kunststandort der Art Statements speziell? Wie produziert man hier Inhalte und stellt diese nicht, wie auf anderen Messen, nur dar?

In Zeiten des globalen Stadtmarketings a la Bilbao erschließt sich jedoch eine tatsächliche und nicht nur marketingstrategische Chance: mit wirklichen Inhalten zu punkten, mit einem Forum, dass über das Angefragte, Erwünschte und sich selbst weit hinaus geht. Hier wird die Messe als Institution in den Köpfen der Menschen langfristig verankert.

Zentrale Vision

Wir begreifen die Art Basel Statements als Manifest/Statement in sich. Eine räumliche Toolbox, die für mehr steht als sich selbst – nicht nur für eine singuläre Position, sondern die Möglichkeit, sämtliche Positionen zu vereinen, zu durchdenken und neu zu produzieren.

So wie Jeremy Penthams Panopticon sich aus dem Zentrum in den Perimeter erschließt, erschließen wir die Statements aus dem Perimeter nach innen: ein kaleidoskopisches Spektrum, dass sich selbst immer wieder neu beleuchtet. Es präsentiert eine räumliche und inhaltliche Neupositionierung des Statements-Konzepts durch eine zentrale Content Zelle, ein Forum der inhaltlichen Auseinandersetzung und Reflektion.

Idealismus oder Pragmatismus? Nein. Idealismus und Pragmatismus!
Noch eine Messe, nur mit anderem Inhalt? Nein. Art Basel Statements soll sowohl die finanzstarken Käufer als auch die wichtigsten global agierenden inhaltlichen Künstler, Produzenten, Institutionen, Kritiker, Journalisten und lokale Gäste anziehen und durch diese Mehrgleisigkeit eine inhaltsgestützte Nachhaltigkeit erzielen. Auf diesem Weg wird die Art für Alle zum Treffpunkt.

Im Zeitalter der Schnelllebigkeit muss sich eine Kunstmesse heute deutlich von anderen Mitstreitern absetzten. Es sollte ein Paket geschnürt werden, dass auch hält, was es verspricht. Deshalb konzentriert sich unser Entwurf nicht nur auf die bestmögliche und effektivste Darstellung existierender Statements, sondern produziert einen zentralen Ort der Messe, auf der Inhalte neu formuliert, gegeneinander gesetzt und ausgehandelt werden: ein Ort der kollaborativen Wissensproduktion, eine zentrale Content-Maschine. Deshalb ist unsere Vision der Statements nicht nur eine Messe als Show, sondern vielmehr ein Ort an dem Werte vermittelt werden.

Hier ist für uns wichtig, dass nicht ein aufgesetzter Idealismus, sondern die inhaltliche Realisierbarkeit des Entwurfs im Vordergrund steht. Wir sind keiner erträumten Formalität verhaftet oder ketten uns an ein vorproduziertes Interieur-Vokabular.

Materialität und Akustik

Unser Entwurf präsentiert einen Präsentationsring aus Galerien und deren Statements in dessen Mitte ein Kern aus variablen Programmen zur Schnittstelle zwischen Messe und Besucher wird. Dieser Kern, in dem Inhalte in Foren, Medien und Formaten, wie zum Beispiel Artist Lounge, Artist Books and Records, Conversations, und Lobby ausgehandelt werden, präsentiert sich in unbehandelter Holz-Konstruktion bewusst als roh und unfertig. Offen für Neues möchte dieser Raum ständig neu erfunden werden anstatt sich als bereits vollkommen abzubilden.

Die Akustik funktioniert hier nach dem Zwiebelprinzip, das mehrere variable Ringe als akustische Pufferzonen ausbildet. Der zuerst abstrakte Grundriss wird dadurch direkt zum pragmatischen Raumkonzept, das sich über die Verteilung der zentralen Programme und Zonen bis hin zum Forum der Conversations entwickelt.

Kollaborationen

Unser Gesamtpaket beinhaltet eine Reihe von Tools, die verschiedene Maßstäbe abdecken. Im Rahmen der Statements arbeiten wir mit der international renommierten Münchner Mode-Designerin Ayzit Bostan und dem ebenfalls Münchner Industrie-Designer Konstantin Grcic zusammen. Als Gruppe haben wir bestimmte Themenfelder ausgearbeitet, die sowohl von der Gruppe als auch Einzelakteuren neu durchdacht werden.

