Last month, i had the chance to attend the Nonument Symposium dedicated to hidden, abandoned and forgotten monuments of the 20th century at CAMP, Prague’s Centre for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning.

Banner of Peace, Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo: HHS/MPAS

Destruction of the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia, Bulgaria

‘Nonuments’ are architectural structures that suffer from neglect, oversight and a lack of recognition. A nonument can be a hotel, a power plant, a high-rise building, a railway, a former anti-aircraft tower, a monumental sculpture in the middle of the city or in the middle of nowhere, etc.

Their status often raise heated debates. For historians and architects they constitute valuable parts of our built heritage. For tourists, they are often concrete clickbait, icons of ruin porn worth a selfie or two. For others, they need to disappear. Either for political reasons or for speculative ambitions. Or simply, as several participants have underlined during the symposium, because we already have so many monuments that require protection status,

Although nonuments can be found all over the world, the Symposium looked closely at several cases of nonuments from Eastern Europe where the structures often present an added layer of controversy. Many citizens and politicians from this area of the old continent see them as symbols of oppression. To them, they are outdated, inconvenient and “too Communists.”

Iriški Venac TV tower (detail), in Iriški Venac near Novi Sad, Serbia, 1975. Photo Fruskac

Iriški Venac TV tower (detail), in Iriški Venac near Novi Sad, Serbia, 1975. Photo Fruskac

The interdisciplinary symposium combined theory, documentation of artistic interventions, historical considerations and discussions with the public to reflect on how we should engage with structures that have intrinsic values but remain contentious.

One of the many issues that emerged during the event is that it is urgent to start a reflection around these structures before they fade into oblivion: their architects are dying and, all around us, public space is shrinking.

Nonument! Symposium at CAMP in Prague. Part 1

The videos of the symposium are online. I’ve embedded part 1 above. You can find part 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 on the fb page of CAMP. Below are some of the notes i wrote down while i was in Prague. This first chapter of my report is focusing on the historical and the architectural elements. The second chapter, which i’ll publish later this week, will look at the artistic interventions i discovered during the symposium.

Flak tower nicknamed “Peter” was part of Vienna air defence during WWII. Photo: Joshua Koeb

Flak tower in Arenbergpark, Vienna. Photo: Bwag

Let’s kick off with curator and art producer Jürgen Weishäupl’s investigation into the thorny legacy of Vienna’s six flack towers. Built between 1942 and 1945 by the Nazis to protect the historical centre of Vienna from Allied air strikes, the massive blockhouses are an embarrassing reminder of Austria’s darkest moments.

The Nazis had originally thought that after they’d had won the war, they would clad these concrete giants in white marble and convert them into victory monuments to fallen German soldiers. After WWII, the flak towers stood empty for many years. One is located within a military base of the Austrian Army, one has become an aquarium, one is used as a storage facility by MAK, one has been leased by a data company with a plan to turn it into data centres and several projects are considered for the others. To this day no official decision has been taken as to what the city should do with this difficult legacy.

Buzludzha monument. Photo

Inside the auditorium of the Buzludzha Monument, 2019. Image courtesy Nonument group

Inside the auditorium of the Buzludzha Monument while 3D scanning the whole structure, 2019. Image courtesy Nonument group

In her talk titled Buzludzha, aka “Bulgaria’s UFO”, – The Apotheosis of the Socialist Art in Bulgaria, art historian Aneliya Ivanova looked at the spectacular former headquarter of the Bulgarian Communist Party.

The Buzludzha Monument served the combined functions of a memorial, a museum and a ceremonial venue. It was built on the site where, 90 years earlier, Dimitar Blagoev and his followers had met to found the first social democratic party in the Balkans; where, in 1868, Bulgarian rebels fought against the forces of the Ottoman Empire. They lost the battle but it served as an inspiration for the Liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottomans ten years later.

Work on the monument began in 1974. 9 meters had to be shaved from the hilltop to give the structure its stable, prominent position. It was the biggest project in Bulgaria at the time. Extra taxes were collected and people had to donate and pay for special stamps in order to fund the construction. As a consequence, most people resented the project right from the start.

The Buzludzha Monument remained open for 8 years. After the government’s fall from power in 1989, the site was abandoned and left open to vandalism. Inside the monument, the mosaics have fallen to the ground and most of the artwork has been removed or destroyed.

Since January 2018, guards have been placed at the site to deter tourists from entering the building.

There’s been plans to turn the place into a hotel, a museum, a spa, etc. But that would of course require a lot of money and with each passing day, Buzludzha is becoming more of ruin. That’s why the The Nonument Group, an artist collective whose interventions attempt to bring more awareness to the issues caused by nonsustainable management of architectural heritage, have recently traveled to Bulgaria to do a 3D scan of both the inside and the outside of the monument.

Kiosk K67 as Tobacco and Newspaper Stand. Image Museum of Architecture & Design Ljubljana, via archdaily

Savin Sever, Mladinska Knjiga Printing House in Ljubljana. Photo via architectuul

Miloš Kosec, an architect and the author of Ruins as an Architectural Object, took examples from Slovenian modernist infrastructures to illustrate how and why some nonumental infrastructures have failed the test of time: an elegant printing house in Ljubljana that once closed never really found a way to be reused adequately; an entirely new city built on the Slovene-Italian border in 1948 along a 2 km long boulevard that started nowhere and ended nowhere; etc.

He did mention one structure that is still successful today: the wonderful k67 kiosk, a modular structure designed in 1966 by Saša J. Mächtig. It could be used as single units or combined to create large agglomerations. The kiosk has been used (and is still being used) as newspaper stand, parking-attendant booths, market stall, ticket booths, lottery stands, bee hive, etc. It has now been re-commodified as design icon and a mobile ruin offering endless reinventions, permutations and functions.

Kosec contrasted the kiosk with current forms of small urban infrastructure: CCTV, anti-terrorist bollards, anti-vandalism benches, anti-immigrant fences, etc. At first, it looked as if they would be ephemeral but they have become permanent. They might use the visual language of being flexible and transitory but they are here to stay. The other fairly recent architectural infrastructure he mentioned is the data center. Energy-hungry, often built in the middle of nowhere, with an extremely bland appearance to remain as anonymous as possible, data centres reflect the lack of transparency and accountability of today’s internet and remind us that infrastructure is not neutral.

Bolt958, Aktentát Transgas, 2017. An action to preserve the Transgas building in Prague. Photos

Ladislav Zikmund-Lender, a researcher in art history, gave a passionate speech in defence of the monuments and structures built over the past few decades. He also tried to examine the reasons why we are still unable to protect public and industrial buildings from the 1970s and 1980s Central East Europe.

Zikmund-Lender remarked that while most people lament the destruction or lack of renovation of buildings from the first half of the 20th Century, they tend to be indifferent when yet another building from the second half of the 20th century is dismantled and replaced by ugly shopping malls and other eyesores. For many people in Eastern Europe, these monuments are associated with communism, with an era they want to leave in the past. The demolition trend observed over the past 10 to 15 is not random he believes.

Hotel Praha in Prague

Hotel Praha’s grand staircase. Photo: Courtesy of Sigmar and OKOLO (via)

Hotel Praha’s bowling alley. Photo: Courtesy of Sigmar and OKOLO (via)

Hotel Praha in Prague is one of the examples the art historian gave of this trend. The Brutalist design dates from the early 1970s but the hotel was only finally completed in 1981. Its architecture closely followed the hill upon which it was erected. The spaces and furniture inside were the result of a collaboration between the best craftsmen, designers and decorators in Czechoslovakia. The hotel quickly became the location of choice for visiting communist dignitaries.

The hotel was privatized in the early 2000s. The new owner, perhaps not the most competent businessman in town, maintained that it was impossible to manage the hotel in a sustainable way. His claim was relayed in the press and so the hotel’s fate was settled. In 2014, in spite of the strong opposition from architects and historians, the hotel was demolished under the pretence that it was an unprofitable, unsustainable structure that couldn’t be fixed.

The building of Transgas, Prague. Photo: Ondrej Kohout

Zikmund-Lender also analysed the case of the Transgas building erected in Prague between 1972 and ’78 in the Brutalist style as a control center for the Transgas pipeline. Part of the complex served as the Federal Ministry of Fuel and Energy. At the time, people assumed that the state would take care of the building forever. But that didn’t happen. Politics changed and the public spaces were left to degrade. The Transgas building was being demolished while we were discussing its fate in the Nonument Symposium.

Zikmund-Lender ended his contribution to the symposium with 5 requests:

1. Stop pretending that this is not political! This architecture is socialist in many ways. It was paid by the state and it promotes the idea of modernity without capitalism.

2. Ask questions while you can. The career of the architects of these buildings plummeted after 1989. They were made to feel guilty, sometimes they were even fired from their positions. We have to talk with them, understand the circumstances and context of their work.

3. Forget Brutalism and Le Corbusier. In the East, architects of these decades knew about Le Corbusier and about Brutalism in France and the UK but they interpreted it in their own way.
4. Your building is our city: public interest and not just private interest has to be taken into consideration. We don’t need new buildings, we need to think about the carbon footprint of new constructions.
5. Stop lying about the real reason to take down these buildings. Instead, research, understand and don’t judge. Fight and resist their demolition.

Bratislava Castle, Baroque garden. Photo

Architecture historian Peter Szalay recounted the absurd history of the renovations of the Bratislava Castle. Burnt in the 19th century, the castel was left as a slowly deteriorating ruin until the middle of the 20th century. It was then remodelled in a Neo-Romantic style with a decidedly modern interior. The castle has recently been revamped again. This time in Neo-Baroque style with white stucco and gold that are supposed to bring back a certain idea of the glorious past of the city.

Things got even stranger when it was decided to build a garage under the castle. Remains of Celtic cities were found underground but, instead of renouncing the parking lot, the city decided to quietly push aside some of the Celtic remains into a small space. Then they built the garage and put a Baroque garden on top. The decision demonstrates the irrationality of this type of nationalism, the self-narcissism of a choice one would expect from an absolute monarch.

Similar manipulative rhetoric is sometimes used to justify the destruction of modernist buildings, Szalay concluded. Sometimes the destruction is presented as being part of a “healing process”, sometimes it’s the “un-ecological state” of the building that is used as an excuse.

Mihajlo Mitrović, Western City Gate, 1977. Photo by jaime.silva

Mihajlo Mitrović, Western City Gate, 1977. Photo by Błażej Pindor 2003 (via)

Historian Vladimir Dulović brought our attention to the fate of the Genex Tower, aka Western City Gate, one of the icons of New Belgrade and its brutalist architecture. A symbol still visible, but now almost abandoned.

Western city gate was built in 1980 in the brutalist style by architect Mihajlo Mitrović. It is formed by two towers connected with a two-storey bridge and a revolving restaurant at the top. The taller tower is residential, while the other one was owned by the Genex company.

After the war, socialist Yugoslavia was perceived as negative and embarrassing. The Genex tower was left empty and is now covered by a huge billboard, the concrete shows signs of damage and the communal areas are left in very bad conditions. The owners have tried several times to sell the building but no one was wants to bid. On the other hand, Brutalism is very fashionable again, tourists in Belgrade are eager to see “something very communist” and residents of the tower understand that the place still has a lot of potential. However, the government is not intervening and most people within Serbia don’t appreciate what they see as “Socialist architecture”. What protects the building now are the residents who live there and its huge size (it enjoys the aura of being the tallest building in Belgrade but not for long.)

Western City Gate is a monument to its own era and also to the way we’ve been treating the monuments of these past few decades.

Hybrid Space Lab, Virtual recreation of the Valley of the Fallen

Elizabeth Sikiaridi and Frans Vogelaar from Hybrid Space Lab, a interdisciplinary platform for architects, urbanists, designers, media artists and engineers, introduced us to Deep Space, a long-term investigative program that explores politics of memory, controversial space and monuments, digitalization and heritage.

One of the cases they are working on at the moment is not located in Eastern Europe but in Spain. Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen) is a vast complex hosting a Francoist regime monument, a basilica and a monumental memorial in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, near Madrid. Franco claimed that the structure symbolized reconciliation after the civil war. Which is a bit cynical when you know that the structure was built partly by the forced labor of Spanish republican political prisoners and that after his rise to power, the Caudillo continued to persecute and kill political opponents.

Valle de los Caídos hosts a mass grave containing the bones of 33,000 combatants of a conflict that Franco contributed to by helping to lead a military coup against democracy. Only two graves are marked: the one of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falangist party, and Franco’s, the only person interred in the Valley who did not die in the Civil War.

Hybrid Space Lab is exploring ways to re-signify, to bring new meaning to the controversial place by adding an Augmented Reality layer that would allow “the other side”, the one of the victims of the regime, to finally contribute to a narrative that has so far glorified a painful moment of the history of Spain. Deep Space also suggests creating a Center for Civil War Research and a Global Center for Peace and Interpretation inside the site’s buildings.

Jan Kempenaers, Spomenik #1 (Podgaric, Croatia), 2006

Jan Kempenaers, Spomenik #9 (Jasenovac), 2007

Art historian Branislav Dimitrijevič closed the symposium with a brilliant keynote titled “Egypt” rather than “October”: Incongruences in Interpreting Yugoslav National-liberation Monuments, Then and Now.

He looked at the debate around Spomenik, the Yugoslav memorials that went viral online after Jan Kempenaers photographed them in 2010. The photos glamourized the monuments and introduced them into the canon of modern sculpture. However, warned Dimitrijevič, the photos show structures isolated from their surrounding which gives them a fascinating aura of mystery, exoticism and otherness. Both the historical and the geographical contexts are excluded from the canonisation of these sculptures. In this type of vision, they are commodified and exposed to commercial exploitation. Countries from ex-Yugoslavia need to reclaim this part of their history and bring it into a more thoughtful, more nuanced light.

Nonument is an ongoing research and artistic project initiated by MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art in Ljubljana. The two-day art and theory symposium was organised by Yvette Vašourková, an architect and founding member of CCEA MOBA, the Centre for Central European Architecture in Prague in collaboration with Neja Tomšič and Martin Bricelj Baraga from MOTA.

If you want to know more about the project, check the growing database on Nonument website which is part of MAPS, Mapping and Archiving Public Space co-operation project. Six organisations have contributed to this database: the Centre for Central European Architecture: CCEA (Prague), WH Media / Beamy Space (Vienna), Tačka Komunikacije (Belgrade), House of Humor and Satire (it’s in Gabrovo and i want to go now), ARTos Foundation (Nicosia) and MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art (Ljubljana). The project is co-financed by Creative Europe.

Second part of an overview of the Nonument Symposium dedicated to hidden, abandoned and forgotten monuments of the 20th century which took place last June at CAMP, Prague’s Centre for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning.

Neja Tomšič and Martin Bricelj Baraga – Nonument Group, From Nowhere to Noplace – Pioneer Railway, 2019. Photo by Peter Giodani. More images

Deimantas Narkevičius, 20 July 2015, 2016. Photo

The term Nonument denotes 20th century architecture, monuments and public spaces that have undergone a shift in symbolic meaning or have lost it, as a consequence of political and social changes.

Artist and writer Neja Tomšič described with great clarity the difference between monument and nonument. During the discussion at the end of the first panel, she explained that the status of a space that has been labelled as a monument is clear, it is regarded as heritage and should remain untouched.

The concept of Nonument, on the other hand, attempts to open up an arena that acknowledges that some spaces or objects encompass conflicts and/or polarised visions. A nonument embodies historical processes and tensions that see people debate whether it should be demolished or preserved. What matters then is not whether this space/objet should be destroyed or protected but how we can retain its ambivalence, how we can acknowledge all the different dimensions and discussions that accompany this nonument.

The videos of the symposium are online. And if you have the time, i’d also recommend you have a look at the videos of the first Nonument Symposium which took place last year in Ljubljana.

In my previous story, i summed up some of the key ideas presented by historians, architects and urban theorists during the Nonument Symposium. This time, i’d like to write a synopsis of some of the artistic ideas and projects i discovered during the event:

Vladimír Turner with Vojtěch Fröhlich, Jan Šimánek and Ondřej mladý, Osvícení / Enlightenment, 2012

Vladimír Turner with Vojtěch Fröhlich, Jan Šimánek and Ondřej mladý, Osvícení / Enlightenment (Making of video), 2012

Vladimír Turner gave a very entertaining talk about the guerrilla action he and his friends organised in 2012. One night, the group of artists/activists climbed onto the structure of a billboard advertising luxury cars and redirected its lamps to illuminate a nearby sculpture. Simple, smart, efficient. The artwork got the attention it deserved. The huge advertising eyesore was plunged into darkness.

The sculpture, located by the Barrandovský Most bridge in Prague, is a cast-concrete work that sculptor Josef Klimeš made in 1989. The company behind the billboard initially wanted to use the sculpture as a pedestal for its advertising structure (!!!?!) but when the sculptor threw them out of his studio and told them they were not allowed to do so, they simply installed the billboard close to the artwork, making it almost impossible to see the sculpture while you drive by, especially during the night since the lights shine only on the advertising space.

This artistic action rectified a wrong and denounced the visual advertising pollution that pervades Prague and other cities. The light kept on illuminating the sculpture for a full week. The apparent lack of response by the owners of the billboard space might be explained by the fact that advertising is sometimes installed without any official permission from the city.

The video that documents the guerrilla intervention is an invitation for other artists and activists to replicate or adapt the action in their own cities.

The Pioneer Railway. Photo: courtesy of the Slovenian Railway Museum

The work brigades are building Ljubljana Pioneer railway in March 1948. Photo: courtesy of the Slovenian Railway Museum

Pioneer Railway, Ljubljana, Slovenia, in operation 1948-1954. Photo: Nonument group

Both architect Danica Sretenović and members of the art collective Nonument Group talked about their attempts to give a presence to a nonument that’s almost invisible nowadays: The Pioneer Railway inaugurated in Ljubljana in 1948.

Part of a series of “pioneer railways” built by the Yugoslavian government, this fully operational smaller-scale railway was made specifically for children. Kids performed all the jobs (except for the train driving) under the supervision of adult railway workers.

The train would run at a very slow pace on the 3,9 km long tracks along Ljubljana. The railway was not part of the wider infrastructure, it ran independently, didn’t stop at any major station and it ended its course in an open field where there was little to do except pick up mushroom when it was the season. The Pioneer Railway was a source of entertainment, an educational tool and a way to get children excited about technology.

Initially, Ljubljana’s Pioneer Railway was very popular (there wasn’t much else for children to do at the time), but the public quickly lost interest and the line closed down in 1954. The rail tracks were removed, the train stations were left to decay or were repurposed. Part of the line is now a bicycle lane. Each time memorial plaques have been installed along the original route to inform passersby about its history, they were destroyed. Over and over again, reflecting the kind of uneasiness spaces and works from Socialist time often trigger in some Eastern European countries.

