SOS Peace Pentagon (imagined exterior)

339 Lafayette Street in New York City, known as the Peace Pentagon, has served as a home base for dozens of activist groups and progressive organizations working for peace for over 40 years. Because it is in need of major repairs, the organization Friends of 339 issued a call for proposals, a design competition to answer the question: How can a building mobilize for peace and justice?

SOS Peace Pentagon (imagined interior)

In the proposal, SOS repurposes an obsolete ocean liner which would replace the existing building as headquarters for the Peace Pentagon. SOS was one of three first prize winners in the competition.

SOS Peace Pentagon (before)

SOS, literally (almost) being a fish out of water, an imperiled but not yet sinking ship of fools—with passengers and crew still foolish enough to set a course toward social justice–this building directs attention to the values of its occupants. The repurposed ship has been rescued from the ship breaking industry, one of the most destructive consequences of globalization. With the outsourcing of production to China, India and other Southeast Asian locations, all kinds of ships, including battleships and cruise ships, are frequently reconfigured to transport goods and materials between Asia and the west. Often barely seaworthy, these ships are a lucrative source of income for their owners. And their last journey lands them on the beaches of Bangladesh, India or Pakistan where they are taken apart by unskilled laborers who risk disability or even death because of unsafe working conditions.

SOS mandates that the initial renovation as well as continued maintenance of the ship/building be performed by Bangladesh laborers who are taught the necessary skills by out of work shipbuilders from defunct American shipyards.

“ANIMAL” (from the “So, Then” series), 2010. "Mango trees convalesce, twist into ceilings. Shadow threatens shade. A stench rises from the dark, recalling another, better ripeness. They tell you, She moves to make herself known. She reminds you what loving is: fear. The wind sends you scattering like the broken teeth of a giant."

“MINERAL” (from the “So, Then” series), 2010. "What is left but sound—flammable and everlasting? Sound was the first thing. Then more sound, this time organized, which is to say “song” or breath igniting air. I hear metal clang metal and skin drum skin. A swollen hum ripples black water. In my depleted state, I mount the hillock, crying, 'Yes, more!'"

“VEGETABLE” (from the “So, Then” series), 2010. "How badly we want to be saved. This week alone, it takes an extra four blocks and thirty-three bucks to Be Good. But nothing can stop the ticking down, our flood of loose change and phosphates. Sunday still comes: bellicose, drenched in sweat, demanding tithes."

The Manahatta Muir web. Photo credit: The Mannahatta Project / Wildlife Conservation Society and Chris Harrison / Carnegie-Mellon University.

What would the island of Manhattan have looked like to Henry Hudson when he first arrived in 1609? In 2000, the landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson began using a combination of cartographic analysis, modern computational geography, and old-fashioned scientific sleuthing to imagine just that. Sanderson’s investigation was presented as an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York (May 20, 2009 through Oct 12, 2009) and published as a book (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2009), both titled Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City.

Both a strong moral tenor and constructive optimism resounds throughout the comparisons that Sanderson draws between the ecology of Manhattan today and the time of the Native American people (the Lenapes). One particularly emblematic moment is Sanderson’s notion of a “grammar of habitat” comprised of a series of “habitat sentences.” Each sentence consists of the following elements:

A subject, or species (e.g., “beaver”, ”bird”, “insect”)

An object, or elements requires to support this species (e.g., “a slowly meandering stream,” “aspen trees”, “alder shrubs”, “willow thickets”, and “area near the water”)

And a predicate that links them, defining the type of dependency (e.g., “the stream supplies water and shelter,” “the trees supply shelter and food,” “the tree supplies materials for a bird’s nest,” etc.)

In other words, each habitat sentence comprised of a subject, object, and predicate that together produce a language of ecological interdependency.

Sanderson’s illustrations, featuring animals at home in a bucolic natural settings, begs the reader to examine his/her “grammar of habitat.”  When rigorously examined, cheeky initial responses like my own (“The metrosexual at home with his/her hair gel, monthly metrocard, tofurkey sandwich on rye toasted light with a little bit of mayo, daily digest of various news feeds, etc.) eventually give way to meaningful and fundamental interrogations about the natural resources upon which we rely and their underlying cultural values.  Sanderson himself reflects upon the recursive nature of the exercise:

“Like the parent of that child who won’t stop asking ‘why?’ we eventually had to define the ‘stops’ — questions we could not answer; otherwise, the search would be infinite and the Manahatta Project never-ending. Stops are elements that we could not or would not define the habitat sentence for; they include time, space, geology, climate, and the strange and surprising turns of human culture. I’m not a sociologist; I wouldn’t try to explain why the Lenape told stories of how the earth formed on a turtle’s back. I simply accept it as a given that they did” (Sanderson: 190).

Thus, by mapping the ‘givens’ (the agreed-upon elements) within a taxonomic structure, the muir web also represents the stops that demarcate the contours of ecological world-views (epistemes).  And it’s exactly at these ‘stops’ that in fact shift a regard of the landscape as an aftermath to one that recognizes the possibilities of the otherwise.

