http://www.ica.org.uk/33267/Talks/Culture-Now-Eyal-Weizman.html

11 May 2012

£5 / Free to ICA Members

Join architect, scholar and curator Eyal Weizman for this lunchtime talk in which he discusses his approach to politics and philosophy.

A key figure within the study of contemporary humanism and architecture, Weizman’s most recent book, The Least of all Posssible Evils (Verso 2011) investigates the genealogy of human rights, from classical and Christian ethics through to modern political philosophy and contemporary theory.

Weizman is also a founding member of the collective, Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Bethlehem, and is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London where he directs the Centre for Research Architecture.

Since his PhD at Birkbeck College (in co-operation with London Consortium), Weizman has published numerous articles and books (Hollow Land, Verso 2007; A Civilian Occupation, Verso 2003; Yellow Rythms and the Territories 1,2, and 3 series. In addition to sitting on the board of numerous councils worldwide, he also manages the ‘Forensic Architecture’ project, funded by the European Research Council.

Filter_Funnel is a sample of FOLDED OCEAN, an on-going experimental research project into the organizational and spatial logics of the Indian Ocean world, a fluid, anti-geographical space where many transnational systems, practices and imaginaries intersect. It is about Lamu, a former slave trading city, Islamic seaport and world heritage site on the northern coast of Kenya, where a new deep-water port is under construction. I examine the proposed port infrastructure as a spatial formula with magical powers, in which many of the wider political dynamics, strategic interests, networks, alliances and machinations re-shaping the contemporary Indian Ocean world are entangled.

Tuesday 12 June – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmiths Main Building — all welcome

Readings:
Keller Easterling, “Zone,” in Urban Transformation, ed. Ilke and Andreas Ruby (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2008), 30-45.

Ridwan Laher,“Resisting Development in Kenya’s Lamu District: A Postcolonial reading”, Africa Institute of South Africa Policy Briefing No. 48, April 2011.

Mikey Salter and Johanna Von Braun, “Bio-cultural Community Protocols: Bridging the Gap between Customary, National and International Law.” , in: Effectius Newsletter 14, 2011.

Website: http://www.savelamu.org/

Dr Lindsay Bremner is Professor and Director of Architectural Research at the University of Westminster. She was previously Professor of Architecture in the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and, before that, Chair of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is an award-winning architect and writer and published, lectured and exhibited widely on the transformation of Johannesburg after the end of apartheid. Her work on the city include Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998 – 2008 (2010), Johannesburg: One City Colliding Worlds (2004), and chapters in Johannesburg – the Elusive Metropolis (2008), The Endless City (2008), Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City (2007), Future City (2005), Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (2002), blank___architecture apartheid and after (1998) and contributions to Domus, Public Culture, Social Identities and Cities. In her design work, Bremner takes on projects having a socially or culturally transformative agenda, such as her third placed entry for a Cyclone Shelter in Bangladesh (with Jeremy Voorhees, 2011), award winning Sans Souci Cinema project in Kliptown, Soweto (with 26’10 South Architects, 2004 – 2007) and second placed entry to the Freedom Square Competition (with Mashabane Rose Architects, 2002). Bremner’s current research, Folded Ocean is investigating the impact of global mobility, trans-nationalism and environmental change on the Indian Ocean world. Bremner holds a B. Arch degree from the University of Cape Town and M. Arch and DSc. Arch degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Complex Scale: Within architecture the idea of scale has a relatively stable meaning typically referring to size, proportion or some form of spatial regularity. This is contrast to the vigorous reconceptualisation of scale taking place in geographical disciplines, where for the last 30 years scale became one its most contested terms. This seminar will introduce students to key moments within the history of scalar thinking and suggest that scale is one of the most critical intellectual and practical concepts for engaging with complex environments.

May 22 – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmihts Main Building — all welcome

Adrian Lahoud is an architect, urban designer and researcher. Through private practice, teaching and research, he explores the disputed, conflicting and often paradoxical transformations of cities.

In 2010 he edited a special issue of Architectural Design titled Post-traumatic Urbanism. Forthcoming in 2012 is Project for a Mediterranean Union on speculative transport, energy and media infrastructure in North Africa and the Middle East. His architectural work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. In 2011, his work was exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial, Gwangju Design Biennale Seoul curated by Ai Weiwei. His theoretical research work, The Life of Forms in the City explores the problem of scale and complexity in architecture and the city. In 2012 he will be Guest Curator for the Think Space Competition Cycle – Past Forward.

There are few exemplars of capitalist modernity more loaded with atavistic symbolism than the skyscraper. These Taylorised Towers of Babel have continued to mark the skylines of 21st century cities, often with the original functional, pecuniary or utilitarian justifications through zoning codes and land values disappearing, in the form of the deliberately wasteful likes of the Burj Khalifa. This paper looks at the various skyscraper proposals made by Soviet artists and architects as a way of implying that this capitalist dream-image had a neglected socialist underside, where from Tatlin onwards Marxists and/or Utopians attempted to reclaim these constructions for some kind of socialism.

May 15 – 10am @ CRA – RHB 312 Goldsmiths – all welcome

Reading material:
Vladimir Paperny – Architecture in the Age of Stalin – Culture Two
Rem Koolhaas – Delirious New York
Moisei Ginzburg – Style and Epoch
This blog: http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/

Owen Hatherley is the author of the acclaimed Militant Modernism, a defense of the modernist movement, and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. He writes regularly on the political aesthetics of architecture, urbanism and popular culture for a variety of publications, including Building Design, Frieze, the Guardian and the New Statesman. He blogs on political aesthetics at nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com.