Neja Tomšič and Martin Bricelj Baraga – Nonument Group, From Nowhere to Noplace – Pioneer Railway, 2019. Photo by Peter Giodani

Neja Tomšič and Martin Bricelj Baraga – Nonument Group, From Nowhere to Noplace – Pioneer Railway, 2019. Photo by Peter Giodani

Nonument Group’s intervention was based on research in the archives of the Pioneer Railway and on interviews with the builders, users and its other workers. Called “From Nowhere to Noplace”, the performance consisted in a participative soundwalk along the cycle lane that follows the old train track.

The light and sound choreography led visitors on a night walk that addressed themes of memory, subjective experience and erasure in relation to infrastructure and ideology.

Nicolas Grospierre, Balneological Hospital Water Tower, Druskininkai, Lithuania, 2004

Nicolas Grospierre, Yellow Housing Estate, Warsaw, Poland, 2005

Nicolas Grospierre, Abandoned solar radiotelescope, Crimean Laser Observatory, Katsiveli, Crimea, Russia, 2012

Nicolas Grospierre‘s A Subjective Atlas of Modern Architecture started its successful life as a Tumblr in 2003 and continued as a series of exhibitions and books.

The artist (who trained as a political scientist) presents the images he took of various Modernist monuments across the world as a sequence dictated by the forms of the buildings, creating thus a flow of architectural shapes. This choice quickly reveals that, although the modernist language is universal, form doesn’t always follow function in this type of architecture.

During his presentation at the symposium, the photographer made an interesting observation. Many of these modernist buildings were schools, churches, bus stops, hospitals, places of gathering, hospitals, public sculptures, etc. What they had in common is that they didn’t generate any profit by themselves and they embodied a faith that tomorrow would be better. Things are different today. First of all, we’ve stopped believing in a bright future. Second, financial investment has become the main criteria when it comes to filling urban space with new constructions.

Nicolas Grospierre, House of Soviets, Kaliningrad, Russia, 2012

The House of Soviets seen above has an amusing story. As Grospierre explained, local people call it the “sunken robot” because it looks like the head of a robot buried in the ground up to the shoulders. The building was never finished and kept its concrete appearance for years until Vladimir Putin visited Kaliningrad. The building was then hastily covered in blue panels to make it look like it was still under construction. Now the building is as abandoned as ever but thanks to its Potemkin façade, it looks even more like a robot than before.

Deimantas Narkevičius, Once in the XX Century (still from the film), 2004

Deimantas Narkevičius’s artistic practice examines the relationship of personal memories to political histories, particularly those of his native Lithuania.

He talked about several of his key works that deal, each in their own way, with the concept of nonument.

For Once in the XX Century, he used pre-existing footage that documented the taking down of a public sculpture of Lenin in Vilnius in 1991. The artist edited this VHS tape to reverse the playback of the material. As a result, the video appears to show large crowds applauding with great enthusiasm the erection of the Lenin sculpture. The original footage (thus before Narkevičius’s intervention) of the removal of Lenin statue showed people welcoming with frenzy the disappearance of a symbol of the old regime. Lithuania was the first Soviet occupied state to announce restitution of independence and people were full of optimism about their future. The very simple intervention on the footage raises questions surrounding shifts in political regimes and public perception of them over time. This was made very clear by another video the artist showed us.

Deimantas Narkevičius, 20 July 2015, 2016. Photo

Deimantas Narkevičius, 20 July 2015, 2016. Photo

The second video work documented the slow removal of 8 old communist statues from the Green Bridge in Vilnius over the course of one day. The event took place in the same city but almost a quarter of a century after the dismantlement of the Lenin statue. 20 July 2015 documents a radically different feeling: total indifference from passerby.

The government saw their removal as a necessity long after the political ideology that they exemplified has been repealed. They had hoped to garner media attention and replicate the success of the 1991 images. Their plan failed rather miserably. Narkevičius interpreted the local government move as an attempt to impose a historical trauma on younger generations who don’t care.

Hans van Houwelingen, What’s Done… Can Be Undone!, 2008 -2010

Hans van Houwelingen, Until It Stops Resembling Itself, 2011

Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz in Atjeh (photo via)

Hans van Houwelingen is an artist whose interventions in public space explore the relations between art, culture and politics. I’m glad the symposium made me discover his work, it’s witty, political and thought-provoking.

I’ll just mention his current project: Van Heutsz, National Monument of Shame. Joannes Benedictus van Heutsz (1851-1924) was a military officer who was appointed governor general of the Dutch East Indies in 1904. After his death and as a thank you for being responsible for the killing of thousands of people in the colonies, he was given a huge monument at the Olympiaplein in Amsterdam. A hundred years later, Van Heutsz’s name was erased from the structure but the celebration of the legacy of the colonialist period remained. According to the artist, what we need are instruments to dishonour the monuments that celebrate colonialism.

van Houwelingen suggests creating something like a pillory, a device formerly used for punishment by public humiliation. He wants to bring Van Heutsz and his killings back into the public memory with a National Monument of Shame that disgraces colonialism. Between this pillory-inspired structure and the existing monument, there would be a space to think about European colonial memory. “Precisely between honouring and dishonouring lies the space for observing history in an unprejudiced manner,” he writes. “The pillory is in essence the equivalent of the statue that has fallen out of favour: if we believe a monument is no longer a suitable embodiment of changing historical views, reframing it as a pillory allows it to endure, and to sustain our critical inquiry.”

And that’s it for my reports about the Nonument Symposium!

Nonument is an ongoing research and artistic project initiated by MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art in Ljubljana. The two-day art and theory symposium was organised by Yvette Vašourková, an architect and founding member of CCEA MOBA, the Centre for Central European Architecture in Prague in collaboration with Neja Tomšič and Martin Bricelj Baraga from MOTA.

If you want to know more about the project, check the growing database on Nonument website which is part of MAPS, Mapping and Archiving Public Space co-operation project. Six organisations have contributed to this database: the Centre for Central European Architecture: CCEA (Prague), WH Media / Beamy Space (Vienna), Tačka Komunikacije (Belgrade), House of Humor and Satire (it’s in Gabrovo and i want to go now), ARTos Foundation (Nicosia) and MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art (Ljubljana). The project is co-financed by Creative Europe.

Proceed this way if you’ve missed part 1.
Previously: A Subjective Atlas of Modern Architecture, East of Nowhere – Contemporary Art from post-Soviet Central Asia, SOS Brutalism. A Global Survey, Utopia London, Balkanology, New Architecture and Urban Phenomena in South Eastern Europe, etc.

This Is Not an Atlas. A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies, edited by kollektiv orangotango+. Published by transcript Verlag.

“More indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns. This assertion has its corollary: more indigenous territory can be defended and reclaimed by maps than by guns.”
— Bernard Nietschmann, geographer

In 2015, the group of critical geographers kollektiv orangotango launched a call for critical maps in English, German and Spanish. They received nearly 150 submissions from all over the world and selected about a third of them for This Is Not an Atlas.

The book is a collection of maps but it is not an atlas. Unlike traditional cartography, it doesn’t pretend to be a paragon of objectivity. It recognizes, right from the start, that maps are always political.

The contributions are counter-cartographies. They visualize social injustices, environmental destruction and territorial struggles. However, because counter-cartographies are anchored in a tradition of post-colonial practices of mapping back, they don’t stop at making unbalances of power visible, they go further: they act as springboards for critical thinking, emancipation, coordination and resistance.

Iconoclasistas, ¿A quién pertenece la tierra? / Who Owns the Land?

Mark Graham, Stefano De Sabbata, Ralph Straumann, Sanna Ojanperä (Geonet)

Mapping in the Amazon. Indigenous Kaxinawa from Rui Humaitá producing sketches during mapping workshop

Brett Bloom, Deep Map

Inside This Is Not An Atlas, you’ll discover an online mapping platform that helps migrants organise their journey across the Mediterranean sea and communicate any violations of their rights; a documentation of the rampant human rights violations by the State police in Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas; maps that help participants of protests find their way in unfamiliar cities; an anti-eviction project that documents real estate speculation in and beyond the San Francisco Bay Area; a series of maps that help strengthen social movements of traditional peoples and communities living in the Amazon; a crowdsourcing project that provide citizens in an Indian megacity with a much-needed map of public toilets; an HarassMap that anonymously crowdsource incidents of sexual harassment all over Egypt; an interactive street map of the squatting movement in Berlin; a free community-based project that does justice to the vibrant neighbourhood of Kibera in Nairobi, etc. And of course many cases of ecological conflicts across the world documented on the Environmental Justice Atlas platform.

The works selected demonstrate that counter-cartography has a role to play locally and internationally. In the Global South and in the Global North.

The two projects i found most compelling illustrate that you don’t need sophisticated technologies to visualize a territory:

Participants watch from below as the red balloon sails above a spot in the camp. Image Greening Bourj al-Shamali, via

The Bourj Al Shamali camp In Lebanon houses some 22,000 Palestinian refugees. An urban agriculture pilot project revealed that no map of the camp was available to its inhabitants. The only maps that exist are kept secret by international organisations for security reason.

The solution was self-mapping using a digital camera and a helium-filled balloon to make aerial photography of the settlement. The approach was very low tech but it had the advantage of being less threatening than using drones

Counter-Cartographies of Exile. Map by H.S., Nasruddin Farouk Gladeema, Alishum Ahmedin, Marie Moreau, Kanké Tounkara, Issa Ibrahm Ahmid, Ahmedin A., S.A. Photo by Mabeye Deme

From Afghanistan to France sketches a trail of exile of a refugee leaving his country to reach France. It was created by an asylum seeker who drew the map from “below”, from a walking point of view that subverts the conventional maps of migrations and nation states.

Critical Geography Collective, Violencia de Estado en torno a los proyectos megamineros de la Amazonía Sur del Ecuador (State violence around the Mega Mining projects in South Amazonia of Ecuador

Critical Geography Collective, GPS Workshop in the moorlands of Salcedo, April 2013

Cian Dayrit (in collaboration with Henry Caceres), Et Hoc Quod Nos Nescimus [And the world as we know it], 2018

Recht auf Stadt (Right to the City)

All these maps are not only informative, they are also meant to be sources of inspiration. That’s why the second part of the publication provides insights, methodologies and resources to help individuals and communities organise sessions of collective mapping and to engage into territorial creative activism. If that were not generous enough, the website of This Is Not an Atlas also provides readers with all the maps and even the ebook for you to download and share for free. It is published under the Creative Commons license.

Inside the book:

Ayumi Matsuzaka‘s work is both magical and literally down to earth. It uses the most mundane material you can think of but it also has the potential to have a big impact on food production and on the protection of the planet in general.

Ayumi Matsuzaka, All My Cycle

Ayumi Matsuzaka, All My Cycle

A few years ago, Matsuzaka started using body waste to make personal soils in which she would grow vegetables, fruits trees and even barley for beer brewing. Her various artistic projects bring valuable nutrients back to the land, close the nutrient cycle of food production and explore a series of issues that are gaining more and more importance today: waste resources, material cycles and energy.

The Future Beer project, for example, saw her installing public toilets at events in Berlin and in Dortmund. The urine of visitors was collected and fed to the barley fields as nutrients. Once ready, the barley was harvested, malted and brewed. The whole process ended with a beer degustation.

The latest iteration of Matsuzaka’s attempts to close the nutrient cycle offers a truly eco-friendly way to dispense with nappies and thus with the 500 kg of waste and 500 kg of CO2 created by the 4,500 diapers used on average by a Western baby.

Ayumi Matsuzaka, DYCLE – The Diaper Cycle

Simply using diapers sold on the market as “bio-degradable” is not the solution as they require specific temperatures and conditions in order to degrade. DYCLE-Diaper Cycle, the system the artist is pioneering, goes much further. It not only turns diaper inlays into fertile soil, it also creates value through the creation of jobs, soil, fruits and a strengthening of the participating local communities.

DYCLE diapers are made of washable outer pants and a compostable inlay. The system is aimed at small neighborhood communities. Parents who participate to the scheme go to a central collecting point every week to bring back soiled inlays and receive fresh ones in exchange.

Ayumi Matsuzaka and her collaborators calculated that baby will produce approximately one ton of black earth every year as long as they use their nappies. Which should provide enough nutrients to plant 1,000 trees. The business model builds on the sale of trees, rather than the cost of diapers.

The natural fertilizer she uses is called Terra Preta, a dark anthropogenic soil used in the Amazon Basin to improve the quality of the soils. Terra preta owes its typically black colour to its charcoal content. Other components of terra preta includes organic matter such as plant residues, animal feces, animal bones and nutrients. The terra preta method has several advantages such as preventing infections caused by parasites and storing more carbon than many other soils.

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Future Beer

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Future Beer

I found Ayumi Matsuzaka’s works so stimulating that i asked her if she could tell us more about them:

Hi Ayumi! Some of your artistic project start with human organic waste: urine, hairs, nails, etc to produce something that people can consume. You also do a lot of workshops and actions in which the public is invited to participate to the process with their own time and of course the nutrients produced by their own body. How do people usually react to your proposal? How do you overcome the ‘yuk’ factor, the prejudices and cultural beliefs some people might have that it’s going to be unhygienic or just awful? What makes them want to participate and follow the project?

Most of my action-based projects were made through invitation. There was never any obligation nor need to convince people to take part in the process. The beauty of this invitation is that people often do not know exactly why or how they are going to experience. During the process they discover themselves to being part of an unexpected cycle, such as being part of the nature cycle.

I must say one of 10 people loves this kind of journey :-) I must take care of wording. I do not use words such as shit, excretions etc. Instead, I use “Bodily waste”, “your dropping” “your donation” etc. Ha ha ha!

Ayumi Matsuzaka, All My Cycle

Ayumi Matsuzaka, All My Cycle

Ayumi Matsuzaka, All My Cycle

Ayumi Matsuzaka, All My Cycle

What makes urine such a good fertiliser? It sounds so strange to me…

Urine is called “liquid gold”, it contains great nitrogen. Green plants need nitrogen after they germinate in spring.

You can make Terra Preta soil substrate out of it. And easy and traditional East Asian way is to dilute your urine with 10 times of water and gently water your plants. I give you an example: I had an almost died basil in a pot that I bought at a supermarket. I gave this diluted liquid energy gently to it for few days. The basil was brought to life amazingly.

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Future Beer – Dortmunder Kreislauf

I had a look at the video of Future Beer Cycle. It looks like you produce beer using urine? How does it work exactly? What is the role of urine in this process and how are its most “unpleasant” components broken down and turned into something safe enough to drink?

Oh please watch the video carefully. You misunderstood. The idea was to use our collected liquid bodily waste (urine) to grow barley as natural fertiliser and produce our own beer. I did not produce beer using urine. People love to mix up every steps but please be careful. I made it for two cities: in Berlin and in Dortmund. In Berlin, I started with a beer tasting party. Guests enjoyed meals and donated their liquid. I diluted it with water (Asian traditional way as I explained), used it to grow barley at Berlin Botanic garden. Botanic soil scientists were involved. After harvesting, I malted and brewed with friends. At the end of the year, guests came back to celebrate together with our own beer. In Dortmund, It was rather anonymous to participate in the process. A composting company set up toilets at a public place, a beer barley company provided their big field to grow barley for this project. The barley was grown only with this liquid fertiliser, donated by Dortmund citizen. Here, I diluted it with water again. Harvested them, malted, brewed ca.1000 bottles. At the final exhibition at Museum Dortmund U, many visitors bought them. So many experts of soil, barley, malting, craft beer companies took part in the whole process. I was so lucky to make it happen.

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Collecting urine in Dortmund city center

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Distribution of the collected nutrients diluted with water on the barley field, Dortmund

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Barley Seeding Day at the Botanical Garden in Berlin, 21 April 2015

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Barley growing in Berlin, July 2015

Harvesting in Berlin, 29 July 2015

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Brewing in Berlin, 09 October 2015

By the way did people enjoy the taste of the beer?

Yes, with several beer experts, we selected carefully the German old barley seed and hops. I needed to study a traditional malting process too.
The taste was amazingly good – both Berlin version and Dortmund version.

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Future Beer

Ayumi Matsuzaka, DYCLE – Diaper Cycle

Your artistic practice is quite successful and impressive. So what made you decide to become an entrepreneur and launch DYCLE – Diaper Cycle? Wasn’t it a risky decision?

The reality is that when I combined my 10 years of several art projects, I could make a business model.

Of course, my business mentor and several surrounding people helped me for this transition. I learned entrepreneurship by doing.

If you ask me “wasn’t it a risky decision?”, I must say that staying in the art field is rather risky for us on this planet! (This is my opinion)

Our world needs 1000.000s of imagination every minutes. Our world needs more Doer than Thinkers.
Our world needs more people like artists and creators who can give Love and share with others openly.

The power of artists is to scan carefully any floating invisible aspiration and wishes of our society and visualise them before our society can see it in reality. So I must say to artists that if some of your important ideas do not fit to the art worlds any more, choose other places to give the birth.

In my case, after having several soil projects here and there, I saw more potential outside the art fields and decided to realise it on a wider scale. And good news is that I still get invitations from art exhibitions and show my entrepreneur ideas there.

The Diaper Cycle

Ayumi Matsuzaka, DYCLE – The Diaper Cycle

The idea behind DYCLE looks very simple and yet, i suspect it requires a lot of orchestrating, organisation, skills, knowledge as well as the goodwill of the participating parents. So how did you manage to gather all this know-how? Do you try to supervise every single step of the project or do you rely mostly on collaborations?

Good question. l needed almost 5 years to realise each key activity of the Diaper Cycle one after another.

Since it is not another new diaper but a new system, each step needed to be proved; Making soil substrate safely from diaper, using the soil for tree plantation, taking care of the trees, building parents community and finally making our own diaper design and producing diaper machinery…

I started solo in 2014, experimenting fermentation of used baby diapers and trying to make soil substrate. After failing, I made my first team in 2015.
Since then, 37 people have joined the team and left. So far, more than 100 people contributed their knowledge, resources, time and finance to hands-on experiments and hackathon workshops. They are individual citizen who really love the concept and love to add their aspiration to it.
I am rather a weaver who carry everybody’s dream in an harmonious way :-)

Ayumi Matsuzaka, Terra Preta made from diaper waste and biochar

Why is this important that the process produces black soil and not any type of soil?

3 reasons. Terra Preta soil substrate is high quality of living soil. It is much more hygienic than normal compost thanks to the proper anaerobic fermentation and humification process (process with compost worms). The degradation process is faster than in normal compost. Normally if you compost human bodily waste, you are recommended to leave it for 3 to 4 years. In Terra Preta method, we can have a one year degradation process. Very speedy. The last reason is for the revenue model. It is important to produce a higher product than normal quality of compost.

These total recycling processes are on the one hand, very down to earth. On the other hand, there’s something also a bit futuristic about them. I imagine that they use techniques that might be used in current or future space travel. Is that something you looked into?

Terra Preta method is nothing innovative. Indigenous people in Amazon area used the method 1000s years ago.
What many people love in this Diaper Cycle system is that we invest (give love) to generations to come – Planting fruit trees with small children.

These young children and babies will have a completely new mindset of sanitation after they experience of the tree-growth in the age of zero. This is probably what makes us so excited.

Ayumi Matsuzaka, DYCLE – The Diaper Cycle

What are the next steps for DYCLE – Diaper Cycle?