More about this can be found online at http://www.wcs.org/mannahatta

Johan Lundh: Since the theme for this issue of Where We Are Now is “aftermath,” I would like to begin with a broad question, which I don’t expect you to give a definitive answer to. One year after Barack Obama entered office, it is quite obvious that his administration isn’t able or willing to make radical social change happen. What is your view on the current political situation in the United States?

Gregory Sholette: I am curious why anyone would think the Obama administration was going to be “radical” in the first place. Granted he is one of, if not the most engaging and intelligent men to hold this office during my lifetime (my first presidential election was that of Washington “outsider” Jimmy Carter), but Obama is the scion of the liberal democratic machine in Chicago and by no means a “radical.”  That said, for a moderately liberal politician attempting modest social reforms after thirty years of aggressive deconstruction of the public sphere I think he has undertaken more than expected. Perhaps this is the real question: what is this feeling of disappointment really about, especially given the conservative and nationalist atmosphere today, the near-catastrophic economic conditions Obama inherited, and the highly deconstructed social ruins left behind by ultra-free market policy, policies that many “liberals” have also supported these past thirty years?

I think Slavoj Žižek put it quite well in a recent op-ed piece retooling President Clinton’s 1992 slogan: It’s the political economy stupid! [1] As I understand his comments Žižek’s aim is not to return us to an outmoded theory of Marxist base and superstructure in which the maintenance of ideology was strictly determined by the relative health of capitalist market. Instead he is insisting on a very much non-nostalgic historical and cultural interpretation of political economy. “When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a ‘discursive’ ideological competition” he insists, adding that it was the narrative of National Socialism and Hitler which came to explain the failure of the German military and the economic collapse following World War One. The question now is larger than Obama and asks how the increasingly redundant population (note they are already floating terms like “jobless recovery”) will respond to the latest capitalist crisis and which narrative will come out on top. This is where artists and other cultural workers can play a small role in trying to define what that other narrative might be, who it is for, and how it might be transmitted.

JL: According to Brian Holmes, “the construction of global brands in the 1980s and 1990s entailed the integration of countercultural and minority rhetorics, as well as the direct enlistment into the workplace of ‘creatives’ of all the domains of art and culture” [2]. In other words, the notion of resistance has become extremely complicated in a neoliberal paradigm. Is it realistic to think that politically engaged practices can generate sustainable social change under our current conditions?

GS: I am sure Brian would agree that disabling resistance is a little more complicated than merely reshuffling the rhetorics of the spectacle. For one thing the so-called high art world has always required cyclical priming of its fiscal and symbolic pump by drawing in what appears as novel sources of content and form. Thus exotic “others”, trashy low art, new modes of perception and representation have regularly been incorporated into the art at least as far back as the impressionists and post-impressionists if not earlier. This refreshment serves to open-up new areas of value formation and thus speculation.

What has changed is the degree to which this process has become more or less automated to the point where it outpaces administrative efforts by the art police and cultural managers, even to the point where the logic of art world expansion has come back around to undermine the system’s own capacity to selectively distribute values that are, nevertheless, collectively produced. You could say that something is now spilling out of the archives, something darkly unnamable that can not be managed or slowed down, its a kind of eruption of the every day and all those ”other” cultural producers into the daylight, scores of  “failed” art school grads, the many little-known artists’ collectives and groups, ethnic artists and the growing wave of non-New York/London/Berlin artists churned up by globalization, but also the countless, utterly sincere amateur and Sunday painters whose marginal visibility is ending thanks to the transnational communication requirements of neo-liberal capital. This crypt is opening and an accumulation of missing art world dark matter is now suddenly flooding into view for better and for worse.

The stakes are this: What will be the narrative(s) that successfully explain this enormous, often redundant productivity, and what will constitute its “success,” for whom and why? Obviously relational aesthetics had its moment and for the less imaginative members of the art establishment it has helped them sleep at night, but the materialization of social production is simply not going to be that easily contained, or turned back into so much art world real estate. Therefore, in terms of your question about resistance, please note, there is nothing inherently progressive or democratic about this archival rupture, this flood of dark matter. But in so far as some of it –perhaps most of it–– has always refused to be productive for the market it remains linked, however diffusely and ambiguously, to that larger archive of resistant practices ––past, present, and to come––that theorists Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge described in more literal terms as a counter-public sphere made up of dissident affects, re-appropriations, and fantasies in order to realize such a “history from below.” I suppose that if there is today some future aesthetics of resistance it probably amounts to no more (but no less) than a minor art, one made up of attractions and marvels and tactics, as well as a politics of sometimes overt and sometimes tepid acts of delinquency, or even bitter gestures of discontent, and yet I would strongly argue that this is not enough. These, or any “gifts of resistance,” must continue to impart an expectation involving the promise of a better world, the one capitalism (and socialism) has so far failed to deliver: lives free from the bridle of scarcity and the monotony of mundane labor, but rich in human solidarity and sensual, aesthetic expressivity.