Ayzit Bostan wird sich konkret auf zwei Punkte konzentrieren: das erdgeschossige Verbindungsglied (Tunnel) zwischen Außenraum und der Statement (erster Stock), sowie einer haptischen Präsentationsform für eine Reihe von Art Basel Statements Produkten, die wir zusätzlich zum Ausstellungsdesign als integrale Bestandteile verstehen und vorschlagen. Hierbei handelt es sich um ein speziell zur Art Basel Statements produzierten Mini-Atlas/Büchlein aller Galerie-Statements, eine DVD mit einer kuratierten Auswahl von Conversations aus dem Art Basel Archiv, eine Statements Tragetasche, sowie einer Reihe strategisch platzierter Automaten, in denen diese Produkte erhältlich sein werden.

Konstantin Grcic wird (in Zusammenarbeit mit Jörg Koch, 032c, Berlin) eine Reihe speziell für die Art Basel nachgerüsteten und individualisierten Möbelstücken für spezielle Sitzgelegenheiten sorgen. Diese werden sich vor allem auch durch Farbkonzept in der zentralen Zelle des Forums/Conversations abbilden.

So versuchen wir nicht nur einen produktiven Mehr- und Erfahrungswert zu schaffen, sondern auch für die Besucher einen haptischen Maßstab aufzuzeigen. Auf der Statements kann man selber zum Produzenten werden. Hier werden Inhalte nicht nur formuliert, sondern können auch nach eigenem Belieben zusammengestellt und mit nach Hause genommen werden.

Zukunft jetzt

Wir begreifen die Art Basel 2009 als Chance in der globalen Krise. Gerade jetzt erschließt sich uns die Möglichkeit durch klar formulierte Positionen einen neuen Ansatz zu erarbeiten. Dieser Ansatz vereint Raum und Inhalt. Hier werden Positionen nicht dogmatisch verteidigt, sondern eröffnen einen Raum des Austauschs und der Wissensproduktion, an dem neue Positionen erarbeitet und nicht einfach ersetzt werden.

Die Statements als Labor, Inspiration, temporäres Forschungsinstitut und Akademie erstellt dadurch ein eigenes, nicht emulierbares Qualitäts- und Gütesiegel, das sich klar von der Vielzahl der globalen Mitstreiter wie zum Beispiel Frieze, FIAC, Armory etc. absetzt: ein speziell durchdachter und produzierter integrativer Ort für Sammler, Künstler, Kuratoren, Produzenten, Galleristen, und Kulturschaffende, die an einem Ort zusammenkommen anstatt sich ausgegrenzt fühlen.

Hier trifft sich Anerkennung von Tradition und kritische Selbstreflektion als Produktionsmaschine neuer Realitäten, die nur hier in Basel so produziert werden können – so wird die Messe als ganzheitlicher Wirtschafts- und Innovationsstandort erfahrbar gemacht: Art Basel Statements als Stadt in der Stadt in der Stadt. Ein Ort, der sich als Content-Raum neu erfindet.

For the last years, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has pursued a simple goal: to become number one in everything. Dubai would get the world’s biggest cargo port, the world’s tallest skyscraper, the world’s largest airport, the world’s biggest amusement park, and the world’s greatest concentration of five-star hotels. But in May 2007, Head of Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority, Matter Al Tayer, asked at the International Design Forum about the emirate’s growing traffic problems, found these astonishing words: “I love Düsseldorf. It’s my favourite city. With bicycles and pedestrian zones next to the Kö [the Königsallee, a central boulevard and luxury shopping mile].”

Düsseldorf was one of the pillars of the German economic miracle of the fifties; with the Kö, the high-rise building popularly called Dreischeibenhaus (”Three-Slice Building”), and its pedestrian traffic lights featuring a yellow phase, it came to epitomize German modernity. Today, Düsseldorf is wealthier than the average German city, but since the reunification of Germany, it has largely failed to attract attention on the supraregional stage. With the end of the real estate boom and the onset of the global financial crisis, Dubai, for its part, finds itself buried under a gigantic load of debt.

What if, in this era of globalization, not only corporations from different countries and continents merged but cities as well? Which synergies might such a fusion generate? Which imaginations and energies might the mere announcement unleash? Starting from an idea proposed by architect Markus Miessen and writer Ingo Niermann, a team of artists, film directors, designers, and architects speculates about how Dubai and Düsseldorf unite their strengths to find solutions for the 21st century.

