Wasteland Twinning Network hijacks the concept of ‘City Twinning’ and applies it to urban Wastelands in order to generate a network for parallel research and action.
CLOG explores, from multiple viewpoints and through a variety of means, a single subject particularly relevant to architecture now.
criticat: revue semestrielle de critique d’architecture
French publishing house: great catalogues that look east and south, not just west.
[brkt] 2 Goes Soft, edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Lola Sheppard. 'Soft refers to responsive, indeterminate, flexible and immaterial systems that operate through feedback, organization and resilience. These complex systems transform through time to acknowledge shifting and indeterminate situations — characteristics that are evident both in the dynamics of contemporary society and the natural environment'.
Darwin Grenwich sails the oceans of the world on Blue Monday, a CS36 traditional sloop, while maintaining his IT support business by email and on VOIP (403-283-1340). He is especially good on Macs.
Shane Neill. 'ASARCO: Anthropocene Anxieties and the Aesthetics of Remediation' in On Site review 29: geology, Spring 2013.ASARCO lead smelter site, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, MexicoShane Neill is a designer and cellist. His current endeavours examine antagonisms on the USA-Mexico border, seeking to undermine the border as a power apparatus and recasting it as a space of appearance.
from his article : 'Anthropocene anxieties are increasingly present in our collective imagination. Images such as those by Ed Burtynsky or Sebastiao Selgado feed these anxieties, placing first-world pursuits in opposition to natural orders. Additionally, shifts from industrial to ephemeral production are coupled with the rapid growth of cities into previously exurban industrial lands. The moral impetus to restore our relationship to the landscape is given economic force by our consumption of land. '
Almost guaranteed to contain things you will never find anywhere else.
To subscribe to the digital edition of On Site that operates across many devices, click on zinio above and it will take you to our place on Magazines Canada's digital newsstand.
Umculo Kawupheli. from the description on youtube, 'Original song with self-made video, featuring clips of the Queens back in the 1970s with their backing, Makhona Tsohle Band.'
1974: just two years to the Soweto Uprising, 14 years since Sharpeville, 10 years since the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.
Steve Bloom's photographs of this era were in this years London Festival of Photography in June. A BBC news documentary was made of Bloom describing some of the work:
Steve Bloom. Beneath the surface. Guardian Gallery, London, June 2012. All images copyright Steve Bloom/stevebloomphoto.com. Music by KPM Music. Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 31 May 2012
Not the perfectly recorded version that was in The Constant Gardener (below), but a live version (above) full of noise, heat and four beautiful dancers.
Krzysztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder. Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery, Nantes. 2012
Pays Expéditions négrières Angleterre 41 % Portugal 39 % France 19 % Hollande 5.7 % Danemark 1.2 %
Principaux ports Nombre d’expéditions Nantes 1714 Le Havre 451 La Rochelle 448 Bordeaux 419 Saint-Malo 218 Lorient 137 Honfleur 134 Marseille 88 Dunkerque 41
Wodiczko and Bonder's memorial is on the Quai de la Fosse in Nantes, the wharf where the slave ships moored before they left for Africa. The most extensive description, including drawings, is on the arcprospect site.
Arjen van der Merwe. Malawi 2010 is a series about modern and traditional culture. From van der Merwe's website: 'The fashionable models, in dresses by Cathy Kamthunzi, and shoes of Pec Fashion symbolize modern Malawian culture. They are placed in a traditional setting.'
Barthes' seminal essay on the writing of fashion talked about it as a system of signifiers coded and intelligible only to readers already in the system. It was written when fashion magazines showed images in black and white, low resolution. Captions and text carried colour, texture, narratives of elegance, aspiration, possibility. We don't have such writing anymore, captions to fashion images are simply lists of the clothes. The images carry everything – all the narratives of impossibility and unattainability. As we are continually told, couture is for selling perfume, the only thing from Dior we can all afford.
In the next issue of On Site, which is on the dialectic between the periphery and the laws of urbanism dictated from the core, Jason Price has written an essay on Arjen van der Merwe, a photographer in Malawi whose fashion portfolio uses Malawian models and garments posed in village settings. Price, living in Malawi, takes a rapier to this work, pointing out the coded signifiers that would perhaps pass us by.
For me, living here, i.e. not in Malawi, the narrative lodged in these images is a return to the village, surely an act of despair for anyone who has managed to escape their small town for a life of infinite possibility in the city. Despite being dressed in wonderful urban fashion and great shoes, beautiful sulky girls are shown lugging buckets from the pump, or making bricks, or sweeping dirt floors.
As a foil to these images, Tim Walker's portfolio of photos for Vogue with Agyness Deyn in Namibia are just as provocative. A particularly pale girl, beautifully dressed, appears to be stranded in a sand-filled abandoned house with a highly decorative, almost-dressed young Namibian man and a docile cheetah. It is a set of signifiers that rings all the bells of colonial privilege that allowed Europeans to live in Africa, to act badly, and yet be protected from the violence they attributed to all the peoples in the periphery. Walker's Namibia portfolio is on a very thin line between an ironic ode to that kind of wilful innocence and the casual belief that such relationships have an aesthetic, apolitical beauty.