JS: I think the idea of a better world is one of the most crucial undertakings today. Like you say, both capitalism and socialism has failed to deliver it. How can we begin to envision a future horizon?

GS: When I say socialism and capitalism have both failed us, what I mean is that as these systems have been historically implemented they depend upon the regimented un-freedom of most individuals organized into their respective economies. Allowing the population to democratically choose how their productivity is directed, including whether or not they have to be productive on demand, but doing so within a social framework that recognizes the responsibilities and interconnectedness of the population—that seems like a first important step towards realizing a better world. But this combination of freedom and responsibility must apply equally to traditional workers as it does to precariously unemployed or semi-employed labor, as well as those structurally excluded from being “productive,” a category that includes many women and young people and students, but is growing in proportion. In other words, regaining control over one’s time and body is a way to re-envision collectivism itself.

And if I was asked to point to one project that I think figuratively initiates this process (modestly) it is Oliver Ressler’s media installation project Alternative Economies in which the artist interviewed a range of thinkers on new social forms and economic possibilities. This project presents a number of intriguing practical and utopian ideas focused on significant social change including one somewhat eccentric individual known only as “P.M” who has proposed a society called bolo`bolo in which numerous micro-economies are aggregated (presumably without coercion) into greater social cohesion. But in general, it is the imaginative way that Ressler and his interviewees approach the problem of the future that is instructive to me. Perhaps we can even say his project allows us to re-approach the idea of communism for the 21st century, to re-imagine its imaginative and liberatory aspects without either nostalgia or preconceived notions so it that appears (again) as a kind of historical promise, rather than as a failure, or series of failures, lodged tragically within our collective past.

Endnotes

[1] ‘It’s the Political Economy Stupid!,’ Slavoj Žižek, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, (not paginated PDF file: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/598678)

[2]Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 Chapter 10: Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics – Cartographies of the Art World, Brian Holmes, p 273 to 295.

Arriving in Tehran two weeks before the Iranian elections, I was looking forward to finally meeting the artists that I’d been collaborating with for over a year on a collective narrative of the everyday realities of Tehran. It would take form as an exhibition in San Francisco, connecting my two homes in two different cities. Waiting impatiently for everyone to come together, I was consumed by the live debates between the candidates and the pre-election publicities that increased everyone’s anticipation. Covered with the color green and filled with high hopes for change, Tehran was paralyzed by the impact of the festivities, bombarded by banners, flags, flyers, posters, graffiti, slogans, Internet postings, SMS texts, and people on the streets celebrating.

We met for the first time as a group two days after two million Tehranis lined up in a human Green Chain extending from Tajrish Square to Enghelab Square. Our level of enthusiasm was so high that focusing on anything else but the elections and the spirit of the people seemed trivial. We discussed the various projects and talked about a few that were in the making: the sound pieces by Nima and Saba Alizadeh that had shifted from a collaborative music compositions to collections of state radio programming, and Homayoun Sirizi’s video which dealt with the election through the use of metaphor. We wondered whether an exhibition about Tehran would now be possible without the inclusion of images of the masses participating in festivities on the streets. We also wondered if this singular point in time would have a long-term effect on the everyday life of the city, so as to merit a revision to the works we were thinking of including.

Taraneh Hemami. "Turning Green", 2009. Laser cut wool carpet, 126" x 108." A map of the streets of Tehran.

We scheduled another meeting to take place through e-mail and Facebook, a platform that was constantly flooding with election postings.  We were out in the streets everyday like the rest of the country, collectively in waiting, hoping for the results to come. After the elections, we were shaken by the power and the cruelty of the backlash. Peaceful demonstrations in objection to the outcome of the vote were met with bullets. Many were arrested in the streets; writers, artists, academics and journalists were specifically targeted. By the time we met again, Tehran had changed for us forever.

With the world’s intense focus on Iran, and the Iranian government’s blaming the West for instigating the demonstrations, accusing the opposition and the people of being funded and agents of the West, the motivations for organizing this exhibition raised a lot of questions. We discussed how an exhibition about Tehran displayed at this particular juncture in time in the US would carry a specific reading for an international viewership. Given that most of the work was created before the elections, the possibility of lending the work such a specific and pointed read became a major concern. Yet we found that the new perspectives the works acquired could add to their strength, and that their content could almost be read as a premonition of the recent events.

Neda Razavipour, "Find The Lost One" (video still), 2009. TRT 2'09"

Neda Razavipour’s video, which asks the viewer to find the missing person from two identical scenes, became a commentary on the missing and dead following the elections. In a more subtle way, the traveling maps of Ghazaleh Hedayat gained a second reading as the routes of the public gatherings that were violently crushed. The photographs in Mohammad Ghazali’s The Red Ribbon series, documenting the giant murals of martyrs that line the streets of Tehran, acquired added meaning as new blood was spilled in these same streets. Mehran Mohajer’s portrayal of Tehran through his pinhole camera, emptied of its people, state government signage as the only visible signifier of life, became a ghostly reminder of the elections’ aftermath.