Currently we develop a semi-automatised diaper machinery with our technological partner. They produce 100% compostable sanitary pads.

We are so lucky to work with them. Once the machinery is fixed, we will import it to Berlin and start our first parents group. This would be in the begin of the year 2020.

Thanks Ayumi!

While in Rotterdam for the Malware exhibition, i crossed the Museum Park and visited Street Dreams. How Hiphop took over Fashion at Kunsthal Rotterdam.

Christopher Wallace (Biggie) & Sean Combs (Puff Daddy), 1996, Cover image VIBE September 1996 issue. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, New York

RUN DMC, It’s Tricky, 1986

Hip-Hop is more than a music style, it’s a movement that has left its marks on visual and performative culture. Its influence on fashion is particularly enduring. Sneakers, brash logos, hoodies, oversized clothing, bold gold jewellery and boom boxes on the shoulder. They are all associated with hip-hop and they are still here decades later. Apart from boomboxes. And big logos, unless you’re ironic.

Hip hop is not just in the streets. It’s on catwalks too now. Luxury brands, which used to berate the bootleg culture of hiphop, is embracing some of its ideas and icons. Virgil Abloh, designer of the popular streetwear label Off-White, was named artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear ready wear line last year. Gucci collaborated with hip-hop designer Dapper Dan on a collection back in 2017 (which didn’t prevent the Italian fashion house from selling a blackface sweater a few months later.) Rapper and hip hop producer Pharrell worked together with Chanel and other major fashion houses. I could go on for hours.

Through visual art, photography and video installations, the exhibition ‘Street Dreams: How Hiphop took over Fashion’ show the looks, the codes and the creative force of hip hop, focusing on the origins and underlying philosophy of this street culture.

The exhibition features surprisingly few items of clothing and very little information about the socio-political context in which hip-hop emerged. But it has work by Nick Cave and by Kehinde Wiley. Images by photographers who documented the early years of hip-hop fashion. And of course music. I left the Kunsthal in excellent mood.

I’ll leave you with the works i discovered there:

Nick Cave, Hustle Coat

Janette Beckman, Slick Rick, Manhattan, NYC, 1989. Photo ©Janette Beckman. Courtesy of Fahey-Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Jannette Beckman, Salt-N-Pepa, NYC, 1987

Jannette Beckman, Jam Master Jay, NYC, 1991

Kehinde Wiley, Saint Amelie, 2014. Courtesy of Templon, Paris & Brussels

Kehinde Wiley is showing one of his monumental works in stained glass. A black young man dressed in streetwear adopts the same pose as the Sainte Amélie that Ingres drew Notre-Dame-de-Compassion Church in Paris. Wiley (who painted the official portrait of Barack Obama) uses the same style and tropes as European artists of the Renaissance but he puts a person of color at the center of the scene, as a modern-day martyr and art history icon.

Jamel Shabazz, A Mother’s Love, Brooklyn, NYC, 1987

Jamel Shabazz, Back in the Days, Lower East Side, Manhattan, NYC, 1982

Jamel Shabazz, Rude Boy, Brooklyn, NYC, 1981

Jamel Shabazz, Young Boys, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NYC, 1981

Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi, Video still Winter in America, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi, Video still Winter in America, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

The video Winter in America is based on the events leading up to the murder of Songha Thomas Willis, Hank Willis Thomas’s cousin in 2000 in Philadelphia. The story is derived from an interview with the main eye-witness to the crime and notes taken by the victim’s mother during the murder trial. The scenes are recreated using G.I. Joe action figures in stop-motion film technique. The work exposes the breeding and normalization of a culture of violence for young boys who are encouraged to author brutal scenarios before they can even read.

Earlie Hudnall JR., Mr. Shine, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1988

Earlie Hudnall, Gucci Brothers, 3rd Ward, Houston, TX, 1990. Photo ©Earlie Hudnall. Courtesy PDNB Gallery

Djamilla Rosa Cochran, Cam’Ron. Photo: Djamilla Rosa Cochran/WireImage

Dana Lixenberg, Snoop, 1993. From the series Imperial Courts 1993-2015. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, New York

Dana Lixenberg, Annie II, 1993. From the series Imperial Courts 1993-2015

In 1992, Dana Lixenberg travelled to South Central Los Angeles to photograph a story on the riots that erupted following the acquittal of four LAPD officers filmed viciously beating Rodney King. What Lixenberg encountered there inspired her to revisit that part of the city, and eventually led her to meet a community whose evolution she portrayed over 22 years, focusing thus on individual lives that are ignored unless a tragedy strikes in their midst.

Dana Lixenberg, Untitled (Navajo Nation), 1998. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam, New York

Thomas J Price, Untitled (Icon 2), 2017. Image courtesy the artist and Hales Gallery

Casper Warmoeskerken

Victor D. Ponten, A Trip Down the Memory Block (video still), Big Daddy Kane, 2019

Victor D. Ponten, A Trip Down the Memory Block (video still), Run DMC, 2019

Victor D. Ponten’s video opens the exhibition and features sixty people from Rotterdam, dressed in outfits that symbolize the history of street wear and hip hop fashion.

Public Enemy, Fight The Power, 1989

Salt-N-Pepa, Push It, 1986

The Sugar Hill Gang, Rapper’s Delight, 1979

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, The Message, 1982

Florian Joahn, 2018, model Tino Kamal, styling JeanPaul Paula

Street Dreams: How Hip Hop Took Over Fashion, curated by Lee Stuart, is on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam until 15 September 2019.

A Dictionary of the American Avant-Gardes, by author and artist Richard Kostelanetz.

On amazon USA and UK.
Publisher Routledge writes: For this American edition of his legendary arts dictionary of information and opinion, the distinguished critic and arts historian Richard Kostelanetz has selected from the fuller third edition his entries on North Americans, including Canadians, Mexicans, and resident immigrants.

Typically, he provides intelligence unavailable anywhere else, no less in print than online, about a wealth of subjects and individuals. Focused upon what is truly innovative and excellent, Kostelanetz also ranges widely with insight and surprise, including appreciations of artistic athletes such as Muhammad Ali and the Harlem Globetrotters, and such collective creations as Las Vegas and his native New York City. Continuing the traditions of cheeky high-style Dictionarysts, honoring Ambrose Bierce and Nicolas Slonimsky (both with individual entries), Kostelanetz offers a “reference book” to be treasured not only in bits and chunks, but continuously as one of the ten books someone would take if they planned to be stranded on a desert isle.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980

William Klein, Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, 1974

Chris Burden, Trans-fixed, 1974 (via)

I never thought i’d ever read a dictionary from A to Z but this one is witty, original and wonderfully opinionated. Plus it’s the abridged version and far easier to digest than a wikipedia entry.

The first edition of this unconventional dictionary was published in 1993 and there’s a good reason why it is still being printed today. Kostelanetz follows his own criteria when it comes to identifying practices and ideas that break rules and pass the test of time. Which means that he often takes you places that you were not expecting.

Carolee Schneemann, Up to and Including Her Limits (documentation of performance), 1976

Tony Schwartz, Sounds of my City (via)

José Guadalupe Posada, Calavera Oaxaqueña

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, 1915. International News Photography Photography © Bettman/Corbis, via

First of all, the timeframe covered by the book is impressive: one moment you read about DJ Spooky. Pages later, you encounter Eadweard Muybridge.

I was also (pleasantly) surprised by the wide array of people he gathers around his understanding of what constitutes the avant-gardes.
There’s Isadora Duncan, Eduardo Kac, Ornette Coleman, Tex Avery and people developing technologies for art at Bell Labs. There’s Erich von Stroheim, Vito Acconci, Rube Goldberg and the Guerrilla Girls. He also sees innovation in the work of art forger Mark Hofmann, the choreography of Muhammad Ali and in Michel Joyce’s pioneering use of hypertext in his literary work. Richard Kostelanetz even contributed an entry about himself.

The author pays homage to artists but also to the works, laws, patrons, agencies and innovations that inspired the avant-gardes and/or created the conditions for its development. The Brooklyn Bridge, the unemployment insurance (1935), the Freedom of Information Act, National Endowment for the Arts (1965) and individuals like Alanna Heiss or Louise and Walter Arensberg. What struck me when i read the dictionary is how many among the actors of the avant-gardes were immigrants. People born abroad who moved to the USA and shaped its art scene.

“How do the Rave-o-lution of 12 March 2018 in front of the Georgian Parliament in Tbilisi and anti-fascist protests in Berlin relate to ancient Dionysian rituals, and why does the soundtrack to these events come from the drums of African Americans? And to what extent does dance club culture reflect the current socio-political situation and the struggle of individuals or of groups?”

Dato Koridze

Dance of Urgency, exhibition view. Photo Sam Beklik

If ever you find yourself in Vienna this Summer, don’t miss Dance of Urgency, an exhibition at Q21 that looks at dance as a political, social and economic phenomenon. The show was curated by Bogomir Doringer, an artist and curator whose interest in the connections between dance culture, crowds movements and politics stems from his experience of dancing and looking for ways to feel free inside a techno club in Belgrade while NATO was bombing his city in 1999. Perhaps it’s this personal experience that makes the exhibition so compelling, entertaining and thought-provoking. That and the music of course.

The show looks at club culture under all its facets. It opens with examples of underground spaces where young people shape countercultures and ideals that eventually spilled into the streets as protests against reactionary governments. And it closes with a spectacle of the massive (and massively lucrative) electronic music festivals that have become mainstream Summer entertainment.

All it takes to create change sometimes is just one guy:

Derek Sivers, First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy, 2010

Writer Derek Sivers used the viral video of a guy dancing alone at a music festival in the USA to explain How to Start a Movement, in a TED talk. The humorous instructional political video is used as an introduction to the section in the exhibition that explores the connections between dance floors and activism, and how ideas resonate, from the dancing body in public spaces to the outside world.

Jan Beddegenoodts, Ayed, 2018

Jan Beddegenoodts, Sama

Jan Beddegenoodts interviewed by MuseumsQuartierWien for Dance of Urgency

Jan Beddegenoodts‘s short documentaries follow some of the strong creative minds who gave rise to collective cultural movements in their own countries.

NAJA is dedicated to Naja Orashvili, one of the icons of Tbilisi #raveolution and of young Georgians’s yearning for a new, progressive country. The artist and activist is one of the founders of BASSIANI, a queer nightclub which was under threat of closure by the Government until thousands of ravers protested in the streets of Tbilisi and forced the authorities to step back. She is also one of the main figures behind the White Noise movement, a political group founded in 2015 with the objective to decriminalize drugs.


AYED is a portray of Ayed Fadel, a member of Jazar Crew, a movement of young cultural activists dedicated to empowering music and culture in Palestine.

SAMA follows Sama Abdulhadi, a producer, sound artist and DJ who organized the first techno nights in Ramallah. She’s since been touring the globe, giving techno music workshops to kids and raising awareness around the violence of the Israeli occupation of Palestine (sometimes by introducing the issue shrewdly into her work but mostly because her interviewers keep on asking her about it.)

Dan Halter, Zimbabwean Queen of Rave, 2005

Dan Halter, Zimbabwean Queen of Rave, 2005

Opponents of the apartheid in South Africa used music and dance to make their voice heard and motivate fellow demonstrators to keep protesting against discrimination and segregation. Dan Halter’s video uses archive material to demonstrates one of the activists tactics: a war dance called toyi-toyi. Characterised by its rhythmic, stomping movements, it was used in political protests in South Africa during the Apartheid. As one activist puts it, “The toyi-toyi was our weapon. We did not have the technology of warfare, the tear gas and tanks, but we had this weapon.” After the Apartheid, people in South Africa kept on using toyi-toyi to express their grievances against current government policies.

The images of mass protest are mixed with archives showing the white young people of 90s rave culture dancing carelessly in public spaces.

The soundtrack of these images is Rozalla’s 1991 hit single Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good). The Zimbabwean electronic music performer became known as ‘The Queen of Rave’. No matter their skin colour and cultural experiences, people danced to her music at the time and understood its call for freedom.

Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, Documenting Cxema (still from the film)

Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, Documenting Cxema (extracts from the film). Music by Stanislav Tolkachev

Initiated by DJ Slava Lepsheev after the EuroMaidan revolution in which almost 100 citizens were killed by the police while demonstrating against the government, Cxema is the biggest rave event in Ukraine. The 2014 uprising has left a mark on youth culture. “The Euromaidan brought people together and created a community, but once it finished we wanted to continue that,” explained one of the organisers in an interview. “This is what CXEMA is about. The rave is political even if people don’t realise it themselves, it’s about community”.

Cxema offered a space for its participants to shape Kiev’s post-revolution identity. And even the less politically-active among them could dance and experience moments of normality, togetherness and freedom in a country where their future looks chaotic.

Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, created an hypnotising movie that attempts to reflect on the atmosphere of Cxema, from swarms of individuals dancing in unison to the moment when they exit one by one and go back to the the light of the sun and the daily grind.

Events like Cxema move from illegal to semi-legal venues. Many of them abandoned spaces on the outskirts of the city. The kind of spaces Nikolaus Geyrhalter toured the world to film…

Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Homo Sapiens

Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Homo Sapiens

Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Homo Sapiens

Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Homo Sapiens (trailer)

Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens films features train stations, shopping malls, hospitals, amusement parks, power plants, schools, churches, whole streets, monuments and other ruins of our industrial age devoid of any human presence. These are the kind of locations that get invaded for one night or longer by ravers. Their choices don’t go unnoticed. Nowadays, cities are following the moves of club culture and other rituals of gathering as they see them as key parts of urban regeneration projects. In Amsterdam, for example, new temporary clubs are often harbingers of gentrification.

Francesco Pusterla, in collaboration with Dimitri Hegemann, commissioned by Bogomir Doringer, Tresor – Berlin 325 Longitudinal Sections, 2019

Francesco Pusterla, in collaboration with Dimitri Hegemann, commissioned by Bogomir Doringer, Tresor – Berlin 325 Longitudinal Sections, 2019

The Tresor club in Berlin is an iconic example of an industrial ruin that became a cultural space. Inaugurated in 1991, the club played an important role in uniting German youth after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It served as an experimental space where new relationships were established through collective dances to the sound of electronic music. Music without words, with repetitive beats, united people and healed unspoken traumas.

Tresor closed its initial location on 16 April 2005, after several years’ prolonged short-term rent. The city sold the land to an investor group to build offices.

The original architecture of the legendary techno club has been reconstructed as
 a laser-cut book sculpture produced by architect Francesco Pusterla with the help of Dimitri Hegemann, the owner of the Tresor club.

Anne de Vries, Critical Mass: Pure Immanence, 2015

The extravagant displays of lights and artificiality pictured in Anne de Vries’ video Critical Mass:
Pure Immanence shows another, more commercial side of techno culture. One that has been politically sanitised and rebranded subculture as a lucrative entertainment. The work highlights how far some techno events are from the 1970s electronic music values that came from an urgency to empower
 and unite its small (often queer) and alternative communities. Current electronic dance music events, in particular the ones dedicated to the genre known as Hardstyle, can reach grandiose proportions, with spectacular audio-visual productions mounted by promotional companies. In the film, swarms of tens of thousands of bodies in concert locations are filmed with the zoom-in and zoom-out of a sporting event cam.

The voice-over of a text inspired by the 1995 essay Pure Immanence by Gilles Deleuze accompanies the film and comments on the philosophical dimension of crowd-based experience. The film is as overpowering as the experiences it depicts. It demonstrates the power of the music industry’s spectacle and its potential to alter states of consciousness and control crowds.

More works and views of the show:

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Lovesick. The Transfection

Shohei Fujimoto, Power of one Surface

Dance of Urgency, exhibition view. Photo Sam Beklik

Dance of Urgency, exhibition view. Photo Sam Beklik

Dance of Urgency, exhibition view. Photo Sam Beklik

Sampo Hänninen, Empiric Study Panorama Bar

Dance of Urgency, curated by Bogomir Doringer, remains open until 1 September 2019 at frei_raum Q21 exhibition space MuseumsQuartier Wien in Vienna.

Participants of the exhibition have contributed their favorite tracks to Dance of Urgency playlist!

Lynn Hershman Leeson. Anti-Bodies, with texts by geneticist and molecular engineer George Church, Curator of media arts Rudolf Frieling, biomedical researcher Thomas Huber and Sabine Himmelsbach, the director of the House of Electronic Arts in Basel.

Publisher Hatje Cantz writes: At the center of this publication is Lynn Hershman Leeson‘s installation The Infinity Engine, modeled after a genetics laboratory. The artist demonstrates that the boundaries between natural and artificial life are dissolving at an increasingly rapid pace in the age of synthetic biology, and that today, life itself can be artificially shaped. This includes DNA manipulation, artificial human organs manufactured via 3D-bioprinting, antibody research, and use of DNA as a biological storage medium. Leeson presents these achievements as works of art embedded in an inimitable aesthetic. Documenting these work cycles in photographs of the exhibition at the HeK Basel, this volume also contains numerous essays that offer both a scientific context and insight into this trailblazing media artist’s oeuvre and her current focus on biotechnology.

Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Genetically modified cat from The Infinity Engine, 2010

Lynn Hershman Leeson. Anti-Bodies is thus the catalog of the exhibition that took place last year at the House of Electronic Arts Basel.

The show invited visitors to don a lab coat and enter a replica of a genetics lab, complete with a bioprinted nose, scientific equipment, a room wallpapered with photos of already existing genetically manipulated organisms, files of legal documents related to genetic engineering, videos and a facial recognition booth that identifies vital parts of visitors’ identity.

The installation had been exhibited in several countries before opening in Basel (i discovered its earlier version at the excellent RIBOCA biennial in Riga) but the Basel version featured two new artefacts: an artificially engineered antibody that bears the name “Lynn Hershman” in its molecular structure and a strand of DNA containing an archive of the artist’s video series The Electronic Diaries (1986 to 1994.)

Lynn Hersman with the Lynn Hershman antibody. Photo: Novartis/Laurids Jensen

Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Anti-Bodies Photo: Novartis / Laurids Jensen, via HeK

The exhibit explored the societal and ethical challenges of DNA programming and all the applications it enables. On the one hand, it leads to astonishing medical breakthroughs; on the other, it enables new forms of governmental and corporate biosurveillance. The work also invites us to ponder upon uncomfortable questions: How do these scientific practices challenge our understanding of human identity and life? Who owns the engineered human body parts when human cells and tissue are turned into commodities? How might bio-engineering affect human evolution on a planet that is getting increasingly inhospitable?

Without ever being judgemental, Leeson’s work aims to bring gene editing and a research that usually takes place behind shut doors closer to the wider public scrutiny.

“If we are unaware of the dangers that we’re facing,” Hershman Leeson told The Art Newspaper, “we can never change them, so you’re dealing with difficult issues and topics that many people have never heard about, and you’re able to look through the records of a lot of the supreme court cases against some of these giant conglomerates who are trying to control gene editing and access to pharmaceuticals, and that has to be a political statement.”