Savage Objects is part of the project Objectology – a wide research on the emergence of non-human actors within a pos-humanist thought. By framing this new paradigm not only within academic discourse, but also within object-research in fields ranging from legal forums, territorial narratives and artistic practices, speculation about objects and things becomes a discussion about conflicting ecologies of thought. This project started taking shape in early 2010 after a cicle of seminars and performances by the name of Urban Totemism organized by SOOPA in Porto, and was particularly informed by the discussions that took place within the colective residency Terror of the Object, in April 2011, organized by DETRITOS as part of Ghost, a residency in Atelier Real, Lisboa. From these encounters and collaborations the idea of bringing together some of the exciting contemporary research into objects and things begun to emerge, and ultimately became the project Objectology, within Guimarães – European Capital of Culture 2012. Objectology consists of the production of a book edited in both Portuguese and English, around the idea of material resistance entitled Savage Obejcts; and of a seminar, Objects, Practices and Territories, focusing the role of non-human agents within legal and political forums.

http://www.savageobjects.com/

BOOK

Book Launch

2012 May, 3th – 17:30

Sociedade Martins Sarmento, Guimarães

Presentations by editor Godofredo Pereira and writer Ken Hollings

What is to be gained by arguing that objects speak? What do recent turns to the non-human and to things have in common? And what conflicts are emerging within the apparently consensual removal of the human from the centre of the problem of knowledge? Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in objects, things, and the non-human – a gradual departure from the domination of text, language, and discourse in previous decades, or, as is often said, a move away from the human as the central point of reference for thinking the world. The claim that there is a consensual turn is compounded by the emergence of numerous publications on non-human actors in fields as diverse as archaeology, science studies, anthropology, philosophy, history, art, and architecture; works in which the divide between nature and culture or between humans and non-humans is effaced, where complex assemblages of people and things challenge thought procedures, and where the ground upon which modernity itself was founded becomes the object of contention. However, if we look closely at the different ways in which these topics are being discussed, the image of a uniform turn immediately disappears; we find that recent attempts to emancipate objects are contingent upon and differentiated by the practices in which they emerge. With this in mind, the present book tries for the first time to bring together several different forums in which objects are being discussed anew, suggesting that the conflicts arising from fortuitous encounters between researchers might be more productive than a consensual turn to post-humanism

The book takes as its point of departure two well-worn notions, objects and savages, specifically in reference to a Savage Thought that we provocatively twist upon itself, bringing to light not the thought per se but its object and the resistance this object holds to thought. We invited contributions from very different fields to respond to this provocation – from philosophers, archaeologists and anthropologists, to activists, architects and artists – to focus not only on objects themselves but also on the practices within which they are constituted and the territories they refer to. By framing these discussions within object-research as well as academic discourse – in fields ranging from textual production, legal forums, image migration, state performance, and acoustic exploration – speculation about objects and things also becomes a discussion about conflicting ecologies of thought, thus providing insight into often overlooked pragmatic and political dimensions. Ultimately, our hope is that, by bringing such diverse practices together, new lines of thought can be suggested and spaces for new alliances be forged.

Contributors: Martin Holbraad; Ayesha Hameed; Michael Taussig; Graham Harman; Bjørnar Olsen; João Maria Gusmão; Eyal Weizman; Susan Schuppli; Reza Negarestani; Jonathan Saldanha; Regina de Miguel; Marcello Maggi; Paulo Tavares, Godofredo Pereira.

Edited by Godofredo Pereira

Artist as Ethnographer: Workshop with Karen Mirza (& Brad Butler)

Tuesday, May 8 @ no-w-here

One of the early interests of our anthropological film “The Exception and the Rule” (2009) was whether we could make a work that invited the viewer to make theory, and not just consume it. That is, to create a filmic space where a viewer actively works through politics of representation for themselves. This mirrored our questioning of the very foundations of our own artistic practice, our imagination, our processes of withdrawal and our political perspective during the making of “The Exception and the Rule”. As a result we began to manifest a context that would envelop, extend and provoke our ideas: a “forcible frame”. The resulting body of work ‘The Museum of non Participation’ is a confluence of 15 years of artistic practice across disciplines, platforms and physical locations. It sits both inside and outside of our long term film practice, offering both a position to speak from and a way to elicit our (common) struggle ‘to speak’. Recent articulations of the Museum have taken place at the Arnolfini in Bristol, and in Spring 2012 we will present a new permutation of this work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In this talk I will overview key questions and concerns of this museum and how these have manifested into a variety of Acts in Art, Anthropology, Pedagogy and Film.

“Inseparable from economic advantage was the superiority of knowledge. Ownership involved greed, and the advantaged tried as long as possible to block the road to education to the have-nots. The privileges of the ruling class could not be eliminated until we gained insight into the conditions and acquired fundamental knowledge. We kept getting repulsed over and over because our ability to think, deduce and conclude was insufficiently developed. This state of affairs began changing with the realisation that the upper classes essentially opposed out thirst for knowledge. Ever since, our most important goal was to conquer an education, a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion”. (Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance)

‘Deep State’ is a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler that has been scripted in collaboration with author China Miéville. The film takes its title from the Turkish term ‘Derin Devlet’, meaning ‘state within the state’. Although its existence is impossible to verify, this shadowy nexus of special interests and covert relationships is the place where real power is said to reside, and where fundamental decisions are made – decisions that often run counter to the outward impression of democracy.

Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film – most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations.

A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum, in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or ‘riotonaut’, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, personification of the ‘Deep State’, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism.

9 May, 7pm @ http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse/film/Deep_State/

‘Deep State’ is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils.

Forensic Oceanography (FO) maps the fluid cartographies between Libya and Italy to understand how more than 1500 persons could have perished at sea in the Spring of 2011.

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/homepage/fields/investigations/sea

FO provided the spatial analysis that lead to the Council of Europe report on NATO’s responsibility for these deaths in the Mediterranean.

The Council of Europe report whose release was covered very widely in all major papers makes makes several references to FO research.
The Guardian has published our sequence of FO maps in this interactive feature.

FO also appears at Human Rights Watch summary of report. The research team is now completing a large report that will be submitted to NATO the EU and the relevant courts.

Mengele’s Skull The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetic by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman

“In this absorbing study, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman show how the politics of human rights was transformed by scientists who treated human remains as a form of photography and photography as a form of human remains. Exposed to all the details of a person’s life like a very sensitive negative, bones were made to speak. Victims and victimizers could now reappear in the lab and take their place in court. The arrival of forensic aesthetics is the arrival of the articulate object. This object that speaks occupies the position of the witness, and in so doing inaugurates a whole new chapter in justice. This fascinating book asks us to reconsider how facts are constructed and opens a new and expanded landscape for thinking.”

