• Neil Young, refuge esthétique - AOC media
    https://aoc.media/opinion/2025/07/16/neil-young-refuge-esthetique

    Paul Valéry le théorisait : lorsque le politique, les valeurs, les institutions, tombent, il ne reste plus que l’esthétique, la contemplation, le refuge dans l’art, et les œuvres. Ce dimanche soir, c’était cela que Neil Young proposait implicitement : je suis un refuge, je joue et chante comme avant. Je ne vous ferai pas l’affront de vous dire ce que vous devez penser ni ce que vous devez être. Voici mes chansons, c’est tout, faites-en ce que vous voulez. Ce n’est pas de la nostalgie, c’est un sentiment encore présent, un film qui remonte le temps et raconte, de « Cinnamon Girl » à « Harvest Moon », des années 1960 aux années 1990, une Amérique utopique qui n’existe plus que par la survivance d’un chanteur de 79 ans, tenant encore ses morceaux et son groupe, tout à son service, au service d’une utopie, d’une illusion aussi, sans doute. C’était d’une beauté si grande que c’était aussi d’un pessimisme infini, qui disait ceci : Neil Young, dans cette époque, n’a jamais été aussi bien défini que par ce vieux surnom un peu daté que les lecteurs de Rock & Folk lui connaissent parfaitement : le Loner. Sa solitude, c’est tout à fait la nôtre face à un monde au devenir fasciste annoncé.

    #Neil_Young #Esthétique_politique

    • Neil Young, refuge esthétique - AOC media

      Deux heures durant ce samedi à Paris, comme avant à Bruxelles ou Glastonbury, Neil Young a égrené une impressionnante setlist de morceaux savamment piochés dans l’ensemble de sa carrière, des années 1960 aux années 1990 – allant jusqu’à totalement ignorer son tout récent album. Comment le comprendre ? En y entendant la seule réponse possible à Donald Trump : l’esthétique.

      Quel sentiment s’est emparé de nous en écoutant et regardant Neil Young, dimanche 13 juillet à l’Adidas Arena de Paris ? Plutôt qu’un sentiment, il s’agissait surtout d’une illumination provoquée par le fait d’avoir été face à la dernière utopie du rock – qui disait par contraste tout ce que l’époque ne peut plus faire ni raconter, ce qu’elle ne porte plus.

      Deux heures durant, le chanteur américain, dont la carrière a démarré dans les années 1960 et qui est sans doute plus âgé désormais que la plupart de celles et ceux qui l’écoutaient ce soir-là, a proposé une séquence de morceaux passant en revue un pan de sa longue carrière, égrenant les morceaux qui se répondent fortement les uns les autres dans le sens où ils forment un tout : le portrait biographique de leur auteur, entre les années 1960 et les années 1990.

      La séquence, qui correspond à un ou deux morceaux près, à tous les concerts que Young joue depuis le début de cette tournée, était pensée pour le spectateur : elle partait d’un morceau rare, « Ambulance Blues », pris sur On The Beach, album maudit de 1974, fortement inspiré par Charles Manson, son culte et les désillusions alors croissantes dans lesquelles mouraient les idéaux hippie des années soixante. On pouvait y voir une façon de commenter le présent et dire la désillusion croissante avec le réel – ou y entendre une autre époque parler à celle-ci : Neil Young chante-t-il un passé où il était possible de protester, pour dire les impasses politiques du contemporain ? Peut-être.

      Il alternait électricité et acoustique avec « The Needle and the Damage Done » au milieu du spectacle, tenu par lui seul, et aboutissait en rappel unique à « Hey Hey My My (into the black) », comme trou noir de conclusion, emportant tout dans sa tension et ses paroles. Plus tôt dans la séquence, des morceaux légendaires comme le grandiose « Cinnamon Girl » ou l’imperturbable « Like A Hurricane » disaient déjà cela : la force d’attraction de l’électricité qui semble occuper toute la place et permettre de s’échapper du monde.

      À force de les avoir écoutés, ces morceaux sont devenus des tubes inconscients : le public les connaît par cœur, il les attend, il les espère. Et ce qui manque à l’appel fait aussi la beauté de l’ensemble : espérer « Cortez The Killer » et ne pas l’avoir fait partie du jeu. Idem pour « Journey Through the Past », « Out On The Weekend » ou pas mal d’autres. A la place, « Southern Man », « When You Dance I Can Really Love », « Cowgirl in the Sand » … et pas un seul morceau de son album sorti en juin, pourtant enregistré avec le groupe qui l’accompagne, les Chrome Hearts.

      Au fond, qu’est-ce ce que cela raconte ? Il y a bien entendu le sentiment si beau d’avoir entendu une légende être à la mesure de sa propre légende : à 79 ans, Neil Young fait du Neil Young mieux que personne. Tant mieux, pour lui, pour nous, c’était splendide, chacun aura comblé ses manques et cela répondait aussi à cet axiome désormais classique du concert : mieux vaut laisser le spectateur sur sa faim que le gaver de trop. En cela, Young est même presque muet entre les chansons, ne commentant rien, ne lâchant qu’une phrase répétée trois ou quatre fois – « How you doin back there ? Everybody ok ? ». C’est l’anti-Springsteen murmure un voisin attentif, qui hésite à le qualifier de taiseux.

      Mais que se passe-t-il en nous réellement, en 2025, qui le regardons ? Que font ces morceaux, mis à part convoquer le fan tapi en chaque spectateur venu là, espérant ses morceaux favoris ? Fallait-il s’attendre à une position politique plus explicite que celle sous-entendue dans les morceaux ? Fallait-il espérer quelque chose de plus extrême musicalement – parce qu’après tout ce qui était montré sur scène, ces façons de bouger en groupe, de mouvoir les guitares, c’était l’idiome même du rock le plus classique, non ? Fallait-il espérer que Neil Young, tel un David Lynch produisant 30 ans plus tard, une saison de Twin Peaks plus folle et plus belle que les originales, convoque quelque chose de résolument neuf tout en étant résolument puissant aussi ? Fallait-il espérer davantage de moments de feed-back, de larsens purs, d’abstraction nihiliste comme il a pu en produire dans les années Bush par exemple ?

      Que pouvait-on trouver dans ces morceaux ? Pouvait-on vraiment y lire une façon de commenter 2025 ou ne s’agissait-il que d’un tour de piste avant la fin annoncée ? Le choix parle de lui-même : sans doute, Neil Young, s’appuyant sur ses morceaux d’antan, ses classiques, dit-il la survivance en lui et en nous qui l’écoutons d’une Amérique idéale, idéalisée. Mais qui n’existe plus – ou n’a jamais plus existé depuis la mort de Kurt Cobain : ce qu’il chante, ce n’est pas l’Amérique de Trump, ce n’est même plus l’anti-Trump – ce que Neil Young chante et joue, est devenu une esthétique pure – c’est l’Amérique de Neil Young tel que Nirvana la fantasmait. Et Neil Young, debout, permet de regarder encore un peu de cette Amérique, de cette Amérique rêvée qui s’est progressivement effondrée, de la mort de Kurt à l’essor de Donald.

      Paul Valéry le théorisait : lorsque le politique, les valeurs, les institutions, tombent, il ne reste plus que l’esthétique, la contemplation, le refuge dans l’art, et les œuvres. Ce dimanche soir, c’était cela que Neil Young proposait implicitement : je suis un refuge, je joue et chante comme avant. Je ne vous ferai pas l’affront de vous dire ce que vous devez penser ni ce que vous devez être. Voici mes chansons, c’est tout, faites-en ce que vous voulez. Ce n’est pas de la nostalgie, c’est un sentiment encore présent, un film qui remonte le temps et raconte, de « Cinnamon Girl » à « Harvest Moon », des années 1960 aux années 1990, une Amérique utopique qui n’existe plus que par la survivance d’un chanteur de 79 ans, tenant encore ses morceaux et son groupe, tout à son service, au service d’une utopie, d’une illusion aussi, sans doute. C’était d’une beauté si grande que c’était aussi d’un pessimisme infini, qui disait ceci : Neil Young, dans cette époque, n’a jamais été aussi bien défini que par ce vieux surnom un peu daté que les lecteurs de Rock & Folk lui connaissent parfaitement : le Loner. Sa solitude, c’est tout à fait la nôtre face à un monde au devenir fasciste annoncé. Et ce « Journey Through The Past », ce voyage à travers le passé, qu’il n’a pas chanté, était pourtant le leitmotiv secret, le McGuffin implicite, de ces deux heures de musiques merveilleuses mais aussi merveilleusement illusoires. Au fond, par-delà le plaisir pur de la musique, la question qui résonne après ce concert, est celle que Nan Goldin posait il y a une semaine aux Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, évoquant Gaza et l’impuissance du monde : et maintenant, on fait quoi ?

      Saada Nehme, Critique

  • « La rue n’est pas qu’un décor : c’est un espace à reconquérir » – Entretien avec #Dugudus
    https://lvsl.fr/la-rue-nest-pas-quun-decor-cest-un-espace-a-reconquerir-entretien-avec-dugudus

    Depuis plusieurs années, les œuvres de Dugudus se sont imposées dans le paysage visuel de la gauche française. Connu pour son style distinctif et pour son engagement politique, celui qui se présente comme un « graphiste social » a su allier l’art et le militantisme pour créer des visuels qui résonnent avec les luttes sociales. Dans cet […]

    #Culture #Entretiens #affiches_politiques #art #culture #Esthétique #France_Insoumise #graphisme #Nouveau_Front_Populaire #PCF #Ruffin

  • Une esthétique de la joie ?
    https://metropolitiques.eu/Une-esthetique-de-la-joie.html

    Croisant les discours de philosophes et d’architectes sur l’expérience #esthétique avec l’analyse de bâtiments, le livre de Céline Bonicco-Donato esquisse une théorie de l’expérience architecturale. Il déploie la notion de « joie d’être à sa place » et souligne l’importance du #corps dans sa manifestation émotionnelle. Voici un livre qui répond à une question que chacun·e a déjà pu se poser : qu’est-ce qui suscite les #émotions singulières que l’on ressent dans certains bâtiments ? Cette interrogation est au cœur #Commentaires

    / esthétique, #philosophie, #atmosphère, corps, émotions, #mouvement, #architecture

    https://metropolitiques.eu/IMG/pdf/met-elkaddioui2.pdf

  • #Corps de rêve : quand l’#extrême_droite dicte les #normes_esthétiques

    Corps tonique, mince, reproductif et blanc : de la tradwife aux réseaux sociaux, comment l’extrême droite tente d’imposer une esthétique réactionnaire et hygiéniste.

    En mars dernier, les images de la secrétaire à la Sécurité intérieure des États-Unis, posant devant des prisonniers vénézuéliens déportés vers un centre pénitentiaire du Salvador, sont devenues virales. Look glamour. Maquillage prononcé. Longue chevelure ondulée. Rolex, pantalon slim et tee-shirt moulant. L’image de ce corps parfait exposé devant des hommes non-blancs, torse nu, mis en cage, est apparue comme le symbole du modèle de féminité qui domine les politiques néoréactionnaires.

    Les langages et les images des industries de la #mode et de la beauté s’adaptent très bien à l’atmosphère culturelle produite par l’extrême droite dans le monde occidental. Au-delà de l’obsession de la #minceur, des prescriptions esthétiques âgistes, toute une #culture_du_corps eugéniste et autoritaire s’immisce dans les modes de consommation de la beauté et du bien-être.

    De la tradwife à la chanteuse country

    Elle circule dans les médias populaires, amplifiée par les algorithmes, dans le luxe, ou les sphères politiques, artistiques. L’univers #Maga aux États-Unis la recycle ad nauseam. De la #tradwife à la chanteuse country, jusqu’aux tendances « #girlboss », les idées réactionnaires sont incarnées par une #esthétique_corporelle genrée aisément identifiable : corps tonique, mince ; cheveux raides, longs (idéalement blonds) ; peau blanche ; maquillage prononcé ; chirurgie esthétique ; efficience productive et reproductive (le corps qui produit des richesses est aussi celui qui enfante).

    Cette conception hygiéniste, raciste, classiste et transphobe de la #féminité s’affirme contre un modèle repoussoir : celui du corps improductif de la #femme de gauche – « fauchée » (#broke), « laide » (#ugly), « pas rasée » (#female_armpit_hair) – pour reprendre les termes d’un musicien conservateur sur Fox News. Le corps des « femmes laides » décrivant finalement l’ensemble du corps politique situé à gauche, moche, non-blanc, sale et pauvre.

    Cette esthétique réactionnaire agressive n’est pas exclusive à l’Amérique blanche. On se rappelle les sorties, en France, contre « la gauche sale et débraillée qui crie partout », visant à disqualifier la Nupes. Les propos sur les « punks à chiens » sur les bancs situés à gauche de l’Assemblée nationale, ou encore sur la « ménopause » d’une politicienne féministe médiatique…

    Véhicules idéologiques

    Ces discours implicitement ou explicitement genrés sont compatibles avec l’esthétique « filtre » des réseaux sociaux qui les imposent massivement. Ils ringardisent un activisme intersectionnel de type #nappy, anti-grossophobie ou body-positif, qui refuse que la différence conduise à une existence recluse, où on ne s’expose pas publiquement, où on ne peut ni s’aimer ni l’être en retour.

    Cette « #déchettisation » de la différence trouve dans la #représentation du corps des #femmes son terrain d’expression favori, faisant de la mode, des tutos maquillage, des vidéos de fitness ou de lifestyle des véhicules idéologiques redoutablement efficaces, jouant sur notre image sociale et nos désirs.

