Kenya Field of Dreams

Watching the World Cup in Kilifi, KenyaDigital Planet had a thing on the Kenya Field Of Dreams project this morning.  This is an inflatable screen set up in Kilifi, a town north of Mombasa.  It is supported by UK Sport, Google and Moving the Goalposts, a charity that uses football to empower girls.   The BBC has given this project a lot of coverage, Digital Planet is the most recent. 

Where to start.  Nominally, in a town where hardly anyone has a tv, a large inflatable screen was set up to broadcast the FIFA World Cup games.  The screen came from Open Air Cinema, donated by Google.  Stuart Farmer of Open Air Cinema provided support and training.  The Open Air Cinema package is just one of many kinds of inflatable screens, usually advertised for showing movies on the beach or at pool parties.  The least horrible video I found of how they are set up is this one from Airscreen: 

They all follow the same principles: the inflatable screen and support structure are stuffed in a big bag accompanied by a small suitcase with a rear screen projector, a hammer, stakes, speakers and a fan: it's a tidy package.  Inflatable screens withstand the weather better than a fixed screen. They bounce around in the wind, but don't blow away. 
On the Kenya Field of Dreams blog Alix in Kilifi writes:  'Oddly, it's not the high-technology which struggles here — we have a satellite internet connection, 3G broadband dongles and excellent mobile coverage for organisation, and imminent arrival of WiMax – it's the low tech: Weather, sanitation, electricity.' 

The fan that inflates the screen is run off a generator and it inflates quickly, in a minute or so.  It is the girls of Moving the Goalposts who set it all up, make the connections and fix bugs.  The girl who was interviewed on Digital Planet said that after the World Cup they will show educational videos about health and education. 

Now, remember all you fellows who can't figure out how to work a digital camera and Photoshop, these are teenaged girls at risk in extreme poverty.   The Moving the Goalposts Kenya site describes its mandate:  'Girls and women in Kilifi District, Kenya are some of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged people. Low retention in school, early and unintended pregnancies and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS trap them in a cycle of poverty. Moving the Goalposts Kilifi (MTG) uses football to empower girls and young women, helping them to fulfill their potential both on and off the football field.'

Moving the Goalposts Kenya, raising self-esteem through girls footballMoving the Goalposts Kenya started in 2001 with a small grant from the British Council and advice from Moving the Goalposts UK.  Football teams were formed, matches played, there are now over 3,000 players.  It has reproductive health rights programmes, HIV/AIDS programmes and a new economic empowerment project.  In 2008 MTG Kenya built a headquarters building with help from the British HIgh Commission and the Ford Foundation.  

Moving the Goalposts Headquarters, Kilifi, KenyaThere is something about this story that makes me feel as if I am the one living in an impoverished society. 

Mario, from Jonal & Malage de Lugendo

A couple of nights ago heard a radio documentary on Franco Luambo Makiadi on BBC World African Perspectives.  You can get it as a podcast from the African Perspectives website.

'Mario' was Franco's most famous song, the opening soukous guitar chords are unmistakable, as is his voice.  This is OK Jazz, from the Congo.  Aboubacar Siddikh has posted a 1985 version in two parts:  there's an interview and discussion in the middle between 4:16 - 6:30.  This is the link to Part 1, then it continues in Part 2.

African jazz was the soundtrack to my life in the early 90s where I would spend the summers in Calgary and drive to Austin Texas for the rest of the year.  The drive down in mid August was terribly gruelling: the temperature goes up 10 degrees each day, so one leaves Alberta at 15°C (5° at night) and arrives in central Texas at 45°C.  These were the days of cassette tapes, of which I had two shoe boxes.  By the end of the day when a campsite showed on the map and one could leave the relentless, fiery heat of the highway, I'd put on my African tapes — Salif Keita, the Malathini Queens, Franco: spirits lift, the pets would know we were about to stop, all would be repaired.  This is music for heat and high humidity where languid is the only way to move.

While looking for Franco's Mario, I found Scott Shuster's posting of Mario done by Jonal and Malage de Luendo.  This is long - 17 minutes or so, but just the thing to ameliorate the coming week of deadlines, deliveries delayed, and all that work to do.  