Tim Walker. Agyness Deyn, Simon & Kiki the cheetah in sand storm, Kolmanskop, Namibia, Africa, 2011. for British Vogue.
Giulio Petrocco, photographer. Juba, 2011Giulio Petrocco took the photographs for Joshua Craze's article on Juba, South Sudan in On Site 25: identity. Petrocco is an Italian photojournalist who places himself in dire and dangerous circumstances: see for example, his work from Sana'a, the Yemeni spring which becomes progressively more violent, or a curious site: a neighbourhood in Queen's which was built on a swamp and was a mafia dump.
Through Petrocco's lens the third world seems to exist anywhere there is struggle. One wonders if the first world is a definition of sleep walking with plenty of rights and lots of food.
Joshua Craze is an essayist based in Juba, Southern Sudan. With Meg Stalcup, he investigated counterterrorism training in America, which was published by the Washington Monthly. Now maybe I am a naïve first world sleepwalker, but I found this study really upsetting – not that there is terrorism and counter-terrorism, but the massive distortions of identity and affiliation that can get one so easily killed. His piece for On Site wasn't quite so dismaying. It was about South Sudan, new country, no identity other than tribal groups which have animals as totemic markers. There was a perhaps spurious plan to rebuild Juba, the capital, according to a plan the shape of a rhinoceros, the totem of the current power group, the eye being the seat of government (and no doubt a great site for future protests – a Tahrir Square in the making). Frankly, I thought it looked reasonable as a plan. As reasonable as any other kind of abstract diagram upon which to base a city.
The distance between this idea and Juba's reality as shown in Petrocco's images is indeed vast, but the plan is so hopeful, so clean, so deceptively simple. For something of the complexity of this area see Craze's piece on Abyei in The Guardian.
Proposal for the rebuilding of Juba, South Sudan, 2010.
Women at the Ndebele Cultural Village, Loopspruit, Gauteng, South Africa 1999
I was looking for a picture of handprints used as decoration around the doorway of a mud brick house somewhere in Africa, stuccoed and painted by women. Clear in my mind, can't find the image anywhere.
On the way, found plenty of information on Ndebele house painting. This is a case of cultural coding that describes family values and histories passed down matrilineally (as the women did the house painting) that was completely opaque to the colonists. It is like having great billboards for resistance movements in a covert language that is, in the meantime, very decorative and so considered harmless. Also probably considered benign as it was smiling women doing it.
So many forms of cultural expression were banned in the colonial era if there was a hint of subversion to them or if they simply were not understood: the outlawing of the Salish potlach – something threatening about power and property there, the outlawing of sati – undue sacrifice of Hindu women to their husbands, outlawing of Blackfoot initiation dances – violent and frightening. Many of these things go underground and reappear as entertainments, living on often as performances for tourists but still speaking, under the radar, to those who understand what they really mean.
Vivienne Koorland. Close Your Little Eyes, 2010. Oil on stitched canvas 31" x 27" inches (79 x 68 cm) Collection the artist
Vivienne Koorland works in New York, is currently showing in London at East Central Gallery and grew up in South Africa, leaving it before the end of apartheid. Her mother was a hidden and smuggled child in Poland during WWII, ending up in a Jewish orphans home in South Africa in 1948.
Koorland's work is characteristically complex where everything from the kind of marks made, the material they are made with, the canvas or burlap or bookcovers they are made upon is heavy with historical memory, from her own conflicted childhood in Africa to her mother's loss of childhood and family to her own exile and homesickness for an impossible childhood that cannot be revisited. It is not just Germany, or just the holocaust, or just apartheid, or just the unfairness, or just the loss of material goods, or talents, or love; it is all these things, constantly jostling on the crowded historical surfaces of her work. Letters, writing, ledgers, sheet music, popular songs, maps – they all lie together.
Her working method reuses her own rejected drawings and paintings, burlap rice bags are stitched together to make a full canvas, their printed labels worked into the content. Her work is constantly being remade and re-referenced. Although nominally about the past, it is the present that is often discussed: a magnificent gold map of Africa is so simple, yet so complex in reference to gold mining, to a shimmering beautiful potential and a hateful process of extraction. This is work that sinks in complexity rather than skimming on a too easily grasped surface.
Vivienne Koorland. Gold Africa, 2010. oil and pigment on stitched burlap. 68.5 x 61 inches (27 x 24 cm) Private Collection, London
David Osborne. The Jompy water heater.This was one of the entries into the Shell World Challenge last year. It is very clever: a flat coil of hardened aluminum alloy, like a flat skillet, that sits between the fire and the cooking pot. What looks like a handle is attached to water, cold or contaminated which circulates through the coil, is heated and comes out of the other end of the coil hot and boiled.