Structure of the Lynn Hershman antibody visualised using PyMOL and presented as powder in a glass vial. From Lynn Hershman Leeson: Anti-Bodies, exhibition at HeK. Image courtesy of Novartis

Lynn Hershman and Thomas Huber on the Novartis Campus in Basel. Photo: Novartis/Laurids Jensen

The book features many images from both the exhibition and the development process of the antibody of course but also essays by scientists, curators and the artists.

Thomas Huber’s essay was particularly compelling. Huber is the scientist who led the therapeutic antibody research group leader the Swiss Corporation Novartis Pharmaceuticals to create the new antibody. Without too much jargon and with great clarity he explains what antibodies do, the kind of ‘personality’ they have and he briefly describes the experiment he and his team did in order to generate a truly personalized antibody.

Another engrossing chapter in the book is the interview the artist made with George Church, the geneticist and molecular engineer who regularly makes headlines for his plans to bring back the woolly mammoth, end inherited disease and even reverse ageing. Their conversation was fascinating, it touched upon necessary regulations in the field, the shifting borders of life, biosurveillance, migration from Earth to colonies in outerspace, the importance of education and science communication, etc.

There is a german translation of the texts at the back of the book.

Artist Talk with Lynn Hershman Leeson, Art Basel 2018

Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Portrait of the artist as DNA, with compressed files and films from the Infinity Engine 2014-18. Photo via Tate

Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Section of a wallpaper showing hybrid crops and animals, part of The Infinity Engine. Photo via Tate

Related story: RIBOCA. A moment to reflect on our age of technoscience.
The book is on amazon UK and USA.

Already in its sixth edition, the Fotopub festival invaded once again a series of mostly disused spaces in Novo Mesto: a crumbling hotel, a school swimming pool left empty by the Summer holiday, a green lawn by the cathedral, etc.

Fotopub not only puts a sleepy Slovenian city on the international art map, it also encourages the development of art by young talents and creates a space for independent research, experimentation and unconventional curatorial gestures.

Exhibition Opening: Is it? by Luca Marcelli, Peter Kolárčik, Michael Kelly, Rok Hudobivnik, curated by Deja Bečaj at Hotel Windischer – Fotocubs Mentorship Programme. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Mark Farid, Poisonous Antidote. Photo by Klemen Ilovar, Fotopub Archive

This year, the Fotopub program of performances, music and exhibitions attempted to “address how the divergence between fiction and reality becomes a tool of manipulation for the construction of collective and individual identities through visual and popular cultures and information technologies, all conditioned by extreme capitalism.”

Fotopub has little means but plenty of ideas that makes it stand out from other Summer festivals. First, there’s the setting: Novo Mesto, a small city with a river (you can actually swim in) called the Krka, an oil painting by Tintoretto inside the cathedral (if that’s your thing) and a lovely old town center. Then there’s a mentoring program that enables young artists who had volunteered during previous editions of the festival to come back the following year and exhibit their own work. Finally, the organizers also invite back some of the artists who had participated to Fotopub in the past, a way to catch up with their work and follow their trajectory. This year’s returnees were The Cool Couple, Thomas Kuijpers, Mark Farid -whom i interviewed a few months ago- and Danilo Milovanović who’ll get his own story later on this week because he’s that good.

Let’s start with Thomas Kuijpers’ massive assortment of pre-9/11 memorabilia:

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019, Novo Mesto. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019. Photo: i-D

Microsoft Flight Simulator (v3.0) via moby games

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019. Photo by Klemen Ilovar, Fotopub Archive

A few years ago, Kuijpers stumbled upon a painting of the New York skyline featuring the Twin Towers. The description only said ‘painted before 2001’. The artist was deeply surprised by the contrast between this image of the standing monuments and his memory of the footage of the collapsing towers on tv. Such was the shock in the Western world and the power of the media that the repeated images of the falling towers has replaced initial representations of the World Trade Center in our minds.

Kuijpers bought the painting. From then on, he started an ever-growing collection of pre-9/11 memorabilia. Posters, tshirts, books and puzzles of course; but also snow globes, mugs and plates, film excerpts and even a bathing suit and a bottle of a discontinued soda. The artist’s most prized acquisition is a copy of the computer program Flightsimulator from 1988. The cover of the package features the Twin Towers and an airplane.

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019. Photo by Klemen Ilovar, Fotopub Archive

Over time he also filled a photo album with portraits of visitors who had just reached the top of the Twin Towers.

The World Trade Center is a symbol of the world before the War on Terror, before the paranoia, the islamophobia. But also a symbol of a culture that celebrated the excesses of capitalism and glorified finance.

By the way, if you happen to own any interesting object or photo of the Twin Towers in their former glory, do get in touch the artist.

Performance: Karma Fails by The Cool Couple at Kapiteljska Cerkev. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Performance: Karma Fails by The Cool Couple at Hostel Situla. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Nowadays even U.S. marines and London bankers get trained in meditation. Uprooted from its Buddhist foundations, meditation has grown into a lucrative industry. It has also become corporate culture’s best friend: it increases the productivity and well-being of employees, allowing the company to make savings on medical insurance and conveniently releasing mental strain while never questioning the rat-race culture that caused stress in the first place. What’s wrong is not capitalism, what’s wrong is inside your head.

“Today meditation has become an effective biopolitical device for keeping a growing percentage of people busy and smiling at life while the world burns around them,” writes The Cool Couple.

Just like business managers at Google and Goldman Sachs manipulate meditation to keep their employees happy and compliant, The Cool Couple uses the ancient Eastern practice as a tool for critical thinking, a language that helps “deconstruct the pervasive visual stereotypes of capitalism in the Anthropocene.” Every morning and every afternoon during Fotopub, the artists set up meditation sessions on the grass outside the cathedral or on a wooden terrace. I was extremely reluctant to enter one but curiosity got the better of me and i joined the group on the last day of the festival. It starts like what i assume is your standard meditation class, with breathe in breathe out lingo and invitations to let your body ‘melt’ into the ground. Once we were totally relaxed, the soothing voice of the meditation instructor started inserting into her instructions invitations to visualise the current state of our planet and our role in the depletion of its resources and in global heating. The experience managed to be both very calming and slightly disturbing. Yet, at the end of the session i could see that other participants were absolutely delighted and wanted to repeat the experience. I’m still as unenthusiastic as ever about meditation but i must admit that The Cool Couple’s take on the practice is cunning and worth the hour i spent on that little yoga mat.

Mila Panić, Saša Tatić and Đejmi Hadrović, Rocking Chairs, 2019. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Mila Panić, Saša Tatić and Đejmi Hadrović, Rocking Chairs, 2019. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Mila Panić, Saša Tatić and Đejmi Hadrović, Rocking Chairs, 2019. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

One of the most interesting moments in the festival for me was Mila Panić, Saša Tatić and Đejmi Hadrović‘s series of “performative installations.” Every afternoon, they installed rocking chairs and carpets in the middle of the city main square and invited people to debate on various social, political and economic urgencies. I didn’t attend all the sessions but i followed with great interest the one that invited the participants to reflect critically on the Fotopub festival, on the economics of art events in general and on the general public’s lack of interest for contemporary art. What elevated the conversation beyond the usual complacent chit chat was that the 3 performers relentlessly pushed us to investigate the role and value of the art world as ruthlessly as possible. Which led us to some exchanges and self-examinations we might not all have been completely comfortable with.

Michael Kelly, Feedback Loop, 2019, at Hotel Windischer – Fotocubs Mentorship Programme. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Michael Kelly, Feedback Loop, 2019, at Hotel Windischer – Fotocubs Mentorship Programme. Photo by Klemen Ilovar, Fotopub Archive

Peter Kolárčik, Not Giving Shape to Ideas, 2019, at Hotel Windischer – Fotocubs Mentorship Programme. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Exhibition Opening: Is it? by Luca Marcelli, Peter Kolárčik, Michael Kelly, Rok Hudobivnik, curated by Deja Bečaj at Hotel Windischer – Fotocubs Mentorship Programme. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

The Fotocubs Mentorship Programme is an informal educational programme led by the Fotopub Team. A group of last year’s volunteers are invited back to Novo Mesto to have a mentored group exhibition(s). The festival’s big THANK YOU to the international art students who had given their time over the past edition. This year, a group of six art students was trying to answer the question, “What do you see when you close your eyes?”

Each of the Fotocubs works had something meaningful to convey but i was particularly interested in Peter Kolárčik’s series of interviews with young artists who, after graduating from an art academy, had suddenly decided to leave the art world. In the conversations, he gets them to explain why/how their ambitions and priorities changed.

Michael Kelly put old tape recorders in circles as if they were having a conversation up there on their battered wooden plinths. 3 of them record the conversations around them. The other 3 play them back. They share a single tape and after a couple of hours, the accumulation of voices and messages accumulate into a noise that has lost both meaning and sense of humanity.

More images from Fotopub 2019:

Exhibition Opening: Turborage by The Cool Couple at Mestni Park. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Exhibition Opening: Turborage by The Cool Couple at Mestni Park. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Exhibition Opening: Poisonous Antidote by Mark Farid at Glavni Trg 6. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Night Programme with Kukla, or Kукла, Visuals by @BeamTeam. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Night Programme. Photo Janez Klenovšek for Fotopub

Spit roast dinner and night programme at Beach Bar Loca. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019, Novo Mesto. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Thomas Kuijpers, When the Twins Were Still Beautiful, 2019, exhibition opening at Hotel Windischer, Novo Mesto. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

1999 The Oracle Told Me I’d Fall in Love with the One, 2019, installation view, Novo Mesto. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Michael Kelly, Feedback Loop, 2019, at Hotel Windischer – Fotocubs Mentorship Programme. Photo by Klemen Ilovar, Fotopub Archive

As promised earlier this week, here’s a few notes about Danilo Milovanović, a super talented artist whose work i discovered at the Fotopub, the festival of young art and “unconventional curatorial gestures” which took place in early August in Novo Mesto, Slovenia.

Danilo Milovanović, Spontaneous Installations, Prague, Czech Republic. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Note.Link.Transfer, 2019. Photo: Janez Klenovšek for Fotopub

Invited back to Novo Mesto for a solo show after winning the Fotopub Portfolio Prize last year, Danilo Milovanović was presenting a research on the relationship between the various phenomena visible (but often overlooked) in the public space and their exhibiting potential.

It was rather unusual for him to have his work exhibited in the safe, white setting of a gallery. Because his works are inspired by the privatisation of public space and natural resources, they tend to feel more at ease in the street.

His public space interventions are playful and smart. Poetic and subtle. With just a few strokes, a space, object or situation gets a new depth and significance. You might pass by one of his works and fail to detect its existence but once you’ve spotted Milovanović’s small alterations of the urban landscape, you can’t help but mull over their socio-political meaning.

Milovanović doesn’t have a website at the moment so i’ll simply list below some of his actions of resistance to the capitalist-consumer invasion of urban space:

Danilo Milovanović, Plastic makes it static, Novo Mesto, Slovenia, 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Plastic makes it static, Novo Mesto, Slovenia, 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist

In 2017, the artist filled hundreds of discarded bottles of water with the same amount of water the fountain on a public square in Novo Mesto could hold. He then filled the deactivated fountain with bottles full of authentic water from the fountain, highlighting how excessive packaging and our careless reliance on ‘convenience’ bring about the threat of fresh water depletion.

Danilo Milovanović, Product, Novo Mesto, Slovenia, 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Product, Novo Mesto, Slovenia, 2017. Photo courtesy of the artist

That same year, Milovanović also collected some of the brand labels glued on imported fruit sold in Novo Mesto supermarkets. He then pasted the stickers on the growing fruits of a living tree. “With this, I wanted to achieve ‘branded’ fruit effect before it became recognized as an ‘edible product of nature’ (a quote from one of the labels),” he wrote. “The work presents a provocative comment on the consumerist policy of the food industry.”

Danilo Milovanović, Cultivation, Celje, Slovenia. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Cultivation, Celje, Slovenia, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Cultivation, Celje, Slovenia, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Cultivation, Celje, Slovenia, 2018. Photo courtesy of the artist

Last year while he was in Celje (Slovenia), he gave some nobility to the plants that have grown up from gaps or damages in urban infrastructures. Usually perceived as unwelcome weeds, these plants don’t benefit from any kind of respect or care. Unlike the plants people grow in their apartments or on their balcony for decorative purposes. Milovanović put clay pots around street plants, emphasising their presence and intrinsic value.

Danilo Milovanović, Switch, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Switch, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Switch, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Photo courtesy of the artist

For Switch, the artist collected the fallen leaves of two trees growing in the center of Slovenia. He kept them in bags in his studio until the summer came back. As soon as the trees turned green again, he returned the foliage under on of the trees, creating an absurd situation that hinted at a problem that is less apparent in urban settings than in rural areas: global warming and the upsetting of natural cycles.

Danilo Milovanović, The Ślimak Project at Katowice Street Art Urban Sound 2019

Danilo Milovanović, The Ślimak Project at Katowice Street Art Urban Sound 2019

Hearing that homeless people in Katowice were using abandoned cars as living spaces, Milovanović transformed a minivan, modelling it on a squat with basic elements of furniture inside and flowerpots and storage boxes outside. The Ślimak Project was both an artistic object and a functional dwelling for the most invisibilized actors of society. Although the original installation offers a certain amount of usability, there are no rules to use it or add or adapt the structure and its content. “The installation is not meant to be a commercial, public attraction, but the very opposite, an intriguing phenomenon in public space.”

I could go on and on, telling you how Milovanović planted trees in front of all the advertising signs on a given street to hide the advertising; or how he joined two green spaces separated by a concrete road in Prague with a grassland-shaped surfaces, creating a continuous ‘organic’ path that remained at the site for eight months. But i’ll stop here and hope his portfolio gets a proper online home soon.

Danilo Milovanović, Re-post, Prague, Czech Republic. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, Spontaneous Installations, Prague, Czech Republic. Photo courtesy of the artist

Danilo Milovanović, exhibition Opening: Note:Link:Transfer at Prešernov Trg 8. Photo by Janez Klenovšek, Fotopub Archive

Danilo Milovanović, Note.Link.Transfer, 2019. Photo by Klemen Ilovar, Fotopub Archive

Danilo Milovanović, Note.Link.Transfer, 2019. Photo by Klemen Ilovar, Fotopub Archive

Previously: A collection of pre-9/11 memorabilia, meditation with a bit of Anthropocene thrown in, etc. This was Fotopub 2019.

What happens to design when it has to evolve from a world where designers do wonders with (seemingly) unlimited resources and energy to a world where their creativity can only rely on limited ones?

Gauthier Roussilhe interviewing David Gener, a citizen and electrician leading his village towards energy autonomy by 2022 (Prats EnR). Credits: Nicolas Loubet

Gauthier Roussilhe is a designer and researcher working on the effects of the Anthropocene. Which is quite a fashionable issue to specialise in these days. Unfortunately, very few designers today are able to address the urgency of the environmental threat with the thoroughness and the determination required. Roussilhe, however, is one of those rare thinkers and designers.

Roussilhe has spent the past couple of years wondering how his discipline could become a meaningful and positive actor in the fight against climate change. He believes in implementing systemic changes, not in ‘saving the world’ with reusable coffee cups, paper straws and other interesting but ultimately secondary gestures.

There are several reasons why I found his work important. First, Roussilhe puts the non-human (animals, plants, natural resources) back into the design reflection. Second, he is keen on sharing his research and reasoning with the next generation of designers but also with public institutions, local councillors, NGOs, private organisations, think tanks and lobbies striving to mitigate the effects of climate change on the planet and on society.

Finally, i found his approach to digital technology worth sharing. He released an eye-opening digital guide to low tech, he leads workshops with UX designers, asking them to design a website with an limited energy budget rather than a monetary budget and together with French think-tank The Shift Project, he recently worked on a report that details and visualises the unsustainable use of online video services.

Gauthier Roussilhe leading a workshop for UX designers in Toulouse, asking them to design a website with an limited energy budget (kWh) rather than a monetary budget (€), credits: FLUPA Toulouse

The designer has been kind enough to answer my many questions over Skype a few weeks ago:

Hi Gauthier! Most designers nowadays are conscious that we need to do something about the ecological emergency. Yet, the idea of a green, sustainable growth made of reusable coffee cups and data centres powered by wind turbines still seems to be the feel-good answer for many designers, businesses and members of the public. What do you think are the main misconceptions around “sustainable design”?

It might be interesting to first go back in time and look at the path that lead me to think about climate change and obviously at the Anthropocene as a framework.

I used to run a small design studio and when i split with my business partner, after 4 or 5 years of collaboration, I started traveling in Europe to shoot a documentary called Ethics for Design. I felt a bit lost and it was a way for me to meet my peers, reflect on the question of design responsibility and turn it into a documentary for other designers who might be asking themselves the same questions as I was. The main take from the documentary for me was that ethics alone means nothing because it’s a vector that leads to politics. Which got me wondering about what kind of critical engagement I should get into. The most urgent thing (not that there’s any hierarchy), the one i felt I could have the most impact on was the the concept of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency. From there, I started to redirect my whole practice towards using this issue as the main framework of my practice.

For a long time, I had been wondering why designers were so bad at accomplishing (or even understanding) something regarding this issue. It took me a long time to reflect upon this and I will hopefully publish a research paper on that very topic soon. The paper will be looking at design through economics because I think it is the main lens through which we should look at the design industry. Not that design is anything but economics but we need to see that economics shapes the way that design sees the world.

I’ve pinpointed 3 economic myths that exist within design, first through my own practice and later on through academic research.

First, designers always thought they were working for humans which is completely false. Maybe some design practices have been looking at that but mostly designers are working for an economic persona thought as a rational being, a historical human being that optimises its exchanges to maximise happiness. That’s what is at the heart of design and it’s deeply problematic because the human shouldn’t be at the centre all the time, it should be put back into the ecosystem.

The second economic myth is that design historically appeared within a paradigm of apparently unlimited energy and resources. The rise of the digital industry made it very clear that no matter the experience of the designer, if you ask them “can you design a website for 3 watts an hour?” Nobody can answer that direct question.

The third problem is that designers do not take into account externalities, such as waste, pollution, social issues. They know about it but don’t engage with it. They see it as a failure of the system, not a constituent part of the system. The reason for that is that in neo-classical economic thoughts, you cannot think of externalities as a constituent because it would upset the equilibrium of price and demand. Designers rarely take externalities as the main basis for their work and succeed by doing so.

Because of these three myths, which are mostly associated with Occidental design and very targeted at urban development, and at the social reproduction of Western, capitalistic development more specifically, design as it is practiced today makes no sense regarding the transition because its framework has been influenced by mainstream economic thinking and economic world view.

In consequence, if you look at design through an Anthropocene framework, you have to change everything when it comes to economics. You have to include more than humans, you have to include non-growth economics, you have to shift the regime of property (from private to commons), etc. You have to release a lot of new imaginaries and tools to foster this practice. We are yet to create those.

Gauthier Roussille, Ethics for Design

Do you feel people are getting more conscious about these issues? Are you scaring off the students and other designers you meet? Or do you tap into something they are already concerned with?