– Beatriz Colomina, Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

“In what ways, Keenan and Weizman ask, can the physical remains of the dead be made to speak? In this lucidly focused text on the exhumation of the historical past, the authors identify a crucial shift in the ongoing work of justice for the victims of state violence and accountability for perpetrators. While avoiding any reductive conclusions, they persuasively insist on the importance of a critical evaluation of how forensic science, with its presumed expertise and ‘objectivity,’ is transforming the nature of evidence.”
– Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University

On the margins of aesthetics, science, and law
Anselm Franke

Forensic aesthetics brings into view the way in which boundaries are currently drawn and stabilized, transgressed and shuttered. In practice, forensics is called upon after the fact: in the aftermath of conflict, crime, and violence, when limits have already been breached, fractured, violated, and are put to the test by ongoing crises that call for resolution. But forensics is not primarily concerned with justice; it is both before justice, as that which establishes the conditions for judgment, and that which happens in place of justice, when agents are no longer accountable. The borderland investigated by forensic aesthetics is one in which the categories of living and dead, subjects and objects, past and present are put into question. It is concerned with the technologies and protocols governing this borderland: its biopolitical containment and expansion, the representation of violence, the (re)construction of historical narrative, or the politics of proof manifest in entertainment and mass media. It is at this frontier that objects are brought to speak.
In this sense, forensics is also a projective practice that constructs languages and spaces of agency. Forensic aesthetics accounts for this blurring of borders—a blurring registered by aesthetics—and also testifies to new sensibilities, describes new territories of action and agency, and critically reflects on the technologies of assessing, calculating, restoring, and redrawing those very boundaries. This book was commissioned to instigate, rather than represent, an exhibition. In this curatorial experiment, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman were asked to produce a book and Hito Steyerl was asked to respond to their text by creating a series of works. This process constructed a form of research within the margins of science, aesthetics, and law— an entangled set of circumstances from which we can examine these fields anew.

http://www.sternberg-press.com/

The principle of the “lesser evil”—the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice—has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt’s exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, Weizman explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Médecins Sans Frontières in mid-1980s Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq. Drawing on a wealth of new research, Weizman charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new “humanitarian” acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/532-the-least-of-all-possible-evils

Reviews:

“Eyal Weizman’s work has become an indispensable source of both insight and guidance in these difficult times. He understands the evolving dynamics of war and sovereignty better than anyone.”
– Paul Gilroy, Professor of Social History, London School of Economics

“This is a wonderful book, written with clarity, precision, and passion. It takes the reader into the heart of contemporary necro-politics and calculations of “lesser evils” by powerful states and their humanitarian accomplices. Deeply learned and informative on every page, this is essential reading for anyone who cares about contemporary conditions of warfare and state-controlled violence; about the spatial practices that reinforce and regulate systemic forms of violence, such as the calculation of minimal requirements for human survival. In the spirit of Doctors Without Borders, Weizman is an architect without borders, at home in political philosophy, military history, just war theory, and the spatial systems of controlled, calculated violence that constitute Israel–Palestine, and much of the world today.”
– W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago

“Originality, ingenuity, and brilliance do not even begin to do justice to this amazing study, this architectural forensics of battle and human rights as pieced together from the study of the ruin and the terrifying logic of “the lesser evil”. How astonishing to see our new world this new way.”
– Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/

Existing at the intersection of architecture, history, and the laws of war, Forensic Architecture refers to an analytical method for reconstructing scenes of violence as they are inscribed within spatial artefacts and in built environments.

It employs new modes of technical visualisation to generate complex knowledge about the spaces and histories of violence; transforming mute architectural products into active material witnesses that can be interrogated within public and legal forums.

We live in a world populated by structures — a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of ways with the other historical construction that surround us, and in these interactions we generate novel combinations. In turn, these synergetic combinations, whether of human origin or not, become the raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of structures inhabiting our planet has acquired its rich variety, as the entry of novel materials into the mix triggers wild proliferations of new forms.

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‘Gone but not forgotten: Archaeological approaches to the site of the former Treblinka Extermination Camp in Poland’.

Lecture by Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls, followed by presentation by Eyal Weizman and Susan Schuppli on the field-work of Forensic Architecture in Serbia and Bosnia.

Tuesday – 28 FEB – CRA Studio, 2pm.

Treblinka in Poland was the massacre site of over 800,000 Jews, Poles and gypsies during the Holocaust. Following the erection of the camp in Spring 1942, the extermination of such a vast number of victims was facilitated by the complex of gas chambers, barracks, mass graves and, later, cremation pyres. Survivor Richard Glazar (2005) noted that, ‘it was normal that for everyone behind whom the gate of Treblinka closed, there was Death, had to be Death, for no one was supposed to be left to bear witness’. The small number of survivors, coupled with the Nazis’ attempts to hide their crimes meant that knowledge of the site’s former function was limited and there had been no attempts since the 1940s to locate the burial sites at the camp. The lack of mapping and information at the site itself is also indicative of how little is understood about its extent and layout. Although a symbolic memorial, railway platform and boundary are present at the site, questions still remained over the spatial layout of the camp, whether traces of the structures survive and where the mass graves and cremation sites were located. Recent non-invasive archaeological survey, remote sensing and archival research have allowed these questions to be addressed and have facilitated a greater understanding of the suffering of the victims and the actions of the perpetrators at Treblinka. This paper discusses the unique non-invasive multidisciplinary approach which was devised to allow the scientific and historic significance of the site to be understood, whilst respecting its religious and commemorative importance. The key results of the project will be outlined and the impact that this research is having upon future plans for memorialisation will be discussed.

resource links:
Any doubts about the existence of mass graves at the Treblinka death camp in Poland are being laid to rest by the first survey of the site using tools that see below the ground, writes forensic archaeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls.

BBC News – Treblinka: Revealing the hidden graves of the Holocaust
BBC – BBC Radio 4 Programmes – The Hidden Graves of the Holocaust
 

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Following Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls’lecture, Eyal and Susan will present materials related to the upcoming research trip to Serbia and Bosnia (which includes the PhDs) and is centred upon an investigation into the Living Death Camp. This project is undertaken with Grupa Spomenik and the Four Faces of Omarska.

The Living Death Camp refers to sites of genocidal violence, specifically former concentration camps, that have been variously re-invented as dark tourism destinations, used as film-sets, staging grounds for artworks and in the case of Omarska now operates as a factory. Our investigative approach hopes to use some of the technological systems that Caroline Sturdy Colls has employed in her conceptually ground-breaking archaeological work on Treblinka, in which systems for the non-invasive examination of sub-terranean matter were deployed to search for human remains.

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Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls,
Lecturer in Forensic InvestigationForensic and Crime Science
Staffordshire University

BIO: I am a Lecturer in Forensic Investigation at Staffordshire University, specialising in the fields of Holocaust and forensic archaeology. My PhD thesis was entitled ‘Holocaust Archaeology: Archaeological Approaches to Landscapes of Nazi Genocide and Persecution’ and centred on the development of a non-invasive methodology which allows the scientific, ethical and religious aspects associated with studies of this period to be upheld. I advocate the development of a sub-discipline of Holocaust Archaeology and I am currently managing ongoing research projects in this field at Treblinka extermination camp in Poland and at the complex of labour camps in Alderney. I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Council for Concentration Camps in The Netherlands, the Atlantik Wall Research Group and the Institute for Archaeologists Expert Panel in Forensic Archaeology. I also possess a BA (Hons) Archaeology and Ancient History (1st class) and an MPhil(B) in Archaeological Practice from the University of Birmingham.