Abbas Kowsari. "The time is 24:00. This is Tehran.", 2009 C-print, triptych, each 14.5"H x 110"W

Abbas Kowsari’s collage of his personal records chronicling the city’s past, highlighted the city’s layered, cyclical, and at times contradictory realities, the extreme as well as the mundane, coexisting side by side as it has for centuries.

Mehran Mohajer. "Tehran, Undated", 2009. C-prints, 5 total, each 27.25"H x 27.25"W

Mehran Mohajer. "Tehran, Undated", 2009. C-prints, 5 total, each 27.25"H x 27.25"W.

Ghazaleh Hedayat. "Taxiography," 2009. Ink on notebook paper, 77 total; each 6"H x 4"W. Red ink depicts the artist's travels on Tehran's highways, blue ink depicts the artist's travels on Tehran's main roads, and green ink depicts the artist's travels on Tehran's smaller roads and alleys.

Yet the hesitation remained: Why now? Why Tehran? And why for an American audience?  Some of the artists felt completely committed to going ahead with the project. They wanted to spread their voices outside of Iran, and to embrace this cultural exchange as a vital form of communication–despite whatever pressures the international media coverage of the elections may have added to the exhibition at this time.  Yet some of the artists questioned art as a form of engagement, feeling that political activism was paramount and anything that could distract from it should be avoided at all costs. As the news coverage of the elections became more infrequent and shifted from stories of clashes on the streets to sanctions and negotiations within the government, the artists found it important to move ahead with the exhibition, allowing the work to speak about the ways in which historical events affected its content.

Some of the artists responded by making new work for the exhibition. Saba Alizadeh’s sculptural sound pieces serve as a monument to the people who lost their lives during the protests, and Nima Alizadeh’s recordings of Tehran radio during the time of the elections document this short but eventful segment of Iran’s history.

We collectively decided to turn these aural and subtle textual elements into the unifying element of the exhibition, thereby lending added weight to the content of the other works. Using clear and white vinyl, we selected quotes from the state propaganda, that together with the continuous sounds of radio, footsteps and breathing filling the space, acted as a vehicle of transport the audiences to a place that functions under another series of rules, emphasizing the difference in perception. The individual reflections on the everyday realities of Tehran became experimentations in the insertion of the personal into the controlled public space that is continuously in conflict with.

Taraneh Hemami. "Yekrooz" (the persian word for ‘one day’), 2009. Neon, 36"H x 36"W

My own interaction with Tehran was manifest as two pieces that reflected on the events and my ever-shifting relationship to the city: a green neon sign that read “One Day” in Persian, and was hung at the entrance to the show to welcome audiences; and a laser cut green wool carpet that mapped the city, centered in the gallery space to anchor the works which had traveled a long distance through pixels and parcels. The project that had begun out of an intense desire to reconnect to the city of my childhood through chronicles of its everyday, the title hinting at the desire of return, One Day’s meaning had shifted, as if overnight. Now the title points toward the future, and the change that has yet to come.

Palisade Bay Team: Guy Nordenson and Associates, Catherine Seavitt Studio, Architecture Research Office, 2010. Storm surge flooding from Hurricane Categories 1 – 4 in Palisade Bay. (Category 1 shown in dark green, Category 2 in light green, Category 3 in orange, Category 4 in red)

If climate change continues as projected, an increase in sea levels between two and six feet is expected over the next hundred years. Fluctuation in water levels is also predicted to increase as weather becomes more severe. The exhibition Rising Currents: Projects For New York’s Waterfront at the Museum of Modern Art proposes a series of projects for a wetter, muddier, stormier future in which coastlines shift and the distinction is blurred between terra firma and the boundless deep. Five teams of architects were asked to develop proposals for sites around the New York harbor. The teams leaders, Lewis, Tsurumki, Lewis, (LTL) Architecture Research Office (ARO), Mathew Baird and Associates, nArchitects, and SCAPE landscape architecture headed by Kate Orff, represent a collection of “emerging” firms, based in New York, whose emergence has been frustrated by the financial crisis. Under the direction of Barry Bergdoll, the Phillip Johnston Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, the exhibition posits an architectural response to a changing world and offers, as MoMA architecture shows have historically been called upon to do, something of a status report on architecture as a discipline.

The legacy, or perhaps the ghost of modernism is everywhere, and appears in two incarnations. The MoMA’s “house ghost” is a discourse, inaugurated by Philip Johnson in his 1939 “International Style” exhibition, which figures modernism as an aesthetic style focused on the specificity of architectural objects. The scale and scope of the work on view, however, connects it with another modernism that envisions the city as a system, a giant social/technological machine that, through expert engineering, can be made rational and efficient.

nARCHITECTS, 2010. Wave attenuating islands and inflatable storm barriers.