    Qui rêve de mourir sans famille, sans ami·es, entouré de chats ? D’être moche, démuni et sale ? Ces questions peuvent apparaître ridicules, mais elles nourrissent un système de représentations affectives et genrées qui est un des fonds de commerce de l’extrême droite. Il faut s’y opposer avec énergie. Et réveiller les puissances libératrices du difforme, de l’inassimilable, de l’improductif, des monstres et autres figures impures et merveilleuses, dans la formation d’#imaginaires et de pratiques anti-autoritaires, vivantes et féroces.

    https://www.politis.fr/articles/2025/05/corps-de-reve-quand-lextreme-droite-dicte-les-normes-esthetiques
    #esthétique #beauté #hygiénisme #âgisme #genre #idéologie

  • Boulez au Collège de France
    https://laviedesidees.fr/Boulez-au-College-de-France

    Chef de file de l’avant-garde musicale au second XXe siècle, Pierre Boulez est né le 25 mars 1925. De 1976 à 1995, il a occupé une chaire au Collège de France. Jonathan Goldman, qui a participé à l’édition de ses cours, évoque ces deux décennies d’enseignement et leur place dans le legs boulézien.

    #Arts #musique #esthétique #avant-garde #musique_électronique
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20250325_boulez.pdf

  • La Cour suprême italienne annule la condamnation du Suisse Stephan Schmidheiny dans le dossier de l’amiante RTS - Julie Liardet avec ats

    La Cour de cassation italienne a annulé vendredi la condamnation de Stephan Schmidheiny pour homicide involontaire dans le dossier des victimes de l’amiante. Les avocats de l’homme d’affaires estiment qu’un nouveau procès en appel est peu probable, le cas atteignant la limite de la prescription le 25 avril 2025.

    Le milliardaire suisse avait été condamné en première instance à quatre ans de prison, une peine réduite à un an et huit mois de prison en appel. Il était poursuivi pour la mort d’un employé de la fabrique de Cavagnolo (Piémont) du groupe italien Eternit S.p.a. L’homme était décédé en 2008 d’une maladie liée, selon l’accusation, à une exposition à l’amiante pendant 27 ans.
    . . . . .


    Le groupe Eternit SEG, dirigé par Stephan Schmidheiny, avait été le plus grand actionnaire puis l’actionnaire principal de l’entreprise Eternit Italia de 1973 à la faillite du groupe transalpin en 1986. La défense de Stephan Schmidheiny assure que l’industriel n’a jamais siégé au conseil d’administration de l’entreprise italienne et n’a jamais eu de responsabilité directe dans la gestion de la société.

    C’est la troisième fois que la plus haute instance judiciaire italienne annule une condamnation de Stephan Schmidheiny, ajoutent les avocats. Un procès en appel est actuellement encore en cours à Turin pour la mort d’employés dans l’usine de Casale Monferrato, près de la cité piémontaise.

    #amiante #Stephan_Schmidheiny #Schmidheiny #santé #cancer #pollution #toxiques #environnement #eternit #chimie #déchets #poison #esthétique #pierre_serpentinite #enquéte #non-lieu non #justice #impunité #Andeva #AVA

    Source : https://www.rts.ch/info/monde/2025/article/amiante-la-cour-supreme-italienne-annule-la-condamnation-de-schmidheiny-28830163

  • AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism
    https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism

    Le dernier turing test : plus con tu meurs.
    Ah, t’es une machine ? Alors je dois présenter mes excuses.

    February 9, 2025 by Gareth Watkins - It’s embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

    Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify’s global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party posts, then is forced to take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic animals. A few days later, they promised to “mainline AI into the veins” of Britain.

    The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To understand it, we must consider the right’s hatred of working people, its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily, its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem like a stretch, but bear with me.

    The first point is the most obvious. ‘AI’ – as embodied by large language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney – promises to make anyone who can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?

    For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.

    Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram followers.

    Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”

    On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. ‘Zuck’ was even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald Trump. (It’s worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to later.) But even Zuck can’t make AI happen. The weird AI-powered fake profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need (cf: Microsoft’s Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the technology just isn’t there. Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”

    And yet they persist. Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according to Goldman Sachs – a figure calculated before the Trump administration pledged a further $500 billion for its ‘Project Stargate’. While previous bets on the Metaverse and NFTs didn’t pay off, their bet on cryptocurrency has paid off spectacularly – $3.44 trillion dollars, at the time of writing, have been created, effectively out of thin air. All of the above technologies had heavy buy-in from the political right: Donald Trump co-signed an NFT project and a memecoin; the far-right, shut out of conventional banking, uses cryptocurrency almost exclusively. This isn’t just about utility, it’s about aligning themselves with the tech industry. The same is true of their adoption of AI.

    OpenAI is unable to make money on $200 subscriptions to ChatGPT. Goldman Sachs cannot see any justification for its level of investment. Sam Altman is subject to allegations of sexually abusing his sister. ‘Slop’ was very nearly word of the year. And then, to top it all off, the open-source DeepSeek project, developed in China, wiped $1 trillion off the US stock market overnight.

    In other words, the AI industry now finds that it needs all the allies it can get. And it can’t afford to be picky. If the only places that people are seeing AI imagery is @BasedEphebophile1488’s verified X account – well, at least it’s being used at all. The thinking seems to be that, if it can hang on long enough in the public consciousness, then, like cryptocurrency before it, AI will become ‘too big to fail’. Political actors like Tommy Robinson won’t be the ones to make that call, but they can normalise its use, and Robinson certainly moves in the digital circles of people who can offer the AI industry far more concrete help. Just as we might donate to a GoFundMe, the capitalist class will provide mutual aid in the form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and attempting to normalise AI by using it. This process of normalisation has led to the putatively centre-left Labour government pledging vast sums to AI infrastructure. If one of the key features of the Starmerite tendency is their belief that only conservative values are truly legitimate, their embrace of AI and its aesthetics may be part of this.

    The capitalist class will provide mutual aid to the AI industry in the form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and attempting to normalise AI by using it.

    We have seen how sensitive the tech industry’s leaders are to criticism. Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto, when not conferring sainthood upon deeply evil figures like Nick Land, largely consists of its writer begging the world to love him. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Joe Rogan featured lengthy sections on how he does not feel validated by the press and governments. Just as when they reach out to ‘cancelled’ celebrities, the right is now proactively creating an alliance with the tech industry by communicating that, even if they can’t materially support companies like OpenAI, they can at least offer emotional support. We may all be good materialists, but we can’t underestimate the effects that non-material support has in creating networks within capital.

    No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it. They would be repelled by it.

    There was a time when reactionaries were able to create great art – Dostoyevsky, G.K Chesterton, Knut Hamsun, and so on – but that time has long passed. Decades of seething hatred of the humanities have left them unable to create, or even think about, art. Art has always been in a dialectical push and pull between tradition and the avant garde: ‘art is when there is a realistic picture of a landscape, or a scene from Greek mythology’ versus ‘a urinal can be art if an artist signs it’. The goal of the avant-garde, as their name suggests, has been to expand art’s territory, to show that Rothko’s expanses of colour, or Ono’s instructional paintings, can do what Vermeer’s portraits can, and do it just as well. There was even a time when the right partook in this, the Italian Futurists being a prime example. There were, at one point, writers like Céline and artists like Wyndham Lewis, who not only produced great work, but developed and pushed forward the avant-garde styles of their day. Are there any serious artists on the right today who do not parlay in nostalgia for some imagined time before art was ‘ruined’ by Jews, women, and homosexuals? Perhaps only Michel Houellebecq, and he is long past his two-book prime.

    The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone with bullshit in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.

    Art has rules – like the rules of the physical universe they are sufficiently flexible to allow both Chopin and Merzbow to be classed as music, but they exist, and even internet memes are subject to those rules. The most burnt-out shitpost is still part of a long tradition of outsider sloganeering stretching back through 60s comix to Dada and Surrealism. They aren’t nothing, and if they’re ugly then, often, they’re ugly in an interesting, generative way. A person made them ugly, and did so with intent. No matter how deeply avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of harming the already vulnerable. Even the most depraved Power Electronics acts or the most shocking performances of the Viennese Actionists had something more to them than simply causing suffering for its own sake. Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right.

    If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody. That hurt can be direct, targeted at a particular group (like Britain First’s AI propaganda), or it can be directed at art itself, and by extension, anybody who thinks that art can have any kind of value. It can often be playful – in the way that the cruel children of literary cliché play at pulling the wings off flies – and ironised; Musk’s Nazi salute partook of a tradition of ironic-not-ironic appropriation of fascist iconography that winds its way through 4Chan (Musk’s touchpoint) and back into the countercultural far right of the 20th century.

    AI imagery looks like shit. But that is its main draw to the right. if AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, they wouldn’t want it.

    I would not be the first to observe that we are in a new phase of reaction, something probably best termed ‘postmodern conservatism’. The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the reactionary movement. Counter-enlightenment thought, going back to Burke and de Maistre, has been stripped of any pretence of being anything but a childish tantrum backed up by equally childish, playground-level bullying. It is, and has always been, “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” and to ‘post-liberal’ ‘intellectuals’, that is in fact a good thing – if anything, they believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation altogether.1 The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask: ‘what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things that I want to do?’ The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone – unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with bullshit – in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.

    Truth does not set you free. Once you know that 2+2=4, that the capital of the Netherlands is The Hague and not Amsterdam, or that immigration is a net economic positive for Britain, then you are forever bound to that truth. Your world has become, in some respects, smaller, your options diminished. If it would be more enjoyable – because this is, at the end of the day, about enjoyment – to create your own truth then you are out of luck. Combine truths with a concern for human life and thriving, and suddenly rules start to proliferate: we have established the truth that heating milk reduces the bacteria and viruses in it that can harm human beings, which is undesirable to us, therefore we must heat all milk that is sold. A lot of people are fine with this, accepting small impositions on their freedom in the name of the greater freedom from disease. Some are not.

    There is no reason, of course, that any rule made in the name of Enlightenment humanism should be necessarily good: liberal politics, Labour’s current mania for austerity, or the interminable justifications for the Iraq war, are often framed as being based on reason and humanism while being anything but. If you’ve been subject to computer-says-no rules governing your access to the basic necessities of life, then you’ll know how easy it is to disguise arbitrary and highly politicised whims as laws of nature, as ironclad as A = π r². The application of rationality and compassion in the real world brings to mind the (likely apocryphal) Ghandi quote about Western civilisation: “I think it would be a good idea.”

    The right is a libidinal formation; it is, for many of its proponents, especially those who aren’t wealthy enough to materially benefit from it, a structure in which to have fun. A hobby, almost. Sartre’s injunction to remember that antisemites are primarily “amusing themselves”2 is true of most – perhaps all – right wing discourse, no matter how serious it seems or how terrible its real-world effects. As such, the right are strongly averse to any sort of reality-testing. It is, to them, beside the point whether anything they say stands up to the tests developed by the sciences and humanities, including those which determine (insofar as such a determination can be made) whether a piece of art is ‘good’, or at least serious. When they do invoke objectivity, it is misplaced, and as deeply naïve as their artistic output, premising their objection to the existence of trans people on ‘basic biology’, when not only can biology not define ‘woman’, it is having difficulty deciding what a fish or vegetable is. Serious engagement with the world as it is – with the facts that emphatically don’t care about your feelings – doesn’t often, if ever, yield the simple explanations that the right require. In the face of this complexity, most people will conclude that it is best to be humble: What is a woman? No idea, don’t really care, but let’s act in a way that causes the least suffering. But the right seem incapable of doing this. Despite all their absurdist posturing, they struggle to come to terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided categories. They want to assert, simultaneously, that unambiguous laws govern all aspects of being, while acting as though ‘truth’ is whatever they want or need it to be at any given moment.

    Despite all their absurdist posturing, the right struggle to come to terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided categories.

    Gender revanchism is one of the main organising principles of the postmodern right, and much everyday AI usage demonstrates a particularly gendered form of cruelty: deepfake nudes, AI ‘girlfriends’ used as a rhetorical cudgel to show real women that they are being replaced, AI ‘art’ of Taylor Swift being sexually assaulted. It’s no coincidence that the internet’s largest directory of deepfakes uses Donald Trump as a mascot. These attitudes are reflected in the upper echelons of the tech and AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – the man we are being told is a generational talent, a revolutionary, on a par with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates – is also, allegedly, a rapist and paedophile, who considered his own sister his sexual property since she was three years old, and who responded to allegations by lamenting that “caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult.” A love of sexual violence is a key part of the identity of the contemporary right, and it is no coincidence that, the further right one goes, the more likely one is to encounter open celebration of rape and, particularly, paedophilia. Altman’s legal trouble will, for many on the right, only confirm that he is one of them. Meanwhile, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Mark Zuckerberg described the tech industry as “culturally neutered” and called for more “masculine energy” and “aggression”.

    Let’s return to Zuckerberg’s clothing. It was he that established the ubiquitous ‘grey hoodie’ style for tech CEOs. But recently he has begun to exhibit a new style. Oversized t-shirts emblazoned with ‘It’s either Zuck or Nothing’ in Latin, the unwieldy lines of his Meta AI glasses, a gaudy and unnecessary gold chain. This isn’t taking risks with fashion, like Rick Owens or Vivienne Westwood. It’s just ugly and stupid. Zuckerberg is also significantly more muscular than he used to be, despite doing nothing in his life that would seem to require a bodybuilder physique. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that, as he embraces corporate incelism and AI, he has felt liberated to ignore what does and doesn’t look good, choosing instead to display that he is wealthy and powerful enough to look terrible if he wants. All the emperor has to do, when the child laughs at his nudity, is ignore them. Trump’s haircut, which we all seem to have become inured to, serves the same purpose. It looks like shit and that’s the point. It is a display of power and a small act of cruelty.