As a practicing forensic archaeologist, I also undertake consultancy for UK Police forces with regards the search and recovery of buried remains. My particular interests in this field include the application of forensic archaeological methods to the investigation of cold cases and socio-historic conflicts. I am a co-author of a forthcoming book entitled ‘Forensic Approaches to Buried Remains’ and have a number of forthcoming publications in the field of Holocaust Archaeology. My interests in archaeology also go beyond the recent past and I have undertaken fieldwork in Greece, the Western Isles of Scotland and a number of sites in England.

GERALD NESTLER: ON PURPOSE -The New Derivative Order

KUNSTRAUM, BERNSTEINER
Schiffamtsgasse 11, 1020 Wien

Opening address: Eva Blimlinger
Rector, academy of fine arts vienna

Special feature in the Basement
Crystal Math. Video installation: Sylvia Eckermann, Lyrics: Gerald Nestler

Duration: February 29 – April 14, 2012
Opening hours: Thursday – Saturday, 4–8 pm, March 1 – 3 and March 8 – 10
and by appointment: +43 699 152 48 623 / mail@geraldnestler.net

Events
Sun March 11 – 5 pm : Performance
In cooperation with Europe in Motion and imagetanz/brut Vienna

Sun March 18 – 6 pm : Agency and the politics of financial derivatives and
algorithmic decision-making. A discussion with Elie Ayache, Thomas Feuerstein, Stefano Harney, Karin Knorr Cetina and Gerald Nestler

Sound performance: Szely.

Sat March 14 – 6 pm : Technopolitics und Technofinance
Brian Holmes, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler and other members of the research project Technopolitics

www.friendsandart.at
mail@friendsandart.at
www.geraldnestler.net

Interview with Peter Galison by Smudge Studio:

Peter L. Galison is a historian, writer, award winning filmmaker and the Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University.  He was appointed a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, he won the Max Planck Prize in 1999, and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1997.

Jamie Kruse (of FOP) had the opportunity to sit with him for an hour in mid-October, 2010 and discuss a few points of shared interest.

Galison’s current research explores the intersections of forbidden wilderness and nuclear wasteland.  He recently delivered the Fifth John McDonald Moore Memorial Lecture at The New School, addressing “speculation as it pertains to these inaccessible sites, focusing on “nuclear wastelands” and “pure wilderness.”

Galison argues that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from dichotomous; that their relation is far more intriguing (and disturbing) than a binary of purity and corruption.  Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity – for reasons of sanctification or despoilment – alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans.”

Our conversation with Galison has continued since then through email, and has ranged from the very pragmatic challenges of storing nuclear waste and communicating its dangers into the far future, to how our view of ourselves in relation to the “pure” or “contaminated” landscapes are the outcomes of our national cultural history, and more recently, the events at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan.  We also briefly discussed how creative practice, in the form of images and moving images in particular, might provide a necessary space for audiences to engage complex and elusive topics such as secrecy and fear.

Galison is currently completing a book, Building Crashing Thinking.  This interview discusses ideas in the last chapter of this book, “Wastelands and Wilderness.” FOP presented Galison with a series of images as visual provocations for our discussion.

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FOP: While visiting the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s “WIPP Experience Exhibit” in Carlsbad, NM, we received this sample of 250 million year old Permian salt.  These pieces are part of a large salt formation and were excavated from 2150 feet below the earth’s surface.  The void created through their extraction is used for the storage of transuranic (beyond uranium on the periodic table) nuclear waste — intended, by WIPP’s design and legislative mandate, to remain undisturbed for the next 10,000 years.  What are your thoughts about designing for this span of time and human attempts to mark this site into the deep future?

PG: I’ve been thinking a lot about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant because the WIPP site, about 26 miles from Carlsbad, forces a kind of combination of thoughts that otherwise would be purely optional, a kind of science fiction exercise.  Here we find such radically different time scales and all of them are relevant.  That salt you have does indeed come from the manifold evaporation and flooding of the Permian Sea across a big swath of the Southwest—during the time before dinosaurs.  You could also see it as a sample of mining: for the last decades, the Permian basin has been the site of potash (potassium chloride) and salt mining—and plunging through those layers is an active drilling program that has been finding and excavating oil and gas.  In part because it is an active extraction environment, the Environmental Protection Agency has driven the Department of Energy to warn future generations about the transuranic weapons waste that is being deposited in this underground salt layer.

This demand for warning puts us in a condition that intrigues me enormously: morally, we have to do it, it seems ethically irresponsible not to try to tell people that there is this plutonium-infested waste.  At the same time, the idea of saying something about a future twice as far from us as human written culture lies in the past—or roughly the entire span of time since the ice age—well, that seems utterly impossible.  This is a task that’s both impossible and necessary.  What could be more interesting than that?

In part in writing and in part in filming, I’m interested in trying to use different media to understand sympathetically, not mockingly, what it means for a group of people who are very sophisticated, from semioticians, archaeologists, anthropologists, to metallurgists, futurologists, and SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) people, to sit down and talk about this in an effort to signal “don’t dig here” to a future that is 400 generations removed from us.  They must consider the role images and icons play in cross-cultural communication.  Will a future society emerge technically sophisticated enough to dig and technically incompetent enough not to register radioactivity?  Could images prove universal?  What role might language play?  Can we bet on a Rosetta Stone?  What can we assume about the continuity or discontinuity of human political culture?  What survives from the past?  What can we learn from the archaeological record about what we can interpret and what we can’t?

Indian mounds are among the more ancient things we have, and we have no idea what they signify.  With Stonehenge we have some fragmentary knowledge about it, and with the Acropolis we have rather a lot of information.  Once we have a combination of written and artifactual objects (as in the Acropolis) you can piece things together.  So this exercise, in some ways, sort of brings to bear the whole of what we know:  historical linguistics, physics, nuclear physics, astronomy, astrophysics, political science —all of these things have bearing on it and at the very least tell us a great deal about who we are. We’re forced to try to apply the sum total of what we know to an extremely difficult, necessary and daunting problem.