Shuster writes (on the original YouTube posting):

LOKASSA YA MBONGO rhythm break about 12:45-minutes into the clip, & great Franco-style solo work by Shiko Mawatu throughout. Also modern Congolese male dancing -watch the WHOLE 19-minutes! They play the Azda Volkswagen commercial commercial at the end, brining back radio memories of the 1970s for millions of Zairoise, Congolese, and others of the Central and East African region. Congolese rumba newbies can learn more about this music at africambiance.com and at tribes.tribe.net/soukousguitar

Mali: Ali Farka Touré, Toumani Diabaté, Malick Sidibé and Ruby

Malick Sidibé

Malick Sidibé. Nuit de Noël, 1963Each spring when TVO does its photography month of documentaries it shows Dolce Vita Africana about Malick Sidibé.  Sidibé opened his photography studio in Bamako, Mali in 1958, and is best known for his photos of Bamako youth, dancing at clubs, clowning around on beaches, posing formally in their coolest clothes.  He photographed everyone however, from babies to the very elderly charting over 50 years and hundreds of thousands of photographs.

Malick Sidibé. Friends, 1976
In Dolce Vita Africana he meets up with a group of men, in their seventies as was Sidibé at the time, with all the photos of them in their teens and twenties.  Much laughter at the clothes, at their youth at their beauty.  One says of all the girls in their bathing suits, 'some of these girls are in burqas now'.  When they have a party, for old time's sake with all the old 45s and everyone dresses up, yes, most of the women are very covered.

Mali achieved independence from France in 1960; it is 90% Muslim, speaks French and has a secular constitution no doubt greatly influenced by the French civil system.  The original Mali Empire controlled trade in the west Sahara, a fluid empire and territory which, after several internal shifts in power over 600 years fell to the French in the late 19th century and became French Sudan.  With decolonisation French Sudan became the Republic of Mali and Senegal.  At which point Sidibé opened his studio and documented the effervescent and heady gaiety of newly postcolonial Mali.  The old shackles were off, the new ones had not yet arrived. 

There is a brief postcolonial interregnum which is a social free-fall, a period of great creativity as paradigms crash before some new ideological system moves in.  Cuba between pre-1959 American colonisation and post-1961 Soviet interest.  Spain between Franco's death in 1976 and joining the EU in 1992.  It is a delicate time, when new values are tried out and either kept or discarded. 
Sidibé comes out of that time.  His eye is so free.  His studio is small, difficult, he lives a social life in his neighbourhood in Bamako, he takes, still, thousands of pictures of people who are presented calmly, formally and respectfully.  The photographic space is shallow, people are significant.

The relatively recent discovery of Malick Sidibé in Europe and the attendant exhibitions, prizes and lifetime achievement awards perhaps indicates the appreciation of a photographic eye that is not ideological and cares very much about the subject, rather than the process of making photographs or using photographs as text, as voice.  This is Sidibé's photographic clarity, his modernity.  

Malick Sidibé. View From the Back, 2001good interviews and reviews from LensCulture, Frieze, and the Guardian.

and the trailer for Dolce Vita Africana:

Michel Campeau, Darkroom/Chambre Noire

Michel Campeau. Sans Titre. Darkroom (2005-2006)

Darkroom - Chambre Noire
On the obsolescence of the sliver gelatin process in the age of digital reproduction
De la désuétude argentique à l'ère de sa reproductibilité numérique

Twice this morning Walter Benjamin has been evoked.  Benjamin liveth. 

Michel Campeau has just been given the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography from the Canada Council.  The CC press release states that 'Michel Campeau has been part of the contemporary photography scene for four decades. His work explores the subjective and narrative dimensions of photography, that contrast with the conventions of documentary photography', which tells us precisely nothing. 
However, on the web is a site for the Darkroom project, series of photos of darkrooms —'a monography of images articulated around the decline of sliver-gelative photography, taking as my object the obsolescence of the darkroom.'

