Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 04:02:36 -0500
Subject: summer x reading 2
From: jonni jemp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unlikely Encounters on Tour: Dresden, Berlin
On Tour: Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space
Featuring Ala Plastica (La Plata), Maclovio Rojas/Borderhack
(Tijuana), Park Fiction (Hamburg) and Sarai Media Lab (Delhi).
The Congress Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space, taking place in
Hamburg St. Pauli from June 26 to 29 will be travelling across Germany
in the first week of July to report the results of the Hamburg
Congress to the partner projects Dresden Postplatz and ErsatzStadt
Berlin.
* * *
Tuesday, July 01
7.00 pm
Dresden Postplatz
Dresden Postplatz Project Office
Entrance Wilsdruffer Str. 24
01067 Dresden
Dresden Postplatz
Different participants in the project take artistic, theoretical and
discursive approaches to the subject of the city and public spheres
which combine and complement each other within a uniting concept.
<http://www.dresden-postplatz.de>www.dresden-postplatz.de
* * *
Thursday, July 03
6.00 pm
ErsatzStadt/ metroZones
"Hier entsteht" - Pavillon of the Volksbhne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
10178 Berlin
ErsatzStadt
Based on the assumption that the reality of urban practises renders
the classic bourgeois conception of the european city obsolete,
ErsatzStadt focuses on strategies of participative architecture. Hier
entsteht(Under Construction...) is a temporary side building of the
Volksbhnepavillion that serves as a forum for the theory and and
practise of social participation and self-organised intervention in
architecture.
<http://www.ersatzmedia.info>www.ersatzmedia.info
* * *
Ala Plastica, La Plata
Silvina Babich, Alejandro Meitin, Rafael Santos
Ala Plastica works on the rhizomatic linking of ecological, social,
and artistic methods. In the former La Plata zoo, the group occupied
the former library in early 1991 to reconstruct from there the public
space destroyed by the dictatorship. Ala Plastica combine direct
interventions, analyses of satellite photos, and precisely defined
concepts to a parallel universe without giving up the symbolic
potential of art.
In 1998, Ala Plastica went to the swamps of Rio de La Plata to develop
together with the local population methods to clean the ecosystem
Shell had polluted with crude oil. The large corporation initially
denied being responsible and then failed in fighting the catastrophe
using its global methods, due to the complexity of the delicate
swampland. They caused even more harm.
Ala Plastica, in contrast, included the local knowledge of the native
population living off this land in an experimental process together
with external biologists. Ala Plastica finally succeeded in winning
> the support of UNESCO and thus creating a dynamic relationship between
local knowledge and a global institution.
Through projects such as these, Ala Plastica is successful both in
intervening directly and at the same time exposing a structure: they
clearly mark what a catastrophe caused on a global level is, as well
as the difference between local and global knowledge. They confront
global ignorance and stupidity with a radical alternative approach.
http://orbita.starmedia.com/alaplastica/
* * *
Maclovio Rojas / Borderhack, Tijuana
Speakers: Luis Humberto Rosales, (Borderhack Tijuana),Christoph
Twickel (Hamburg)
Maclovio Rojas is a renegade ejido settlement located on the
Mexican-Californian border, 7 miles from Tijuana, Mexicos fastest
growing city. Tijuana is only a stones throw away from San Diego, the
richest city in the United States and from the worlds most strictly
guarded border.
The Mexican Revolution in 1910 granted landless peasants the right to
collectively take possession of unused land in order to cultivate it
and live on it. The article establishing the ejido rights was deleted
> from the Mexican constitution in 1993 to make the country more
attractive for foreign investors within the frame of NAFTA. Maclovio
Rojas is an ejido mainly directed by women with a Zapatista
background. It is inhabited by around 1000 families who emigrated from
the south of Mexico. The self-constructed, illegal, autonomous town
with its own administration, schools, and public facilities is
permanently threatened by demolition; the community organisers are
subject to constant repression by the police. Parallel to guarding and
further developing the colony, the settlers pursue a clever networking
policy with artists, church and activist groups on both sides of the
border and organise union activities in the maquiladoras.