This modernism informed Robert Moses’s massive public infrastructure projects that shaped the New York City waterfront in the post-war era and, in more utopian form, an array of speculative megastructural projects produced in the 1960’s and 70’s. Both Johnson’s and Moses’s modernisms are stalked by their own specter. Johnson and the generation of “postmodernists” he fostered fought anxiously to preserve architecture as a civilized humanist discipline in the face of advancing technocratic barbarism. Post-war planners such as Moses, for their part, lived in fear of losing their grip on the power they had created—that the reactors powering the bright future they were building would melt down or that the frozen geopolitical order of the Cold War would crack in a cataclysm of atomic destruction. The architects in Rising Currents struggle with both of these ghosts. The desire to create beautiful, interesting objects co-exists, however fractiously, with ambitions of master planning and the conception of the city as an invisible system or infrastructural framework supporting and sustaining life.

Rising Currents moves beyond a re-negotiation of old dichotomies to come to terms with climate change through an assertion of radical uncertainty and a commitment to provisional solutions. The architecture seeks neither to change the world nor to withdraw from it but to adapt to, and operate within systems that are no longer closed, fixed, or stable. The urban infrastructures imagined here sit self-consciously within nested layers of larger systems—the regional ecology, the global environment—and contain within their structures architectural machines and other devices whose action agglomerates globally.

Technological systems are also grafted onto living systems in ways that blur the distinctions between infrastructure and ecology, architecture and environment. Design takes form as master planning and as deft interventions leveraging larger systems. At their best, the projects in the exhibition operate across scales and between levels of control, evidencing the beginnings of “new tendency” that embraces opportunism, curiosity and adaptability and faces the threat of future meltdown with a determination not to seize greater control but rather to surf, to drift and ride out the storm by remaining buoyant.

Old refrains still echo through these designs. In New Aqueous City, the proposal for Bay Ridge, Sunset Park and parts of Staten Island, nArchitects imagine canal-spanning housing blocks comprised of service-providing armatures into which individual units plug. Despite resembling MDRDV’s freight-container-inspired housing in Amsterdam harbor, the system works more like an interchangeable, modular Archigram’s plug-in scheme. New Aqueous City goes further in equipping its support armatures with “digesters” that turn the buildings into organic bodies, consuming, digesting and excreting material into a larger urban ecology. The environment the bodies inhabit is shaped by (literally) “soft” infrastructure of levies and breakwaters that inflate and deflate in response to changing ocean conditions. Uncannily, the three-armed star forms of modernist towers reappear (rendered fetchingly in international-orange Plexiglas) as massive submerged breakwater elements that create artificial islands between the inflatables.

Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio's New Urban Ground transforms Lower Manhattan with an infrastructural ecology. 2010. Courtesy Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio.

Sunken infrastructure appears again in New Urban Ground, a plan for Lower Manhattan by Architecture Research Office (ARO) and landscape architect Susannah Drake of dlandstudio. In this case, it is submerged in earth as well as water. An invisible megastructure is discovered as much as created beneath the streets as services are enclosed in watertight vaults allowing them to “float” in the inundated ground. The solidity of the ground plane is dissolved as earth becomes another media in which things are suspended and the surface becomes a permeable membrane through which plants grow and water seeps. Integration of these natural and artificial systems creates an under landscape that’s at once more dense and possessed of the vital resilience of nature. Moments of disjunction between systems are then created as when the ground is allowed to drop away from the streetscape turning sidewalks into bridges that fly through the tree canopy of a “sunken forest”.

LTL Architects, 2010. Water Proving Ground: a landscape of "test beds" served by by an infrastructurial framework.

Water Proving Ground by LTL, is more explicitly concerned with the ground plane. A flat floating framework is laid over new tidal zones on the New Jersey coast, creating a patchwork of “test beds” or “Petri dishes”. Rather than plugging modals into this framework, Water Proving Ground becomes an experimental apparatus consisting of smaller, microcosmic systems within a larger framework that record information and generate empirical knowledge about the environment. The scaled systems-within-systems condition is made cleverly explicit with the inclusion of a test bed containing a scaled hydrological model of the New York Harbor allowing a doubling of the coastline’s profile in plans of the project. The radical uncertainty in Water Proving Ground plays out formally as well in mediation on the link between plan and section. A six-foot sectional shift in mean water level subjects areas of the plan to intermittent inundation with tidal fluctuation and increased storm surges, thereby destabilizing the neat figure/ground distinction between land and water. Light frames float on the changing surface and heavy masses of earth are sheared and sloped to amplify the translation between shifts in plan and section as they sink and reemerge from the water. Motifs of floating datums and unstable, or unproven, ground fall easily to hand here as traces of the discourses on “deconstructivist” architecture within which LTL developed their distinctive style in the 1990’s. These architectural operations, however, remain fresh, relevant and engaged by setting up a tension between organizing systems and the specificities of architectural objects making without necessarily setting the two in opposition. The loss of control and weakening of the architect’s position relative to that of the heroic modernist planner is accepted not with anxiety, but rather with a certain opportunistic wit.