One could see this as an homage to a lost art form: the trays, the darkness, the rickety wires and clothespegs -- something very romantic, but this work isn't romantic at all.  The darkrooms are photoographed in the glare of the flashbulb in all their tawdriness, in all their squalor, actually.  The distance between these ad hoc environments, surely the only environments where appearance does not matter as they exist only in the dark, and the products produced in these environments is immense.  The clinically beautiful iMacs used now will never be the subject of such a photo project.  Pixels and levels adjustments have no physicality, the terrors of virtual reality where all is disembodied came with the first point-and-shoot digital camera. 

Campeau however has a classical photographer's eye: the subject matter is at once interrogated for its really pathetic expedience while rendered beautiful.  The photo above, the poetically identified CRW3446 – layers of plywood partitions hacked through with a skilsaw for a drainpipe, is phenomenally eerie, beautiful in its details: the splintered paint surface, the necklace of steel strapping, the hose clamps, the crossed lines at the corners of the openings as if it had been casually drafted with a sawblade.  It is a most lovely thing, graphically, abstractly, and in its capture of a very human struggle with obdurate building materials.

wikileaks

http://wikileaks.org/
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said he will avoid travelling to the US because of pressure by the US government to reveal the source of many many videos and reports revealing mistakes made in Afghanistan, especially the killing of  92 children in Garani which the military thought were insurgents.  Bradley Manning, an American intelligence analyst has been arrested in Baghdad after claiming he had sent 260,000 pieces of information to WikiLeaks. 

Assange is from Australia; he was living in Iceland but on returning to Australia had his passport cancelled.  He is a hacker.  Iceland has, in the past week, proposed hugely open freedom of information legislation, the project of Brigitta Jonsdottir, an MP, an anti-war activist and an associate of Julian Assange.  This is reminiscent of the early days of the German Green Party and Petra Kelly, where activists and radicals move through whatever process is available into the mainstream.  In an increasingly polarised world where the left is increasingly marginalised, certain countries are emerging as defenders of human rights, of transparency in government: the wildly liberal Iceland is one of them.

There is a lot going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan that is suppressed in the mainstream press as, among other things, it would trouble the conflicted relationship we have for our Armed Forces and the relentless pressure to support our troops.  Thus, only heroism can be revealed in the press, never mistakes.  This seems to be a fact of war: that the people at home are given only rationed bits of information that won't dent national jingoism or other propaganda.  It is only after a war is over that truth starts to leak out.  WikiLeaks has simply accelerated the process of leaking the facts of war. 

I wish Assange was from Canada, had found a safe haven in Canada, but we don't seem to produce such people, neither are we interested, as a country, in interrogating our own massive complacency.  I think being invited to join the G7 by Gerald Ford in 1976 to bolster US positions was not helpful. 

botswana: the only way to play guitar

how to do the Diski Dance

by the wonderful iSchoolAfrica World Cup Press Team:

iSchoolAfrica: Soccer's offside rule explained

Martín Ruiz de Azúa

Martín Ruiz de Azúa. Medallas Campeonato Europa de Atletismo Barcelona 2010

Martín Ruiz de Azúa is a tremendously inventive Barcelona designer who has recently designed the medals for the European Athletics Championships being held in Barcelona July 26-August 1, 2010.

It is interesting, this medal, as it leaves the military tradition of the minted coin as a medal and concentrates instead on the ribbon holding the medal, undercutting the formality of a symmetrical disc.  Azúa has designed previous medals that play with eccentricity: an off-centre ellipse for the 2005 European Athletic Championships in Madrid – immediately one thinks of the shape of an elliptical track.  For the World Swimming Championships in Barcelona 2003, the medal was a large disc holding a flat lens full of water and air bubbles: 'water the main part of the medal and the principal element of the sport'.  The ribbon was translucent silicon, much like the bands that hold swimming goggles in place. 

Given Spain's difficult past, especially Franco's imposition of a near obsessive respect for military pomp and tradition – uniforms, castles, massive formalistic memorials, it is no wonder that new Spanish design rejects any aspect that could possibly reflect those monstrous traditions.  It is a political and social imperative to re-think everything, so much an imperative that it has become second nature.  And this why, since the early 1980s, we have looked to Barcelona for a kind of pure modernism that only looks forward.