Although in use in South Africa, Kenya and India, in theory it is the same as the hot water on demand burners which are slowly replacing the elephantine hot water tank that lurks in most basements. The Jompy is much more minimal however, and consequently more adaptable to different conditions and uses. David Osborne, a plumber and gas fitter from Troon in Scotland was on his honeymoon in a water-challenged part of Africa and figured out this inexpensive way of boiling water with fire already doing some other task such as cooking food.
David Osborne. The Jompy in demonstration in Kenya by Celsius Solar's enthusiastic representative, Kalfan Okoth, just reminding everyone that this is a Scottish product.
The Western Desert. WWIIGaddafi expelled all Italians from Libya in 1970. Libya had been the North African staging post for the Italian-German axis in WWII, as Libya had been under Italian control/occupation since the 19th century.
On Al Jazeera last night there was a map of the north coast of Libya with Tubruq on it which, when it was known as Tobruk, was the site of a major and extended battle during WWII. Rommel held Tobruk for 240 days and then lost it to the Eighth Army.
On the maps we are seeing on the news, one realises just how close Tunisia and Libya are to Sicily. Lampedusa, a miniature and bleak little island 70 miles off the coast of Tunisia is still part of Italy and until 1994 had a US Coast Guard base on it, used to monitor Libya and fired upon by Libya after the US bombed it in 1986 killing, among many others, Gaddafi's daughter. Lampedusa is the main entry point for African refugees/ illegal immigrants / economic migrants to Europe. Although closer to Tunisia, Libya is the easier country to leave from, evidently.
During WWII Tunisia and Libya were simply known by the Allies as the Western Desert. Strategically important, it was the launching point for the Italian invasion which began with the landings on Sicily. In On Site 22: WAR, Aisling O'Carroll wrote about the use of camouflage in the desert where whole dummy armies were installed in misleading locations. This was a North African war conducted, it seems, without local involvement, something that seems difficult to believe now.
At the time the google satellite took the picture of Green Square in Tripoli, this week the site of an emergent genocide, it was used as a parking lot. it is across the street from a vast museum and archaeology complex, on the other side, to the south east is an immense stretch of parks and squares. Directly south and south west is a bit of city – shops and offices, directly north a large pond, a divided highway and the Mediterranean with a built up edge – all gardens and plaza.
Green Square isn't a place of compression, it leaks all over into adjacent flat spaces. One can read urban patterns only so far. Tripoli has an unused traffic circle, it has larger open spaces, it has spaces adjacent to more powerful government buildings than the National Museum, so why Green Square?
Ah, on a tourist site I find (from 2009): 'The square is one of the most important celebration places in Libya. Muammar Kaddafi addresses his speeches to the nation from here on the most important days such as 1st September Revolution anniversary. . .. Traffic circles the square and it is full of speeding cars day and night.'
So it has been made a potent urban site by association with the reiterated revolutionary origins of Gaddafi who came to power in 1969 with a coup against King Idris. He was 27, Gaddafi was.
Cristovao Canhavato (Kester). Throne of Weapons, 2001Transformaçaõ de Armas em Enxadas (Transforming Arms into Tools) is a project initiated by Bishop Dinis Sengulane in Mozambique in 1992 to exchange the weapons accumulated during the 1976-1992 civil war for tools such as sewing machines, bicycles, hoes and shovels. One village exchanged all their arms for a tractor. The weapons are decommissioned, cut up into scrap metal which is then used by artists.
The resulting sculptures are powerful anti-war statements, diagrammatic in their political import: the first image on the TAE website is of a saxophone made from an AK-47 and a bazooka. The caption reads: 'It is the antithesis of the weapons used to construct it. It regroups people rather than separating them. It's an instrument of peace rather than an instrument of death.'
In 2005, in conjunction with Christian Aid which supports TAE, Bishop Sengulane gave an enormous Tree of Life to the British Museum. It is as one would expect, a large metal baobab tree trunk made of gun barrels.
A more subtle piece is Throne of Weapons, 2001, by Cristovao Canhavato (Kester) who studied at the Núcleo de Arte in Maputo in 1998, becoming involved in the TAE project. This is a generation of artists, many of whom were child soldiers, who grew up knowing only civil war and the tools of civil war. Art here is instrumental in turning those tools – chunks of metal, plastic and wood – into things that war cannot appropriate.
The Throne of Weapons which featured recently on BBC's A History of the World in 100 Objects turns the weapons of war back into politics: thrones, chairs, seats – these are the euphemisms for power, especially during war when it is those who sit in chairs that conduct the war, not the children with the AK-47s.
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.
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
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.
Monday, July 23, 2012 at 8:40AM 
Steve Bloom. Beneath the surface. Guardian Gallery, London, June 2012. All images copyright Steve Bloom/stevebloomphoto.com. Music by KPM Music. Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 31 May 2012