    The Cybertruck – itself a work of anti-art that could only be the product of a mind addled by the far right – failed, largely because it is embarrassing to be seen in one.

    AI is a cruel technology. It replaces workers, devours millions of gallons of water, vomits CO2 into the atmosphere, propagandises exclusively for the worst ideologies, and fills the world with more ugliness and stupidity. Cruelty is the central tenet of right wing ideology. It is at the heart of everything they do. They are now quite willing to lose money or their lives in order to make the world a crueller place, and AI is a part of this – a mad rush to make a machine god that will liberate capital from labour for good. (This is no exaggeration: there is a lineage from OpenAI’s senior management back to the Lesswrong blog, originator of the concept of Roko’s Basilisk.) Moreso even than cryptocurrency, AI is entirely nihilistic, with zero redeeming qualities. It is a blight upon the world, and it will take decades to clear up the mountains of slop it has generated in the past two or three years.

    AI is, unfortunately, a fever that will have to burn itself out. It may be the case that, like cryptocurrency, elites are simply so invested in this technology that, despite its total lack of utility, they will keep trying to make it happen. Given how great a fit it is for them psychologically, I would say that this is more likely to happen than not. However, as we saw in those two brief weeks of last year’s US election campaign, the right wing psyche is incredibly fragile. For some reason, they are able to process any inversion of empirical reality, but are acutely sensitive to being laughed at. Calling them weird absolutely works, and telling them their sole artistic output looks like shit also works. Laughing at people who treat AI art as in any way legitimate works. Talking about AI’s environmental impact or its implications for the workforce will not work - they like that, it makes them feel dangerous. Instead of talking about taking money from artists, talk about how it makes them look cheap. If hurting and offending people is part of the point, then we can take that fun away from them by refusing to express hurt or offence, even if we feel it.

    Technological progress isn’t linear, and it’s not wholly undemocratic. We, ordinary people, stopped Google Glass from being widely released because we mocked its users, calling them ‘glassholes’. The Cybertruck – itself a work of anti-art that could only be the product of a mind addled by the far right – failed, largely because it is embarrassing to be seen in one. We have already seen that the AI industry is vulnerable – it was possible for Chinese grad students to build the same thing for a fraction of the price, calling into question the entire model of growth through massive investment in data centres. The left is powerless across much of society, but a training in ruthless criticism of all that exists has made us masters of negativity, while always keeping one eye on the better world that is possible when the slop has been cleared away. Our most effective weapons against AI, and the right wing that has adopted it, may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics. They might be replying “cringe,” “this sucks,” and “this looks like shit.”

    #intelligence_artificielle #esthétique #fascisme

  • Pourquoi l’imagerie générée par #IA est la nouvelle esthétique fasciste
    https://www.ladn.eu/mondes-creatifs/pourquoi-limagerie-generee-par-ia-est-la-nouvelle-esthetique-fasciste

    Une nouvelle #esthétique $fasciste

    L’aspect disruptif et accélérationniste de cet outil est un autre critère à prendre en compte. Si l’intelligence artificielle est adoptée par des artistes et des graphistes, la technologie est aussi perçue comme un danger pour ces métiers et tout l’écosystème créatif. S’ajoute à cela un ogre énergétique (et financier) qui repose sur le scrapping massif et gratuit du travail produit par des milliers d’artistes. Dans un essai intitulé IA : la nouvelle esthétique du fascisme, l’écrivain britannique Gareth Watkins estime que c’est justement cet aspect « dangereux », voire « cruel » qui attire l’extrême droite : « Si l’art consiste à établir ou à briser des règles esthétiques, alors l’art de l’IA, tel qu’il est pratiqué par la droite, affirme qu’il n’y a pas de règles, mais l’exercice pur et simple du pouvoir par un groupe sur un groupe extérieur. Il affirme que la seule façon d’apprécier l’art est de savoir qu’il fait du mal à quelqu’un. Cette blessure peut être directe, ciblée sur un groupe particulier (comme la propagande de l’IA de Britain First), ou elle peut être dirigée contre l’art lui-même, et par extension, contre quiconque pense que l’art peut avoir une quelconque valeur. »

  • AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism // New Socialist
    https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism

    Gareth Watkins

    It’s embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

    Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify’s global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party posts, then is forced to take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic animals. A few days later, they promised to “mainline AI into the veins” of Britain.
    The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To understand it, we must consider the right’s hatred of working people, its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily, its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem like a stretch, but bear with me.
    The first point is the most obvious. ‘AI’ – as embodied by large language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney – promises to make anyone who can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?
    For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.
    Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram followers.

    On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. ‘Zuck’ was even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald Trump. (It’s worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to later.)
    […}

  • Forensic Architecture’s investigations are both art and evidence

    There is barely a whisper during the premiere of the film Situated Testimonies of Grenfell at the Royal College of Art in London. Nobody even glances at a phone; we are immersed in that terrible night in 2017 when fire ripped through Grenfell Tower in west London, killing 72 people.

    Including recordings of emergency calls, accounts of residents’ pre-existing safety concerns and social-media footage of the blaze, the film also reveals the process of its own construction as we see architectural software developers sit with survivors and eyewitnesses, while software experts recreate the building and its destruction using 3D modelling. Meticulous and detached yet filled with emotion, the film is a chilling, unequivocal condemnation of the multi-agency failures that led to the tragedy.

    The film is also a form of evidence. Created by multidisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with members of the Grenfell community, Situated Testimonies of Grenfell was prepared for a civil claim against private companies, local and government agencies and the London fire brigade.

    From Banksy’s refugee-friendly actions to the exposés of Ai Weiwei, numerous creative practitioners narrow the gap between art and life. But few walk that tightrope with more purposeful precision or powerful effect than Forensic Architecture. Founded by the British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman in 2010, the collective’s members include architects, lawyers, scientists, software developers and “aesthetic practitioners” such as artists and curators. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London, where Weizman teaches, the collective’s reports, which investigate alleged acts of violence by state or corporate agencies, have stretched from Myanmar to the US.

    Its varied skillsets — from detailed analysis of a photograph or footage to the reconstruction of a bullet’s trajectory — help them to expose falsehoods and lacunae in official narratives. Its recent report, Inhumane Zones, into alleged human rights violations in Gaza, is being used by South Africa in its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

    But their work operates as art as well as evidence: the agency has also been shortlisted for the Turner prize. Shown at Tate Britain, their Turner installation centred on a film about the shooting of a Bedouin villager, Yaqub Musa Abu alQu’ian, and a policeman, Erez Levi, by Israeli police. Another film, The Killing of Mark Duggan, was central to War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truths and Rights, an exhibition about Black activism and resistance at the ICA in London in 2021.

    “There’s a parallel between forensics and curating,” Weizman says as we sit down in a light-filled studio at Goldsmiths. “You need to proceed with an argument using images, and sometimes objects, and you need to tell a story that is convincing and coherent.”

    Although Weizman studied at the Architectural Association in London, his awareness that architecture had its own politics was seeded in his Israeli youth. Born in Haifa in 1970, Weizman grew up alongside Palestinian people. He has fond memories of Haifa: “It was so fabulous . . . with the mountains [and] the sea on all sides.” But he also observed an “architecture of colonisation”: Israeli neighbourhoods occupied the city’s heights while Palestinians were “contained” in the valley. Returning after his studies, he focused on how architecture was employed to reinforce Israeli domination, particularly in the Occupied Territories.

    His work has always raised hackles. In 2002, the Israeli Association of United Architects cancelled an exhibition that it had commissioned from Weizman and his fellow architect Rafi Segal for the Berlin Congress of Architecture about settlement construction. Entitled A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, it was described by the commissioners as “one-sided political propaganda”. However Esther Zandberg, the architecture critic of Israeli newspaper Haaretz, defended the show and its catalogue as a “rare work in its power and importance”.

    The cancellation triggered international media attention — “The New York Times reported on it and made a big fuss, so everybody wanted to see what was censored,” Weizman says — and a new series of shows evolved, entitled Territories, which preceded the foundation of Forensic Architecture.

    By now, Weizman was “thinking very hard about presenting evidence in public spaces”. Yet he was surprised to find himself adopting forensics — or counter-forensics, as he sometimes dubs it — as a tactic. “If someone had told me I would end up running a forensic agency 20 years ago . . . I would have been appalled.” he says. But there was also, as he puts it, “a battle about truth”.

    He pauses. “The way I experienced colonialism is that it’s a violence against people but it’s also a violence against truth. Against the truth that those things have happened.” The decision to create Forensic Architecture was a bid to “work collaboratively and in a multidisciplinary way” and “take forensics out of the court and into the public domain of art and media”.

    Today, Forensic Architecture numbers a core team of 26 plus a further 13 research fellows. Their funding comes from donors and organisations, such as the Sigrid Rausing Trust, and income from commissions and exhibitions. They are no strangers to challenge. At the Whitney Biennial 2019, their film Triple-Chaser investigated a tear-gas grenade manufactured by a group owned by Whitney Museum vice-chair Warren Kanders, who had become an object of protest since the group’s tear gas was fired at civilians by US border guards. Triple-Chaser intensified the pressure on Kanders to resign, which he did.

    Weizman embraces the friction. Forensic’s work, he says, “should sit uneasy within an art institution . . . [Museums] want political credibility. They invite us and then they are surprised when our art becomes political!”

    In legal settings, they work to “transform what can be presented as evidence”. Weizman takes a breath. “The law is very conservative. It took a few decades before photography was considered reliable evidence. Now it’s the same with open-source evidence [such as that] captured on Twitter and YouTube. You need to claim other ways of seeing; other ways of telling.”

    The scrupulous remapping within a report such as Inhumane Zones, which compares Israeli plans for safe zones and humanitarian aid in Gaza with UN satellite imagery, media footage and witness testimony, exemplifies Weizman’s observation that his team’s job is to “interpret weak signals”, perhaps no more than “a few pixels in an image, a faint trace, on a tree, on the ground marked in the concrete”. In a world where truth is so contested, that skill has never been more valuable.

    https://www.ft.com/content/39a9a6b5-74da-48c2-a9b4-f7183bf8bd0a
    #art #art_et_politique #architecture_forensique #preuve #Eyal_Weizman #Grenfell #esthétique #vérité #violence #colonialisme

  • « Suivre #érections » /

    Gérard D., Dominique S, et les autres, si vous gardez le bon bout du cap...

    RSS : #érections

    "Ce thème est attribué ’ #manuellement ’ par les personnes des messages."

    Oh, les pauvres ! Ça use, ça use les #poignets...

    #art #le_geste #la_grandeur #élévation #sexe #esthétique #illumination #transformation #société #peace #love #seenthis #vangauguin #humour #sous_le_bras

  • Histoire de l’idée de l’art - .
    https://www.librairie-tropiques.fr/2023/11/histoire-de-l-idee-de-l-art.html

    On a parfois reproché au philosophe sa méconnaissance de l’art et de son histoire. On peut également reprocher à l’histoire de l’art de ne pas avoir mesuré que l’art n’est pas seulement constitué d’œuvres mais aussi de mots pour les dire, de concepts pour les catégoriser, de théories pour les penser. Car si la philosophie de l’art sans histoire de l’art est vide, l’histoire de l’art sans philosophie de l’art est aveugle.
    C’est à partir de ce double constat qu’est né le projet d’une histoire philosophique de l’art occidental, depuis l’Antiquité grecque jusqu’à nos jours : autrement dit d’étudier le développement des arts et la succession des styles en relation avec l’atmosphère théorique où ils se sont produits, et de dessiner les contours des grands paradigmes artistiques qui se sont succédé. Aussi est-il question dans cet ouvrage de concepts (mimesis, catharsis, contemplation, beaux-arts, goût, génie, expérience esthétique, engagement…) et de visions du monde, d’artistes et de théoriciens, d’œuvres et d’idées relatives à leur nature, leurs fonctions et leurs valeurs. Tous les arts sont traités ici à l’unisson : beaux-arts (peinture, sculpture, architecture…), belles-lettres (poésie, théâtre), musique, ce qui fait toute l’originalité de cette entreprise.

    #Carole_talon-Hugon, #Oliver_Brax, #Julien_Audebert, #Histoire, #Philosophie, #esthétique

  • In questo mondo : qualche riflessione su #Io_Capitano

    Rappresentare il dolore, la pena e la povertà degli altri è sempre un compito delicato e complicato. La migrazione oggi, resa illegale dalla legislazione europea e spettacolarizzata dai media, è il caso più evidente. L’empatia è apparentemente generata solo quando l’anonimato dei corpi stranieri può essere individualizzato per essere raccontato. Poteri e relazioni strutturali più ampie sono solitamente allontanati dal racconto, ridotti a vaghi riconoscimenti. La storia richiede l’identificazione dell’individuo. O, almeno, questo è ciò che ci insegna la nostra cultura.