FOP: In 2005, the EPA issued a standard requiring the disposal facility at Yucca Mountain to protect human health from the dangers of the high-level radioactive waste contained within for a remarkable one million years.  This was a vast increase from the previous standard of 10,000 years.  We’re very interested in this difference.  Humans have difficulty imagining beyond a span of time equal to that of our visible, material past.  And it is impossible to project how dynamic earth forces will play out into such an extremely distant future.  Given these realities, all attempts to design such a facility become speculative at best and appear to exceed human capabilities.  Yet, we are confronted with the reality of finding a way to deal with this waste nonetheless.

PG: A million years!  Ten thousand is beyond our imagination.  But with a million years, you’re talking not only about the possibility of political, linguistic, material processes, but biological evolutionary processes undergoing great changes.  A million years ago we weren’t “we,” not in any very immediate, biological as well as cultural sense.  A requirement to warn a million years isn’t even science fiction—it is a statement by the controlling agency that they are imposing a demand either to disable the project or to indicate they have no intention of enforcing it.  To my knowledge there have been no attempts, no serious attempts, even to imagine what communication across that kind of gap might be with future beings, much less to warn them about a pile of by then relatively harmless radioactive waste.

Back to the 10,000-year requirement.  An ethical aspect of this project that moves me is that the status quo is not satisfactory.  It’s easy to look at these projects of waste disposal and protection from the outside and say, “How could people predict what the future could be, why don’t we just leave the waste where it is?  It’s fine, even morally just, to leave it where it was produced.”  Well, it’s not fine.  It’s in rotting barrels and open pits; it has been left in flood plains and earthquake zones—and in some cases is already blowing and leaching into our environment.  If we needed any further evidence of the intense danger of leaving stored waste on the surface in dangerous areas, the catastrophe of Fukushima Daiichi should put such complacency to rest.  Newspapers may report the idiocy of leaving waste in rooftop pools atop nuclear reactors in Japan—but we do the same thing here in the United States.

How big is the problem?  Well, nuclear detritus includes a huge variety of things: everything from hospital waste (contaminated by americium, for example) to sludge from the separation of plutonium during World War II and indeed all throughout the Cold War. The United States produced about 30,000 nuclear weapons and the residue from that atomic race is not in a satisfactory condition now.  With floods, and dramatic natural processes that happen, such as the big fires near Los Alamos, it’s simply not okay to just say: “do nothing.”  That’s why the effort to safely and responsibly dispose of this waste is a necessary one.  But then very soon we’re in a situation predicting the 10,000-year future—or, even worse, the absurdly distant million-year future.

Consider the efforts to think about the future in 1991 [at the WIPP site].  It was organized around an inadvertent intrusion or a geological process that might lead to an escape of the radioactivity.  No one was really interested in the idea of terrorism. Ten years later, after September 11, 2001, everyone was interested in terrorism.  And that’s ten years- not ten thousand, one hundred thousand or a million.

FOP: Yes, the discrepancy between the scales of geologic time and human time needs to be reconciled, or at least considered differently, when it comes to nuclear materials.  We hope to use geologic spaces and geologic time to contain what we can’t secure ourselves.  Yet, we establish regulations that mandate safety over spans of time we know we can’t guarantee.  While nothing moves forward, waste continues to accumulate, posing an ever-menacing threat.  It’s hard to not think we’re missing an opportunity to plan and respond differently to the real challenges we face, both in the short and long-term.

You have suggested that when landscapes are made into zones of exclusion, we give them the ability to remain wild.  When people are restricted from interacting with landscapes, those landscapes support more diversity of life.  What keeps wilderness wild, it seems, is the exclusion of humans.  It’s as if the only way for us to live in relation to landscape that also keeps it wild is to exclude ourselves from it.  This photo is of an area in California, in the Restricted Area R-505 of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.  Here, some of the oldest petroglyphs (estimated up to 100,000 images) are being preserved.  The petroglyphs illustrate a certain kind of living in relation to the landscape that is no longer possible in this area.  Today, our exclusion from this landscape is what protects it.  What are your thoughts on this?

PG: What ultimately interests me in zones of exclusion is how these spaces, and more generally how material culture, machines, and in this case, landscapes, change understandings of the self – what it means to be human.  In a way, I’m interested in a double process.  The first part is: what do you have to assume about who we are to make certain kinds of objects or spaces?  What do you have to believe about us to think that a Rorschach test or that an inkblot can reveal something about our inner most selves?  Once you have a Rorschach test, there’s a second kind of reverse action, one where the objects train us up in a certain way.  There are two parts to this question.  One is, what do you have to believe about who we are to even think a certain kind of technology is possible, imagined, in any way?  And then once you have it, how does it teach us how to be?  Once in place, Rorschach tests become a kind of master metaphor for our time.  We start to use it in everyday life.  We routinely say things like “Your view about nature is just a Rorschach about your contemporary political allegiances.” A hundred years after the inkblots turned to the unconscious, such turns of phrase are by now built into our everyday speech.  As such the Rorschach becomes more than a metaphor, more instructional and directive.  I am just now finishing a book called Building, Crashing, Thinking about this dual process, how an historically specific self provides a sort of necessary background to the technology, machines, and material aspects of our lives that we make.  And how, once we do that, certain of these technologies rear up and change us, tell us how to live, train us how to be in some very deep senses.

In the case of exclusion landscapes, the first moment of this back and forth is this: what do you have to believe about humans’ relationship to nature to even think about the very idea of a wilderness or a wasteland?

In a certain way, it’s the beginning of a process where you start to say we are outside of nature.  Nature on one side of a metaphysical dividing line, us on the other.  Nature in its essence (so this view has it) is “wild and free,” something we aim to preserve and protect.  Wilderness becomes a designation encoded in laws that restrict human use of putatively “primeval” lands on which humans count as “visitors.”

In some ways “wilderness” (in this sense) is an American phenomenon.  In Europe the ideas of land “without us” is hard to picture because the land has been used over and over again, and by so many generations.

Once you think about wilderness as land too pure for more than an occasional visit, it becomes easier to think about the inverse: land that is too polluted for human use that, like wilderness, is more or less outside our dominion.  You start to carve out land like the Nevada Test Site (recently renamed the Nevada National Security Site), a gigantic piece of land, a territory the size of Rhode Island, and you begin to speak about “national sacrifice areas” with all the theological and patriotic resonance of the term.  Bit by bit you begin taking pieces of the country, small, medium and large, putting fences around them, posting radiological warning signs, only permitting people in on a bus tour or suited up and sporting radiation badges.