The “softening” of the land/water distinction also figures heavily in Working Waterline by Matthew Baird, which proposes an adaptive reuse of an oil tank farm and a military pier on the industrial coastline in Jersey. Baird enthusiastically embraces both the effects of climate change and the architect’s role as systems engineer for the dystopian future. The larger scale implications of climate change are considered in positing the opening of an ice-free artic sea passage that diminishes the importance of New York Harbor as a shipping port and leaves industrial sites like the tank farm idle and in need of remediation and reuse. The site is opened up for recreation and the industrial infrastructure is allowed to become a monument to its former productive self.

The most striking (though apparently unintended) parallel to Baird’s project is an unrealized plan for a floating nuclear power plant off the coast of Atlantic City, designed by the engineer Richard Eckert for the New Jersey Public Service Company and profiled in an 1975 New Yorker Magazine article by John McPhee [1].  The reactors in the Atlantic Generating Station were to be mass-produced as ready-made modules that could be floated into position and plugged into the power grid as needed. The project called for the costly construction of enormous breakwaters made of tens of thousands of concrete “dolos” in order to allow the plant to survive the rigors of its unstable, ocean non-site [2]. It was political expediency as much as technical necessity that shaped the project and drove the decision to situate it offshore in the hope that it could escape bureaucratic entanglements and popular resistance. Both proved in vain.

Baird’s proposal also includes piles of dolos and involves energy production but situates the whole process closer to shore in a new, muddy, tidal region amidst the ruins of older industry. The scheme calls for two factories, one that melts down glass bottles from the New York area and molds them into “jacks” (as they are called in the exhibition) and another that uses wastewater to feed bio-fuel producing algae. The jacks are used to create artificial reefs, providing marine habitat and breaking waves and the algae bio-fuel is used to fire the glass furnaces. Instead of siting powerful reactors out of site in an effort disentangle the project from political pressures and popular resistance, Working Waterline turns the whole landscape into a slimy, murky, organic power station that feeds itself and grows.

Similar to the Working Waterline, the Rising Currents exhibition as a whole embraces such an entangled murkiness with as much enthusiasm as resignation. The post-war vision of a future of scientific progress, albeit threatened with nuclear annihilation, is replaced with narratives of a fossil-fuel-burning consumer culture slowly drowning in its own excess but, paradoxically, perhaps able to save itself by eating (or drinking) it’s way out of trouble. It’s a risky gamble and one that seems set on preserving the role of the architect as a maker of “magical objects,” as Nicolai Ouroussoff calls the “jacks” in his New York Times review [3].

If, however, the genie that the architects in Rising Currents are tasked with getting back in its bottle is not modern technology but rather modern consumer culture, then it seems that the magic of media or markets may prove more useful than that of expressive object making. The project Oystertecture by Kate Orff sees this most clearly. Orff takes the oyster as a module and uses it to create a system that is at once social, ecological and infrastructural. As a stomach with out a face, the oyster is both an aphrodisiac fetish commodity and a metaphor for orally fixated mass-consumer-subjects who build cities, like oyster beds, by accretion, smothering those beneath them as they grow. Oystertecture takes up the oyster both as a specific species as an icon in advocating for increased biodiversity in general and the integration of the city’s anthropocentric systems with larger ecologies. Rather than looking to new technological, the standard techniques of commercial oyster cultivation–themselves a simple amplification of the oyster’s lifecycle–are appropriated, reconfigured and expanded into a mechanism for urban restructuring. Orff imagines setting up a system of commercial and community organizations that would work towards adapting the existing infrastructure of the Gowanus canal for oyster cultivation. A choreography of nursery tanks, oyster larvae seeding boats and water-flushing impellers turns the canal into a giant hatchery. The young oysters flow out into the harbor to establish themselves in a system of geo-textile sheets installed in the tidal regions to create oyster beds and a substrate for eelgrass and other species to attach to. The geo-textile mesh fills up with oysters and other biomass to create living reefs that clean the water and stabilize the coastline.

The engineering here is not simply “soft” but actively living, growing, and adapting in dialog with the changing environmental conditions. Orff’s team puts a certain amount of effort into representing what the later stages of the intervention would look like and how the reefs would be inhabited but a major part of the project’s potential lies in these things not being known or fixed. As “shovel-ready” as the project may be, there will never be a ribbon cutting; the development is an ongoing process. The presentation includes menus, material samples, cartoons and sketches that give the impression that the project could operate more like a marketing campaign, political movement or relational art project on an urban scale than a conventional architecture project. As a set of practices or a choreographed collection of ongoing events, Oystertecture opens up a possibility for architecture to engage with the range of performance, activists and entrepreneurial practices that have come to play increasingly important roles in the planning and organizing urban space. Orff offers a model of opportunistic intervention that moves away from architecture as technocratic master planning or hermetic aesthetic discourse. It’s far from a total solution but the promise held out is that techniques can be developed for coping with vast scale and complexity not by seizing a firmer grip on power or assuming a grander scope of vision but through leverage, cleverness and asymmetrical acts of hopeful subversion.

SCAPE, 2010. Oystertecture: oysters and a system of reefs and hatcheries.