    Tutto ciò è stato istituzionalizzato sia nella filosofia politica che nei romanzi che raccontano le nostre vite. Tuttavia, è una prospettiva che ci lascia con una povertà di spiegazioni e di comprensione. Nel recente film di Matteo Garrone, Io Capitano, incontriamo tali domande e problemi. Il viaggio di Seydou e del suo amico Moussa dal Senegal attraverso il Sahel e la Libia, e poi il Mediterraneo, è intensamente raccontato in tutti i suoi strazianti dettagli. Seydou, indotto dai suoi rapitori libici a guidare un barcone verso l’Europa, sperimenta tutte le remore morali della sua responsabilità. Nonostante tutto, riesce nella sua impresa. È un eroe e c’è un (temporaneo) lieto fine. Ma sappiamo che non è così. Oltre alle torture in Libia, questi migranti affrontano anche le condizioni di quasi schiavitù in Italia. Senza documenti e protezione, sono soggetti alla condizione di non avere il diritto di avere diritti. Il sogno europeo è spesso un incubo. Intrappolata in questi meccanismi, ulteriormente codificati e rafforzati dal razzismo strutturale, questa non è certo una narrazione che può essere facilmente trasmessa. Soprattutto, se siamo onesti, essa rivela la nostra responsabilità primaria nel racconto. Nel caso del film di Garrone, la costruzione dell’Africa come luogo di estrazione umana e materiale a beneficio dell’Occidente – dalla schiavitù e l’inizio della modernità atlantica ai metalli preziosi dei nostri gioielli e cellulari – riguarda in ultima analisi la costituzione coloniale del presente. Il migrante moderno non è solo un rifugiato economico o uno sgradito portatore di crisi, ma rappresenta piuttosto il ritorno di quella storia repressa.

    Quindi, cosa sto dicendo? Il film di Garrone non avrebbe dovuto essere realizzato? È un fallimento politico ed etico (e quindi estetico)? Le cose non sono mai così semplici. La consolazione delle alternative binarie, persino del ragionamento dialettico, sfugge. Per il momento, siamo bloccati con la narrazione individualizzata, con scelte e orizzonti ridotti a una comprensione soggettiva del mondo che oscura forze più profonde e relazioni più ampie. Il trucco è lavorare su questa imposizione in modo tale da spingerci oltre questi parametri. La risposta umanista all’eroe migrante è insufficiente. Dopo tutto, ci conferma nella nostra formazione del sentimento, quella stessa formazione che ha prodotto il ‘migrante’ contemporaneo attraverso la nostra colonizzazione delle risorse umane e materiali del pianeta.

    Non c’è una formula ovvia o un’alternativa pronta. Si tratta, pensando con il cinema, di un’estetica cinematografica che ci prepara a un’altra etica in cui la nostra posizione e il nostro punto di vista sono messi in discussione, interrotti, persino emarginati o aggirati. Il metodo non può che risiedere nella pratica cinematografica stessa.

    Ho in mente due film che affrontano il percorso etico ed estetico proposto in Io Capitano. Uno è diretto nel suo stile ‘documentaristico’ come il film di Garrone: Cose di questo mondo (2002) di Michael Winterbottom. L’altro, di Abderrahmane Sissako, Aspettando la felicità (2002), suggerisce un modo poetico di riconfigurare le brutali imposizioni della modernità. Mi limito al film di Winterbottom, più vicino per stile e intenti a quello di Garrone, dove entrambi i registi europei affrontano l’alterità di altri mondi che la loro (mia) cultura ha inquadrato e ora punisce. Nel film In This World seguiamo due afghani, Jamal e Enayatullah, provenienti dal campo profughi di Shamshatoo, vicino a Peshawar, nel nord-ovest del Pakistan, mentre cercano di raggiungere Londra attraversando Iran, Kurdistan, Turchia, Italia e Francia. Enayatullah muore per soffocamento nel container che porta loro e altri migranti da Istanbul via mare a Trieste. Jamal alla fine riesce ad arrivare a Londra. La ruvida bellezza del paesaggio, la violenza dei confini e l’avidità dei trafficanti sono presenti in tutta la loro crudezza.

    Anche il giovanissimo Jamal è un eroe semplicemente per essere sopravvissuto a tutte le avversità. Tuttavia, le relazioni sociali che si creano lungo il percorso, dalla vita familiare allargata a Peshawar alla solidarietà in Kurdistan e all’amicizia nella ‘giungla’ di Calais, ci fanno costantemente entrare in un mondo più ampio. Il singolo viaggiatore non è semplicemente parte della migrazione moderna: il campo di Peshawar è presentato all’inizio del film come il prodotto dell’aggressione prima sovietica e poi americana e alleata, dove sono state spesi quasi 8 miliardi di dollari nel 2001 per sganciare delle bombe sull’Afghanistan. Le brutali semplicità della geopolitica trasformano un’odissea personale in una riorganizzazione radicale delle mappe del mondo moderno: dal basso, dai margini, dal silenzio di altre storie. Anche la mia narrazione non riesce a marcare la differenza. Ciò che si nasconde nel linguaggio cinematografico è un eccesso che allude a qualcosa in più della spiegazione verbale. L’immagine contiene sempre un supplemento in più del semplice svolgimento del racconto. Lasciarla per così dire respirare, sottraendoci alla linearità della narrazione, dissemina una complessità in cui la poetica sostiene una politica più opaca ma profonda (lo stesso si può dire del film di Sissako).

    Riflettendo sul film di Matteo Garrone, delle cui opere cinematografiche resto un ammiratore, sia l’idealizzazione della vita familiare in Senegal sia l’impeto incessante della narrazione che ci spinge verso il Mediterraneo e l’Europa ci negano quello spazio: le sue ambiguità e complessità. Le immagini sono drammatiche, i sentimenti ben intesi, ma la sua estetica resta bloccata da un’etica che ha il fiato corto, che non è disposta a scavare più a fondo e nemmeno a lasciare che il migrante abiti una storia e un mondo che non è semplicemente nostro da raccontare.

    Chiaramente, non esiste una soluzione. Solo un viaggio critico perpetuo. Nel continuum coloniale del presente i nostri fallimenti, una volta riconosciuti e registrati, segnano ulteriori percorsi da perseguire.

    http://www.technoculture.it/author/i-chambers
    #film #douleur #empathie #migrations #colonisation #présent_colonial #colonialité_du_présent #Afrique #esthétique #éthique #continuum_colonial

  • #Bien-être : « Tant qu’on utilisera le #yoga pour être en forme au #travail, on aura un problème »

    Loin de nous apporter le bonheur promis, la sphère bien-être perpétue un système nuisible qui ne peut que nous rendre malheureux. Interview de #Camille_Teste.

    Huiles essentielles, massages et salutations au soleil promettent de nous changer de l’intérieur, et le monde avec. À tort ? C’est le sujet de l’essai Politiser le bien-être (https://boutique.binge.audio/products/politiser-le-bien-etre-camille-teste) publié en avril dernier chez Binge Audio Editions. Selon l’ex-journaliste Camille Teste, non seulement nos petits gestes bien-être ne guériront pas les maux de nos sociétés occidentales, mais ils pourraient même les empirer. Rassurez-vous, Camille Teste, aujourd’hui professeur de yoga, ne propose pas de bannir les sophrologues et de brûler nos matelas. Elle nous invite en revanche à prendre conscience du rôle que jouent les pratiques de bien-être, celui de lubrifiant d’un système capitaliste. Interview.

    Le bien-être est la quête individuelle du moment. C’est aussi un #business : pouvez-vous préciser les contours de ce #marché ?

    Camille Treste : La sphère bien-être recouvre un marché très vaste qualifiant toutes les pratiques dont l’objectif est d’atteindre un équilibre dit « intégral », c’est-à-dire psychologique, physique, émotionnel, spirituel et social, au sens relationnel du terme. Cela inclut des pratiques esthétiques, psychocorporelles (yoga, muscu...), paramédicales (sophrologie, hypnose...) et spirituelles. En plein boom depuis les années 90, la sphère bien-être s’est démultipliée en ligne dans les années 2010. Cela débute sur YouTube avec des praticiens et coachs sportifs avant de s’orienter vers le développement personnel, notamment sur Instagram. Rappelons que le milieu est riche en complications, entre dérives sectaires et arnaques financières : par exemple, sous couvert d’élévation spirituelle, certains coachs autoproclamés vendent très cher leurs services pour se former... au #coaching. Un phénomène qui s’accélère depuis la pandémie et s’inscrit dans une dynamique de vente pyramidale ou système de Ponzi.

    Pourquoi la sphère bien-être se tourne-t-elle autant vers les cultures ancestrales ?

    C. T : Effectivement, les thérapies alternatives et les #néospiritualités ont volontiers tendance à picorer dans des pratiques culturelles asiatiques ou latines, comme l’Ayurveda née en Inde ou la cérémonie du cacao, originaire d’Amérique centrale. Ce phénomène relève aussi bien d’un intérêt authentique que d’une #stratégie_marketing. Le problème, c’est que pour notre usage, nous commercialisons et transformons des pratiques empruntées à des pays dominés, colonisés ou anciennement colonisés avant de le leur rendre, souvent diluées, galvaudées et abîmées, ce qu’on peut qualifier d’#appropriation_culturelle. C’est le cas par exemple des cérémonies ayahuasca pratiquées en Amazonie, durant lesquelles la concoction hallucinogène est originellement consommée par les chamanes, et non par les participants. Pourquoi cette propension à se servir chez les autres ? Notre culture occidentale qui a érigé la #rationalité en valeur suprême voit d’un mauvais œil le pas de côté spirituel. Se dissimuler derrière les pratiques de peuples extérieurs à l’Occident procure un #alibi, une sorte de laissez-passer un peu raciste qui autorise à profiter des bienfaits de coutumes que l’on ne s’explique pas et de traditions que l’on ne comprend pas vraiment. Il ne s’agit pas de dire que les #pratiques_spirituelles ne sont pas désirables, au contraire. Mais plutôt que de nous tourner vers celles d’autres peuples, peut-être pourrions-nous inventer les nôtres ou renouer avec celles auxquelles nous avons renoncé avec la modernité, comme le #néodruidisme. Le tout évidemment, sans renoncer à la #médecine_moderne, à la #science, à la rationalité, et sans tomber dans un #traditionalisme_réactionnaire.

    Vous affirmez que la sphère bien-être est « la meilleure amie du #néolibéralisme. » Où est la connivence ?

    C. T : La #culture_néolibérale précède bien sûr l’essor de la sphère bien-être. Théorisée au début du 20ème siècle, elle s’insère réellement dans nos vies dans les années 80 avec l’élection de Reagan-Thatcher. Avant cette décennie, le capitalisme laissait de côté nos relations personnelles, l’amour, le corps : cela change avec le néolibéralisme, qui appréhende tout ce qui relève de l’#intime comme un marché potentiel. Le capitalisme pénètre alors chaque pore de notre peau et tous les volets de notre existence. En parallèle, et à partir des années 90, le marché du bien-être explose, et l’économiste américain Paul Zane Pilzer prédit à raison qu’au 21ème siècle le marché brassera des milliards. Cela a été rendu possible par la mécanique du néolibéralisme qui pose les individus en tant que petites entreprises, responsables de leur croissance et de leur développement, et non plus en tant que personnes qui s’organisent ensemble pour faire société et répondre collectivement à leurs problèmes. Peu à peu, le néolibéralisme impose à grande échelle cette culture qui nous rend intégralement responsable de notre #bonheur et de notre #malheur, et à laquelle la sphère bien-être répond en nous gavant de yoga et de cristaux. Le problème, c’est que cela nous détourne de la véritable cause de nos problèmes, pourtant clairement identifiés : changement climatique, paupérisation, système productiviste, réformes tournées vers la santé du marché et non vers la nôtre. Finalement, la quête du bien-être, c’est le petit #mensonge que l’on se raconte tous les jours, mensonge qui consiste à se dire que cristaux et autres cérémonies du cacao permettent de colmater les brèches. En plus d’être complètement faux, cela démantèle toujours plus les #structures_collectives tout en continuant d’enrichir l’une des vaches à lait les plus grasses du capitalisme.

    Il semble que le #collectif attire moins que tout ce qui relève l’intime. Est-ce un problème d’esthétique ?

    C. T : La #culture_individualise née avec les Lumières promeut l’égalité et la liberté, suivie au 19ème et 20ème siècles par un effet pervers. L’#hyper-individualisme nous fait alors regarder le collectif avec de plus en plus d’ironie et rend les engagements – notamment ceux au sein des syndicats – un peu ringards. En parallèle, notre culture valorise énormément l’#esthétique, ce qui a rendu les salles de yoga au design soignées et les néospiritualités très attirantes. Récemment, avec le mouvement retraite et l’émergence de militants telle #Mathilde_Caillard, dite « #MC_danse_pour_le_climat » – qui utilise la danse en manif comme un outil de communication politique –, on a réussi à présenter l’#engagement et l’#organisation_collective comme quelque chose de cool. La poétesse et réalisatrice afro-américaine #Toni_Cade_Bambara dit qu’il faut rendre la résistance irrésistible, l’auteur #Alain_Damasio parle de battre le capitalisme sur le terrain du #désir. On peut le déplorer, mais la bataille culturelle se jouera aussi sur le terrain de l’esthétique.

    Vous écrivez : « La logique néolibérale n’a pas seulement détourné une dynamique contestataire et antisystème, elle en a fait un argument de vente. » La quête spirituelle finit donc comme le rock : rattrapée par le capitalisme ?