Future Perfect Continuous

By Carson Chan

As the Bank of England’s ‘Architect and Purveyor’ from 1788 until his retirement in 1833, Sir John Soane saw to the completion and continual implementation of the bank’s neo-Classical design, which stood intact until it was finally rebuilt to Herbert Baker’s specifications between the wars. Soane, whose famous obsession with the trappings of man’s endeavor against the wheels of time (sarcophagi, busts, oil paintings etc.), propelled him to not only collect from the past, but to project the future of history – as if doing so would bring even the uncertainties of tomorrow into his control. In Crude Hints towards the History of My House, a text he wrote in his sixties, Soane imagined returning to his London home (now a museum) at Lincoln’s Inn Fields two-decades later, to find it a ruin. In 1830, the year of the fictional homecoming, Soane commissioned his amanuensis-turned-creative partner, Joseph Gandy, to make perspective renderings of the Bank of England. As in Crude Hints, Gandy’s softly luminous images show the bank building overgrown and dilapidated – its front steps on Threadneedle Street drop into a rocky chasm.

Architecture, shown through pictures, is conducive to this sort of storytelling. Narrative images – done in atmospheric perspective – have allowed Bible stories and property-developer pitches verisimilitude. What is obvious in Markus Miessen and Ralf Pflugfelder’s fanciful Dubai/Düsseldorf alliance – where images are deployed in such a way – is that beyond spinning an architectural fiction, the architects also employ narrative pictures as the metric against which lived reality is observed, critiqued and calibrated. Giving these places a future narrative is to look at them away from historical and political distractions, where meaning can fall anew onto known forms.

Miessen and Plugfelder’s Kunsthalle Dubai Düsseldorf project (2009), a collection of two and three-dimensional representations of fictional architecture projects in each of the two places, begin its narrative in 2008 when the global economic crisis seizes the local coffers and moves them into a partnership that would ensure mutual wealth and business opportunities. As if the bane of one is the boon of the other, the twinned governments ban art to save the economy – clueing in to the fact that the billions spent on art each year have offset available monies for far more dire global pursuits, say, green energy or world hunger. Art, it can be said, becomes detrimental to culture.

To mark this shift, like all past monumental paradigmatic shifts, two colossal structures are built, one in each town, to display a single piece of art – the only, and last allowable art-object, commissioned to commemorate the momentous union. The Kunsthallen are hollow, identical, chamfered boxes, like oversized John McCracken sculptures with about seven times more floor space than the Louvre. In Düsseldorf, the building sits on a plinth overlooking the Rhine. In Dubai, its height, 450 meters, is sunk into the ground – ostensibly to counter the emirate’s punishing climate and density. The structure’s interior walls are lined with terraces that allow visitors to view the single art-object, enshrined and ceremoniously lifted on a plinth.

The Kunsthallen play foil to Boulée’s 18th century, totalizing, encapsulations of knowledge with which they share iconic stature. Where the Bibliothèque du Roi (1785) or even the Cénotaph à Newton (1784, and roughly the same height as the Kunsthallen) bear the imprimatur of Empiricism, and therefore a hermeneutics of endless deducibility, the Kunsthallen sits vacant, and silently delays interpretation of its use or purpose. If Boulée’s designs depict the apotheosis of human learning – taking form as cosmic globes, cloud-piercing pyramids and bookshelves that recede into the horizon – it also exposes its limitations in the absolute finitude of materiality. A library, no matter how long its shelves, contains a limited number of books – a sobering concept contra to the suggestion of a roving, ever-expanding ken.

If Boulée’s architecture lays out a rational directive, then the Kunsthallen run on parallel but opposite passions, and in Miessen and Plugfelder’s chonology (the buildings are completed in 2071), they act as proverbial bookend to the Enlightenment shelf. By putting almost nothing inside their vacuous spaces, Miessen and Pflugfelder show their skepticism of Enlightenment’s architectural touchstone, the public institution; which they recast as an oversized void, unearthly and mystical. In the future, when people possess transcendent, bionic brainpower, architecture’s thralldom will no doubt be limited to its ability to cow with scale. Vast, inestimable emptiness, not plenitude, will impress.