In France, I first came in contact with students and professional designers through ethics, that was my entry point into the field. When I was giving conferences or screening the documentary, I was actually pinpointing something that students felt but were not able to express. Even if ethics is part of the curriculum, it’s never enough and professors cannot dwell too much on ethics because they have a pedagogical agenda to follow. Even in the context of continuous training, designers who are already in the professional field are not really talking about ethics, politics, non-occidental word views, they sometimes think about energy and climate within design but they also feel powerless. They don’t have any tools nor do they know how to reframe the ones available in order to work towards the issues that need to be urgently addressed. Since Modernism, design has been mainly thought as a universal practice that can be applied all over the world and that uses the city as its main scale. I come from the countryside so I was already aware of that urban-minded approach. I could see that mainstream design methodologies and tools were neither appropriate nor efficient in rural areas…

Could you give an example of what you mean by that?

For example, my PhD research is based in my village. Over there, it’s completely pointless to say I’m a designer. Nobody knows what it means and nobody cares about designers. If I was actually trying to make some design practice in this village, what title would people give me? Maybe I’d be called “deputy mayor”, that might be the closest thing to designing for them. Is it even important to be called designer as long as you work towards the territory needs and interests? At least, it counters social reproduction of the “designer”.

The fact that we think of digitalising everything makes no sense in specific territories where social links don’t need to be digitalised and people don’t want to depend on technical structures to communicate. Most of the things we have been told in design have been completely challenged in the rural context. Designers have mostly been urban-centred. All their methods and tools have not been very successful when implemented in the countryside, especially if you think about commercial design. You can’t brand a village. You don’t produce standardised digital tools for a village, you can’t erase all the specificities of these territories.

I’m going to play the devil’s advocate. What if i told you that the rural way of life belongs in the past, that it needs to adapt to the changes society is undergoing?

It’s only my hypothesis but I think that people are largely mistaken about how urban and rural areas interconnect with each other. In France, more and more somewhat privileged, well-educated young people, if they have a chance to move, go back to rural areas, only to understand that “ruralilty” as they had thought it doesn’t exist. They are sometimes dragged out of the false binary of rural/urban to have a more precise view of a territory in which they live. Once there, they change their practice. I don’t think rural areas will have to dissolve into urban lifestyles. Quite the opposite. I believe what we call “rural areas” are where changes can happen. Because everything is territory-based there and that’s important.

Cities are becoming increasingly uninhabitable. At least for me. I want to be part of a specific territory. In rural area you can see for yourself what your life depends upon. The city doesn’t show you that.

I’ve started working on a PhD. The first year of the PhD, I will try and answer the question: What does the village depends on? I will work with people in the village who have an amazing amount of skills to collaborate and create a giant cartography that will show what the village depends on. It will be the size of the wall in the municipal council and every political decision should be reflected on this cartography. I need to look at energy, water infrastructure, garbage and waste system, soil production, geology, farming, cultural life, etc. It will be my first exercise of this kind but I want to make it in a way that will make it possible for people to assess it, reproduce it and adapt it to their own territory.

After that, I’ll go to China for another part of the PhD to articulate local and to question possible autarkic views of independence or autonomy in a globalised world. Then I’ll go back to the village again to try and imagine what daily life is when there is less energy, less resources in this very specific context while bridging the historical inhabitants of the village and the newcomers.

Underneath this practice-based research is the need to completely rethink what design is for me. I don’t think that the main function of design nowadays is to produce things. We should however adapt existing systems. I see more value in investigation than in production. I’m now working on a triptych that is investigation, negotiation, production. Production comes as a last step and can only be relevant if the previous step have been performed correctly.

In parallel, I’m organising an Adult Education Scheme in design in Paris. It is a free pedagogical programme that will take place once a month and is aimed at young designers. We are trying to figure out what will be the basis of design education in the framework of the Anthropocene. I’ve lost faith in design education, at least as it is conceived in France, but that’s another story. There will be 10 classes, I’ll give 3 classes that will look at the history and theory of economics in design. I will also cover ethics and cosmopolitics. Others classes will look at energy, techniques and engineering. Furthermore, I will ask other designers to talk about decolonisation, maintenance, etc. Just to set up the main guidelines of a new curriculum for design. It will be free and open to everyone. We’ll document the interventions on videos. They’ll be open source and available online.

You’ve lead workshops with UX designers, asking them to design a website with an limited energy budget (kWh) rather than a monetary budget (€). Your own website is an elegant and striking example of what this means. Apart from lower image resolution, where else can UX designer intervene?

I think people have a very standardised imaginary of what a low-tech website can look like. Mostly because, so far, no brain power has been invested in this area. People are comparing low-tech web design with a practice of design that’s been thriving for the past 20 years on unlimited energy and very limited structural constraints. We cannot compete with that because it was a design produced without any concern for planetary boundaries. But now we should also start investing time and thinking into what low-tech websites should actually look like. We still have a lot to investigate and explore in that area. I’m actually getting a lot of job offers on that very specific topic.

We are now looking at how we can add an map to a website. Usually, when you want to add a map, you just embed Google Map. However, in a scenario where we have limited energy, we have to look for the easiest way to produce a map in a very specific context. You need to pick up the scale of the map so it is consistant with the information the user is looking for. This means that you are not relying on standards anymore. You have to push back all the standards you’ve been relying on so far and question everything you use while building a website. Using a standardised map tool (like Google Maps) is actually reproducing a non-choice. It also means that you don’t think about what a map means and how it shapes the understanding of a territory and a culture (the geopolitics). Developing new ways to use maps on digital tools is utterly important to de-standardise the use of maps and design new kinds of maps that are based on a specific territory and culture.

I recently did a workshop with the Low Tech Lab in Brittany to help them set up their website. We used a plug-in we recently released that shows the impact of your navigation. When we opened the website we realised that just opening the homepage required 8 megabytes, half of it were eaten up by a little Facebook timeline which was embedded into the website. It was not only absorbing half the energy, it was also taking in the data of the website. Even a simple-looking Facebook widget is both energy-hungry and a tracker that enables Facebook to follow you. Instead of relying on the available icons, it makes more sense, in terms of privacy and energy, to write down the text and add an hyperlink.

This is just an example but it shows that you need to rethink everything you’ve learnt in web design once you’re given limited energy. In addition, some of the issues we commonly have with web design (addiction, privacy, etc.) are completely fading away once you rely on limited energy. Which shows that a lot of the problematic issues we associate with big tech companies are linked to abundant energy.

I would compare a website to a house. In french we talk about “passoire thermique” (“thermal strainer.”) I want to isolate a website, a bit like you would spot and stop the leaks in order to isolate a house. Most websites are passoires thermiques. We released a report on online video recently with a think-tank called The Shift Project.

Many people are contacting me, they sound very concerned about the issue. The most recent company that got in touch was a national French television channel. Their design team is looking for new ways to reduce the impact of their streaming services. They realise that their business model is not good and want to do something for the climate, at the scale of their company. I’m going to advise them to do a workshop with their developers and we’ll go through the process of trying to design a website with an energy budget.

Why put yet another technological layer on top of the others when designing a website? Why not use energy as your guiding constraint instead? With creativity and innovation, especially visual innovation, we can find way to present what is usually represented through standards. Simply embedding a Google Map on your website doesn’t require any creativity nor any reflection on what exactly is a map.

But it seems to me then what you want to achieve is actually going in the exact opposite direction of the path that the tech and communication industry wants to follow. What you’re telling me is not compatible with 5G, the internet of things, Netflix, etc.

People seem to be living in a techno-fantasy dream. Mostly because they don’t understand the infrastructure on which it is relying. Eventually, the physical world with its energy limits and planetary boundaries will catch up with these dreams. I’ve been dedicating a lot of time in conferences and workshops explaining to people why autonomous cars will not be possible. Once you open the black box and reveal the infrastructure, people understand what is behind their dreams. You can break the spell, even in the French start-up scene.

A city I will advise this year is also trying to reduce the ecological repercussions of its digital strategy for the next 5 years. Their first concern is to set up sober digital tools that would help lower the environmental impact of the digital industry. Other cities are starting to get interested in these issues too. So i would say that the consciousness of the price that the environment is paying is growing in France.

The Shift Project, Carbonalyser, the browser extension (add-on) that makes visible the invisible climate impact of web browsing

Does a low tech life necessarily imply a return to the past, a downgrade of our ways of life? Is there any way we can make low tech appealing?

First, i think we need to deal with the term “Low tech” we’ve inherited. It’s not an exciting term indeed. We usually understand it as being in total opposition to High Tech but the reality is a bit more nuanced. James Auger was telling me recently that in the UK, they don’t differentiate ‘technology’ and ‘technique’. It’s important to be precise and understand what we are talking about: techniques or technology? In this sense, high tech is low technique and high technology, knowing that technology lies within techniques. On the other hand, the way low tech is thinking is high techniques, low technology.

Techniques implies know-how, learning the tools in a specific context to be able to engage with them, etc. It’s not automation and devices that hide all the machinery. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry by Albert Borgmann is a great source of inspiration. It’s also far more readable then Heidegger. Another good book to think about techniques and technology is The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton. If we look at the history of techniques and of technology based on a sole inventor that invents something, we assume that this invention will be in the world as a whole. However, the use of a technique or technology can appear, disappear, reappear then fade away again and then reemerge in a different space. We need to think of the richness of techniques and technology. You cannot follow just one line of technological progress. That’s part of my teaching when I’m talking with people who live in this techno-dream.

When it comes to low-tech, that’s the term we’re left with so we’ll work with that. We might change it later on and find a better word. I know that there is the term wild tech. In any case the way we think of techniques through low-tech is so much more exciting but you need time, engagement and to some extent you also need to make it specific to the context, in the sense that it will work well on the specific territory where it operates compared to the technology that aims to be applied indiscriminately upon the whole world. The more precisely it responds to the needs of a territory, the more attractive this kind of technology will be.

Of course developers have been looking into efficiency and other issues for many years but it’s still very new in design. Design practices are structured to stimulate the rebound effect. Designers are still mostly economic lubricants. On the other hand, when developers look into efficiency, they don’t think about the ease of use or the rebound effect, they don’t care how people will use the technically nice tools they make.

Digital low-tech is also about materialising. Perhaps more importantly, digital technology has never been linked to a territory, it has always talked about “the global village”. We need to learn how to make a digital service territory-specific, which means that it will be linked to its own energy production, to weather and other parameters we need to consider. It’s much more exciting than just designing digital services where you only need to follow trends.

Thanks Gauthier!

I don’t have the time to write about many of the interesting artworks i discover over conversations or even through my visits to galleries, festivals and museums. So i put them in a digital drawer that i often forget to open. Today, however, i’d like to share with you an installation i discovered while discussing with Peter Bencze during the Fotopub festival in Novo Mesto, Slovenia. Bencze is the owner of ENA Viewing Space, a gallery on a rooftop in Budapest. He had recently helped artist János Brückner instal a work that was part of the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. It all started peacefully enough….

János Brückner, Here and Now, 2019. Photo: Dániel Végel / Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art, Archives and Digital Archives

On day 1 of the opening of the exhibition at Ludwig Museum, visitors encountered a wall surface covered with white paper. As they got closer, they could see numbers in tiny squares that indicated how many notches per unit surface must be drawn using the marker pens available. Over time, the instructions said, a picture would emerge. This collaboration between people to recreate an image, according to Brückner, transforms the participants into a giant “human printer”. This is part of a series of art pieces that, instead of imitating nature, imitate the functioning of machines and embrace human imperfections and errors.

“An essential aspect of these works is that they allow for errors, or, to be precise: there are no rules and regulations prescribing what has to be done,” he explained in an interview. “There is a description next to the colouring sheets explaining that if the spectators are interested in the picture, they can make it visible with this and that method, but it never says they have to do it in a certain way and everything else is forbidden. Therefore, this is a zone where it is up to the recipients to decide what they do: whether they collaborate, rebel, or remain indifferent. A bit like in real life outside the exhibition. The result – the artwork – is a perfect imprint of how the recipients reacted. In other words, these images cannot be “messed up”: every error, rebellion and non-cooperation is an important component of the final artwork.”

János Brückner, Here and Now, 2019. Photo: Áron Weber

János Brückner, Here and Now, 2019. Gif via contextus

János Brückner, Here and Now, 2019. Photo: Emerging Europe

For two months, museum attendees contributed to the completion of the enormous wall drawing. No one, not even the museum director, knew what it would depict. It’s only towards the end of the exhibition, that the final image started to emerge: a portrait of Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s far right leader and bulldozer of liberal democracy. He was much 30 years younger on the image and instead of eyes, he had two clocks, each spelling out the phrase “This Too Shall Pass”.

Just like the wall drawing, Brückner said, Orbán is the “result of a common creation and/or error.”

The appearance of the prime minister’s portrait is said to have have triggered serious tensions between the director, Brückner and Bencze.

The artist wanted to document the finished work, but when he arrived at the museum, the drawing had already been taken off the wall. The museum justified their decision by saying that the work was “weak” and that it dit not even “carry a specific message”.

No matter what one might think about the quality of Brückner’s large-scale installation, it made palpable the power of a portrait of the prime minister and the type of fear and (self-)censorship it can bring about in individuals and cultural institutions.

János Brückner, Have You Ever Hugged a Politician?, 2016. Video by Máté Fillér & Csilla Orosz

I love Brückner’s ingenious, brave and quiet critique of politics, the way he renders visible the influence politics has on the culture it often funds and thus controls. Back in 2016, the artist received an award from an independent art organisation. The ruling right-wing and populist political party saw the award ceremony as an opportunity to pose as a humanistic and empathetic “father“. At the moment of receiving his award on stage, Brückner expressed his gratitude by hugging the Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs – and didn’t let him go for a long, extremely awkward full minute.

János Brückner, Idézet I. A., 2017

Computer viruses are nefarious, chilling and increasingly sophisticated. The way their makers constantly reinvent the tactics that will bypass all security measures and infect our privacy, businesses and governments deserves our attention. That’s exactly why Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam has dedicated an exhibition to the intrinsic beauty and cleverness of their contagious tactics. Malware. Symptoms of a Viral Infection (open until 10 November and curated by Bas van de Poel and Marina Otero Verzier) is an anthology of some of the most cunning forms of bugs, worms, ransomware and Trojan horses. The collection is informative and at times also quite entertaining. Except of course if you’ve recently been a victim of this type of computer villainy.

CodeRed Malware. Photo credit: Johannes Schwartz for Het Nieuwe Instituut

Melissa Virus Malware. Photo credit: Johannes Schwartz for Het Nieuwe Instituut

I reviewed the exhibition shortly after having visited it but i thought it would be a pity if i didn’t try and interview Bas van de Poel. The designer is a connoisseur of computer viruses. Back in 2014 already, he compiled a Computer Virus Catalog, a kind of album of computer viciousness interpreted and illustrated by graphic designers.

Hi Bas! I keep reading that you were born the same year as the first computer virus. But surely that’s not what sparked your fascination for malware. How did you get so interested in them?

My dad was very involved with computers and technology. I got a computer when I was quite young and got exposed to the early DOS viruses. I was immediately intrigued by them and by their aesthetic beauty. In my teenage years, mass mailing really took off. ILOVEYOU, Melissa and others viruses further got me interested in the dark side of computing and that inspired me to tinker a bit myself with viruses. An interest which got me suspended from high school one day. After art school, I launched the Computer Virus Catalog which is basically an illustrated guide to the world’s most destructive viruses in computer history. That sparked my interest to look at viruses from a design perspective.

Do you think people are conscious of the threat that malware poses? Would you say that the media brings enough attention to it?

There’s certainly attention to the issue. However, my general observation is that the problem often appears so “technical” that different types of malware and cyberattacks are often covered in very general terms or turned into attention-grabbing and oversimplified headlines.

Could you tell us about the selection process for the exhibition? What guided your selection of malware? Did you and Marina Otero Verzier try and find the most iconic, the ones that made the most damage? The ones that gave you the best opportunities to share an interesting story?

The curation process was a daunting task. There are more than a million viruses in the world. Together with Marina, we looked at the cultural, social, political and economic impact of these viruses and made a selection based on that. The exhibition is chronological so we looked at the timeline, starting with the very first computer viruses and followed their evolution. Furthermore, we looked at the socioeconomic cultural context of these viruses.

ILOVEYOU Virus Malware. Photo credit: Johannes Schwartz for Het Nieuwe Instituut

CryptoLocker, Malware, exhibition view at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Photo credit: Ewout Huibers

The premise of the Malware exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut is that malware are manifestations of creativity, that they can be pieces of design. So what would be the role of designers in this context? How can they contribute to counter the way malware spread and wreak havoc?

The exhibition does indeed look at the creators of viruses as designers, focusing on the beauty, sophistication of their work and highlighting the unique method of impact they developed. At the same time, there is an ongoing arms race between white hat designers and black hat designers. Designers don’t always take into account that the product or service they are developing can be used for malicious purposes. When Microsoft introduced the Macro language which is a programming language for their Office Suite, their aim was to empower people to be more creative with the products, to explore and expand their possibilities. The introduction of that language gave rise to a whole new type of malware making Melissa, I Love You, Anna Kournikova and other types of mass mailing worms possible.

Designers should be very much aware of how their creations can be used or contextualised to have a negative impact, how they can be used with malicious intent.




Malware, exhibition view at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Credits: Astin le Clercq

Malware, exhibition view at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Credits: Ewout Huibers

You worked with Tomorrow Bureau to visualise viruses and their impact. How much did you use archive material and how much did you rely on creativity?

The early DOS virus were very explicit. As soon as your computer was infected, you saw it. However, as viruses developed and become more complex, they also become more invisible. And that was the challenge from the curatorial point of view: “How do you make the invisible visible?”

Each corridor in the exhibition focuses on a certain era in the history of malware (and in general, technological advancement.) The first corridor features early DOS viruses, the second corridor Windows worms and ransomware and the final corridor highlights malware used for geopolitical purposes.

From a visual point of view, we also tried to reflect the generalised aesthetics of each particular era.

Starting with the 8-bit aesthetic, then UI elements from Windows 95-98, up to the current moment we’re living. We are now dealing with highly advanced ransomware. We tried to reflect the sophistication of today’s malware by using highly complex renderings in combination with propaganda media materials..

Kenzero Malware. Photo credit: Johannes Schwartz for Het Nieuwe Instituut

LSD Virus Malware. Photo credit: Johannes Schwartz for Het Nieuwe Instituut

In 2014, you compiled an impressive Computer Virus Catalog. How has the field evolved over the past 5 years?

I think it has become evident that technology has lost its innocence the past 5 years. And I’m not only talking about viruses. Facebook, to take a more recent example, is no longer an innocent platform used for social interactions. It turns out it has the ability to undermine entire democracies. There has been a better understanding of how the digital reality of malicious software can have impact on the physical realities we live in. A virus like Stuxnet, for example, was already out when I was working on the catalogue but it was relatively targeted form of malware. More recently however, a malware like Petya targeted businesses, disrupted airports, banks and hospitals. It had huge implications on the daily life of the citizens of Ukraine. I would thus say that the impact of malware attacks have become more evident to all.