    C. T : La quête de « la meilleure version de soi-même » branchée sport et smoothie en 2010 est revue aujourd’hui à la sauce New Age. La promesse est de « nous faire sortir de la caverne » pour nous transformer en sur-personne libérée de la superficialité, de l’ego et du marasme ambiant. Il s’agit aussi d’un argument marketing extrêmement bien rodé pour vendre des séminaires à 3 333 euros ou vendre des fringues censées « favoriser l’#éveil_spirituel » comme le fait #Jaden_Smith avec sa marque #MSFTSrep. Mais ne nous trompons pas, cette rhétorique antisystème est très individualiste et laisse totalement de côté la #critique_sociale : le #New_Age ne propose jamais de solutions concrètes au fait que les plus faibles sont oppressés au bénéfice de quelques dominants, il ne parle pas de #lutte_des_classes. Les cristaux ne changent pas le fait qu’il y a d’un côté des possédants, de l’autre des personnes qui vendent leur force de travail pour pas grand-chose. Au contraire, il tend à faire du contournement spirituel, à savoir expliquer des problèmes très politiques – la pauvreté, le sexisme ou le racisme par exemple – par des causes vagues. Vous êtes victime de racisme ? Vibrez à des fréquences plus hautes. Votre patron vous exploite ? Avez-vous essayé le reiki ?

    Le bien-être est-il aussi l’apanage d’une classe sociale ?

    C. T : Prendre soin de soi est un #luxe : il faut avoir le temps et l’argent, c’est aussi un moyen de se démarquer. Le monde du bien-être est d’ailleurs formaté pour convenir à un certain type de personne : blanche, mince, aisée et non handicapée. Cela est particulièrement visible dans le milieu du yoga : au-delà de la barrière financière, la majorité des professeurs sont blancs et proposent des pratiques surtout pensées pour des corps minces, valides, sans besoins particuliers.

    Pensez notre bien-être personnel sans oublier les intérêts du grand collectif, c’est possible ?

    C. T : Les espaces de bien-être sont à sortir des logiques capitalistes, pas à jeter à la poubelle car ils ont des atouts majeurs : ils font partie des rares espaces dédiés à la #douceur, au #soin, à la prise en compte de nos #émotions, de notre corps, de notre vulnérabilité. Il s’agit tout d’abord de les transformer pour ne plus en faire un bien de consommation réservé à quelques-uns, mais un #bien_commun. C’est ce que fait le masseur #Yann_Croizé qui dans son centre masse prioritairement des corps LGBTQI+, mais aussi âgés, poilus, handicapés, souvent exclus de ces espaces, ou la professeure de yoga #Anaïs_Varnier qui adapte systématiquement ses cours aux différences corporelles : s’il manque une main à quelqu’un, aucune posture ne demandera d’en avoir deux durant son cours. Je recommande également de penser à l’impact de nos discours : a-t-on vraiment besoin, par exemple, de parler de féminin et de masculin sacré, comme le font de nombreux praticiens, ce qui, en plus d’essentialiser les qualités masculines et féminines, est très excluant pour les personnes queers, notamment trans, non-binaires ou intersexes. Il faut ensuite s’interroger sur les raisons qui nous poussent à adopter ces pratiques. Tant que l’on utilisera le yoga pour être en forme au travail et enrichir des actionnaires, ou le fitness pour renflouer son capital beauté dans un système qui donne plus de privilèges aux gens « beaux », on aura un problème. On peut en revanche utiliser le #yoga ou la #méditation pour réapprendre à ralentir et nous désintoxiquer d’un système qui nous veut toujours plus rapides, efficaces et productifs. On peut utiliser des #pratiques_corporelles comme la danse ou le mouvement pour tirer #plaisir de notre corps dans un système qui nous coupe de ce plaisir en nous laissant croire que l’exercice physique n’est qu’un moyen d’être plus beau ou plus dominant (une idée particulièrement répandue à l’extrême-droite où le muscle et la santé du corps servent à affirmer sa domination sur les autres). Cultiver le plaisir dans nos corps, dans ce contexte, est hautement subversif et politique... De même, nous pourrions utiliser les pratiques de bien-être comme des façons d’accueillir et de célébrer nos vulnérabilités, nos peines, nos hontes et nos « imperfections » dans une culture qui aspire à gommer nos failles et nos défauts pour nous transformer en robots invulnérables.

    https://www.ladn.eu/nouveaux-usages/bien-etre-tant-quon-utilisera-le-yoga-pour-etre-en-forme-au-travail-on-aura-un-
    #responsabilité

    voir aussi :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/817228

  • Forensic Architecture : Mapping is Power

    https://vimeo.com/711628232

    “The truth is in the error.” Meet the head of Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, in this fascinating in-depth interview about his work and the potential of architecture as a critical tool for understanding the world.

    “Since I remember myself, I have wanted to be an architect.” Eyal Weizman grew up in Haifa, Israel, and from early on developed an understanding of “the political significance of architecture”:

    “I could see the way that neighbourhoods were organized. I could see the separation. I could see the frontier areas between the Palestinian community and the Jewish majority.”

    Forensic Architecture is far from a traditional architectural company. It is a multidisciplinary research group investigating human rights violations, including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. It includes not only architects but also artists, software developers, journalists, lawyers and animators. Working with grassroots activists, international NGOs and media organisations, the team carries out investigations on behalf of people affected by political conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.
    Forensic Architecture uses architectural tools and methods to conduct spatial and architectural analysis of particular incidents in the broadest possible sense. Visualising and rendering in 3D, they not only reconstruct a space but also document what happened in it.
    “People mistake architecture to be about building buildings. Architecture is not that. Architecture is the movements and the relations that are enabled by the way you open, close and channel functions, people, and movements within that. The minute that you understand that architecture is about the incident, about the event, about social relations that happen within it, it enables you to understand social relations and events in a much better way. In fact, in a very unique way”, says Eyal Weizman.

    Forensic Architecture gives a voice to materials, structures and people by translating and disseminating the evidence of the crimes committed against them, telling their stories in images and sound. When an incident of violence and its witnessing are spatially analysed, they acquire visual form. Accordingly, Forensic Architecture is also an aesthetic practice studying how space is sensitised to the events that take place within it. The investigation and representation of testimony depend on how an event is perceived, documented and presented.

    “There is a principle of Forensic investigation called the “look hard principal” – and it claims that every contact leaves a trace. Because many of the crimes that Forensic Architecture is looking at today happen within cities, happen within buildings, architecture becomes the medium that conserves those traces.”

    Unlike established forms of crime and conflict investigation, Forensic Architecture employs several unconventional and unique methods to shed light on events based on the spaces where they took place. They also invest much attention in mapping and understanding concepts like witness, testimony and evidence, and their interrelations. Witness testimony, which sits at the centre of human rights discourse, can be more than viva voce, oral testimony in a court. Any material, like leaves, dust and bricks, can bear witness.

    Forensic Architecture investigates and gives a voice to material evidence by using open-source data analysed using cutting-edge methods partly of their own design. Using 3D models, they facilitate memory recollection from witnesses who have experienced traumatic events. The objective is to reconstruct the ‘space’ in which the incident in question took place and then re-enact the relevant events within this constructed model.
    The most important sources tend to be public: social media, blogs, government websites, satellite data sources, news sites and so on. Working with images, data, and testimony and making their results available online while exhibiting select cases in galleries and museums, Forensic Architecture brings its investigations into a new kind of courtroom.
    “Our work is about care. It is about attention. It is about developing and augmenting the capacity to notice, to register those traces. But that’s not all. Then we need to connect them – one trace to the other. In that sense, our work is like a detective. We look at the past in order to transform the future.”
    Eyal Weizman was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner at Forensic Architecture’s studio in London in April 2022.

    #Eyal_Weizman #forensic_architecture #architecture_forensique #vidéo #interview #architecture #traces #preuves #vérité #esthétique

  • « On ne sort jamais d’une image politique »
    https://laviedesidees.fr/On-ne-sort-jamais-d-une-image-politique.html

    La photoreporter Adrienne Surprenant traque les effets de la dengue et du dérèglement climatique partout dans le monde. Tout en montrant la cruauté ou la douleur du monde, elle s’efforce de concilier #témoignage et #esthétique en établissant avec ses sujets un rapport de confiance réciproque.

    #International #violence #guerre #photographie #épidémie

  • Instagram : la foire aux vanités

    Deux milliards d’utilisateurs actifs chaque mois, 100 millions de vidéos et photos partagées quotidiennement : lancé à l’automne 2010, au cœur de la Silicon Valley, par Kevin Systrom et Mike Krieger, deux étudiants de l’université de Stanford, le réseau Instagram a connu une ascension fulgurante. Surfant sur le développement de la photographie sur mobile, l’application, initialement conçue pour retoucher (grâce à ses fameux filtres) et partager des clichés, attire rapidement des célébrités et attise la convoitise des géants du numérique. En 2012, Mark Zuckerberg, le patron de Facebook, qui flaire son potentiel commercial, la rachète pour la somme faramineuse de 1 milliard de dollars. La publicité y fait son apparition deux ans plus tard, favorisant l’explosion du marketing d’influence. Désormais, les marques se tournent vers les personnalités les plus suivies pour promouvoir leurs produits. Les stars aux millions d’abonnés, comme Cristiano Ronaldo ou Kim Kardashian, engrangent des revenus astronomiques, tandis qu’au bas de la hiérarchie, soumis à une concurrence impitoyable, les « nano-influenceurs » se contentent de contrats payés en nature ou d’avantages promotionnels. Transformé en gigantesque centre commercial, le réseau abreuve ses utilisateurs de visions modifiées de la réalité, entre corps jeunes et dénudés, spots touristiques aussitôt pris d’assaut et images esthétisées de nourriture, labellisées « food porn ». Conséquences : les opérations de chirurgie esthétique se multiplient chez les jeunes, enrichissant des praticiens peu scrupuleux, tandis que l’anxiété et la dépression progressent de façon inquiétante chez les adolescents, particulièrement perméables à ces idéaux standardisés.

    https://www.film-documentaire.fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/66132_0

    #film #documentaire #film_documentaire
    #réseaux_sociaux #Instagram #drogue #beauté #fanbook #Mark_Zuckerberg #esthétique #marketing_d'influence #influencer #foll-ow #mise_en_scène #fast_fashion #mode #corps #algorithme #nudité #misogynie #standardisation #dysmorphie #santé_mentale #chirurgie_esthétique #décès #food_porn #estime_de_soi #reconnaissance

  • Difficult Heritage

    The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the University of Basel are collaborating in the organization of the international summer program Difficult Heritage. Coordinated by the Decolonizing Architecture Course from Sweden and the Critical Urbanism course from Switzerland, the program takes place at #Borgo_Rizza (Syracuse, Italy) from 30 August to 7 September 2021, in coordination with Carlentini Municipality, as well as the local university and associations.
    The program is constituted by a series of lectures, seminars, workshop, readings and site visits centered around the rural town of Borgo Rizza, build in 1940 by the ‘#Ente_della_colonizzazione’ established by the fascist regime to colonize the south of Italy perceived as backward and underdeveloped.
    The town seems a perfect place for participants to analyze, reflect and intervene in the debate regarding the architectural heritage associated to painful and violent memories and more broadly to problematize the colonial relation with the countryside, especially after the renew attention due the pandemic.
    The summer program takes place inside the former ‘entity of colonization’ and constitutes the first intensive study period for the Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Course 2020/21 participants.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0jY9q1VR3E

    #mémoire #héritage #Italie #Sicile #colonialisme #Italie_du_Sud #fascisme #histoire #architecture #Libye #Borgo_Bonsignore #rénovation #monuments #esthétique #idéologie #tabula_rasa #modernisation #stazione_sperimentale_di_granicoltura #blé #agriculture #battaglia_del_grano #nationalisme #grains #productivité #propagande #auto-suffisance #alimentation #Borgo_Cascino #abandon #ghost-town #villaggio_fantasma #ghost_town #traces #conservation #spirale #décolonisation #défascistisation #Emilio_Distretti

    –-
    ajouté à la métaliste sur le colonialisme italien :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/871953

    via @cede qui l’a aussi signalé sur seenthis : https://seenthis.net/messages/953432

    • Architectural Demodernization as Critical Pedagogy: Pathways for Undoing Colonial Fascist Architectural Legacies in Sicily

      The Southern question

      In 1952, #Danilo_Dolci, a young architect living and working in industrial Milan, decided to leave the North – along with its dreams for Italy’s economic boom and rapid modernization – behind, and move to Sicily. When he arrived, as he describes in his book Banditi a Partinico (The Outlaws of Partinico, 1956), he found vast swathes of rural land brutally scarred by the war, trapped in a systematic spiral of poverty, malnutrition and anomie. After twenty years of authoritarian rule, Italy’s newly created democratic republic preserved the ‘civilising’ ethos established by the fascist regime, to develop and modernize Sicily. The effect of these plans was not to bridge the gap with the richer North, but rather, to usher in a slow and prolonged repression of the marginalised poor in the South. In his book, as well as in many other accounts, Dolci collected the testimonies of people in Partinico and Borgo di Trappeto near Trapani, western Sicily.1, Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 2009.] Living on the margins of society, they were rural labourers, unemployed fishermen, convicted criminals, prostitutes, widows and orphans – those who, in the aftermath of fascism, found themselves crushed by state violence and corruption, by the exploitation of local notables and landowners, and the growing power of the Mafia.

      Dolci’s activism, which consisted of campaigns and struggles with local communities and popular committees aimed at returning dignity to their villages, often resulted in confrontations with the state apparatus. Modernization, in this context, relied on a carceral approach of criminalisation, policing and imprisonment, as a form of domestication of the underprivileged. On the one hand, the South was urged to become like the North, yet on the other, the region was thrown further into social decay, which only accelerated its isolation from the rest of the country.

      The radical economic and social divide between Italy’s North and South has deep roots in national history and in the colonial/modern paradigm. From 1922, Antonio Gramsci branded this divide as evidence of how fascism exploited the subaltern classes via the Italian northern elites and their capital. Identifying a connection with Italy’s colonisation abroad, Gramsci read the exploitation of poverty and migrant labour in the colonial enterprise as one of ‘the wealthy North extracting maximum economic advantage out of the impoverished South’.2 Since the beginning of the colonisation of Libya in 1911, Italian nationalist movements had been selling the dream of a settler colonial/modern project that would benefit the underprivileged masses of southern rural laborers.