Further rhetoric lies within the general purview of the project. The fact that the Kunsthalle – traditionally a smaller, collectionless exhibition space – is inflated to more than thirteen times the volume of the current largest building in the world (the Boeing plant in Everett, Washington), expresses a snide observation on the premium put on architecture as a provider of spectacle to both create and validate public spaces. Today, Times Square in New York can barely be understood as public space in any traditional sense, but rather as a condensation of profligate distractions that begets ever more amplified, competing versions that vie for our fragmented attention. The Kunsthallen provide ‘space,’ which is ‘public,’ but its usefulness as public space, as such, is nulled by the building’s humbling dimensions. Standing across the long-length of the building (just under a kilometer), people will look no bigger than peppercorns. These people, I imagine, are the same ones seen milling about on the banks of the Rhine in the Düsseldorf image. They look like all the stock-image people one finds populating computer generated architectural renderings: a carefree, leisurely class, a people who truly enjoy and fully utilize public space, native to nowhere except the collaged reality of architectural renderings. For Miessen and Pflugfelder, architectural reality, vis-à-vis city planning’s perennially stilted bureaucracy, is never projected so much as imagined; hoped.

The clearing of architecture’s socio-political register for a fictional one is made explicit in Miessen and Pflugfelder’s axonometric drawing of the Kunsthallen. While theorists like Manfredo Tafuri were claiming that architecture’s striving for formal autonomy transpired from its ‘guilty’ relationship with rationalist-capitalism, many practicing architects since the late 1960s used the axonomeric projection to present form free from its socio-political context, to allow for architectural typology and urban morphology’s self-produced traditions to delimit disciplinary contours. Axons – a projection where the dimensions of each edge are scaled equally, unlike perspectives – are understood to be more truthful in that they show a universal rather than subjective view. In Miessen and Pflugfelder’s drawing, the Kunstalle’s form similarly functions free from its contextual confines; the drawing references neither Dubai nor Düsseldorf as actual places. The Kunsthalle’s constituent parts – terraces, shell, base, roof and art object – are exploded, revealing new correspondences between an otherwise fixed set of relations. The roof-plate figure – a shape that is never really experienced by the visitors – gains a higher symbolic status as a kind of architectonic organizer; its beveled outline serving as the drawing’s borders. Superimposing the axon over the plan, ghosting the forms in a lighter line-weight to show transposition, and ‘gridding’ the drawing to give it its own order, Miessen and Pflugfelder’s drawing parodies a style of hand-done, pen-on-Mylar drawings from an era of exploratory drawing practices between the 1970s and early 1990s – a time when many prominent architects devoted time to theory and philosophy, and found it beneath them to actually build buildings.

The power of Kunsthalle Dubai Düsseldorf lies not in its critique of past practices, but in its ability to propel a critique of architecture and its tools as a practice of the past, itself a historical form. For what Gandy suggested by representing the Bank of England as a ruin, Miessen and Pflugfelder expand by giving a future history to buildings that were never meant to be built. Like Gandy’s bank, Miessen and Pflugfelder’s buildings are voiced, so to speak, in the hazily clairvoyant future perfect continuous tense: the Kunsthallen will have been built to mark the diplomatic unification of two places that jointly renounce art. Architecture’s stability is unseated by this simple conjugation, and it gives the effect of propping a distorted mirror to that which we have eternally held to be solid.

Then again, perhaps the image is unsettling, not because it is distorted, but because it has become so familiar – like repeating a single word many times until it loses all semantic sense. The moment the diverse and dirty stuff of art – of culture – is essentialized into a single object, is also the moment society resigns itself of change. It should be mentioned that the art piece in each Kunsthalle is kept inside a reliquary shaped like the combined buildings – a shiny white box (Düsseldorf) atop a shiny black box (Dubai). Presented with a state-approved object of adoration that resembles the state-sanctioned space for said adoration, we find ourselves locked within a shrouded, mediated experience, looped so tightly upon itself that it takes on the self-validating logic of religion. That this process will have been existing in two far-flung locales shows the rather blighted condition that Miessen and Pflugfelder predict for the future of urban design. For architect Michael Sorkin, “urban design, with its single, inflexible formula, is produced for customers – worshippers – rather than citizens.”[i] The mirror Miessen and Pflugfelder props, then, is not distorted but doubled, like the ones found in clothing store dressing rooms that reflect endlessly into darkness.