Mags Harries, Asaroton (Unswept Floor), 1976

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, MassachussettsAsaroton was a public art project by Mags Harries for Massachussetts' bicentennial in the Haymarket in Boston.  Market debris has been cast in bronze and embedded in a crosswalk, part of Boston's Freedom Trail.  'Asaroton' describes Roman scraps of food, long since fossilised.  And then in the title comes (Unswept Floor) with its guilty domesticity.  This piece marks the market and the detritus left on the streets and in the gutters when the market closes.  It valorises the everyday: a crushed cardboard box in bronze becomes a beautiful, abstract thing, without monumentality, something difficult to achieve at the scale of a public art project. 

We have so much monumentality, so much at the large scale, so many broad strokes in our cities.  The public realm, or the fairly meaningless descriptions 'public space' or even worse, 'green space' is not developed from the small detail, the scale of the foot or the hand, but is constructed at the scale of the crane, the flatbed truck, the swipe of brick paving texture on the plan.

One does wonder if civic public art programs which take a percentage of the cost of new developments for sculpture on the street, or on the plaza, or on the plinth are necessary compensations for the lack of the small-scale intimate detail in the modern city.  It isn't about supporting art, as is claimed, but is a deep desire to achieve beauty that in other eras was a component of ordinary civic engineering. 

Historic 18th century Boston is stuffed with beauty; perhaps this is why it understood a project that is so essentially humble and tender. 

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, Massachussets

more sidewalk details

Joseph Clement. New York sidewalk details. Spacing, September 6, 2007Joseph Clement had a great piece in Spacing a couple of years ago on New York's sidewalks.  I found it when I was looking about for the glass block inserts.  He makes the point that when the sidewalk takes the place of a back alley for loading and services it makes for very wide pavements: clearly this proportional difference makes a better ground for pedestrian life.  The flâneur simply couldn't flan on niggardly strips of concrete pressed up against parked cars or downtown traffic. 

The photo above shows the care with which water is conducted away from seams between metal and paving.  Whenever the manhole cover was installed, or the glass lens panel laid, someone was thinking about longevity and the details needed to keep rain water from pooling, from splashing.  Again it is like the design of the cat's eyes where two glass marbles are set in a heavy rubber block which compresses if a car tire runs over it.  In front of the marbles is a small well to collect water, so when the rubber compresses the water rinses the front of the glass marbles keeping them clean.  There is tremendous attention to detail here that goes beyond the ease of installation and is more about imagining the post-installation working life of the product.  What a quaint idea.   

unstable surfaces

La Jolla, California, 2007Now, here's an example of the ground beneath one's feet being completely ambiguous, certainly mysterious: how deep is the slump beneath this sink hole?  Is it at the level of the water table, or the aquifer, or a mile deep?  This photo looks like something by Jeff Wall: a small suburban crisis.

If you click on the picture it will take you to a Guardian photo series of other, recent sink holes.

sidewalk glass blocks

Yesterday's glass block lights remind me of the heavy glass block panels let into sidewalks that provided light to cellar spaces under the pavements.  Haven't seen these for years, although they were once very common, and in looking around for pictures found lots of websites about their preservation.  The Ringuettes have a good site on the sidewalk glass prisms of Victoria BC where all the downtown sidewalks appear to have had lenses. 

Glass prisms, either square or round, are set in structural metal frames and then the whole unit spans the sidewalk over the basement level storage or working space.  They date from the early 1900s and are found extensively in old sections of cities that have either been preserved as historic districts or are so run down as to have escaped modernisation, which in sidewalk terms usually means concreting over the glass sections.

Originally clear glass, the manganese used in glass in the early 1900s  has turned these lenses a deep amethyst with exposure to sun. I remember Victoria's glass sidewalks as being quite dark glass — but I've also seen glass panels in London that are white and shine brightly at night when the cellars below the sidewalks have their lights on.  It was this that I thought of with the LED glass blocks. 