      The South of Italy was already considered an internal colony in need of modernization. This set the premise of what Gramsci called Italy’s ‘Southern question’, with the southern subalterns being excluded from the wider class struggle and pushed to migrate towards the colonies and elsewhere.3 By deprovincialising ‘the Southern question’ and connecting it to the colonial question, Gramsci showed that the struggle against racialised and class-based segregation meant thinking beyond colonially imposed geographies and the divide between North and South, cities and countryside, urban labourers and peasants.

      Gramsci’s gaze from the South can help us to visualise and spatialise the global question of colonial conquest and exploitation, and its legacy of an archipelago of colonies scattered across the North/South divide. Written in the early 1920s but left incomplete, Gramsci’s The Southern Question anticipated the colonizzazione interna (internal colonization) of fascism, motivated by a capital-driven campaign for reclaiming arable land that mainly effected Italy’s rural South. Through a synthesis of monumentalism, technological development and industrial planning, the fascist regime planned designs for urban and non-urban reclamation, in order to inaugurate a new style of living and to celebrate the fascist settler. This programme was launched in continuation of Italy’s settler colonial ventures in Africa.

      Two paths meet under the roof of the same project – that of modernization.

      Architectural colonial modernism

      Architecture has always played a crucial role in representing the rationality of modernity, with all its hierarchies and fascist ramifications. In the Italian context, this meant a polymorphous and dispersed architecture of occupation – new settlements, redrawn agricultural plots and coerced migration – which was arranged and constructed according to modern zoning principles and a belief in the existence of a tabula rasa. As was the case with architectural modernism on a wider scale, this was implemented through segregation and erasure, under the principle that those deemed as non-modern should be modernized or upgraded to reach higher stages of civilisation. The separation in the African colonies of white settler enclaves from Indigenous inhabitants was mirrored in the separation between urban and rural laborers in the Italian South. These were yet another manifestation of the European colonial/modern project, which for centuries has divided the world into different races, classes and nations, constructing its identity in opposition to ‘other’ ways of life, considered ‘traditional’, or worse, ‘backwards’. This relation, as unpacked by decolonial theories and practices, is at the core of the European modernity complex – a construct of differentiations from other cultures, which depends upon colonial hegemony.

      Taking the decolonial question to the shores of Europe today means recognising all those segregations that also continue to be perpetuated across the Northern Hemisphere, and that are the product of the unfinished modern and modernist project. Foregrounding the impact of the decolonial question in Europe calls for us to read it within the wider question of the ‘de-modern’, beyond colonially imposed geographical divides between North and South. We define ‘demodernization’ as a condition that wants to undo the rationality of zoning and compartmentalisation enforced by colonial modern architecture, territorialisation and urbanism. Bearing in mind what we have learned from Dolci and Gramsci, we will explain demodernization through architectural heritage; specifically, from the context of Sicily – the internal ‘civilisational’ front of the Italian fascist project.

      Sicily’s fascist colonial settlements

      In 1940, the Italian fascist regime founded the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano (ECLS, Entity for the Colonization of the Sicilian Latifondo),4 following the model of the Ente di Colonizzazione della Libia and of colonial urban planning in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The entity was created to reform the latifondo, the predominant agricultural system in southern Italy for centuries. This consisted of large estates and agricultural plots owned by noble, mostly absentee, landlords. Living far from their holdings, these landowners used local middlemen and hired thugs to sublet to local peasants and farmers who needed plots of land for self-sustenance.5 Fascism sought to transform this unproductive, outdated and exploitative system, forcing a wave of modernization. From 1940 to 1943, the Ente built more than 2,000 homesteads and completed eight settlements in Sicily. These replicated the structures and planimetries that were built throughout the 1930s in the earlier bonifica integrale (land reclamation) of the Pontine Marshes near Rome, in Libya and in the Horn of Africa; the same mix of piazzas, schools, churches, villas, leisure centres, monuments, and a Casa del Fascio (fascist party headquarters). In the name of imperial geographical unity, from the ‘centre’ to the ‘periphery’, many of the villages built in Sicily were named after fascist ‘martyrs’, soldiers and settlers who had died in the overseas colonies. For example, Borgo Bonsignore was named after a carabinieri (military officer) who died in the Battle of Gunu Gadu in 1936, and Borgo Fazio and Borgo Giuliano after Italian settlers killed by freedom fighters in occupied Ethiopia.

      The reform of the latifondo also sought to implement a larger strategy of oppression of political dissent in Italy. The construction of homesteads in the Sicilian countryside and the development of the land was accompanied by the state-driven migration of northern labourers, which also served the fascist regime as a form of social surveillance. The fascists wanted to displace and transform thousands of rural laborers from the North – who could otherwise potentially form a stronghold of dissent against the regime – into compliant settlers.6 Simultaneously, and to complete the colonizing circle, many southern agricultural workers were sent to coastal Libya and the Horn of Africa to themselves become new settlers, at the expense of Indigenous populations.

      All the Sicilian settlements were designed following rationalist principles to express the same political and social imperatives. Closed communities like the Pontine settlements were ‘geometrically closed in the urban layout and administratively closed to farmers, workmen, and outside visitors as well’.7 With the vision of turning waged agrarian laborers into small landowners, these borghi were typologically designed as similar to medieval city enclaves, which excluded those from the lower orders.

      These patterns of spatial separation and social exclusion were, unsurprisingly, followed by the racialisation of the Italian southerners. Referring to a bestiary, the propaganda journal Civiltà Fascista (Fascist Civilisation) described the Pontine Marshes as similar to ‘certain zones of Africa and America’, ‘a totally wild region’ whose inhabitants were ‘desperate creatures living as wild animals’.8 Mussolini’s regime explicitly presented this model of modernization, cultivation and drainage to the Italian public as a form of warfare. The promise of arable land and reclaimed marshes shaped an epic narrative which depicted swamps and the ‘unutilised’ countryside as the battlefield where bare nature – and its ‘backward inhabitants’ – was the enemy to be tamed and transformed.

      However, despite the fanfare of the regime, both the projects of settler colonialism in Africa and the plans for social engineering and modernization in the South of Italy were short-lived. As the war ended, Italy ‘lost’ its colonies and the many Ente were gradually reformed or shut down.9 While most of the New Towns in the Pontine region developed into urban centres, most of the fascist villages built in rural Sicily were meanwhile abandoned to a slow decay.

      Although that populationist model of modernization failed, the Sicilian countryside stayed at the centre of the Italian demographic question for decades to come. Since the 1960s, these territories have experienced a completely different kind of migration to that envisaged by the fascist regime. Local youth have fled unemployment in huge numbers, migrating to the North of Italy and abroad. With the end of the Second World War and the colonies’ return to independence, it was an era of reversed postcolonial migration: no longer white European settlers moving southwards/eastwards, but rather a circulatory movement of people flowing in other directions, with those now freed from colonial oppression taking up the possibility to move globally. Since then, a large part of Sicily’s agrarian sector has relied heavily on seasonal migrant labour from the Southern Hemisphere and, more recently, from Eastern Europe. Too often trapped in the exploitative and racist system of the Italian labour market, most migrants working in areas of intensive agriculture – in various Sicilian provinces near the towns of Cassibile, Vittoria, Campobello di Mazara, Caltanissetta and Paternò – have been forced out of cities and public life. They live isolated from the local population, socially segregated in tent cities or rural slums, and without basic services such as access to water and sanitation.

      As such, rural Sicily – as well as vast swathes of southern Italy – remain stigmatised as ‘insalubrious’ spaces, conceived of in the public imagination as ‘other’, ‘dangerous’ and ‘backward’. From the time of the fascist new settlements to the informal rural slums populated by migrants in the present, much of the Sicilian countryside epitomises a very modern trope: that the South is considered to be in dire need of modernization. The rural world is seen to constitute an empty space as the urban centres are unable to deal with the social, economic, political and racial conflicts and inequalities that have been (and continue to be) produced through the North/South divides. This was the case at the time of fascist state-driven internal migration and overseas settler colonial projects. And it still holds true for the treatment of migrants from the ex-colonies, and their attempted resettlement on Italian land today.

      Since 2007, Sicily’s right-wing regional and municipal governments have tried repeatedly to attain public funding for the restoration of the fascist settlements. While this program has been promoted as a nostalgic celebration of the fascist past, in the last decade, some municipalities have also secured EU funding for architectural restoration under the guise of creating ‘hubs’ for unhoused and stranded migrants and refugees. None of these projects have ever materialised, although EU money has financed the restoration of what now look like clean, empty buildings. These plans for renovation and rehousing echo Italy’s deepest populationist anxieties, which are concerned with managing and resettling ‘other’ people considered ‘in excess’. While the ECLS was originally designed to implement agrarian reforms and enable a flow of migration from the north of the country, this time, the Sicilian villages were seen as instrumental to govern unwanted migrants, via forced settlement and (an illusion of) hospitality. This reinforces a typical modern hierarchical relationship between North and South, and with that, exploitative metropolitan presumptions over the rural world.

      The Entity of Decolonization

      To imagine a counter-narrative about Sicily’s, and Italy’s, fascist heritage, we presented an installation for the 2020 Quadriennale d’arte – FUORI, as a Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR) project. This was held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, the venue of the Prima mostra internazionale d’arte coloniale (First International Exhibition of Colonial Art, 1931), as well as other propaganda exhibitions curated by the fascist regime. The installation aims to critically rethink the rural towns built by the ECLS. It marks the beginning of a longer-term collaborative project, the Ente di Decolonizzazione or Entity of Decolonization, which is conceived as a transformative process in history-telling. The installation builds on a photographic dossier of documentation produced by Luca Capuano, which reactivates a network of built heritage that is at risk of decay, abandonment and being forgotten. With the will to find new perspectives from which to consider and deconstruct the legacies of colonialism and fascism, the installation thinks beyond the perimeters of the fascist-built settlements to the different forms of segregations and division they represent. It moves from these contested spaces towards a process of reconstitution of the social, cultural and intimate fabrics that have been broken by modern splits and bifurcations. The project is about letting certain stories and subjectivities be reborn and reaffirmed, in line with Walter D. Mignolo’s statement that ‘re-existing means using the imaginary of modernity rather than being used by it. Being used by modernity means that coloniality operates upon you, controls you, forms your emotions, your subjectivity, your desires. Delinking entails a shift towards using instead of being used.’10 The Entity of Decolonization is a fluid and permanent process, that seeks perpetual manifestations in architectural heritage, art practice and critical pedagogy. The Entity exists to actively question and contest the modernist structures under which we continue to live.

      In Borgo Rizza, one of the eight villages built by the Ente, we launched the Difficult Heritage Summer School – a space for critical pedagogy and discussions around practices of reappropriation and re-narrativisation of the spaces and symbols of colonialism and fascism.11 Given that the villages were built to symbolise fascist ideology, how far is it possible to subvert their founding principles? How to reuse these villages, built to celebrate fascist martyrs and settlers in the colonial wars in Africa? How to transform them into antidotes to fascism?

      Borgo Rizza was built in 1940 by the architect Pietro Gramignani on a piece of land previously expropriated by the ECLS from the Caficis, a local family of landowners. It exhibits a mixed architectural style of rationalism and neoclassical monumentalism. The settlement is formed out of a perimeter of buildings around a central protected and secured piazza that was also the main access to the village. The main edifices representing temporal power (the fascist party, the ECLS, the military and the school) and spiritual power (the church) surround the centre of the piazza. To display the undisputed authority of the regime, the Casa del Fascio took centre stage. The village is surrounded on all sides by eucalyptus trees planted by the ECLS and the settlers. The planting of eucalyptus, often to the detriment of indigenous trees, was a hallmark of settler colonialism in Libya and the Horn of Africa, dubiously justified because their extensive roots dry out swamps and so were said to reduce risks of malaria.

      With the end of the Second World War, Borgo Rizza, along with all the other Sicilian settlements, went through rapid decay and decline. It first became a military outpost, before being temporarily abandoned in the war’s aftermath. In 1975, the ownership and management of the cluster of buildings comprising the village was officially transferred to the municipality of Carlentini, which has since made several attempts to revive it. In 2006, the edifices of the Ente di Colonizzazione and the post office were rehabilitated with the intent of creating a garden centre amid the lush vegetation. However, the garden centre was never realised, while the buildings and the rest of the settlement remain empty.

      Yet despite the village’s depopulation, over the years the wider community of Carlentini have found an informal way to reuse the settlement’s spaces. The void of the piazza, left empty since the fall of fascism, became a natural spot for socialising. The piazza was originally designed by the ECLS for party gatherings and to convey order and hierarchy to the local population. But many locals remember a time, in the early 1980s, before the advent of air-conditioned malls that offered new leisure spaces to those living in peri-urban and rural areas, when people would gather in the piazza for fresh air amid summer heatwaves. The summer school builds on these memories, to return the piazza to its full public function and reinvent it as a place for both hospitality and critical pedagogy.

