1972. Bangladesh is a new state emerging out of a national liberation war and a cyclone. Inspired by the Green Revolution, UNICEF undertook a major public health engineering project, drilling millions of hand pumps aimed at providing safe drinking water, and over subsequent years sinking private tube wells became normative practice. Although considered a major humanitarian success, it exposed a significant part of the population to ground water aquifers rich in arsenic.
CHAPTER: ENTER GLACIER
“It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to ␣nd our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.”
– W.G Sebald
v Introduction
21 We Arrived and Saw A Flag Out of the Window
Interruption: Note of the Princess
31 Time to Negotiate: A Shape of a CommonWorld
Interruption: Letter of the Ministry
47 Tolerance Now: A Hiccup in Contemporary Dutch Politics
Interruption: Interview with Joris Ivens
59 Conclusion
67 References
70 Colophon
It was from waiting in a world bound by my own subjectively imagined delay that this essay originates.
To be involved in politics without aspiring to govern, governed by the best leaders, or abolish the institutions of government: such are the constraints that delineate the field of nongovernmental politics.
Political acts are encoded in medial forms—feet marching on a street, punch holes on a card, images on live stream, tweets—that have force, shaping people as subjects and constituting the contours of what is sensible, legible, visible. Thus, these events define the terms of political possibility and create terrain for political actions.
The past two decades have seen revolutionary shifts in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The data flows that condition much of our lives now regularly include Global Positioning System (GPS) readings and satellite images of a quality once reserved for a few militaries and intelligence agencies, and powerful geographic information system (GIS) software is now commonplace. These new technologies have raised fundamental questions about the intersection between physical space and its representation, virtual space and its realization.
Neither apolitical nor governmental, to be involved in politics without aspiring to govern… such are the constraint that delineate the condition common to all practitioners of nongovernmental politics [...] Nongovernmental politics can be envisioned as encompassing the political involvements of the governed, or better still, as the politics in which the governed as such are involved [...] what all these activists all have in common is that they are driven by a shared determination not to be governed thusly.
"In the first section, ‘Pessimism of the Intellect’, I adduce arguments for believing that we have already lost the first, epochal stage of the battle against global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, in the smug but sadly accurate words of one of its chief opponents, has done ‘nothing measurable’ about climate change. Global carbon dioxide emissions rose by the same amount they were supposed to fall because of it. [2] It is highly unlikely that greenhouse gas accumulation can be stabilized this side of the famous ‘red line’ of 450 ppm by 2020.
19 April 2013
3pm
ICA Cinema 1, London
Current conflicts over territory and resources bring to the fore the importance of spatial and material evidence to the resolution of legal and political disputes. The seminar Devils Advocate in CRA sets out to interrogate such presentation of evidence in diverse and often contradictory political and legal forums. Its goal is to think the articulation of expert evidence and documentation with legal advocacy, towards a pragmatics of intervention through law, while at the same time questioning the limits of law itself as a political tool.
Edmund Clark
Centre for Research Architecture
March 5 2013 2-4 pm
RHB 312
This talk will explore how Clark represents the experience of control and detention in the hidden prisons of the War on Terror.
Focussing on his books 'Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out' and 'Control Order House' he will discuss how he combines photography of architecture, space and objects with found material, to evoke wider ideas of shared experience and humanity.
“Now if there is a law, and thus a history, for subjective wars, there is none for objective violence, which is without limit or rule, and thus without history.