The sense that downtown sidewalks are actually roofs, that the sidewalk is not ground beneath your feet but a hollow space in which people are working, registers a lovely kind of urban knowledge.  In contrast, the total pedestrianisation of downtown streets such as 8th Avenue in Calgary, or Granville in Vancouver, where one can wander willy nilly from street wall to street wall as if the road was a creekbed at the bottom of two cliffs, where everything is up, lacks this sense that the pedestrian surface is a fragile skin between a shadowy underworld and a bright thrusting upperworld.  

It also indicates an ambiguity of ownership and property: who owns that bit under the sidewalk?  In cities obsessed with property and jurisdiction, such as Calgary, this ambiguity is not allowed.  This is a city where corporate security patrols the edges where plaza meets sidewalk, where one cannot take photographs of the public sidewalk from a private-public plaza, or photos of the private-public plaza from the public sidewalk.  The lines are hard here, the sidewalks concrete.

Norm Ringuette. Blanchard Street, Victoria, BC. 2006

glass block lights

the Tuff Block Light installedA press release came in the mail today about a glass block with LED lighting embedded in it.  It is from Arizona, and the brochure stresses that the inventor is Harold P Kopp, Blind Veteran, USN Retired.  The website is even more curious: the back story of Kopp's various bouts with illness appears to be as important as product information. It is certainly more important than spelling.  Whatever, the lights have a life of 50,000 hours and are laid in with regular brick or block paving.  The brochure appears to come from some other century altogether.  Is this one man working away in his garage, inventing clever electrical devices and then running off product information on his printer and mailing them at some expense to architecture magazines all over the continent?  It appears so. 

It is a bit like the cat's eyes story where Percy Shaw laboured away in near-destitution for 5 years during the depression before someone in the Ministry of Transport recognised that with the blackout conditions in WWII in England, some sort of low-level road lighting system such as reflective marbles embedded in the road would be of some use. 

The cost of the Tuff Block Light is prohibitive: $US 80 each, plus all the wiring laid down the side of your driveway, or patio or sidewalk.  To get something like this to take off it would need a large government contract attached to some sort of safety bylaw, then when it was in production in a mass-market sort of way, one could start to do some quite nice things with these blocks.   On second thought,  I'll wait for one with photovoltaic cells.  On third thought, I'll just use a hand crank flashlight.  No. On fourth thought, I'll just eat more carrots and develop my night vision. 

João Luis Carrilho da Graça: Ponte Pedonal, Carpinteira

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Ponte Pedonal, Covilha. see reportage 403 when you get to the website.

It is odd which architects in other countries come to our attention and which don't.  João Luis Carrilho da Graça has a huge reputation in Portugal, many awards, a long and stellar career of relentlessly minimal sculptural modernist work.  Websites are full of dramatic photos of shooting white wall planes, hard blue skies.  The work of Alvaro Siza, who has a much larger critical reputation outside Portugal, appears almost hand-made in comparison: shaped and trogdylitic, lots of saudade, absent in da Graça.

However, FG+SG sent us this da Graça footbridge over the Carpinteira near Covilha a little while ago: new photographs, the bridge was designed in 2003 and finished in 2009.   It is a 220m pedestrian bridge, centre piece perpendicular to the stream bed and valley, the two end sections determined by anchoring points.   Hard to find much hard information on the engineering, materials or constructions but I did find this news clip which appears to discuss the controversial nature of the project:


As I write this, I'm also listening to a radio program about Louise Bourgeois who died a couple of days ago.  She says 'all my work is suggestive, not explicit.  The explicit is boring'.  This footbridge is very explicit, its engineering is beautifully calculated to just draw a brave line across the valley — and there it sits, nothing ulterior or mysterious about it.  One might wonder if this is the ultimate limitation of the modernists, that in the past 30 years of layered signification in urban environments and in architecture, this kind of minimalism ultimately says too little to sustain a conversation beyond its engineering. 

The question is perhaps why we have asked our architecture to speak eloquently about the human condition, rather than just containing, with some sort of grace, the human condition. 

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Ponte Pedonal Covilha, 2010

PLANT: roof garden at Nathan Phillips Square

PLANT. Sedum garden, Nathan Pillips Square, Toronto 2010.