Thanks Bas!

Happy99 Virus Malware. Photo credit: Johannes Schwartz for Het Nieuwe Instituut

PollyCrytp Malware. Photo credit: Johannes Schwartz for Het Nieuwe Instituut

Malware, curated by Bas van de Poel and Marina Otero Verzier, remains open until 10 November 2019 at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam.

Previously: Malware: What if we looked at computer viruses as works of design?

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is an advertising platform that allows businesses to bid on the keywords they are interested in. The higher your bid, the more prominent your clickable ad on the search engine results.

In poetry and other forms of literature, words acquire value based on the type of emotions, mental landscapes and history they evoke. For Google algorithm however, the value of a word fluctuates according to the power of the industry that uses and advertises it. The term “cloud”, for example, evokes meditative moments, dreams and celestial visions. But on Google planet, it is associated to the technology that uses the internet and remote servers to store data and applications. Which explains why the word “cloud” is much more expensive than the word “sunny” for example. This type of emotionless commodification of language has helped Google become one the most successful and wealthy companies in the world.

Pip Thornton, William Wordsworth’s Daffodils, 2019. Photo credit: Chris Scott

Dr Pip Thornton‘s research explores the economic, cultural and political effects of this monetisation of language.

As the value of words shifts from conveyor of meaning to conveyor of capital, she writes, has Google become an all powerful usurer of language, and if so, how long before the linguistic bubble bursts?

Thornton’s doctoral thesis, Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism is accompanied by a series of artworks that feed poetry through the Google Ads system. Each of the words in the literary texts she chose are analysed and given an approximate price by Google. The results are then printed out in the form of a receipt.

She was particularly interested in how the Google algorithm would approach Orwell’s Newspeak, a language featured in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Newspeak is an extremely controlled language developed by the ruling Party of fictional Oceania to ensure that the grammar and vocabulary are so restricted and poor that it would be impossible for its speakers to articulate any freedom of thought and any other critique of the Big Brother ideology.

Pip Thornton, {poem}.py, 2019. Photo credit: Amy Freeborn

Until recently, the highly lucrative Google Ads system could not be applied to spoken-word poems that had not been transcribed online. This stronghold of resistance has started to crumble now that speech-recognition has improved and that we’ve welcomed Alexa, Siri and other “personal assistants” into our life.

Dr Pip Thornton is a post-doctoral research associate in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve asked her to tell us more about her research:

Hi Pip! Your PhD thesis, Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism, was accompanied by creative experiments that consisted in feeding poetry, literary texts and even your own thesis through Google Ads (formally AdWords) in order to communicate and critique linguistic capitalism. How were art and creativity useful to your research? 

The creative intervention part of my research was a serendipitous accident, but foregrounding the importance of language as art became an integral method. I wanted to use the power of language – existing poetry and literature, as well as new experimentations and speculative work – to critique digital technologies/economies, rather than just using digital tools and technologies to analyse and experiment on language sitting passively in datasets and corpora. I wanted to give language its agency back as human, emotive language, rather than as a training set, or as a vehicle for the flow of advertising capital around digital spaces, which is what it is increasingly becoming. The monetised poem-as-receipt (the {poem}.py project) began as a simple way of visualising the idea of linguistic capitalism, and conveying it to multiple disciplinary audiences. When I worked out how to actually print receipts, and started framing them, it then kind of automatically turned into art – almost by default – which is interesting, as the words I had so carefully rescued from the algorithmic market then become enrolled in an entirely new market. I tried to make these tensions clear in my thesis, and resist them as much as possible.

Pip Thornton, William Wordsworth’s Daffodils, 2017

Apart from Google Adsense, where else can we observe linguistic capitalism in action?  

The definition of linguistic capitalism my thesis stems from is from Frédéric Kaplan’s discussion of Google AdWords in his 2014 article ‘Linguistic Capitalism and Algorithmic Mediation’, but it’s definitely also relevant to other Google platforms such as AdSense (as in its part in the spread of fake news) and GMail. An early inspiration for my own artistic intervention into AdWords was Cabell and Huff’s American Psycho, where they sent pages of Easton-Ellis’s novel through Gmail and collected the adverts that were triggered by the text. They then reconstructed the book physically, leaving the text out, but inserting phantom footnotes to the adverts, thus revealing an economic para-text in which the misogyny and violence of the text is obfuscated by its money-making potential.

For me then, linguistic capitalism occurs when the economic value of words – their exchange value – negates their value in their communicative, or aesthetic sense, with potential collateral effects on the wider discourse. Franco Bifo Berardi calls this the grammar of the digital economy.

I think about it in terms of the illiquidity of language in the digital economy – if words are now tied to an economic derivative value that is more and more distanced and decontextualized from its other – more liquid – values, then do they risk becoming subprime?

Pip Thornton, The price of 1894, 2017. Photo credit: Ray Interactive

Pip Thornton, NEWSPEAK, 2019. Photo credit: Maxime Ragni

The piece NEWSPEAK involves the whole text of Orwell’s 1984 being shown as a stock market ticker-tape, with the word prices fluctuating according to live data from Google Ads. How fast and how widely does the price of words fluctuate over the course of a day for example?  

I haven’t done an in-depth analysis of the changing prices of the words during the NEWSPEAK installation yet. Since Google Ads’ latest upgrade, the estimated bid prices change far more dynamically and quickly than they used to, so I need to update my analysis accordingly. What I can say is that when I first monetised 1984 through AdWords in 2017, and printed it out as a receipt, the text was theoretically worth just over £58,000. The final iteration of NEWSPEAK 2019 came in at around £72,000, so it’s gone up £14,000 in two years!

Pip Thornton, Intersections (exhibition view), 2017

Have you ever thought about what the ruling parting of Oceania would have made of this way of monetising words?  

They’d be raging at Google for pinching their model! The appendix to 1984 gives a full description of Orwell’s vision of Newspeak as deployed in Oceania. It’s specifically a language where words can only be used for a specific and controlled purpose – for example the word ‘free’ can be used to say things like ‘this field is free from weeds’, but can’t be used in a political sense of being ‘free’ from oppression, or intellectually ‘free’. Google’s search and advertising model exercises a similar method of what Anna Jobin and Olivier Glassey have called semantic determinism. Whatever the context of the words we put into the search engine, it is the linguistic market that decides the context of the search results based on the most economically lucrative version of that word – which is not necessarily the one you intended. The best example to illustrate this in my own work is the suggested bid prices for the words cloud, crowd and host in William Wordsworth’s Daffodils poem, all of which have high economic values, based not on Wordsworth’s vision of a Cumbrian springtime, but because of their re-contextualisation as valuable keywords relating to digital technologies such as cloud computing and web hosting. Likewise, in Newspeak, Orwell imagines that words cannot be used for literary purposes. What I think makes the 1984 critique so powerful is that in Oceania, this control of language is overtly deployed as a means of controlling thought, whereas in linguistic capitalism, the political and social effects of this semantic determinism go largely unnoticed, or are somehow dismissed as a quirk, a glitch, or as an acceptable trade-off for the wider perceived benefits of Google’s systems.

This year, you worked with Ray Interactive to add a voice recognition element to your project. What did voice recognition bring to your work?  

When I began the {poem}.py intervention back in 2015, it was ‘written’ words on the internet I was interested in – specifically the words going in and out of the search engine, so I would only do receipts for poems that I could cut and paste from the web. Conceptually the words needed to have been ‘vulnerable’ to the algorithm in some way. Indeed, the first collection of poems I monetised through AdWords included a VOID receipt for a spoken word poem that only existed as audio on the web.

Spoken word thus became a form of resistance against the forces of linguistic capitalism. However, now just a few years later, with the development of Siri, VOIP calling and home assistants such as Amazon Alexa, as well as developments in the monetisation of audio on YouTube etc, speech and audio are no longer safe from digital exploitation, so I wanted to reflect and explore that in my work.

I started imagining a kind of dystopian future when voice-based technologies are so prevalent that it becomes impossible to speak without our words being monetised in some way, and that what we say starts to be dictated by how much linguistic capital people create in different physical spaces. So maybe data packages or Wifi are dependent on the generation of value through speech, so people would earn social capital from making money in areas where keywords are worth more, such as cities, business/commerce hubs, rich areas etc, but not all people have access to those areas, so social divisions are magnified to the point of unrest or conflict.

To reflect this in my work I wanted to develop a voice activated version of {poem}.py, so that spoken words could be automatically monetised in real time, and also to integrate a physical spatial element – maybe in the form of a maze, or other structure, – to convey the idea (and the frustration), of having your movement through space controlled by how much or how little money you make with your words. It was just a theoretical idea at first, but after meeting Brendan and Sam from Ray Interactive through the Creative Informatics project here in Edinburgh, we managed to make it a reality.

You tested the voice recognition system with a group of playwrights, “asking them to create stories according to the economic value of the words they speak as they walk through and react to different surroundings.” Can you tell us how the experiment went?  

Yes – the first time we tested it was at a workshop hosted by the Edinburgh International Festival. We asked playwrights and writers to explain a play or book to their team in three scenes, or stages. We had boxes marked on the floor, and players had to negotiate their way through the space while avoiding running down their team’s budget with what they said. So it was all about an economy of words – trying to avoid using economically valuable language, while at the same time also not losing its communicative and creative value. It was very much a first iteration, but it had interesting results, and we’re hoping to develop it further in the future.

Does linguistic capitalism have any effect on the language people speak in their everyday life? or is it confined to the world of online advertising?  

I suppose there are links between online keywords and the buzzwords people use to gain social and economic capital in spoken communication, and of course language always evolves according to changes in technology and other cultural factors. It’s what’s ahead that bothers me though… like I said before, offline communication used to be relatively untainted by this particular form of linguistic capitalism, but it’s becoming more and more normalised for private and public spaces to be monitored or recorded – whether you consent to it or not. This might start as Siri requests being recorded, or data from VOIP calls and home assistants being monitored and monetised, to smart city projects like what Google is planning in Toronto or things like the technologies monitoring schools for audio signals of anger and violence. With the workshop at the Edinburgh International Festival, I wanted to convey the frustration that might be felt if we were to be aware that the words we say might be hoovered up and exploited in various ways, and also to challenge people to think carefully about their choice of words. Participants were encouraged to think of ways to resist linguistic capitalism by conveying messages (in this case plays) to their human teammates in ways which confounded the voice recognition software. For example, it became clear that strong accents are ‘misheard’ by the software, or participants could draw out their words so slowly that they could make themselves understood to their team, but avoid their words being monetised. As a critique of new voice technologies, it worked quite well. People were annoyed that the very basic voice recognition software we used sometimes didn’t understand them, and there was also the aspect that they couldn’t turn it off – players were arguing with off-mic team mates, but it was all picked up and monetised… there was no escape!

Pip Thornton, 1984 (end), 2017

You explained in a Linguistic Geographies post that “the final chapter of my thesis will examine ways of turning this power back around, and ‘making art political’, or more specifically to this project, reclaiming language as art.” Could you tell us more about that aspect of your research? 

Yes – the ‘making art political’ part is a direct response to what I argue is an aestheticisation of the politics behind technologies such as Google search and advertising. It comes from Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). Benjamin was writing in 1930s Europe, where the fascistic politics of the 1930’s had been ‘aestheticised’ by its co-option of popular culture and the myth of inclusion. I argue that a similar thing is happening today – we are lulled into a sense that we have any control or agency by the aesthetics and ubiquity of technologies like Google, and more and more this has extreme political consequences. Benjamin’s call to overturn the aestheticisation of politics required the politicisation of art, which is what I aim to do with my intervention – quite literally embedding the political critique in the material intervention, and re-aestheticising language.

Pip Thornton, 1984 poem.py, 2017

Any other upcoming events, fields of research or projects you could share with us?

I have a piece of speculative fiction coming out soon called ‘Subprime Language and the Crash’. It’s in an edited collection (Kitchin, Graham, Mattern, Shaw 2019) that imagines what would happen if cities were run by companies such as Amazon, Google etc. My piece explores some of the concepts I mentioned earlier. I also want to address Subprime Language from a more academic perspective, so am working with John Hogan Morris on developing the economic and theoretical concepts around such a project. I’m also thinking about the idea of a ‘digital écriture féminine’, an adaptation of Hélène Cixous’s work on the gendered binaries in language – which are so apparent in Google AdWords data- and how we can turn them around through intervention and creativity. Apart from that, I am really keen to take the NEWSPEAK ticker-tape project forward – a monetised version of 1984 playing in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square maybe?

Thanks Pip!

Entangle. Physics and the Artistic Imagination, a book edited by Ariane Koek, with essays by science writer Philip Ball, Ariane Koek, art historian Gavin Parkinson, physicist Carlo Rovelli, curator and historian Nicola Triscott. Graphic design by Maria Persson.

Publisher Hatje Cantz writes: Black holes, dark matter, gravity, time, motion—these phenomena fascinate physicists and artists alike. Both strive to discover how they shape our world. The connection between art and science is gaining increasing significance in contemporary art.

Now, the influence of physics on today’s art, design, and architecture is being more closely examined. Curated by Ariane Koek, the founder of the arts program Arts at CERN, the exhibition Entangle – Physics and the Artistic Imagination and its companion catalog present the works of fourteen contemporary artists who are inspired by physics and its investigation of natural phenomena. Besides their works, this ground-breaking publication also contains interviews with the artists and physicists who share their different ways of seeing.

Julius von Bismarck, Freedom Table & Democracy Chair at IMO gallery Copenhagen in 2013

Entangle. Physics and the Artistic Imagination is the catalogue of the exhibition that closed recently at Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden. I haven’t seen the show alas but the book is an enlightening substitute for the museum experience.

Whether they are physicists or curators, the contributors of the book have an uncanny talent to communicate, in limpid and approachable terms, their enthusiasm for particle physics and other seemingly abstruse concepts. In her introductory essay, curator Ariane Koek articulates the mutual benefits physics and art can draw from each other. Physicists, she argues, allow artists to observe the world under a new lens. Conversely, artists allow all of us to see the world under a different light and help us make sense of our place in the world. Both expand our horizons, make use of imagination and don’t hesitate to probe the limits of knowledge.

Her point is illustrated further in the book by a series of duos of short texts in which one artist and one scientist present their own understanding and experience of a specific natural phenomenon or concept: gravity, matter, space, entropy, etc.

Ryoji Ikeda, data.tron [WUXGA version], 2011

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote a fascinating essay about quantum physics in which he explains the notion of ‘entanglement’. You have to hold on tight but his stories of traveling gloves and subtle connections make the whole experience rewarding.

Philip Ball makes the case for the importance of imagination, dreams, patience and failure in physics. He also has some interesting remarks about the dangers of a society where big data threatens to take precedence over knowledge. Gavin Parkinson recounts the Surrealists’s fascination with physics. Nicola Triscott shares her experience of bringing physics into the wider cultural experience and the arts into scientific practices (you can read more about it in the book she edited together with Fiona Crisp The Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture.)

Entangle. Physics and the Artistic Imagination presents insights and ideas that were new and exciting for me, challenged my perception of the world and pushed my imagination to places i would otherwise never enter. I still fantasize about a passage in one of the essays that explained that it’s not because we haven’t seen white holes that we shouldn’t imagine their existence.

Quick list of some of the works i discovered in the book:

Julian Charrière, Terminal Beach (Aomen II), 2016

Julian Charrière’s series Second Suns examines the post-nuclear landscapes and the architecture on the Bikini atoll, a group of islands that the U.S. used as an atomic bomb test site between 1946 and 1958. The artist’s photos of concrete bunkers and other decaying infrastructures are “corrupted” by grains of sand from the atoll’s still-radioactive beaches. The grains were placed on the negatives while they were developed, leaving behind their eerie, glowing marks on the picture.

Carey Young, Report of the Legal Subcommittee, 2010

A print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a United Nations meeting in which international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space.

This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Entangle. Physics and the Artistic Imagination. Video produced by Bildmuseet

Solveig Settemsdal, Singularity, 2016

Iris van Herpen, Magnetic Motion shoes, 2015

William Kentridge, The Refusal of Time (installation view), Bildmuseet 2018

A couple of weeks ago i took the train to Marseille to see the first monographic exhibition of works by Paul Destieu at the Galerie des Grands Bains Douches de la Plaine. The French artist has an uncanny talent for mixing time, space, rhythm, movement and emotions in a single work. The result is not only visually pleasant but it’s also critical, lucid and witty. I had experienced many of his installations over the years (mostly during my visits of the GAMERZ festival in Aix-en-Provence) and was eager to see how they would fit together in a solo show.

Paul Destieu, Fade Out, Sans titre n.2, 2011

Paul Destieu, Fade Out, Sans titre n.2, 2011. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

Paul Destieu, Fade Out (extraits), 2011

The show opens with a reference to one of Destieu’s most famous works: Fade-Out. The video shows the merciless burying of a drum set under gravels. The gravel hitting the percussion parts produces a rhythm section, which rapidly turns into a sound and visual chocking. It’s a bit like watching music being entombed alive. You’re upset but you can’t turn your gaze away from the spectacle until the instrument is completely covered and silenced.

Instead of a video or even a series of large scale photos from the performance, the exhibition presents us with only one still from Fade Out. Not even a big one. Just a photo that seems to suggest that there’s no need to dwell on past glories, that Destieu has far more than one string to his bow.

Paul Destieu, Météore, 2019. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

Paul Destieu, Météore, 2019. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

Which is sadly true for the musical instrument. The drum kit survived the barbarous burial to emerge again in one of the works exhibited in the gallery. Dismembered and suspended as a graceful mobile, it looks vulnerable. A kind of Calder kinetic sculpture powered by air or the push of a visitor’s hand. I wouldn’t mind a miniature version of it above my bed. The instrument still has rhythm and that rock’n’roll attitude but this time it’s purely visual.

Paul Destieu, Shuffle, 2014

Paul Destieu, Shuffle, 2014. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

I wish the Shuffle video was available online because it is difficult to communicate the hypnotising effect it has on viewers. So i won’t even try… Shuffle is a video that collects snippets of youtube videos that document the brief moment in which a drum player clicks his drum sticks together to set the synchronization beat and kick off a live performance. Destieu assembled the video footages to form a metronomic trip through rock history. You can get an idea of it over here.

At this point of my visit of the show, i was starting to wonder why the artist keeps returning to drums in his work and how he manages to constantly reinvent their functions and forms.

What’s so special about the drum? Maybe it’s not the instrument itself but the brain of its player. Destieu is a drummer himself and drummers, a Swedish research suggests, have fundamentally different brains than the rest of us. Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm found a link between intelligence, good timing and the part of the brain used for problem-solving. According to them, using all the parts of a drum kit to keep one steady beat demonstrates intrinsic problem-solving abilities. Well i don’t know what problem the artist is trying to solve but i certainly enjoy his responses to it!

More drum experiments follow…

Paul Destieu, Archive d’une frappe /​ Solo pour caisse claire, charleston et tom alto (detail), 2015. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

Paul Destieu, Archive d’une frappe /​ Solo pour caisse claire, charleston et tom alto, 2015. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

Archive d’une frappe (Archive of a beat) explores the materialization of sound and musical forms. Each of the sculptures records and decomposes the movement made by a drumstick just before it hits a cymbal.