[i] Michael Sorkin, “The End(s) of Urban Design,” in Urban Design, edited by Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) 2009 p. 170

Archive Kabinett’s purpose is to create a space where to experiment with formats and concepts related to the field of publishing, to stimulate a challenging collaboration between artists, writers and curators while exploring their roles. Archive Kabinett aims not only at fostering art practices but also at defining and developing a platform for art publishing. Its intent is to present the viewer with thought-provoking events, to encourage a critical discussion around “contemporary culture” through artists lectures, exhibitions and talks and to promote curiosity. Devoted to research and reflection on artistic, social, and political practices, Archive Kabinett aims to translate, organize, and circulate theoretical materials. Archive Kabinett is the home of Archive Books and Archive Journal.

A more detailed program with further upcoming events will be available online on www.archivekabinett.org

Archive Journal is a quarterly journal comprised of both new and already existing material. The format and structure of Archive Journal intends to reflect ideas of possible archiving, by being composed of differing, open-ended, yet interconnected sections, some will run over consecutive issues, some may disappear to reappear in the future, and some may cease to exist completely. By publishing this discourse it brings to light a possible interpretation of history, like a conscious point of view on contemporaneity, while also pointing to the necessity to reflect on those principles and rules that construct our cultural environment. Archive Journal is an inquiry on that place in between the notion of tradition and authorial work that we call history or reality.

www.archivejournal.org

Why Portscapes

At the extremity of The Netherlands, to the west of Rotterdam, an extension to the port of Rotterdam has been underway since September 2008. With the construction of Maasvlakte 2, The Netherlands will become 2,000 hectares larger and the port, already the biggest in Europe, will increase in size by 20%. The construction of Maasvlakte 2 prompted the Port of Rotterdam Authority to join with SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space) in asking artists to reflect on the port, its expansion and its function. Under the title ‘Portscapes’, an artistic voyage of discovery will take place throughout 2009, touching on the port’s architectural, political, social and ecological past, present and future.

Artists

Portscapes involves artists from The Netherlands, China, Mexico, Austria and the United States. By creating events varied in scale, temporary art works, performances, excursions and screenings in the port area, for example, Portscapes will evolve as a kind of cultural guidebook to the port area, focusing on the future and Maasvlakte 2.

Programme

Portscapes’ projects will take place at different times and locations. The launch takes place during Art Rotterdam in February. The opening of Futureland, the information centre for Maasvlakte 2, is a further occasion around which art works will be presented (end of April). Other projects will be realized to coincide with the World Port Days and the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale (September, October). Check the agenda on this site. Construction work on Maasvlakte 2 will continue until 2013. Following 2009 as a pilot year, the Port Authority plans to commission art projects annually during the next four years in cooperation with SKOR. Through the diversity of artists taking part in Portscapes and the different perspectives their work will suggest, a range of possibilities for future artistic engagement will be explored.

Organisation

Portscapes is a Port of Rotterdam Authority initiative developed with advice from SKOR (Foundation Art and Public Space) and programmed by the curatorial duo Latitudes (Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna). Latitudes is invited on the basis of its international experience with exhibitions and publications in the field of land art and ecology.

The Freedom of the Sea (Mare Liberum, 1609) is a book on international law written by the Dutch jurist and philosopher Hugo Grotius, formulating the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade.

Territorial waters, as defined by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), is a belt of coastal waters extending at most twelve nautical miles from the baseline (low-water mark) of a coastal state. The territorial sea is regarded as the sovereign territory of the state, although foreign ships (both military and civilian) are allowed innocent passage through it. This sovereignty also extends to the airspace over and seabed below. The Convention entered into force on November 16, 1994, and established the limits of national jurisdiction.

The term “territorial waters” is also sometimes used informally to describe any area of water over which a state has jurisdiction. A coastal nation has total control over its internal waters, slightly less control over territorial waters, and ostensibly even less control over waters within the contiguous zones.

During incidents such as nuclear weapons testing and fisheries disputes, some nations arbitrarily extended their maritime claims to as much as 50 or even 200 nautical miles. Since the late 20th century the “12 mile limit” has become almost universally accepted. The United Kingdom extended its territorial waters from 3 to 12 nautical miles in 1987. Distances measured in nautical miles are exact legal definitions, while those in kilometres are approximate conversions that are not stated in any law or treaty.