In the end, you have twin zones of exclusion: wilderness and wasteland.  The lands start to instruct us:  here, the exclusion zones say: “you must tread lightly,” “this territory is not yours, you do not belong.”  But there is more: we begin to see these exclusion zones of purity and defilement as connected.  Nature parks sit on top of wastelands—at a pragmatic level, untrammeled nature helps secure the waste, and simultaneously helps keep people safe by restricting access.  Beyond the practical, we become habituated to seeing the two kinds of exclusion zones together: dive the pristine waters of the South Pacific and see, all at once, “untouched” nature and the remnants of nuclear weapons tests.  Primeval nature and apocalypse join.  We become truly “special” tourists—nuclear tourism has become a big business.  And with our “special” authorization to go to these sites, we tour the Nevada Test Site, Chernobyl or, perhaps in the not too distant future, the nuclear coast of Japan.

Remediation specialists—even environmentalists—have begun to talk this way.  “Nuclear tourism” and “national sacrifice zones” have become commonplace expressions.  There’s even a kind of contemplative aspect that is sometimes inscribed in terms of eastern religion, that we’re “guardians” of wastelands or “guardians” of wilderness.  I would suggest that we begin to use a new term: waste-wilderness to capture regions like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or the Nevada Test Site.

Instead of thinking of Wastelands and Wilderness as sitting at opposite ends of a spectrum, we need to readjust our semantic field.  Instead of being on a rigid ruler with a spectrum that goes from the infrared to the ultra violet, I suggest that the relation between wilderness and wasteland can, in these sites of exclusion, form something of a different topological order—something more like a bent-metal bracelet that brings the two ends into contact.

The following is not my position, but more and more frequently people say, “it might be good for the land to be a little radioactive because then people will stay away.”  And yet, this kind of utterance is something that becomes part of the discourse in a strict sense. We get to see people say “well, I’m a systems ecologist, it’s good that the biological lands around Oak Ridge are a little contaminated because it keeps people away and then nature can restore itself to its primeval state.”  Again, a form of waste-wilderness—sanctification and defilement join.

I’m sometimes misinterpreted as arguing that certain lands are in some essential sense sacred or defiled.  I do not hold that view.  No, this idea of a sanctified land, far from being mine, is deeply lodged in the American national consciousness.  I’m grateful that people who took the land to be sacred established the National Parks system or helped found the notion of wilderness areas.  That doesn’t mean we should swim in the whirlpools of those concepts—or that sacralizing land is the only or even the best way of keeping an intact earth.

FOP: The borders of these exclusion sites are continuously shifting.  They can actually be quite porous, such as the news in March 2010 that contaminated groundwater inside the Nevada Test Site was moving towards the edge of its reservation and would eventually meet a community water supply.  It seems as time goes on, there will be no option but for more land to become accepted as waste-wilderness.  The “either/or” isn’t going to be able meet the reality of our lived situation.

PG: There have been these kinds of problems, such as the Hanford Reach, where nuclear contamination has now escaped the DOE plants and arrived at the Columbia River—far more quickly than the Cold War waste experts expected.  I think from a kind of conceptual point of view of trying to understand who we are and what kind of relationship we have to land, this idea of waste-wilderness has really dug itself deep into our awareness.  I don’t think it’s an irony, it’s got to do with the ground of the idea.  That is to say, there are unexpected consequences to accepting that we are separate from nature: temporary visitors to lands of wilderness, temporary visitors to lands of nuclear waste.  For once one starts to think that way, it is a short step to identifying the two kinds of lands, to thinking them together, so to speak.  We begin to treat both as a form of real nature, we even begin to think of a kind of priesthood presiding over both kinds of lands.  In the limit, we actually identify the two kinds of territory and say things like “radioactivity is good for nature because humans are excluded.”  More and more it becomes a habit, a phenomenological habit, to see ourselves as facing a kind of sacred space just in virtue of our exclusion.  Imagine yourself standing outside a vast area marked “Ecological Nature Preserve.  Nuclear Contamination.  Do Not Enter.”  We think of this as special land, and ourselves as outside it—post-Romantic tourists into the Forbidden Zone.  In short, the waste-wilderness begins to instruct us on who we are—as humans.

FOP: I can see how the idea of waste-wilderness helps open a space for public discussion.  It’s less radicalized and more nuanced.  Even with contamination, plants and animals still live in and upon these landscapes.  Alleviating the polarization can assist in creating contexts where people begin to talk and think about them as places we live in relation to rather than outside of.

PG: It goes deep into the heart of a lot of the problems that environmentalists have had politically, which I am sympathetic to.  When you start to think of wilderness as land without people, you get into all sorts of difficulties.  You end up with helicopters strafing the bushes of elephant feeding grounds to kill poachers.  I think a lot of the more interesting attempts to save elephants, to take a very different example that doesn’t have a nuclear component, is to try to enlist people who live there in ways that will give them a livelihood so they have a stake in it, such as running a tourist trade.  Then its not a no-man zone and its not a free-fire zone and probably turns out to be a better way of keeping the open grazing lands for elephants safe.

I think that we got off on the wrong foot more than a 100 years ago when we began to think of the idea of the wilderness area as primeval—if by primeval we understand as that which is absolutely and completely without humans.  I think that’s a fantasy.  As Cronon, the great environmental historian has pointed out, the wild lands before the settlers were burned regularly in New England by Native Americans to clear the brush so they could hunt.  Land has constantly been in motion in all sorts of ways: geology, human intervention—I think there are ways to think about the lands and landscape that takes into account who we think we are, without just a wanton free for all of destruction and development.

FOP: Public engagement and investment seems essential—people want to know what is happening on the land near where they live.  Perhaps Finland has been successful in building Onkalo (the world’s first geologic repository for high level nuclear waste) because of local, public support.  The people on the island where the repository is being built have lived near a nuclear power plant since the early 1970s.  Public engagement and investment in the issue seems less common in the United States.

PG: One of the things that I came away from in writing and filming about national security secrecy is a really deep sense that people need to understand their world around them. They want to understand the world around them.  If secrecy is overused, if it is deployed not for genuine issues but to cover embarrassment or protect bureaucratic power, people will make up the meanings to fill the gap.  The most secret societies are the most paranoid—and the politics of paranoia and conspiracy are very nasty.  You can whip people up into a genocidal rage if they start to believe wild things to explain the disasters that befall them.  If you think about World War I, the German government wouldn’t share the fact that they were losing.  When the War ended it seemed to many Germans that there must be somebody responsible for this.  In the absence of any real discussion and analysis of the causes and conduct of the war, Jews and Communists became scapegoats in the fearful imaginary world that replaced fantasy.