Rooftop garden atop the podium at Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto.  Once the acme of Brasilia-like windswept concrete pavers named open space in the plan, the top of the podium is now a garden of sedums of various hues and heights.  Sedums store water in their leaves and are primitive fat-leaved clustering plants that one can imagine were chums of horsetails and such plants trampled by dinosaurs.   They are also known as Stonecrops, succulents and sempervivums – all Crassulaceae of various genuses.  Sempervivums (which means live forever) have a curious hermaphroditic reproductive cycle, and some species were used medicinally in ancient Greece.  They are also called houseleeks in some places, especially those with slate roofs on which they can live.  Good luck evidently. 
The podium garden will be a sturdy garden, frost resistant, drought tolerant and beautifully coloured.  The garden opened this week, pictures are on Plant's website.

Other things on this website include a really great 20' x 70' back yard in Cabbagetown: a minimal masterpiece which goes up a hill to a terrace at the very back walled by brick-filled gabions.  No grass, just deck, gravel and a folded metal plate stair that makes a path through precisely planted bands of plants chosen for seasonal colour and texture.  The planting pattern doesn't show in the photos, but on the plan one can see everything is planted in rows. 

The garden at the Schindler House comes to mind, reconstructed supposedly to Schindler's original plans where the ground was pushed about in strips: a ditch, a berm the shape of a speed bump, a flat bit: each condition planted with something different – what ever grew well in ditches went there for example, or specific grasses on the overly-drained berm.  There was a romantic relationship between the rigorous organisation of the garden and the willfulness of plants all shaggy and blowing about, and all of this with the concrete house walls as background. 

Plant's Wellesley Cottages garden has this same simplicity and the same uncompromising severity.  It is amusing, this fierce kind of organisation of the near-unorganisable.  It just looks so brave and so wonderful.

PLANT. Wellesley Cottage garden

Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira: MYCC Arquitectos

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira, MYCC Arquitectos, Madrid. 2010

MYCC  consists of three Spanish architects who studied variously in Dresden, Rotterdam, Vienna and Dortmund and then all arrived at ETSAMadrid, graduating in 2005.  Carmina Casajuana specialises in housing and urban design, Beatriz Casares works with Arquitectura Viva and Marcos Gonzalez is a specialist in urban environments. 

The project shown here is a pre-fabricated house in Galiza: Prefab House Cedeira. MYCC's statement about prefabrication and modularity clearly distinguishes between houses that are manufactured and those that are built – 'Something that leads us to believe in the efficient assembly line of an industrial building, covered and controlled, unlike a traditional work setting at the mercy of external factors that determine the construction.' 

Nothing too controversial here, this has been the argument for pre-fabrication for decades.  However, there isn't a great history of pre-fab housing in Europe: it simply isn't in their architectural tradition as it is in North America.  MYCC appears to be unhindered by the conventions of pre-fabrication with which our manufactured homes seem to struggle. 

Right, so it is about the design, not the process.  Perhaps.  This house has a loft, it has a glass front, it has a rusted steel screen over the glass front with workable shutters in it.  It is really beautiful, minimal, efficient, romantic.  It looks like an art gallery, it really is a cabin in the woods. 

Side walls and roof are the same material: from the photos it looks like an insulated steel panel.  We have these.  They are made in Airdrie and used to make ghastly imitation new urbanism housing for northern reserves.  However, here in the Casa Cedeira, the side walls and roof wrap the two storeys: the gable end walls are glass and steel.  How do we know this isn't Canada?  None of the steps have handrails and so they read as plane changes.  The main view of the ocean is screened, protected, rationed.  The relationship between house and landscape, even given that this house is newly constructed and the site is still scarred, is pretty uncompromising: it sits like a barn — neither the house nor the landscape are mediated or softened.  The hard line between building and site seems to have an urban sensibility to me.  Anything romantic about it is contained within the building itself, in the screen, in the light and shadows inside, not in its relationship with nature. 

I wonder if in Canada with our well discussed and theorised relationship with nature and survival, our cabins and cottages, camps and summer houses aren't too apologetic in their architecture, trying to either be invisible, or so deferential to things such as 'the view' that nature (whether it be the beach, the woods, or the front street) is over-exposed and unremitting.   Cedeira is more like a little fortress, autonomous and very much in control of its position.