      Let’s not forget that the village was first used as a pedagogical tool in the hands of the regime. The school building was built by the ECLS and was the key institution to reflect the principles of neo-idealism promoted by the fascist and neo-Hegelian philosophers Giovanni Gentile and Giuseppe Lombardo Radice. Radice was a pedagogue and theoretician who contributed significantly to the fascist reforms of the Italian school system in the 1930s. Under the influence of Gentile, his pedagogy celebrated the modern principle of a transcendental knowledge that is never individual but rather embodied by society, its culture, the party, the state and the nation. In the fascist ideal, the classroom was designed to be the space where students would strive to transcend themselves through acquired knowledge. A fascist education was meant to make pupils merge with the ‘universal’ embodied by the teacher, de facto the carrier of fascist national values. In relation to the countryside context, the role of pedagogy was to glorify the value of rurality as opposed to the decadence wrought by liberal bourgeois cultures and urban lifestyles. The social order of fascism revolved around this opposition, grounded in the alienation of the subaltern from social and political life, via the splitting of the urban and rural working class, the celebration of masculinity and patriarchy, and the traditionalist nuclear family of settlers.

      Against this historical background, our summer school wants to inspire a spatial, architectural and political divorce from this past. We want to engage with decolonial pedagogies and encourage others to do the same, towards an epistemic reorganisation of the building’s architecture. In this, we share the assertion of Danilo Dolci, given in relation to the example of elementary schools built in the fascist era, of the necessity for a liberation from the physical and mental cages erected by fascism:

      These seemed designed (and to a large extent their principles and legacies are still felt today) to let young individuals get lost from an early age. So that they would lose the sense of their own existence, by feeling the heavy weight of the institution that dominates them. These buildings were specifically made to prevent children from looking out, to make them feel like grains of sand, dispersed in these grey, empty, boundless spaces.12

      This is the mode of demodernization we seek in this project: to come to terms with, confront, and deactivate the tools and symbols of modern fascist colonization and authoritarian ideologies, pedagogy and urbanism. It is an attempt to fix the social fabric that fascism broke, to heal the histories of spatial, social and political isolation in which the village originates. Further, it is an attempt to heal pedagogy itself, from within a space first created as the pedagogical hammer in the hands of the regime’s propagandists.

      This means that when we look at the forms of this rationalist architecture, we do not feel any aesthetic pleasure in or satisfaction with the original version. This suggests the need to imagine forms of public preservation outside of the idea of saving the village via restoration, which would limit the intervention to returning the buildings to their ‘authentic’ rationalist design. Instead, the school wants to introduce the public to alternative modes of heritage-making.

      Architectural demodernization

      In the epoch in which we write and speak from the southern shores of Europe, the entanglement of demodernization with decolonization is not a given, and certainly does not imply an equation. While decolonization originates in – and is only genealogically possible as the outcome of – anti-colonialist struggles and liberation movements from imperial theft and yoke, demodernization does not relate to anti-modernism, which was an expression of reactionary, anti-technological and nationalist sentiment, stirred at the verge of Europe’s liberal collapse in the interwar period. As Dolci explained for the Italian and Sicilian context, there is no shelter to be found in any anachronistic escape to the (unreal and fictional) splendours of the past. Or, following Gramsci’s refusal to believe that the Italian South would find the solutions to its problems through meridionalism, a form of southern identitarian and essentialist regionalism, which further detaches ‘the Southern question’ from possible alliances with the North.

      Demodernization does not mean eschewing electricity and wiring, mortar and beams, or technology and infrastructure, nor the consequent welfare that they provide, channel and distribute. By opposing modernity’s aggressive universalism, demodernization is a means of opening up societal, collective and communal advancement, change and transformation. Precisely as Dolci explains, the question it is not about the negation of progress but about choosing which progress you want.13

      In the context in which we exist and work, imagining the possibility of an architectural demodernization is an attempt to redraw the contours of colonial architectural heritage, and specifically, to raise questions of access, ownership and critical reuse. We want to think of demodernization as a method of epistemic desegregation, which applies to both discourse and praxis: to reorient and liberate historical narratives on fascist architectural heritage from the inherited whiteness and ideas of civilisation instilled by colonial modernity, and to invent forms of architectural reappropriation and reuse. We hold one final aim in mind: that the remaking of (post)colonial geographies of knowledge and relations means turning such fascist designs against themselves.

      https://www.internationaleonline.org/research/decolonising_practices/208_architectural_demodernization_as_critical_pedagogy_pathway

      #Partinico #Borgo_di_Trappeto #Italie_du_Sud #Italie_meridionale #Southern_question #colonizzazione_interna #colonisation_interne #Ente_di_Colonizzazione_de_Latifondo_Siciliano (#ECLS) #Ente_di_Colonizzazione_della_Libia #modernisation #bonifica_integrale #Pontine_Marshes #Borgo_Bonsignore #Borgo_Fazio #Borgo_Giuliano #latifondo #Pietro_Gramignani #Caficis

  • From Form‑Trans‑Inform to Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée. A Discussion with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou
    Zeppelin
    https://e-zeppelin.ro/en/from-form%e2%80%91trans%e2%80%91inform-to-atelier-darchitecture-autogeree

    Summer 2021

    Interview: Alex Axinte

    Co-founded by Constan­tin Petcou and Doina Petrescu, atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) is “a collective platform of research and action around urban change and emerging cultural, social and political practices in the contemporary city. aaa initiates and supports strategies of ecological transition involving citizen locally and internationally. aaa acts against global crisis (ecological, economic, political, social, etc) by creating the conditions for citizen to participate in the ecological transition and adopting resilient ways of living. aaa functions within an open interdisciplinary network, where different viewpoints cross each other: architects, artists, students, researchers, pensioners, politicians, activists, residents, etc.

    aaa is an international reference in the field of participative architecture and urban resilience, aaa’s projects have been exhibited at Venise Biennale 2012 and 2016, MoMA New York, Berlin Biennale, Pavilion d’Arsenal Paris, Untied Nation Pavilion Geneva, etc. For its activity, aaa has received international recogni­tion and numerous awards across the years including the International Resilient Award Building for Humanity (2018), The Innovation in Politics Award for Ecology (2017) being one of the “100 projects for the climate” selected by the public at COP21 (2015). (Alex Axinte)

    The passages bellow are extracted from a series of conversations I had during several days with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou. At their studio, at home, in cafes and metros or visiting their projects located in different Paris suburbs, we spoke about their beginnings in Romania, about their current practice atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) and about future plans. While still in school, within the social and political context of 1980’s Romania, they were involved in initiating groups and networks, they engaged in experiment and innovation, building after graduation an alternative practice through a critically approach of architecture.

    Visiting aaa. Drawing by Alex Axinte

    Alex Axinte: Let’s start from the time when you were professionally and humanly trained in Romania within the socialist education system of that time. Has this contributed to what your practice became?

    Doina Petrescu: Certainly it was a seed there, which wasn’t enough by itself, but it was important because this prepared us to face practical situations, knowing everything that a traditional architect should know. And this thing was a solid base, for knowing how to build, knowing about materials, knowing about structure, knowing history, you can see now that this is not taught in schools anymore, that these became specializations, you specialize in such things. We learned them all. And somehow this general formation counted a solid base, as a foundation. On top of this you can add other more sophisticated things, you may try to position yourself, you can take a stand, and you can develop certain interests. So this was one of the good things. Other good thing from the school, not necessarily different from the school, but one that we took or created in the school, was some sort of parallel school, of which Constantin can say more because he initiated it, adding the fact that the school allowed us the freedom to do other things.

    Constantin Petcou: I did two interesting things in school: first is that I walked a lot through Bucharest and I took the street as a teacher. I had also good teachers, but I studied a lot vernacular architecture. And second is that I initiated a group, a sort of school in school, which was called Form-Trans-Inform and which was based on knowledge theory, and other theories as well. [Stratford H, Petrescu D & Petcou C (2008) Form-Trans-Inform: the ‘poetic’ resistance in architecture. arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 12(02)] Basically it was a transdisciplinary group: there were students from scenography, we had interactions with others too, we also organized some events in Club A, we invited philosophes, art critiques, until they spotted me and wanted me to enrol in the party…

    “Inner Gesture“ – happening, Baneasa 1982, team: Constantin Petcou, Constantin Gorcea, Florin Neagoe, Lavinia Marșu, Doru Deacu, Sorin Vatamaniuc, Constantin Fagețean ©Form-Trans-Inform

    AA: What vernacular Bucharest meant?

    CP: It meant some fabulous neighbourhoods, because many they were self-constructed, this being usual in mahalas (ie. popular neighbourhoods). The inhabitants were partly self-sufficient: they were already controlling the household climate, having a lot of courtyards covered with vine, they were trying to produce energy, and there were quite a lot of wind mills, they were trying to produce food by raising pigeons in big cages , which were flying all around… It was like in Garcia Marquez. If you were really sensitive to space and wind and light, you were blown away by how much you could see and feel…

    AA: Is this something that you were looking for also in Paris, or you rather came with this type of looking from Bucharest?

    CP: In Paris you don’t have such a thing. I think it was a root that we came from there.

    DP: Yes, and we applied this later in projects like R-Urban and other projects which we developed later. It was a lesson we have learned, we have understood from those conditions. Also, we still kept having this sensibility to “read” spaces’ potentiality. For example you see a square and some trees: you realise that there is a place there with a certain urban quality and in Bucharest there were many such places with very special qualities due to the urban typologies and ways of living. This mahala type of living was actually a sensitive urban typology.

    Constantin rises on his tops and waters the plants hanging from the studio’s ceiling. We flip through black and white magazines in which there were published some of their projects receiving prizes in paper architecture competitions. They tell me about how they became involved in organizing exhibitions, about working with clothing, about publications which didn’t make it past the 1st issue and where many articles finished with ‘to be continued’. Than, they continued with their architect’s life in Romania before ’89: Doina working in sistematizare (state planning) and Constantin as ‘mister Design’ in a factory of clothing and shoes. Here, with found materials, they worked together for redesigning an office space as a sort of ‘participative deconstructivist’ manifesto, quite provocative at the time. Doina goes out in the courtyard and ransacks bended over some compost containers. Here are their pets, some big earthworms which just received banana peels as their favourite meal. After ’90 they left for Paris guided by the idea to continue their postgraduate studies and than to come back.

    “Catarg towards Ithaca“ –“Honorable mention“ at Shinkenchiku Residential Competition, Japan, 1986. Echipa de proiect/Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Mircea Stefan, Victor Badea

    *The Design section atelier – Valceana Leather Factory, 1988. Project team : Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu ©ConstantinPetcou

    AA: It is a fairly quite spread perception, that architecture is architecture and politics is politics. We are doing our job, we design, we build. If this supports an ideology or not, this is not architecture’s business. How architecture became for you a political acting?

    DP: I think that in a way it was the context that forced us when we started. We started from scratch. And we had to invent ways of negotiating to gain access to space, to gain access to ways of practicing architecture, and we quickly realized that such a negotiation is political and that actually you need to learn to speak with people caring political responsibilities. But at the same time, we realized that the very fact of asking, of doing the practice differently is a political act. There were some things we refused to do, such as the conventional capitalist practice. We wanted to facilitate the inhabitants’ access to space, for any city inhabitant, we wanted to open urban spaces that are closed and that are controlled either by the municipalities or other institutions, and this is already a political act. We managed to ensure access to space, and afterwards, slowly, the self-management of the space, which was also a process, by persuading people that they have to become responsible if they want to use the space, that they need to learn how to manage it, to get along, to organize. This is in fact what Deleuze and Guatarri are calling micro-politics, meaning politics at the level of the subject, transformations at the subjective level. [Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2004), Anti-Oedipus, London: Continuum] We always worked with people. Our architecture always included this subjective and social architecture into the project. The fact that we formed a social group around the project, that people have changed, that they changed their interest, all these are for us part of architecture.

    AA: Do you tend towards consensus in your projects?

    CP: We don’t really use the word consensus. It is about temporary equilibrium. In any such a project, as there are many people involved, and here we speak about governance, co-management and self-management, there are various interests, there are people with different cultural backgrounds – some are employed, others not -­ and people with more or less time. So they cannot have the same vision over the use of space, over the type of activities, and then you need to reach some agreements, some temporary, partial deals, which should not suffocate the others and allow others to emerge. What we do is to give the inhabitants the opportunity to appropriate a space, an equipment, a way of organising time together, of organising the neighbourhood’s life, which are ecological, solidary, all this obviously with some guidance. Because the majority of inhabitants of the banlieue are very much excluded. And we are offering them an emancipatory space, or, in Guatarri’s language, a re-subjectivation capacity, very useful in today’s society which excludes many. [F. Guattari (1977), La révolution Moléculaire, Paris: ed. Recherches] In such spaces they gain new qualities; someone is a gardener, someone else takes care of the chickens, somebody else of the compost, one of the kitchen…

    DP: This is actualy the micro-politics.

    CP: Including until the kids’ level. I remember when we were at the Ecobox I had a lot of keys and a kid asked me, mais Constantin, you have keys from every space in the neighbourhood?! Can you open any space? And obviously that I answered yes, because, for his imaginary it was very important to know that you can open spaces, that you can make this urban space to evolve, which has become now more and more expensive, inaccessible and segregated. Such imaginary is fundamental for the “right to the city”, it is to know that, even for a kid, space could be negotiable, accessible and welcoming, that there are no barriers and walls. Actually, we don’t make walls: we make doors, windows, bridges… this is the kind of things we are building.

    Steering to the passers-by, Doina recollects her diploma project for which she collaborated with an ethnologist to design something which today could be called an ethnological cultural hub. Once arrived in Paris, after a master, they began teaching, being among others the co-founders of Paris-Malaquais architecture school. Step by step, they began to act as citizens, teachers and architects in the neighbourhood where they were living: La Chapelle. This is how aaa started. In the same time, they kept on teaching and initiating projects also in Romania, in Brezoi, but which got stuck. Constantin starts the fire in a small godin in the Agrocite, located in southern Paris, at Bagneux, which is a sort of ecological prototype spatializing aaa’s concepts: short circuits, popular ecology, urban resilience.