Unfortunately, during the Cold War the genuine secrets of nuclear weapons production spread into an out-of-control system of classification and the Department of Energy began using secrecy willy-nilly to hide terrible and embarrassing non-secrets.  What were those secrets?  They were about atomic workers’ exposure, about radioactivity experiments on uninformed patients; about accidental and intentional emission of radioactive materials into the environment.  Nothing is more important in the present moment than transparency about the waste and its disposal—without openness every aspect of the nuclear cycle is condemned forever to meet with terror and resistance.

This is a lesson that seems endlessly hard to absorb.  I write these words in March 2011, as the world anxiously looks at the six earthquake and tsunami-damaged reactors at Fukushima Daiichi.  Throughout the spiraling disaster, the Tokyo Electric Power Company systematically under-estimated, misinformed, and stonewalled on what was actually going on in the reactors and waste pools.

When people get fearful, they start to believe all kinds of terrible things.  When you exclude things completely people fill in the dark spaces with their imaginations and it’s not always benign.  So, I agree with you.  I’m not saying that I’d like to see “how to” instructions for binary chemical weapons on the web, I really don’t.  We would not be better off.  But to remove over-classification is to give us a sense of our world.

As for the siting of the geological repository, there were many differences between Yucca Mountain and Carlsbad.  Carlsbad and its surroundings are in a region where extraction industries are commonplace.  Drive a bit and you’ll see gas and oil wells, potash mines, trains hauling material out and mining equipment in.  It is a region that’s been through hard economic times—and it has a politically conservative populace.  For Carlsbad, the WIPP Site has provided hundreds of high-paying and secure jobs with spin-offs and connections to a myriad of already-existing businesses.  Yucca Mountain was in a very different environment, economically, politically, geologically.  Even Northern New Mexico responded very differently to the WIPP proposal—which was fiercely opposed in parts of Santa Fe and Albuquerque, for example.

FOP: It seems like it is time to accept the precarity of our current situation, consider the bare facts—and begin to enlist a wide variety of responses.

PG: Yes.  We cannot and should not act as if we are in 1850 or 1920.  It is long past the time when we can hold “primeval” land without people, even as an ideal.  I do think that our relationship to the land is changing. Compared to other nations the United States has always had a great deal of land.  We’ve sometimes been quite careless with it, as if it would never come to an end.

Look, we’ve learned a lot about handling environmental questions over the last few decades, and in particular we’ve learned that we can’t treat humans as if they are alien to pure, primeval land.  We have learned, for example, that you do better saving elephants by giving local people an economic stake in photographic tourism than in machine-gunning poachers from helicopters.

FOP: As populations continue to grow exponentially, such as in cities like Las Vegas, located just outside the Nevada Test Site, these zones of exclusion will become less remote.  Understandings will have to change as cities blend with the waste-wilderness.

Throughout your film, Secrecy, you used what might be called an artfully poetic means, including animation, to depict what can’t be seen about secrecy.  We sensed that these means were not just illustrative, but were something that invited audiences to activate their imaginations.  How do you describe the hybrid means that you’ve created in order to talk about things that spill outside of any single genre or knowledge domain?

PG: One of the things written material does well is to parse material analytically.  When I was trying to understand the development of the moral political debate about the hydrogen bomb it was at first very confusing. Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer—all of them switch their positions many times. They were for the bomb, then against it, on and on.  After awhile I began to see that there were these periodization points.  There were these moments between the start of the Manhattan Project, the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the beginning of the Cold War (which many people date to the failure of the Baruch plan which failed to control nuclear weapons in 1947), the Russian test in the summer of 1949, the first H-bomb test in 1952—where you could see how people shifted their positions within these structures.  So, with a colleague, I wrote a paper  (1) showing how these historical punctuation marks precipitated the shifts in position.

Film does that sort of analytic division terribly.  Of course film can mark off chapters in imitation of print—but it would always remain awkward and it’s like explaining what a second cousin once removed is.  In print, I could draw you a little family diagram in two seconds and you’d never forget it.  In film, if someone starts lecturing to you with a five-point argument and a diagram, it is not a film, it’s actually a fake lecture or piece of writing.  It would be like trying to write a book in tiny print on a stretched canvas in a frame.  You could.  But why?

What film does, and images can do very differently, is this multiple coding of significance. You have a picture here of a still from Ruth Lingford’s animation that we used in Secrecy. The animation was designed to function as the film’s unconscious, where you would go imaginatively when the characters were describing things, once they passed the zone of exposition.  We were searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and you can show images of people looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in an underground facility, and then at a certain point they begin to imagine, and whether they were in the film, whether they were CIA interrogators, or anti-secrecy advocates, or they were NSA analysts, secrecy always signified more than simple protocols of national security behavior.  All of the people that we interviewed had to grapple, one way or another, with the complexities of secrecy—what it meant politically, biblical illusions to secrecy, sexual aspects of secrecy.  Secrecy always has a kind of allure and fear.  It could be a precipitating event leading to a paranoid illusion about what could be behind that door or that blacked out sentence.  So, secrecy is always more than just the literal and that has always interested me from an artistic point of view.  The secret is always more, it’s both important in the National Security context, but it’s more than just pragmatic.  That aspect of secrecy, the multiple coded nature of secrecy, is something that I think images, and for me film, can get at in a way that purely analytical pieces can’t.  If you want to use the possibility of film and image, for me, I want to use them as such, not as stand in for what I can do better in print.

In the new film I’m making with Robb Moss—Nuclear Underground—the hope is once again to find a triple intersection of aesthetics, politics, and science.

FOP: It will be interesting to see how people in the United States view these zones of exclusion differently if policies of secrecy around them change.  We’re interested in seeing how Americans might respond to what has been there the entire time, when these sites are presented as real places, rather than merely forbidden zones of exclusion.

PG: When we talk about burying dangerous things, again, you’re in one of the problems that I find very interesting.  It’s a very pragmatic issue that has political and regulatory structure.  It is a piece of administrative law.  But everything nuclear, and things that are nuclear and buried, are already and always in our awareness in other ways.  Everyone knows that and that’s why Yucca Mountain is partly an issue of technical aspects of how volcanic tuff rock responds to water and its permeability, but its also about politics, popularity and fear.  Harry Reid made cancellation of the site a condition for his putting President Obama over the finish line in the presidential election of 2008.  In the domain of nuclear waste, you are never, ever in a purely technical regime.  And because this dreaded substance is never just a matter of physics alone, because it grabs our attention like no other form of everyday detritus, we will need all we can muster from words and images.
1) Peter Galison and Barton Bernstein, “‘In any light’:  Scientists and the Decision to Build the Hydrogen Bomb,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 19 (1989):  267-347.