The capture and the motion analysis of the musical gesture fleshes out the tensions between the musician and his instrument. Looking at the sculpture feels a bit like having the flicker fusion rate of a fly and being able to see the movement in slow motion. Or like propelling chronophotography in 3 dimensions.

Once captured, synthetized and 3D printed, the hit on the musical instrument is extracted as a physical counter-form both from the interpreter and the drumstick.

Paul Destieu, Silence, ça tourne, 2017. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

Paul Destieu, Still from the video Silence, ca tourne!, 2017

Between a per­for­mance and a making-​​of, the video Silence, ça tourne was shot on top of the Lot valley, an area in South West France with vineyards, stunning landscapes and barely any human life. The sequences, shot at a different location each time, show the area from dawn till dusk. Each one starts with the video maker shooting in a mega­phone: Silence, ca tourne! The expression is french for the cinematographic command Aaaaand… Action! but it can also (and quite literally) mean “Silence, it turns!” The call can thus be interpreted as an injunction to stay quiet and enjoy the scenery of the Earth’s rotation on its axis and its slow revolution around the Sun.

It also sounds like a distant echo of the famous Eppur si muove which Galileo Gallilei is attributed to have muttered after he had been forced by the Church to recant his claims that the Earth moves around the Sun….

Paul Destieu, Still from the video Silence, ca tourne!, 2017

And since i’m on a “historical references à gogo” roll today, i also thought about the most famous painting of Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich when i saw the scene above. Just a man, a precipice, the fog and the landscape.

Paul Destieu, Light cube, 2010. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

There are many other works in the show. I’ll end with Light Cube #3 because who knew you could suggest architecture with a bunch of good old projectors? The installation plays with the oriented projections of empty slide projectors. Instead of offering the usual frontal, two-dimensional projection, each trapezoid is distorted in order to model the respectives sides of an architecture made of light.

Paul Destieu, Boucherie de l’avenir, 2018. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

Paul Destieu, Sans titre / Untitled, 2019. Exhibition view at Art-cade*, image courtesy of Otto-prod

There’s only a couple of days left to see the works. Paul Destieu solo show remains open at Art-cade in Marseille until 28 September. The exhibition is part of the pre-opening of GAMERZ Festival’s 15th edition.

A collaboration between OTTO-Prod, Art-cade*, Lab GAMERZ | M2F Créations & D.D.A Diffusing Digital Art.

Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Paypal, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Each of these tech companies has chosen to install its European headquarters or at least major offices in Dublin. The U.S. giants, lured by a very advantageous and very controversial tax policy, have left their marks on the fabric of the city. They came with jobs of course but also with hideous office buildings, energy–hungry data centers, rampant gentrification and rents Dubliners can no longer afford.

Photo credit: Paul O’ Neill

A tour of the Internet’s physical infrastructure in Dublin with Paul O’Neill. Photo credit: Harikrishnan Sasikumar

All these issues are regularly discussed in the national press of course but researcher, artist and activist Paul O’Neill wants to expand the IT debate to the wider geography of tech infrastructures. A few months ago, he started taking Dubliners and curious tourists on a guided tour of the headquarters, warehouses, data centers and other infrastructures the internet relies on.

His objective is to bring to light the kind of influence and power that hide behind the sheer banality of corporate architecture and manhole covers.

Photo credit: Paul O’ Neill

I’ve met O’Neill twice. The first time was during an online workshop with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe. The second time was a few months ago when we were both in France for Nø School Nevers. That’s when i realised he was the guy a few friends of mine had told me about: the academic and artist who walked through industrial estates, Silicon Docks and availability zones with anyone wondering what the internet was made of. By the time i had realised what his research was about, it was already 2pm and i had to run to the train station. So i caught up online with him and interviewed him about his guided tours:

Hi Paul! You organise tours that uncover the physical infrastructure of the internet in Dublin. What got you interested in the topic?


For the last few years I have been interested in doing a project on the many big tech companies based here. I felt that there wasn’t too much critical reflection in Ireland connecting the actions and impacts of these companies internationally with their corporate offices in Dublin. Last year I attended Freeport, a summer school in Barcelona, organised by Bani Brusadin and led by the Share Lab. This programme detailed many different methodologies including the analysis of national Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and ranges. When I came back to Dublin I started looking at IP addresses for Ireland. I found that just under 33% of all Irish IPv4 addresses here were registered to Amazon. This compelled me to look at the operations of Amazon, in particular their cloud computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS). The reason for the high percentage of Amazon IP addresses was because of AWS data centres. Ireland is an AWS region (EU-West-1) and has at the moment approximately 8 data centres surrounding Dublin city.

At the same time that I was doing this research on AWS, I was also reading Ingrid Burrington’s Networks of New York: An illustrated field guide to urban internet infrastructure. Using this book, I began to search for traces of the physical internet within Dublin city centre. Through this process I was able to map the cellular towers in the city, as well as some of the fibre optic cables running under the streets – alongside the companies who owned or controlled them. The next step was to try to connect the physical internet infrastructure within Ireland to the rest of the world. To do this I started looking at the subsea cables that land here.

I was trying to figure out different ways, outside of ‘traditional’ academic and artistic settings, of disseminating all the information I had gathered. Taking inspiration from Spanish artist Mario Santamaria’s brilliant Internet Tours, I decided that this participatory tour approach would be the best way to not only share my research, but also to facilitate conversations surrounding the physical infrastructures and the different sites of power that they connect with and run through – be that a data centre in an industrial estate in the suburbs of Dublin, or in the corporate offices within the city centre.

A tour of the Internet’s physical infrastructure in Dublin with Paul O’Neill. Photo credit: Èrika Marcet

A tour of the Internet’s physical infrastructure in Dublin with Paul O’Neill. Photo credit: Harikrishnan Sasikumar

What is the most surprising things you discovered while researching the presence of the world’s largest technology companies in your own city?



I guess what surprised me most was what I already knew. Dublin, and Ireland, is a significant part of the internet’s physical and corporate infrastructure. AWS is not the only large tech company with a large physical infrastructural presence in Ireland. Google, Facebook and Microsoft also operate data centres here. This is on top of their corporate interests. Google and Facebook’s European, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters are here, whilst Amazon and Microsoft have significant corporate operations. Most of these companies, alongside Twitter, Airbnb and Linkedin (all with EMEAs in Dublin) are all concentrated within close proximity to each other, in an area now referred to as Silicon Docks.

Photo credit: Paul O’ Neill

Photo credit: Paul O’ Neill

What kind of people are interested in the tours?


So far I have only done two full tours (they last 6 hours and take quiet a bit of preparation). The first iteration was for a group of artists, academics and activists, the second was for students from the School of Machines, Making and Make-Believe who were in Ireland as part of the Future Landscapes programme in NUI Galway. However, I’ve led a few mini-tours where people have heard about the project and got in touch. This has been a great opportunity for me to connect with others doing similar research here – I’ve learnt a lot from them and I’ll be incorporating their insights into further iterations of the tour. I’ve had other people contacting me from diverse professional backgrounds, everything from network engineers to actual ‘real’ tour guides, as well as interest from mainstream media – which was weird! Hopefully I’ll be able to get the engineers and ‘real’ tour guides on the next one, not as participants but as guest speakers/guides.

I am very eager to include other people’s expertise and personal experiences within the project. The last tour featured two guest speakers. The first guest, Ceilim Robinson, is a student and artist who grew up in Ringsend, a neighbourhood next to ‘Silicon Docks’. Ceilim spoke about his experiences of growing up in this area and how as a result of the tech companies moving into the area and the subsequent gentrification, he will never be able to buy a house in the neighbourhood his family have lived in for generations. Ceilim’s presentation was delivered outside of AirBnB’s headquarters. The second guest was Patrick Brodie, a PhD researcher based in Concordia University in Montreal. Patrick gave a fascinating overview of the history and development of the data centre industry in Ireland within the context of post-industrial society’s production centres alongside Ireland’s path to globalization. The participatory aspect of the project is important.

We are all, whether we choose to be or not, part of this ‘networked’ world, therefore we all have a part in its story. We can all be tour guides, and maybe in doing so we can take control of a narrative that is constantly framed within the context of ‘progress’, without too much reflection on the cost or consequences of this progress.

Would you say that you are reaching the audience you’re aiming for?

Yes and no. As you would expect, most of the people who have participated in or got in touch all have an interest or are involved in some aspect of digital culture. However, I’d really like to have people who may not have too much prior knowledge or awareness of the issues raised in the tour. I’d love to hear their insights and perspectives, whilst also hopefully demystifying both the language and physical infrastructures of tech, by literally pointing to, as Lisa Parks puts it, the ‘stuff we can kick’.

Photo credit: Paul O’ Neill

Where do you find all the data and information about the location, ownership and function of this infrastructure? Do you use wikileaks, pour through publicly available information, collaborate with other experts? Have you ever tried to contact these companies?



Let’s start with the IP addresses I mentioned earlier. I was able to determine this information using various IP geolocation websites, all free and accessible to anybody with a laptop and internet access. Although WikiLeaks released a document late last year detailing AWS data centres around the world, I had already found the ones in Dublin, although this was a little bit tricky at first. They were mentioned in national and local media but specific addresses were a little vague. I found the exact locations by looking through planning permission applications on various city council websites although even that was a little difficult. I was searching these sites using the terms ‘Amazon’, ’Amazon Web Services’ and/or ‘AWS’. However, many of the actual planning applications were made using the acronym ADSIL (Amazon Data Services Ireland Limited), once I figured that out, I could access the planning permission documents of AWS.

I was able to map various infrastructures within the city centre using publicly available data found online such as the Irish Commission for Communications Regulation website. This site provides the location of all the cellular towers in the country, who is using them, and for what. Tracing fibre optics beneath the streets was more problematic. I did a lot of walking, looking at/for manhole covers branded with particular company names and logos. I then put in an FOI request which helped me to get some (but not all) of the information I needed. To identify the various subsea cables landing in Ireland, I used online sources and also checked foreshore licences, which are similar to planning permission documents and are issued to subsea cable operators by the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government.

Overall, most of the information used in the tour was available online. Obviously every country is going to be different in terms of transparency, but you can really achieve a lot with a laptop, connectivity and of course time, which not everybody has unfortunately. The hardest part of the research process was collating everything into a coherent narrative that not only engages and entertains the audience, but also clearly links the technical with the social, historical and political dimensions of communications infrastructure(s).

Apart from approaching AWS for comment for an article I wrote for the Dublin InQuirer, I haven’t contacted any of the companies mentioned above. This may sound naive, but I like the idea of the tour as being a ‘people’s tour’. I’m pretty sure any contact with these companies would just result in them coming out with some sort of PR glossy sound bite. At the same, there is a need for dialogue with these companies… but that’s a job for somebody else!

Map of the 1858 trans-Atlantic cable route (Unknown – Howe’s Adventures & Achievements of Americans)

You mostly do tours in Dublin, right? Do you know if similar situations can be observed in the rest of the Republic of Ireland? In Northern Ireland? Or is there something special about Dublin?


The tour is obviously very Dublin centric as I live and work here. There are of course plenty of other tech related stories around Ireland. For example, Apple has been based in Cork since 1980. Last year it cancelled plans to build a data centre in Galway following numerous planning permission objections and challenges. Apple, alongside the Irish State, are also currently involved in a battle with the EU over a 13 billion euro tax bill.

In terms of more physical infrastructure like subsea cables, that’s even more rich in terms of history. The first transatlantic subsea cable dates back to 1858 and stretched between Valentia Island off the southwest coast of Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada. A consortium of companies, including Facebook and Google, are currently developing a new subsea cable on the west coast, which I assume will connect to their data centres in Dublin. I’m a little bit unsure of the North’s infrastructure to be honest. There are approximately 7 subsea cables connecting it directly to different parts of the UK and to the US. Although Dublin centric, I do include all of the above, and more, within the tour. I guess the ‘special’ thing about Dublin is not only the concentration of tech companies in one specific area, but the proximity of these corporate-tech sites of power to data centres, another critical infrastructural and site of power. Dublin is a small city, you can travel from the Silicon Docks area to many of these data centres in about 40 minutes using public transport.


I’m particularly curious about the cables. How easy is it to just go to the location where they emerge from the sea? Can you actually see something? Or are they all well hidden or maybe protected with care?

I’ve been caught! I spent a couple of days aimlessly wandering around Sandymount, a coastal area just outside the city centre, looking for a specific cable but couldn’t find any traces of it. This was at the early stages of my research. I’m pretty sure with all the information I’ve collected now such as admiralty charts and foreshore licenses ,I could probably find it and others. I did discover some online blogs/communities with people who were documenting different landing points, mostly in the UK. You probably know these already, but I would point your readers in the direction of artists such as Evan Roth and Femke Herregraven, or more academically, Nicole Starosielski, who have all done a lot more detailed research on subsea cables around the world. For the current version of tour, the specific location of them is not really necessary as the focus is more on data centres and corporate HQs, but maybe in future iterations…

One of the texts you wrote for Dublin Inquirer mentions that the Snowden documents “revealed that British intelligence, specifically GCHQ, had been targeting subsea telecommunications cables, including some with landing points in Ireland.” Maybe my question is a bit naive or stupid but could Brexit have any impact on the way this infrastructure (cables or others) can be accessed and used for surveillance?

Tricky question. My understanding is that if any state wants to access these cables, and have the means to do so, they will. Despite the horror show that is Brexit, I assume countries (and corporations) will still work together – and against each other- in terms of surveillance and monitoring, whenever it suits them. What I do think is interesting in relation to Brexit is the possibility of infrastructural routes being altered. At the moment, there is one subsea cable under development that will connect Ireland directly to France. This is not as a result of Brexit, but I do find it interesting. In the future will latency be sacrificed for geopolitics? Probably not, as latency, in my understanding, is ultimately all about financial gain.


How specific is Ireland, and Dublin in particular, compared to the rest of Europe, when it comes to facilitating the operations of the GAFA and turning a blind eye to its most opaque practices?


I’m slightly wary of discussing other European countries as I haven’t done much in the way of comparative research. As for Ireland, obviously we’ve been consistently aggressive in terms of attracting foreign direct investment through our corporate tax regime. It makes economic sense to have all of these companies here and does much to elevate Ireland as a ‘player’ in the international corporate tech environment. My take is that the Irish government are a little out of their depth in relation to the bigger issues surrounding these companies and seem to be too eager to please. As a result of GDPR and with so many of these companies having their EMEA HQs here, I imagine Ireland will increasingly be a focus point for all kinds of data/tech related issues, yet I’m not convinced that this has been given any sort of serious consideration in relation to potential long term implications and responsibilities. We do have an unfortunate and horrible history of turning a blind eye to the actions of powerful transnational organisations here…

What is next for your research? A book would be nice… Or maybe a map?

It all comes down to time. A book and/or a map would be great and is something I have considered. From a more short term perspective, I need to get all of the information I have collected online in some sort of open navigable way. As I mentioned earlier, I’m very interested in other people contributing to the project. It would be great if people started doing their own tours using some of my research but building on it based on their own research and experiences. There are so many stories in all of this, not just the big data/tech headline grabbing stuff, but also the perspectives of people who just engage at the interface level, or the workers who lay the fibre optics cables around the country, the people working in the phone repair shops and so on. I like the idea of a people’s history of the internet, or something like that. All of this is in the hope that we can generate a bit more understanding amongst ourselves surrounding all of these corporate-tech debates and controversies, and through this process of peer learning, make these companies more visible, transparent and answerable to us.

Thanks Paul!

Paul O’ Neill is a PhD researcher based in the School of Communications in Dublin City University. His research focuses on tactical media, media archaeology and hacktivism. You can follow him @AsWeMaySink or @CNodeDublin.

Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping, and Performing Resistance, edited by Patricio Dávila.

Onomatopee describes the book: We draw diagrams to help us think, communicate and put forth what we think is important or what we want to be true. While some diagrams are seen as statements of fact, they can also further agendas by discounting other realities beneath a cloak of perceived objectivity. Diagrams of power work against representations that claim omniscience by speaking from a position, and making visible what and who gets represented and who does the representing. They also make us consider how we create and maintain relations between producers and receivers of particular forms of knowledge.

Diagrams of Power: Visualizing, Mapping, and Performing Resistance, brings together the work of designers, artists, cartographers, geographers, researchers and activists who create diagrams to tell inconvenient stories that upset and resist the status quo.

Iconoclasistas, ¿A quién pertenece la tierra? (Who owns the land?), 2017

I’ve reviewed books about cartography before. Like this one, these publications explore the work of artists, communities and activists who use maps as tools that give visibility and a sense of agency to disregarded issues. Who challenge dominant narratives, bring attention to neglected social problems, unearth hidden knowledge, reveal intricate connections, etc. In short, they reverse the top down approach to mapping.

This book is different from the others for several reasons.

First, it features the usual essays but also many transcripts of conversations between map makers. Guided by designer, researcher and educator Patricio Dávila, the exchanges reveal what makes these maps (or “diagrams”) invaluable: a sense of responsibility towards the people and territories visually represented, a close collaboration with these communities, the focus on a personal narrative rather than the claim of total (and totally unobtainable) objectivity, the need to distribute and make these maps accessibly to all, the importance of building multidisciplinary teams, the way maps can help even communities that need to remain invisible, etc.

And then there’s the cast! I already knew and admired the work of some of the artists, designers and activists involved: Burak Arikan, Joseph Beuys, Bureau d’Études, Teddy Cruz, W.E.B. DuBois, Forensic Architecture, Fonna Forman, Lize Mogel & Alexis Bhagat, Laura Poitras, Philippe Rekacewicz, Iconoclasistas and Visualizing Impact. I discovered others whose work and views were new to me: Josh Begley, Joshua Akers, Vincent Brown, Department of Unusual Certainties, Peter Hall, Alex Hill, Patricio Dávila, Catherine D’Ignazio, Fonna Forman, Terra Graziani, Lucas LaRochelle, Eliana MacDonald, Julie Mehretu, Ogimaa Mikana, Margaret Pearce, Sheila Sampath.

A quick walk through some of the works i discovered or rediscovered in the book should give you an idea of the breadth of perspectives and the diversity of voices Diagrams of Power presents:

Ogimaa Mikana, an (unofficial) street sign in Toronto that displays its indigenous name. Credit: Tyana Grundig

Artist collective Ogimaa Mikana pushes back against the erosion of indigenous presence in Canada. One of their most famous actions consisted in installing billboards, street signs and plaques in Toronto to remind/inform passersby of what the First Nation peoples called these places long ago, giving them back a history and a visibility. They also mapped indigenous communities whose presence had so far been left out of mainstream cartography and thus navigation systems.

“Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta, GA, USA,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Georgia Negro: A Study’ (1900) (via Library of Congress)

“Distribution of Negroes in the United States,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Georgia Negro: A Study’ (1900) (via Library of Congress)

W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous civil rights campaigner and writer, was also a talented infographics artist. In 1900, he led an all-black team who hand-drew stunning data visualizations for the exhibition, The Exhibit of American Negroes. The show, which took place both at the First Pan-African Conference in London and the Paris Exposition, also featured hundreds of photographs, patents and books by African Americans, a statuette of Frederick Douglass, etc.

Josh Begley, Best of Luck with the Wall, 2017

Critical cartography doesn’t tend to fall for data and its myth of totality. Josh Begley, however, makes a powerful use of data with a short film that travels across the US-Mexico border. Stitching 200,000 satellite images together, Best of Luck with the Wall reveals the vast scale of the Earth as observed from the sky, the artifice of national borders and the dishonesty of a politics that feeds on oversimplification and fear of the other.

Forensic Architecture, Iguala (satellite image) from The enforced disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students

Forensic Architecture exposes a cartography of violence from street corner to an entire state. Their work meticulously documents the events that happened in a small city of Guerrero in Mexico where, on the night of the 26–27 September 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were attacked by the local police, in collusion with criminal organisations and other branches of the Mexican security forces. Six people were dead, 40 wounded, 43 students were forcibly disappeared. We still don’t what became of them.

Collective civil society undertook independent investigation to help investigate crime and confront criminal impunity and failure of Mexican law enforcement. Forensic Architecture reconstructed the events and turned testimony, interviews, videos and phone records into data-points that can be explored on an interactive platform. The platform exposes the relationship between incidents and actors and gives members of the public a more nuanced and faithful narrative that contrasts with the inconsistencies and distortions presented by official reports.

Lucas LaRochelle, Queering the Map, 2017

Queering the Map gives the queer community a platform to record and share experiences and memories in relation to places. The website spans all continents and many languages and operates from the perspective that queer existence is resistance.

In the early days of the platform, Trump supporters came out to troll and spam the growing archive with pop-ups reading: ‘Make America Great Again, Donald Trump Best President.’ A group of queer coders came to the rescue of Lucas LaRochelle, removed the malicious code added to the site and increased its security to protect it from future attacks.

Burak Arikan, Islam, Republic, Neoliberalism, (Network of Mosques detail view), 2012

Burak Arikan mapped the 3 dominant ideologies of Turkey, Islam, Republic and Neoliberalism, and their respective areas of influence in Istanbul. Interestingly, the network of the 3000+ mosques in Istanbul is connected through overlapping call to prayer sounds which can reach ~300 meters in radius.

Visualizing Impact, Visualizing Palestine, Bethlehem Besieged

Visualizing Impact, Visualizing Palestine, AIRBNB benefits from Israeli rights abuses

Visualizing Impact‘s most famous project, Visualizing Palestine, is a growing body of data-driven tools that champion a factual, yet compelling narrative of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Their visuals covering political and humanitarian issues such as land appropriation, restrictions to movements, hunger strikes, water appropriation, Israel’s discriminatory transport system, child prisoners, etc.

The best surprise of the book was the chapter in which Lize Mogel and Alexis Bhagat look back at An Atlas of Radical Cartography, a collection of 10 political maps and 10 essays about social issues they had edited in 2007. Although they reflect on how much things have changed since then (at the time digital cartography wasn’t as accessible as it is now), it remains one of my favourite books both for its design and its content.

I also need to mention the essay written by geographer and information designer Philippe Rekacewicz. I was particularly interested in his reflection on the power of invisibility and why we don’t have descriptive cartography that would lay bare the way authorities and structures of influence function.

More books on cartography: Ecologies of Power: Counter Mapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense, This Is Not an Atlas. A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies, Drawing the Line: Maps that shaped the 20th century, Book review – Visual Complexity, Mapping Patterns of Information, etc.

One of the most visually seducing exhibitions i visited this year was All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, Julian Charrière‘s solo at MAMbo, Bologna’s Modern Art Museum.

Julian Charrière, Where Waters Meet [3.77 atmospheres], 2019 | © the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

Julian Charrière. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Charrière is known for the way he unpeels the various layers of the Anthropocene, revealing the visible, the invisible, the (in)human and the toxic beauty of our world.

“Through a series of videos, photos and installations that cover the story of science, the development of our media culture and the current ecological emergency,” the press material says, “Charrière tries to understand history through his work, looking at the past to imagine what the future holds. Like an archaeologist, the artist gazes into history to understand the future while reflecting on the present.”

Several of the works in the show are set in a microcosm where few human beings venture, a place remote from the rest of the world but which played an important role in human history: the Bikini Atoll. Situated in a far-flung region of the Pacific Ocean, the ‘paradisiac’ coral reef was subjected to some of the most powerful explosions in history—during Operation Crossroads, the U.S. nuclear testing program of the mid-20th century. Since then, the fate of the islands has been largely ignored by everyone. Except by the descendants of atoll’s inhabitants who were forcibly sent into exile.

The artist embarked on an archaeological and geological examination of a landscape that oscillates between our recent past and our distant future. It might be highly toxic to us but it remains magnificent and resilient. And it needs us less than we need it.

Quick walk through some of the artworks on show at the MAMbo:

J.W Ballard’s ‘Terminal Beach’ is a short story set on an island that used to be a nuclear testing site. The island is covered with concrete bunkers and other decaying monuments to the nuclear age. That’s pretty much the scenery that Julian Charrière encountered in the Bikini Atoll (Marshall Islands).

Julian Charrière, Iroojrilik (film still), 2016 © Julian Charrière; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany. Courtesy of the artist

Julian Charrière, Iroojrilik (film still), 2016 © Julian Charrière; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany. Courtesy of the artist

Julian Charrière, Iroojrilik (film still), 2016 © Julian Charrière; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany. Courtesy of the artist

The video Iroojrilik follows the diving excursions Charrière made there together with Nadim Samman.

Charrière’s submarine shootings are interrupted by twilight-dawn images of surface. While these sequences are showing a seemingly untouched paradise, the submarine images are inhabited by shipwrecks corroding on the seabed. They were brought in the area in the 1940s and 1950s when the US-military decided to observe the kind of damages nuclear tests would make on old ships.

The film presents a landscape of friction where dreamy subaquatic views and white sandy beaches cohabit with rotting a submerged Ghost Fleet and radioactive plants.

Iroojrilik shows the aftermath of destruction and the recovery of ecosystems devoid of any human presence. Nature seems to brazenly regain control over the scene. Under the water seaweed is covering the shipwrecks. On the shore, abandoned bunkers are colonized by vegetation. Yet, radioactivity is everywhere, invisible and contaminating the environment for millions of years to come.

Julian Charrière, As We Used To Float, 2018

Julian Charrière, As We Used To Float, 2018

Julian Charrière, As We Used To Float, 2018. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

The video installation As We Used to Float, projected on a huge vertical screen, similarly explores Bikini as a space of fantasy and trauma.

Both Iroojrilik and As We Used to Float are sea-stories for the Anthropocene, portraits of a postcolonial geography we engineered at our own peril.

“The atoll became a place that seems a speculative apparition of the future,” the artist told BerlinArtLink. “You can look at something that no one is looking at anymore because it doesn’t exist, but is still being discussed. In 70 years, nobody has been there, it’s very luxurious. We have the oppressive feeling of the radioactivity and history, which is dark and heavy on our shoulders. Then, we have the magnificent pristine coral reefs or the coconut groves that are re-growing. You always have the sensation of looking into a speculative future. It’s a place that is bound with the past, bound with the future and actually very present in an encapsulated reality. So, while you are there, you can describe yourself as a future speculative archaeologist.”

Julian Charrière. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Julian Charrière. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

The main exhibition room was set to make visitors feels as if they were submerged under the water too. Somewhere in the Bikini Atoll. A huge diving bell is hanging in the middle of the room, counterbalanced by plastic bags filled with seawater from the Pacific.

Julian Charrière, Pacific Fiction, 2016. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Around the diving bell are 146 coconuts from the Bikini Atoll. Encased in lead, they form the Pacific Fiction installation. The metal suggests both a protection from further radiation and the possibility of using them as bomb in echo of the colonial violence that scarred the region. Coconuts are a food staple and a symbol of life in the region. They’ve now become a radioactive hazard.

Other work in the exhibition continued the Anthropocene narrative but moved to other shores…

Julian Charrière, 
Polygon X, 2014

Julian Charrière, Polygon XII, 2014

Julian Charrière, Polygon XXIX, 2014

Also known as the Polygon, Semipalatinsk in the steppes of eastern Kazakhstan was the Soviet Union’s main nuclear test site from 1949 until 1989. During these 40 years, they operated 456 nuclear tests, including 340 underground and 116 atmospheric explosions. The extent of the radioactive contamination on the environment and on local population was not fully known for many years.

Charrière travelled to Kazakhstan and used analogue photography to capture the sites. He then exposed the negatives to radiation. The printed images evoke Bernd and Hilla Becker’s documentation of abandoned industrial structures. Only the white spotting caused by the radiation indicate that the subjects of the images have a far more sinister story to tell.

Julian Charrière, Savannah Shed. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Julian Charrière, Savannah Shed. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Alligators, like other animals living near the Savannah River nuclear weapons site, bear the physical traces of half a century of nuclear weapons production and the occasional dumping of contaminated waste in unmarked pits that were not secure enough to keep highly toxic material from spreading into soil and groundwater. Every year, scientists capture and test thousands of animals to assess the progress in the cleanup of the area.

Charrière reconstructed the set-up of scientific testing which, according to the artist, took place after an accident in the area in 1964. The researchers released an alligator into the wild, captured it again and then they measured its level of contamination.

Julian Charrière, Somehow, They Never Stop Doing What They Always Did, 2019. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Julian Charrière, Somehow, They Never Stop Doing What They Always Did, 2019. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Julian Charrière, Somehow, They Never Stop Doing What They Always Did, 2019. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Inside each vitrine of the installation Somehow, They Never Stop Doing What They Always Did are pyramids that recall ancient monuments. They are made from plaster mixed with fructose and lactose, plus water that comes (or so the description says) from major rivers such as the Nile, Euphrates and Yangtze. Over time, bacteria grow on them and slowly erode the structures. Just as the ancient civilisations that rose along these rivers declined, the sculptures will eventually collapse.

From the Tower of Babel all the way to the decaying landmarks of the nuclear age, Charrière traces an unbroken line of ingenuity mixed with hubris, destined to fall apart and to follow the rules inherent to the matter that constitutes them.

Julian Charrière
, Somewhere (video still), 2014

Julian Charrière
, Somewhere, (video still), 2014

Julian Charrière
, Somewhere, (video still), 2014

Julian Charrière, Where Waters Meet, 2019 | © the artist; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

Where Waters Meet is a series of eerie photos of naked bodies diving deep into cenotes in Yucatan, Mexico. Rather than descending into the water filled caves, their bodies seem to float onto a delicate, underwater cloud called chemocline.

Julian Charrière. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere, installation view at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. Photo: Giorgio Bianchi, Comune di Bologna

Julian Charrière. All We Ever Wanted Was Everything and Everywhere was curated by Lorenzo Balbi and exhibited at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna over the Summer.

During a brief encounter with London two weeks ago, i visited as many exhibitions as i could. Only one made me want to write a review.

Ignacio Acosta, Demonstration outside Antofagasta PLC Annual General Meeting. Church House, London, England, 2013

Ignacio Acosta, Satellite views of Chuquicamata corporate mining town, c. 2011. Atacama Desert, Chile. From Miss Chuquicamata, The Slag

Ignacio Acosta: Tales from the Crust at the Arts Catalyst on Cromer Street near King’s Cross St. Pancras is part of a programme of events investigating the politics of extraction across the planet.

Acosta‘s work is the perfect introduction to the topic. The Chilean artist and researcher exposes mining practices through extensive fieldwork, collaborations with both experts and local actors, visual documentation and critical writing. His show at the Arts Catalyst focuses on the social and ecological impact of the extraction of a mineral that is crucial to modernity: copper. Copper is essential to the production of wiring, motors, domestic appliances, plumbing, electronics and of course renewable energy systems and green technologies. Yet, its extraction, refining and production have a detrimental impact on both ecologies and communities.

Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

The artist travelled to places such as Chile and Swedish Sápmi where social cohesion and the environment are threatened by copper mining. His images and texts focus not only on the damage made to communities and ecosystems but also on the local resistance to ruthless extractivist practices.

“This multifaceted spatial narrative is populated by the overlapping voices of activists, indigenous people and archaeo-astronomers – bringing together a constellation of stances rooted in the distant to recent and present geographies of extraction, exploitation and trauma. Here, filmed interviews, close-ups of resilient landscapes and cartographies of global power expose forms of human and non-human resistance.”

Each of these individual cases studies encapsulates what happens on the global scale when ecosystems and traditional ways of life “get in the way” of corporate greed and the hunt for resources.

Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

Rock samples and iron material from fieldwork conducted in Chilean and Swedish mining sites. Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

I started the visit with the exhibition room that brings to light mining practices in Chile. The mining sector is one of the pillars of the national economy. The country provides the rest of the world with gold, copper, silver, molybdenum, iron and coal. Copper exports are particularly lucrative for Chile. Unfortunately, the water-hungry industry is concentrated in the arid north of the nation where it is threatening local ecosystems.

Acosta’s research zooms in on one of the communities affected by mining: Los Caimanes, a small agricultural town in northern Chile fighting against mining giant Antofagasta Minerals which operates the Los Pelambres open pit copper mine. The mine piles up its tailings in water contained by the colossal El Mauro dam. It is the largest toxic site in Latin America with an estimated 3,500 million tonnes of waste expected to be stored behind its high walls.

El Mauro dam is located above Los Caimanes where residents claim that the dam has dried up a local stream, contaminated underground water and thus deprived them of the fresh water necessary for agriculture. They now rely on trucks transporting water for sanitation and consumption.

There is also a human cost to the mining activity: the division of the rural mountain community. People whose livelihood depend on farming are (rightfully) irritated by the appropriation and pollution of water. Others, who have benefited from new jobs and investment, accuse the farmers of standing in the way of economic growth and progress.

Interview with Patricio Bustamente, 2019. Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

The exhibition features a gripping interview with Patricio Bustamente. The researcher and activist was drawn to the issue because the mining activities were threatening archaeological sites. He was particularly concerned about the fate of the El Mauro site. Before the construction of the dam, the place was an oasis with a rich archeological heritage.

He also commented on the complicity between the mining company and the Chilean authorities, highlighting in particular how people having close connections with the company are given positions of influence in the government.

I particularly liked the translucent prints of Acosta’s photos that were covering the large windows of the Arts Catalyst gallery. I’ll only comment on two of them:

Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

Forest of Eucalyptus planted to absorb contaminated water from Los Palambres mine. From Antofagasta Plc. Stop Abuses! (from ‘Copper Geographies’), Pupio Valley, Chile, 2012 © Ignacio Acosta. Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

One of the windows was covered with a photo of eucalyptus trees. They are not native from Chile but have been planted near Los Palambres for phytoremediation, a process that involves covering the surface of contaminated sites with plants in order to remove, degrade or isolate toxic substances from the environment. Which looks like a great solution to the degradation of soils caused by mining activities. However, (according to wikipedia and several other sources i consulted), Eucalyptus trees show allelopathic effects; they release compounds which inhibit other plant species from growing nearby. Outside their natural ranges, eucalypts are also criticised for sucking more water from the ground than some native tree species.

Slag heap from Panulcillo mine, now closed. Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

Slag heap from the now closed Panulcillo copper mine in the Coquimbo region, north of Chile, occupy another window of the gallery. Copper extraction in the area dates back to the 19th century. The ore extracted in the region was shipped mainly to Wales and smelted in the Lower Swansea Valley. As curator Tehmina Goskar wrote “the Lower Swansea Vallery was a truly transoceanic phenomenon, involving mining/processing complexes on different continents and mobilisation of capital, labour and technology across immense distances.”

Speaking of immense distances, let’s follow the artist to the north of Sweden….

Ignacio Acosta, still from Litte ja Goabddá (Drones and Drums), Jåhkåmåhkke [Jokkmokk], Norrbotten, Swedish Sábme, 2018

Ignacio Acosta, Litte ja Goabddá (Drones and Drums). Installation view from Tales from the Crust by Ignacio Acosta at Arts Catalyst, London, 2019; photo courtesy the artist

Ignacio Acosta, still from Litte ja Goabddá (Drones and Drums), Jåhkåmåhkke [Jokkmokk], Norrbotten, Swedish Sábme, 2018

Ignacio Acosta, Pajala abandoned mine, still from Litte ja Goabddá (Drones and Drums), Jåhkåmåhkke [Jokkmokk], Norrbotten, Swedish Sábme, 2018

Ignacio Acosta, still from Litte ja Goabddá (Drones and Drums), Jåhkåmåhkke [Jokkmokk], Norrbotten, Swedish Sábme, 2018

Sweden’s failure to ratify the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention No. 169 considerably weakens any right the Sami would have over the land they live on.

That is one of the reasons why they are deeply worried about the project to exploit the Gállak North iron ore deposit. Mining exploration company Beowulf Mining PLC has submitted an application for a 25 year exploitation concession for the site. The area they covet, however, is located on the ancestral lands of the indigenous Sami people and forms part of the reindeer winter grazing lands.

A mining permit would have a detrimental impact on the fragile ecosystems, disrupt the reindeer migration paths and threaten the Sámi way of life.

Unsurprisingly, the plans to establish a mine at the site has met with resistance from the Saami people and other local communities. It has raised concerns in regard to the proposed plan to combine hydro power with tailing dam which, a safety research concluded, could jeopardize the provision of drinking water downstream.

Thanks to local resistance, the request to start the exploitation has still not been approved by the Swedish government.

Acosta’s film installation Litte ja Goabddá (Drones and Drums) explores how the Sami are using drones as a way of resisting mining exploration in northern Sweden. Based on research visits and close collaboration with local activists and Sami families, the project explores the link between drums and drones as navigation and communication tools.

Sámi, like many other indigenous communities, live in close connection with with natural forces and have a lifestyle rooted in traditions. The video demonstrates that this doesn’t stop them from using technologies such as drones in their fight against extractive violence on their territory. Diverted from their usual association with vertical control, surveillance and warfare, the drones become as counter-surveillance tools in the protests against the Gállak mining venture.

As for the drums, they are an essential element of Sámi ritualistic activities, and are used to communicate and travel between worlds and have a strong connection to Mother Earth.

Don’t miss Tales from the Crust if you’re in London, it’s a small exhibition but it offers a powerful reminder of the high price other communities are paying for the progress we enjoy.

Ignacio Acosta. Tales from the Crust is at the Arts Catalyst, Centre for Art, Science & Technology in London until 14 December 2019.

Related stories: Edi Hirose: bleak skyscrapers and erased mountains, The scars left by electronic culture on indigenous lands, A bodily experience of man-made earthquakes, HYBRID MATTERs: The urks lurking beneath our feet, Interview with Cecilia Jonsson, the artist who extracts iron from invasive weeds, Home catastrophes, wandering mining hole and limbo embassy. (My) best of the Graduation Show Design Academy Eindhoven, etc.