Oystertecture responds, if only episodically, to the full implications of the crisis identified in Rising Currents. If concerns about future environmental disaster are the explicit organizing principles of the show, then lurking not far below the surface lie anxieties about the future of architecture both as a profession threatened with the unraveling of its financial basis and as a discipline threatened with a crisis of relevance. The feared catastrophe here is not a systemic breakdown or destructive cataclysm but a loss of control and surety. That the progressive elements of architectural practice hinge on developing techniques for operating on relational networks, staging, scripting or, perhaps, precipitating events seems obvious at this point. This, however, is just for the moment. The only certainty, aside from that of money being tight for the next little while, is that things will be different in the future, and the things that we find ourselves doing may bear scant resemblance to what we see now as our practice. The water is rising and a lot will get washed away in the flood. Of all the things to be saved, a constricted conception of Architecture seems least interesting. Better to hang on to the curiosity, the cleverness, and the capacity to reinvent oneself that glimmers from within the projects in Rising Currents.

FOOTNOTES

[1] John McPhee, “A Reporter at Large, the Atlantic Generating Station,” The New Yorker, May 12, 1975.

[2] Iconic early example of efforts in “soft engineering,” designed in the early 1960’s by South African harbor engineers, dolos are (relatively) huge, multi-armed concrete units in the shape of jacks that lock together in lose configurations to resist wave action while still shifting and moving.

[3] Nicolai Ouroussoff, The New York Times, March 25, 2010

Robert S. Eshelman: We both just returned from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which took place just outside of Cochabamba, Bolivia. Explain what took place there and describe what your impressions of the conference were.

Tina Gerhardt: The World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia provided a stark contrast to the December climate talks in Copenhagen. In his opening address, Bolivian President Evo Morales, who convened the conference in light of the failed Copenhagen talks, criticized the Copenhagen Accord. First, it was a backroom deal drawn up by five countries – the U.S., Brazil, China, India, and South Africa – in a nondemocratic manner, in that it ignored the progress of the UN’s two working groups – the AWG-KP 11 and the AWG-LCA 9 – and it ignored a basic UN tenet of transparency in protocol drafting. Second, by forcing other UNFCCC delegates to sign off on it last minute, these five countries trammeled on another UN tenet: consensus in decision-making.  Morales’s comments echoed the critiques of numerous nation groups – such as the G77, the Alliance of Small Island States and the Least Developed Countries – expressed at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Bonn in early April.

To counter this undemocratic process, Morales suggested four goals for the People’s World Conference: 1. reparations from developed nations to developing nations, to assist them with adaptations to climate change; 2. the creation of an International Climate Justice Tribunal to prosecute crimes against the environment; 3. the development and transfer of technology from industrialized nations to industrializing nations; and 4. a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Morales also called for borders to be opened to climate refugees.

Morales convened the Bolivian summit to establish a balance of power by bringing together governmental representatives, indigenous people, NGOs and climate justice groups from around the world. In this way, the Bolivian summit aimed for a completely different decision-making structure — one that is bottom up, that includes civil society, that includes indigenous peoples from Bolivia and around Latin America, and that basically takes all of their voices into account. There were 17 working groups and panels, which drafted in a final declaration that Bolivia has already submitted to the UNFCCC for discussion at the UNFCCC’s COP 16 talks in Cancún at the end of the year.

The People World’s Conference provided the climate justice movement a vital opportunity to meet and reevaluate organizing priorities and strategies prior to the COP 16 in Cancún. Furthemore, the Bolivian summit marked a vital shift in the configuration of the climate justice movement, as nation-states, NGOs and climate justice activists work together to address the ticking time bomb that is climate change.

And throughout the conference, a fundamental critique of capitalism as the source of climate change was pervasive, from Morales’s opening speech to the final declaration. Morales underscored the incompatability of capitalism, predicated on the need for ever-increasing growth to ensure continued returns on profit, and environmental sustainability. It echoes the climate justice movement’s call in Copenhagen for “System Change not Climate Change.”

RSE: I expected the conference to be a precursor to a type of preparatory meeting for Cancún but, now that it’s over, I think the conference served a much more basic function of bringing together disparate political networks and establishing a framework for strategizing and communication. In order to block implementation of the Copenhagen Accord and to check the power of rich nations, there’s going to have to be a tremendous upsurge of oppositional power. The Bolivian conference created a forum for building that power. It was an incubator of sorts.

Bolivia is putting forth this very long-term set of demands – the establishment of a climate justice court, a call for an international referendum on climate change, passage of a UN declaration on the Rights to Mother Earth, and distribution of climate reparations. All of these demands are really far from the core discussions occurring within the UNFCCC process, which is not to say that they are not demands we shouldn’t get behind. But I think in order to push those demands, a lot more organizing has to be done to connect social movements around the world and to build cooperation between these movements and nation states like Bolivia that are not neo-liberal ones but have direct connections with political movements. So I think the benefit of the Cochabamba conference was to establish an imagination and establish a set of principles upon which social movements may be able to organize around and begin to build relationships that can push these demands.