Article 111 states that: “The hot pursuit of a foreign ship may be undertaken when the competent authorities of the coastal State have good reason to believe that the ship has violated the law and regulations of that State. Such pursuit must be commenced when the foreign ship or one of its boats is within the international waters, the archipelagic waters, the territorial sea, or the contiguous zone if the pursuit has not been interrupted…The right of hot pursuit ceases as soon as the ship pursued enters the territorial sea if its own State or of a third State.”

Complications arise when authorities such as a navy or coast guard wishes to intercept vessels suspected of carrying out illegal activities, such as piracy, smuggling or there is potential for an act of terrorism. If a suspect vessel is flagged with a state other than the state of the pursuing authorities, then in most cases the pursuing authorities must gain the permission of the ‘flag’ state prior to boarding. If the suspect vessel crosses into the territorial waters of another state, possibly a third state, which is not the home state of the pursuing authorities, then permission must be sought from the territorial state prior to intercepting or boarding.

While UNCLOS is only one of many regimes, or sets of rules, laws, codes and conventions that have been created to regulate the activities of private, commercial and military users of our seas and oceans, it provides the framework for further maritime security cooperation.

To date, the United States is the only state not to ratify UNCLOS. While the Secretary General of the United Nations receives instruments of ratification and accession and the UN provides support for meetings of states party to the Convention, the UN has no direct operational role in the implementation of the Convention. And no one else has either.

Download United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea as PDF (957 kb)

Book launch: October 28, 2008, 6:30pm at the Swiss Institute, New York, 495 Broadway #3
Guest: Eda Cufer, curator, dramaturge and NSK collective member

With contributions by Can Altay, Marina Abramovic, Paddy Ashdown, Zdenka Badovinac, Katherine Carl, Eda Cufer, Reinier de Graaf, Mladen Dolar, Lisa Farjam, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Carin Kuoni, Zak Kyes, Jacques Le Goff, Aaron Levy, Genevieve Maitland Hudson with Cyril Blanc, Markus Miessen, Viktor Misiano, Miran Mohar, Shamim Momin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Orchard, Dan Perjovschi, Marjetica Potrc, Nebojsa Seric Shoba, Michael Shamiyeh, Erzen Shkololli, Taryn Simon, Nedko Solakov, Alenka Suhadolnik, Milica Tomic, Kazys Varnelis, Felix Vogel, Borut Vogelnik, Jordan Wolfson, and Sislej Xhafa.

East Coast Europe, which took place during Spring 2008, is a project about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics. The title “East Coast Europe” is a word play. “Europe” in the title is the central topic for investigation, its contemporary culture, expansion, and its status as a continuing social project. “East Coast” refers to two distinct edges of Europe, both real and imaginary—the geographical East Coast of the United States of America and the political “East Coast” of the European Union. The project invited leading figures in culture and politics from the two east coasts—of the United States of America, and of the countries in the European Union and its vicinity to comment on their perception of Europe today. East Coast Europe dives into the urgent details of a dense network of contemporary experience of the European Union’s extensive exchange of knowledge, people, and goods with the East Coast of the United States and also with its own eastern border. What are its challenges and possibilities for social, political and spatial practices?

East Coast Europe was commissioned and produced by the Consulate General of Republic of Slovenia in New York City, during Slovenia’s Presidency of the Council of the EU in 2008, with support of the EUNIC Network New York and Delegation of the European Commission, New York. The ECE project is conceived by Katherine Carl, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Markus Miessen and Alenka Suhadolnik.

East Coast Europe Preface: Berlin

As a preface to the main project in New York (May 2008), a set of billboards facing Berlin’s Karl Marx Allee inscribe an imagined borderline of ‘East Coast Europe’. The first manifestation took place on December 21, 2007 in Berlin at KROME ART & ARCHITECTURE with a special installation by Markus Miessen and Zak Kyes, coinciding with their book launch of The Violence of Participation (Sternberg Press).

East Coast Europe: The Book

East Coast Europe deals with perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics. It is a program of public conversations, interviews, a design project, and a book. The project invites leading figures in culture and politics from the two east coasts – of the United States of America, and of countries in the vicinity of the present European Union such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Lebanon, Macedonia, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine to comment on their perception of Europe today.