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira,night. MYCC Arquitectos, Madrid, 2010

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

Sophie Fiennes. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, 2010Sophie Fiennes' Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is a documentary about Anselm Kiefer's vast workshop, installation and landscape at Barjac which he worked in and on between 1993 and 2009.  It shows not just the scale of his work, but the violence with which the work is made: blowtorches, sliding concrete, molten lead, shattered glass, ashes treaded into enormous canvases which are slowly raised to vertical, the ash falls away from a charred forest.  Violence isn't the right word. Primitive industrial processes make the work: they are manual, physical and involve much breakage: of buildings, of materials, of ideas, of clarity.  Paintings emerge as pieces in just one of many stages of construction. 

Barjac was an abandoned silk factory, and has been abandoned again.  Evidently, from a Guardian interview with Fiennes, the film is near wordless – an interview with a German journalist, but otherwise, just Kiefer working.  From the clips on the Over Your Cities website, the film watches, the filmmaker's gaze is intense and calm.  Sophie Fiennes has made two documentaries with Slavov Žižek, which perhaps is why Kiefer appears deceptively un-theorised in Over Your Cities: there is no critical voice-over telling us how to consider his relationship to Germany and Naziism, to ideology and interpretation.  There is just the material experience of Kiefer making art.  The critical stance is in how the film presents Kiefer – a Lacanian position, knowing that the interpretation of the work is both inevitable and uncontrollable. 

Kiefer's project is enormous – it is the investigation and recovery of a German history that was suppressed for his generation.  For those born just after the war and living in reconstructed, prosperous, blithely a-historical West Germany where the war was blamed on the Nazis, not the Germans, just how consequential the historic narrative of German supremacy at the heart of national socialism had been led to the rejection of any kind of symbolism, national narrative or mythic structure.  Kiefer's work is about such things, while rejecting such things.  This gives it its confrontational duality, while its physicality is how Keifer speaks.

João Mendes Ribeiro

João Mendes Ribeiro. Mala-Mesa, 1998

João Mendes Ribeiro is a Portuguese architect, set designer, performance artist, theorist. The core of Ribeiro's work, according to Vasco Pinto whose essay on Ribeiro one can read in the usual bizarre translation provided by Google, is Uma Mala-Mesa, a table which packs itself in and out of a suitcase.  This transformative action is minimal in form, going from motion to stasis, from parts to construction to object, from solidity to spatiality.  The suitcase-table has been constructed many times for different locations from Morocco to Berlin to Prague with slight variations each time, and presented as installation, performance, film and dance. Inherent in the suitcase-table is its double referencing, which Ribeiro takes into his architecture. 

Ribeiro came to my attention through a Portuguese architectural photographer, Fernando Guerro, FG+SG who regularly sends us portfolios of new projects.  Ribeiro and Cristina Guedes collaborated on the 2009 Casa das Caldeiras, a new art studies building at the University of Coimbra which used an old steam plant and added a new building to house a cafeteria, bookstore, academic spaces for graduate studies. Exhibition space is in the old coal room.

Pinto, writing from within Portuguese culture sees the Casa das Caldeiras as about the primacy of form, and in the 100 or so photographs of this project you can see the theatricality of many of the spatial decisions: staircases are great wood sculptures in white-walled galleries, an outside deck is as narrow and precarious as a gangway over a stage. 

If there are any double references it is in the elision of architecture and performance, the conceptual underpinning to Ribeiro's work.  The sense of architecture here is not narrowly described as programme, or brand, or image, or budget, or context.  If these five conditions circumscribe one's architecture, then that is the architecture that results.  Last week I went to an absolutely numbing lecture by a well-known and respected Canadian architect who spoke only in these terms.  When I wrote the other day about work being used merely as a trigger for topical critical discourse, it has to be understood that there must be something in the work to initially nourish the discourse, something more than a preoccupation with image and brand.

Why does new work from Europe often look so beautiful?  I don't think it is my un-decolonised self asking this question, rather it is a recognition that the terms of reference we work under are not the only ones that contribute to the making of architecture.

FG+SG. Casa das Caldeiras, Coimbra, Portugal. 2010