IMG – waste storage and craters left in the wake of underground testing at the NTS, National Nuclear Security Administration (Archive FOP)

Haus der Kulturen der Welt, opening March 15, 19hs – curated by Anselm Franke

Animism is a multi-faceted exhibition project that addresses the reevaluation of modernity currently taking place along the lines of Bruno Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern“. The exhibition’s starting point is the artistic-aesthetic process of animation, best known from cartoons and animation films, and examines its relationship with the categorial definitions and limits of the modern world-view.The attraction of animation, namely, is that it transcends borders: the difference between life and non-life, stasis and movement, the human and the animal, reality and imagination are systematically destabilized by animation.

The Exhibition places these phenomena in the context of the term ‘animism’, which stems from 19th-century ethnology. Animism is generally understood to be a religious practice, which, in contrast to the objectivizing standpoint of modern rationality views objects and nature as living things, which possess different forms of subjectivity. The project asks questions about the borders between objects and subjects, between nature and culture, between the psyche and the material world. The term ‘animism’ becomes that starting point of an inquiry into these borders – not least because they have become more fluid through the global and technological developments of recent years and are therefore being reevaluated. The exhibition, with works by about 30 international artists, creates an Ethnological Museum of Modernity in Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

The accompanying conference (15 – 17 March) brings together a range of theorists and artists who have played an essential role in the revision of the modern view of animism and thus open up new forms of access to our concept of “modernity”. In cooperation with the publishing house diaphanes, the project in Berlin is accompanied by a publication with theoretical texts on the central topic of the exhibition. “Animismus – Revisionen der Moderne”, edited by Irene Albers and Anselm Franke, is the first German-language discussion of central positions in the international debate.

With the artists: Adam Avikainen, Agentur/Agency, Marcel Broodthaers, Didier Demorcy, Walt Disney, Jimmie Durham, León Ferrari, J.J. Grandville, Victor Grippo, Candida Höfer, Tom Holert, Ken Jacobs, Yayoi Kusama, Lars Laumann, Len Lye, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos und Maurizio Lazzarato, Vincent Monnikendam, Istvan Orosz, Roee Rosen, Dierk Schmidt, Erik Steinbrecher, Paulo Tavares, Rosemarie Trockel, Martin Zillinger u.a.Mit den Konferenzteilnehmern: David Abrams, Heike Behrend, Cornelius Borck, Diedrich Diederichsen, Masao Fukushima, Harry Garuba, Hiromi Ito, Esther Leslie, Thomas Macho, Spyros Papapetros, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Erhard Schüttpelz, Isabelle Stengers, Michael Taussig

The project in Berlin is supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

“If nature is no longer a mere background for human activities, what change does it entail for the arts and the social sciences?” — Roundtable Seminar – Bruno Latour and  The Programme for Experimentation in Art and Politics – SPEAP (SciencesPo) together with the Centre for Research Architecture.

Monday March 5th 2012, 10:00 for a 10:30 start, in our studio/ RHB 312

The day is open to all members of the Centre for Research Architecture (MAs, PhD and CRA staff and FA fellows).

10:30 — INTRO – CRA + SCIENCES PO
Eyal Weizman: brief intro to the Centre
Susan Schuppli Forensic Architecture.
Bruno Latour introduced the theme/question he proposed for the seminar:
“If nature is no longer a mere background for human activities, what change does it entail for the arts and the social sciences?”

11:20 > Paulo Tavares (an architect undertaking PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture and MARA coordinator)

Murky Evidence: Because nature has become a fundamental space to which cultural and political rights are bound, with increasing frequency and relevance, ecological systems tend to inhabit the courtrooms of national and trans-national forums as potential witness of legal violations. As the Earth enters the legal arena, the scientific and documentary techniques employed to mediate its testimony appear as sites through which the construction of historical-political narratives are disputed. Following the histories inscribed in murky earth-samples extracted from the soils of an environmental disaster zone in the Amazon, this presentation attempt to map out the messy assemblages of scientific practices, ngo-advocay, international law and global geopolitics that gathers around nature. Shattering the limits of pre-defined forums, nature participates in a scale-less political construct that connects the particular and the universal by articulating ethical engagements on behalf of humanity with the contingency of political-material histories. Animated by a legal court, organic-matter becomes vibrant and talkative entities whose opaque speech calls for a “radical universality” according to which human and non-human rights are mutually constitutive and interdependent.

11:40 > Nabil Ahmed (an artist undertaking PhD at the Centre for research architecture)

Radical Meteorology: The contemporary history of Bangladesh is one of the starkest examples of the politicization of natural disasters. The devastating 1970 Bhola cyclone, for example, had a direct impact on its war for independence from Pakistan. Coastal zones on the Bay of Bengal that form part of the Indian Ocean rupture nature and the political in a way where geologic, atmospheric and oceanologic forces resist and collide with human populations in dramatic fashion. At the same time recent discovery of oil and gas deposits is transforming the disaster zone into an area of renewed interest for global capital. Entangled within this calculus of risk, giant brown clouds, cyclones, the supreme terror from the sea and the dead buried there speak for a new political ecology in the age of man.

12:00 > Discussion
1:00-2:00pm > LUNCH

2:00 >Presentation by a group of 3 SPEAP students
3:00 > discussion

3:20 >John Palmesino, (architect, principle of Territorial Agency, MA lecturer, undertaking PhD at the centre)

NORTH: The architecture of a territory open on all sides: Today a number of surveying practices are reshaping the relation between contemporary polities and their spaces of operation. At the higher latitudes remote sensing, satellite imagery, multispectrum scans, biological prospecting, seismic analysis are being combined to present a set of images of possible industrial, geopolitical, logistic, and military reorganization. The North presents architecture with an escalating demand to re-conceptualise change and transformation: to what degree of magnitude can architecture operate? Can architecture supplement the grid of rules, criteria, laws that characterise the showcasing of human intervention at the higher latitudes by integrating spatial analysis with image making, geographic knowledge, remote sensing? How to think new processes and processions where knowledge production is intertwined with the forming of inhabited territories? Can architecture rethink its agency?
3:40 >general discussion followed on from John’s presentation
4:00 > END of Seminar

IMG – Archive North, Territorial Agency