Borderhack develops actions directed against the border between Mexico
and the United States. Luis Humberto Rosales is a medical doctor and a
founder of Indymedia Tijuana. Christoph Twickel is a Hamburg based
journalist who just spent some time in Maclovio Rojas who will report
on the situation there and show some video material.
indymedia tijuana (mostly espanol): http://tj.linefeed.org/
about maclovio rojas: http://webnetarts.com/socialjustice/maclovio.html
an artists story about maclovio rojas:
http://www.variant.ndtilda.co.uk/4texts/David_Harding.html
a quakers report about maclovio rojas:
http://members.aol.com/WestQuakes/maclovio2000.html
about borderhack:
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors/ilichtext.html
* * *
Park Fiction, Hamburg
Speaker: Christoph Schaefer
"Someday, wishes will leave the house and hit the streets.... They'll
put an end to the reign of boredom and bureaucratically managed
misery." This was the leitmotif for a group of artists and musicians
who joined a citizens' initiative in 1994 in the harbor area of St.
Pauli, the red-light district in Hamburg and one of the citys poorest
quarters. Their goal was to stop plans for construction on the last
remaining open space and to have the city build a collectively
designed park instead. The campaign and the planning process that
followed brought together and enriched art, subculture, and politics
in unique ways. lt was not just about open space, but about organizing
a collective process guided by the individual wishes and desires of
the quarter's inhabitants. This "wishproduction" resisted the dominant
interests of economic policy propagated by "the ImageCity".
"Infotainment" (lectures, actions, concerts, raves, open-air movie
screenings, and exhibitions) formed the basis for the planning
process, reflecting the social, historical, and political importance
of gardens and parks and the construction of public spaces. In order
to make it possible for peopie to articulate their wishes, artists
Christoph Schfer and Cathy Skene developed various tools for the
> initiative: a wish archive, a garden library, a clay modeling office,
a wish hotline, a planning container, and an action kit (mobile
planning briefcase). The artists also distributed questionnaires and
plans for the public to fill out.
Margit Czenki joined the Park Fiction group in 1997 to capture on film
the energetic spirit of the planning process. The film shows the wide
variety of wishes as well as the project's different participants. The
open planning process allowed participants to filter and combine
aesthetic and practical desires with political achievement. Frequently
mentioned wishes, such as a fountain, were matched with individual
plans, resulting in the "Pirate Fountain," for example, while everyone
agreed to the wish for a "strawberry tree house where grown-ups aren't
allowed."
The planned construction was stopped. After eight years of radical
democratic urban planning and negotiations, Park Fiction is now being
realized. lt is a unique example of a combination of Conceptual Art
and collective subjectivity, navigating between private and public
space and various cultural fields: a project in which differing
interests were able to benefit each other. "The park is a utopian
> place; its model is paradise.... The park shows us what the world
could be like" (film quote).
(Christiane Mennicke in the Documenta11_shortguide)
www.parkfiction.org
Theoretical background (1995/98):
http://www.parkfiction.org/infotainment_urbanist_concept.html
* * *
Sarai Media Lab, Delhi
Speakers: Mrityunjoy Chatterjee, Shveta Sarda
Sarai is an experimental field for collective digital work, an urban
research centre, and a media lab. Sarai reads urban everyday life and
publishes fantastic readers that accomplish the feat of dealing with
urban studies, academic analyses of the citys hotbed of rumours, and
everyday poetry - with dignity and in a horizontal way. Sarais work is
not limited to the Internet or the art business, however, but conveys
open source concepts to other social fields to the city.
In Delhis self-organised, informal settlements, which are constantly
under the threat of being demolished, Sarai operates computer labs and
urban studies centres called Cybermohallah. Young people describe the
cities within the city that remain uncharted territory on official
maps. With their sensitive accounts of improvised settlements, the
youths not only create a fragmentary urban literature of the
mega-cities; their poetry, which is published in Hindi and English,
reinforces the settlements on a second level. A medium completely
remote from power turns into an element of a constituting power. Works
by Sarai and the Raqs Media Collective could be viewed at Documenta >
11.
www.sarai.net
* * *
Park Fiction presents: Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space
Exhibition of the Park Fiction Documenta11 Installation: June 19 -
July 6, 2003, daily from 12 am to 10 pm.
International congress: June 26 - 29, 2003
Hamburg St. Pauli, Reeperbahn 1.
www.parkfiction.org
Backed by 'Hafenrandverein fuer selbstbestimmtes Leben und Wohnen auf
St.Pauli, e.V.'
Sponsored by 'kulturstiftung des bundes'
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