ECE dives into the urgent details of a dense network of contemporary experience of the European Union’s extensive exchange of knowledge, people, and goods with the East Coast of the United States and also with its own eastern border. These two crisp north-south borderlines belie many geographic spatial complexities including the islands of Switzerland and the Western Balkans that now reside within the landmass of Europe but outside of the European Union. ECE investigates the cultural and political confluence between these two north-south borderlines, one geographic and one political. What is this new transverse region through multiple time zones? What are its challenges and possibilities for social, political and spatial practices? What is the future of international cultural practices in light of the expansion of the European Union? What are the changing prospects for intercultural collaboration between the players within the single entity of the European Union? What are the new emerging roles for cultural practices beyond European boundaries, like the East Coast of the United States and the “East Coast” of Europe towards Russia, the Middle East and Asia? What is the future of the cultural representation of European boundaries? What are cultural practices currently learning from this geopolitical expansion?

East Coast Europe Roundtable at the Vera List Centre for Arts and Politics, New York

A one evening public debate (April 15, 2008) about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics.

Participants

• Carin Kuoni, Director of Vera List Center for International Politics
• Alenka Suhadolnik, Consul General of the Republic of Slovenia
• Reinier de Graaf, director of AMO and partner in Office for Metropolitan Architecture (AMO/OMA)
• Aaron Levi, founding Executive Director and a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia
• Dan Perjovschi, artist, writer, cartoonist & curator from Bucharest, Romania
• Marjetica Potrc, artist and Vera List Center Fellow
• Markus Miessen, architect, researcher, and writer, Studio Miessen
• Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, architect and founder of Normal Architecture Office

Press Voices on East Coast Europe:

“In applying a spatial, geographical and cultural eye to the peripheries of a Europe suddenly profoundly unsure of its identity and its future, this book attempts to outline some of the issues and responses to the idea of Europe as an entity […] it presents an eastern border as defined as its correspondent coast on the other side of the Atlantic. To study its borders is to study its present, its future and its very existence.”
Edwin Heathcote, Architecture Critic
Financial Times, London

“This new encyclopedic endeavor is the necessary injection of optimism that Europe urgently needs. A brilliant toolbox for the 21st century.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Director of International Projects
Serpentine Gallery, London

“A timely and eminently readable book. This collection has a geographic rubric – in this case an ostensibly European one – but then encourages us, subtly and sneakily so, to rethink how we conceive of geography in the first place. With its pastiche of ideas drawn from the worlds of art, architecture, politics, its spirit and approach will have multiple echoes beyond this moment, beyond this space.”
Negar Azimi, Senior Editor
Bidoun, New York

October 2008, English
11.1 x 17.8 cm, 352 pages, 3 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN 978-1-933128-49-8
€12.00

New perspectives on entrepreneurship on display in Dubai, New York, Berlin, Moscow, Geneva, Milan, Madrid, and London

Dubai/Zurich
Credit Suisse launches its “Art & Entrepreneurship” exhibition tour at Art Dubai, featuring a new generation of 19 successful artists from around the globe. The exhibition contains unique pieces of art, which are all based on the theme of entrepreneurship; a spirit which has fueled important breakthroughs in science, business and culture. Following its launch in Dubai, the Credit Suisse “Art & Entrepreneurship” exhibition will be presented in seven major global cities. The tour concludes on November 24, with the auctioning of the artwork in London. One half of the proceeds will go to the contributing artists, the other half to the charitable organization, “Room to Read.”

Of all the huge urban areas around the world, Tehran stands out as a different kind of Megalopolis. It boasts one of the most dynamic art scenes in the Middle East even as the city itself deals with a rudimentary public transport system, an exploding population crisis, and an ever-increasing sprawl of mass housing; An unsightly city of experimental architecture that swallows entire villages and towns without offering them any sort of public services.

Despite its complicated urban situation—which according to experts has already spiraled out of control—artists’ societies in Tehran continue to hold numerous biennials in semi-tribal fashion. A great number of these events are government-sponsored projects whose outlook and also their premises can shift 180 degrees from one year to the next. Each community has its own set of ceremonies, as a result of which, any sense of solidarity among the artists is lost.

The Tehran Visual Arts Festival, The Calligraphy Biennial, The Sculpture Biennial, The Cartoon Biennial, The Painting Biennial of the Islamic World, The Graphic Design Biennial, The Children’s Books Illustration Biennial, The Painting Biennial, The Poster Biennial, The Poster Biennial of the Islamic World… the list is endless.