    Mobile modules – EcoBox project, 2003. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Denis Favret, Giovanni Piovene ©aaa

    *Eco interstice “Passage 56“ – street view, 2007, Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Raimund Binder, Sandra Pauquet, Nolwenn Marchand ©aaa

    AA: 100 years after Bauhaus, 50 years after the May ’68 revolt and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, within the current global capitalism crisis, all Bauhaus’ principles of how to live and work together are becoming again relevant. In this context, how legitimate is still Bauhaus’s questions if design can change society, and what it means to be modern today?

    DP: So all these ideas are reaching some sort of anniversary and one needs to take them together, one cannot take only Bauhaus ideas, but also other ideas which came after in order to understand what can design do today: participation, global democracy, ecology. Design need to remain open, as Ezio Manzini was saying: ‘design when everybody designs’. There is an acknowledgement of the fact that we are all designing, in our own way, we design our life, we design our decisions. How can you put all those things together in a strategic way, at a moment when the society and the humanity need to take some decisions, need to be prepared for a civilizational change, otherwise we become extinct? I think design has a role in this, by helping, by mediating, by formulating questions, decisions, or solutions together. And how to do design together is the big question, and there is not only one way of doing it, there are many ways. We also need to imagine what are these places where ways of designing together are possible. Which are the new institutions, the new mediating agents? – all these seem to me to be the questions of our times.

    Constantin confesses that Bauhaus changed his life, when, after an exhibition, improbable for that time, where 1:1 modernist furniture was exhibited, he quits the arts high school in Iași and joined the architecture school.

    CP: I am sure that design has an immense capacity to change society until even distorting it (see the tablet, the iPhone…). As architects, we are working a lot in a broader sense of design, and that’s why we are trying to launch not just projects, but also movements like One Planet Site or R-Urban which can be adopted also by others, because we have the capacity and the responsibility, so you have the capacity, but you have also the responsibility to act. It’s like a doctor. If you are in a plane and someone is sick, you have the capacity and responsibility to act. This is the case for us architects: we acted here in the neighbourhood we are living because there were many difficulties. The planet is now in great difficulty and you need to act. We know how to design, to project into the future, to find money, to create a horizon of hope, a model which becomes interesting for others too, so we have this capacity to design, in a broader sense, complex, temporal and functional. All these including re-balancing how much technology, how many resources, how much mutualisation, how much governance, all these are in fact design.

    DP: For example, with R-Urban we proposed a resilience strategy as designers. We have used design and the organization and shaping of space, of making visible specific practices, as a catalyst. We succeed in a way to organize a social group around the project, by giving it also a political dimension, again, by using architecture’s capacity to make visible, to make real the idea of short circuits for example. People could finally see what happens if you collect rain water, where it goes, that you have to think differently about space to make passive heating, and that you need to think differently about the heating system if you want to reduce the fuel consumption. That by using space in a certain way, in 1 year time you will have this amount of reduction of carbon emissions, which is much better than the national rate. So, all these things can be made visible through the way you design their experience. We didn’t just design a building, or a site, but we designed a usage and a way of creating an activity there.

    “ R-Urban “ – Diagrams on the ecological transition principles 2008. Echipa de proiect/Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu cu Nolwenn Marchand, Sara Carlini, Clémence Kempnich ©aaa

    ““Agrocité”—micro-farm for urban agriculture and ecological training, Colombes, 2013-2014

    “Recyclab”—social economy hub, urban waste recycling and eco-design, Colombes, 2013. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Clémence Kempnich

    “Agrocité”—micro-farm for urban agriculture and ecological training, Bagneux, 2019. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anna Laura Bourguignon, Alex Gaiser, Rémi Buscot, Juliette Hennequin

    AA: So you could say that this means modernity now?

    DP: The concept of modernity is very much contested in fact, but in a way you could say that this means a hope for the future.

    CP: Modernity I think it had the quality of promoting progress, a democratic progress for all, through small prices, standardization, through in fact what they knew back then. And I think that these ideals remain somehow valid. Such as fablabs are in a way a continuity of this progressive modernist ideal of making accessible and democratic the use to technology. And it’s good. But the problem is the excess. When standardization becomes excessive and exploitative. I think modernity needs to be revisited, keeping what is good, like democracy, ethics, progress and others, and readapting it. Because modernity couldn’t address at that time the problems of limited resources issues, climate change, extractive capitalism, or extinction of species; those problems weren’t visible back than.

    AA: What is the relation with technology in your projects?

    DP: We document and present all our technological devices with an interface accessible to the users and we make them with means that makes them transferable and reproducible. I think we need to take into account the democratization of technology and the fact that the reproduction is not made by the industry, but by the masses, everyone being able to take part. What is important is to keep a degree of creativity, of appropriateness, of participative innovation possible at all levels. All these technological devices were conceived together with experts. The grey water filtration system was made together with a specialist in phyto-remediation. What we brought new is that we designed the first prototype used in urban contexts. This approach is also situated, is specific for a certain situation, you work with the specialist to find the solution there, and afterwards you integrate also local and traditional knowledge. For example, for the phyto-remediation device it was very cool that we built it with a team of Romanians having a construction company in France. Due to the fact we were in a flooding area, we needed to raise the device above the ground by 1 meter and we didn’t know how to build it. And then, the team of Romanians which knew how to make… barrels, manage with what we had, with found boards that were boarded like for barrels… and this is how we made the phyto-remediation device. This shows that all skills and ways of knowledge are useful in a certain situation.

    They choose together the tomatoes, than Doina the aubergines and Constantin the potatoes from a temporary market installed in the Paris former mortuary house. This is now a cultural centre, open to everyone and full of life. Recently they participated in the biggest architectural competition organized by the city of Paris which offered some difficult sites for development – “Reinventer Pars”. The brief was very close to the R-Urban model. They haven’t officially won, but their proposal was very good and this is how they were able to develop it in a different location. The project is called Wiki Village Factory (VWF) and is a cluster of technological and social innovation of 7000 sqm which aims to become a sort of central node in the R-Urban network towards developing the city 2.0 (ecological and collaborative).

    “Wiki-Village-Factory” – cluster of social and ecological innovation, Paris, 2016. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Benjamin Poignon, Pierre Marie Cornin, Grégoire Beaumont © aaa-REI-Deswarte

    AA: With WVF for example, how important is for you the materiality and the aesthetics? Or is the program more important?

    CP: Aesthetics for as is a result. You need to take care for the building to be well integrated in the context, you need to express well what’s going on. For example, the coop spaces are trying to make you to wish to collaborate with others; it’s not just like any other office. The ground floor, we try to have it open towards the neighbourhood, despite it is a difficult neighbourhood.

    DP: I would say that aesthetics are trying to express not necessary the programme, but what is important in the program and beyond the program. We are using architecture tactically if you want, as a way of exposing and communicating principles of functioning, of governance, of construction and the ethics of using a building today.

    CP: We are exposing the ecology of the building in fact, and this is beyond function. In order to become more ecologic. This is to make you use fewer materials, less insulation, but count on the passive insulation of the building’ skin. We also succeeded in convincing them to have dry toilets. This will be the largest building with dry toilets in Europe. We will build a special device, like a large scale prototype, which doesn’t exist right now. In fact, although they are on a tight budget, they will put more money into this than into usual toilets, because also the developer and everybody want this aspect to be exemplary. And it will be quite vegetal, with urban agriculture; we will try to remediate the grey waters. All the principles that we are using in R-Urban hubs will be implementing as much as we can also here.

    AA: So, the city 2.0 should look differently because it values and creates hierarchies in a different way?

    DP: Yes, it is important to create a new discourse, but also governance is important, social and ecological governance, that is what we try to express through architecture. There are many layers which add up to the modernist functional layer. And there is also the idea of being reversible, the fact that a building needs to evolve, to adapt, to disappear if necessary after a while, so it is not built to last hundreds of years. Because we need to leave room for future generations to build the architecture they need, don’t we?

    #ville #écologie #participation #auto_gestion #urban_planning

  • Walkscapes | Actes Sud
    https://www.actes-sud.fr/catalogue/walkscapes

    Ouvrage culte pour les urbanistes et les architectes, « Walkscapes » fait de la marche beaucoup plus qu’une simple promenade. Pour Francesco Careri, en effet, l’origine de l’#architecture n’est pas à chercher dans les sociétés sédentaires mais dans le monde nomade.

    La #marche est #esthétique, elle révèle des recoins oubliés, des beautés cachées, la poésie des lieux délaissés. Mais elle est aussi politique : en découvrant ces #territoires qui sont à la marge et cependant peuplés, elle montre que les frontières spatiales sont aussi des frontières sociales.

    Ainsi s’ouvrent les derniers espaces de liberté de nos sociétés quadrillées et s’esquisse une tentative de réponse aux préoccupations de demain : comment réinventer la #ville pour en faire une terre d’accueil de l’altérité ?

    #livre

  • Manchester University Press - Border images, border narratives
    https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526146267
    https://www.biblioimages.com/mup/getimage.aspx?class=books&assetversionid=278716&cat=default&size=large

    This interdisciplinary volume explores the role of images and narratives in different borderscapes. Written by experienced scholars in the field, Border images, border narratives provides fresh insight into how borders, borderscapes, and migration are imagined and narrated in public and private spheres. Offering new ways to approach the political aesthetics of the border and its ambiguities, this volume makes a valuable contribution to the methodological renewal of border studies and presents ways of discussing cultural representations of borders and related processes.

    Influenced by the thinking of philosopher Jacques Rancière, this timely volume argues that narrated and mediated images of borders and borderscapes are central to the political process, as they contribute to the public negotiation of borders and address issues such as the in/visiblity of migrants and the formation of alternative borderscapes. The contributions analyse narratives and images in literary texts, political and popular imagery, surveillance data, border art, and documentaries, as well as problems related to borderland identities, migration, and trauma. The case studies provide a highly comparative range of geographical contexts ranging from Northern Europe and Britain, via Mediterranean and Mexican-USA borderlands, to Chinese borderlands from the perspectives of critical theory, literary studies, social anthropology, media studies, and political geography.

    #frontières

  • De l’ordre de la #nature à l’ordre social
    https://laviedesidees.fr/Jacques-Ranciere-Le-temps-du-paysage.html

    À propos de : Jacques Rancière, Le temps du paysage. Aux origines de la révolution #esthétique, La Fabrique. L’art des jardins anglais au XVIIIe siècle ouvre une brèche qui nourrit l’invention de nouvelles formes de vie collective. Jacques Rancière démêle les fils de cette filiation complexe.

    #Arts
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/docx/20201012_ranciere.docx
    https://laviedesidees.fr/IMG/pdf/20201012_ranciere.pdf

  • Pulpe fiction dans les quartiers nord de Marseille - regards.fr
    http://www.regards.fr/politique/societe/article/pulpe-fiction-dans-les-quartiers-nord-de-marseille

    À la tête de son propre centre d’#esthétique, Monia Institut, dans le quartier de Saint-Louis depuis douze ans, Monia Dominique confirme l’emballement. « Je dirais que 50% de ma clientèle a déjà fait soit de la médecine esthétique, soit de la #chirurgie », estime la trentenaire. Native de la Savine, une cité du 15e, sa belle-sœur Alexia abonde. « Aujourd’hui, tout le monde veut la bouche de Kylie et les seins de Kim Kardashian ! », sourit l’esthéticienne. À vingt-cinq ans, elle a subi une rhinoplastie, pour affiner un nez qu’elle n’aimait pas. Fluette, elle montre avec dépit sa poitrine menue sous son soutien-gorge push-up rose pastel. Refaire ses seins ? Elle l’envisage : « Après mon premier enfant ».

    Aujourd’hui, la clinique Phénicia revendique près de 40% de clientes issues des quartiers populaires du Nord de la ville. « C’est une clientèle à la recherche de considération. Mais qui, parfois, ne maîtrise pas tous les codes et a, avec la chirurgie, un rapport de consommation immédiate », analyse Isabelle Delaye, directrice de la communication dans l’établissement. Une mode dont les icônes incontestables du moment sont les sœurs Kardashian, brunes incendiaires aux courbes très avantageuses. « Il faut parfois calmer les ardeurs, prolonge le Dr Marinetti. On nous demande beaucoup de bouches agressives à la Nabilla. Ou des seins décrits comme "naturels" mais qui, en fait, ne le sont pas. Les seins bombés vers le haut, comme Kim Kardashian, ça n’existe pas dans la nature ! C’est importé des États-Unis, c’est le surgical look à l’Américaine. »

    À l’influence des séries et de la téléréalité s’ajoute le poids, tout aussi écrasant, de la publicité, des clips, voire de la pornographie. « La téléréalité est, souvent, une mise en compétition des corps, sur un modèle réactionnaire, néolibéral. Une hiérarchie entre ceux censés être beaux et ceux censés être laids… », note Sophie Jéhel, maîtresse de conférence à l’université Paris 8. Basées sur des caricatures de féminité et de masculinité, ces représentations ont un impact énorme. Dans son cabinet du 5e arrondissement, dans le centre-ville marseillais, ce médecin en convient : « Les jeunes femmes arrivent avec sur leurs portables des photos des actrices de la téléréalité à qui elles s’identifient et donc veulent ressembler ». Sonia, vingt-six ans, qui confesse sans mal avoir subi une double mammoplastie, en témoigne. « Nabilla, ça a été un truc énorme, ici. D’un coup, tout le monde a voulu des gros seins et des Louboutin ! », lâche-t-elle en riant.

    @beautefatale