Although the legendary “TEHRAN BIENNIAL” goes back 50 years, not a single one of the above-mentioned events can be considered a biennial by prevailing and accepted international standards”.  An arts society recently published a call to boycott the upcoming Painting Biennial in order to demand a professionally curated exhibition, protesting the open call process and a “jury” they deemed unacceptable. I

t seems impossible to have a proper Tehran biennial in Tehran, so our sprawling city and its elitist art scene remain excluded from the highly competitive art market in the region despite being surrounded from all sides by lucrative biennials and auctions. We may have great artists living and working in Iran, but we don’t have a chance to share the profits.

Tehran, as one may suppose, does not seem interested in presenting itself as a desirable destination for cultural tourism, by playing it ‘cool’ like other global cities, or scramble to be hip by coughing up the membership dues to be in the international art market.

Project Links: www.thegreatpyramid.org & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_pyramid_monument

Structural Engineering: Bollinger & Grohmann

A BRIEF FOR A ZONE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
Contemporary societies still focus on the cult of the youth, yet slowly but inevitably the discourse is acknowledging the demographic facts of the aging population. The new question is: How does a society react to a reality in which age and death shift into its centre? How does a society organize spaces that negotiate the dead and the living? Is it still possible to define those spaces as “heterotopian”, i.e. as Foucault did when he described the modern invention of hospitals, asylums and cemeteries? Can we develop spaces that include age and death and understand them not in notions of decay but as a trigger for urban development?

Based on the pyramid as its urban catalyst the project creates a zone between life and death, a city of passing away, without being marginalized by the societies that its inhabitants originate from. The urban addresses the question of how one can think of environments that produce a quality of homeliness. The vast majority of people tend to think of death as something that can be postponed, something that – as an overbearing issue – is not to be addressed within one’s lifetime. However, with more and more people suffering from terminal illnesses, one needs to think about scenarios in which people can not only immerse in environments of care, but further, how they relate with the space where they will eventually get buried. The question arises as to what could potentially turn those spaces into typologies that are no longer connected with fear and despair, but both solitude and community.

Until now, we seem to have failed to produce the necessary links between what one might call the ‘environment of home’, and the ‘environment of death’. In order to generate a rupture within the homogeneity of the kinds of care environments we are used to, a new space is needed, one that is comprised of a mix of international residents, visitors, and service personnel: a multi-language, multi-ethnic, and a-territorial population – an environment in which everything is possible and nothing is forbidden.

In January this year Rem Koolhaas, as chairman of the jury, announced that all four contestants won: “In the end the variety and richness of the entries kept the jury from declaring a single winner – given the enormity of the enterprise, there is scope for each author to contribute and enrich the massive effort.”

Review by Eikongraphia:

“In their design Hirsch, Lorch and Miessen have projected the pyramid in a lake that is lined with a small city dedicated to the transition between life and death. There the grievers, the dying and the dead find services of their liking. Boats take them to the actual pyramid. ‘Based on the pyramid as its urban catalyst the project creates a zone between life and death, a city of passing away”, the designers write: “[…] what could potentially turn those spaces into typologies that are no longer connected with fear and despair, but both solitude and community.’ I think it is brilliant. The isolation of the pyramid in the lake adds to its mystique. It becomes an ‘over there’, something to confront. You can walk around the lake, and thereby walk around the pyramid, without any possibility to approach it. To thicken the experience a rule could be applied that tourists – there will be tourists – are not allowed to cross the lake. Even future-grievers or future-dead are not allowed to go there. Only the dead and those who have stayed behind can approach and climb the pyramid. From an aesthetic point of view the lake forms a beautiful abstract plane that enhances the form of the pyramid. Like the desert in Egypt adds drama to the ancient pyramids there. I also think there is a great processional quality in this proposal. First you prepare yourself at viewing distance of the pyramid, then you move towards it, and finally you climb the pyramid. The clear definition of those three steps underscores each experience. Furthermore I think this continues an intrinsic practice of funerals, at least as I know them: First there are speeches and prayers in a dedicated building or church, then you go to the graveyard by car or by walking, to then there bury the loved one. That processional practice has a contemplating and social aspect to it that has worked forever. One intriguing question also arises at this design: should we connect this ‘taking the boat’ to the Greek myths of the ferryman in the underworld? Could we expect a re-emerging of the practice to place coins on the eyes of the passed, money to pay for the passage?”