I agree though that one of the more interesting things about the conference was this relationship between nation states and social movements. There’s a vexed relationship here.  And in Cochabamba we saw, in some ways, how bringing social movements on board with their program benefits nation states such as Bolivia. Bolivia will go to Cancun with the final conference declaration and say that we had 35000 people supporting our platform and I think that that will give them a certain amount of power in negotiations just as, conversely, social movements having the backing of certain nation-states are benefitted by the conference. This type of relationship gives both nation states and social movements some added cache yet their interests are not always aligned.

Also, looking back to Copenhagen and in light of Cochabamba, I think there’s a crucial question. During Copenhagen the demand coming from the climate justice movement was for governments to “sign a deal.” But I think that was a shortsighted demand because it never took up the details of what that deal might entail, like an establishment of billion dollar carbon markets or continuing World Bank-funded deforestation under the guise of preserving forests. Maybe now, given the tenor of international negotiations, the demand should be “no deal” and push forward with Bolivia’s platform.

But you were just in Bonn for the last UNFCCC talks and maybe you’ve got some insights on whether or not a deal that adequately addresses the need for greenhouse gas emissions reductions is really possible.

TG: You bring up a very valid point. As I mentioned, the UNFCCC process is predicated upon two key principles – transparency in protocol drafting and consensus in decision-making. Additionally, there are two working groups that meet regularly to extend the Kyoto Protocol. These two working groups – not some self-appointed nations – provide draft texts that go before the full UNFCCC membership for approval.

A backroom deal like the Copenhagen Accord ignores the progress of these two working groups and up-ends the entire consensus-based process. When I was in Bonn in April, which was the first UNFCCC meeting since Copenhagen, most nations and nation groups critiqued the way things went down in Copenhagen. In essence what you had is a majority of the world’s nations expressing displeasure at the way the U.S. and several developing nations – China, Brazil, India, and South Africa – crafted a last-minute deal that they attempted to push through the UNFCCC process.

While these nations critiqued the backroom deal for its nondemocratic manner, reaffirming the UN tenets of transparency and consensus, they also reaffirmed their commitment to the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Action Plan, which established the two working groups.

Coming out of Bonn, I think two issues were key: 1. A reaffirmation of the UNFCCC process; and 2. A reaffirmation of which text will serve as the basis for Cancún, not the nonlegally binding Copenhagen Accord but the Kyoto Protocol.

Additionally, what I continued to see in Bonn was that the U.S. deputy climate negotiator John Pershing really tried to throw a wrench into the process. For example, he called the UN process into question and thereby derailed the talks. Then, 45 minutes later, he complained about how delays are indicative of how the UN process does not work. These kinds of moves by the U.S. are intended to impede and derail the UN process. But they are actually indicative not of the UN’s failings but of the U.S.’s intention to block the UN process. Having said that, even without the U.S.’s antics, I question whether the UNFCCC process is the most effective way to address climate change.

In Bolivia, the climate justice movements had the opportunity to meet with nations that are keen to address climate change. And this really could provide the seeds for future action toward climate justice, which could really add up to significant efforts to confront the dire and increasing realities of climate change.

But as Bolivian envoy Solon put it in Bonn: “we’re not trying to save a summit. We’re trying to save humanity.”

RSE: Much of this reminds me of the situation during the WTO protests in Cancun in 2003. The WTO was also consensus-based. But, as we know from consensus-based decision-making processes within leftist organizing, not every party within a consensus process necessarily has an equal voice. There are all sorts of dynamics that grant one person or one nation’s greater or lesser power than another nation. Just as with international trade negotiations, the small island nation of Tuvalu does not have the same amount of power in climate negotiations as, say, the U.S., despite the fact that Tuvalu will soon be underwater due to rising sea levels. The U.S. is a leading geo-political player and wields any number of coercive means to bully and “convince” nations into agreement and Tuvalu, or perhaps more relevantly Bolivia, does not. And let’s be honest: one of the most outspoken critics of the U.S. during Copenhagen was from the Sudan, a country that may give us pause when considering whether or not to align ourselves behind them. When we discuss climate aid, do we really want to advocate for the U.S., the E.U., or any other rich nation of the world to funnel aid to poor nation-states that continue to be kleptocratic? You know, the ones that skim international aid from poverty programs? There are many NGOs putting forth demands about climate aid without considering the mechanisms of how climate aid would be distributed.

So I agree there are many problems with pushing for a deal on the international level. Hoping and organizing for a silver-bullet solution within the UNFCCC process that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide climate aid to poor nations overlooks the strategic difficulties in pressuring rich nations, through the UNFCCC process, and in the ways that governments of poor nations don’t necessarily work in the interests of the people living within a country’s borders.

If we want to continue to organize internationally – and I think its important to do so – perhaps the climate justice movement could pressure leaders of the G20 nations to end fossil fuel subsidies that add up to billions of dollars annually. Obama promised last year to work toward ending these subsidies. How about organizing around that?

Regardless of the demands, though, there’s clearly a need for some movement building and Cochabamba went a good deal of the way in building that sense of power. We’ll see how different the climate justice movement looks though in Cancun at the end of this year.

Oliver Ressler is an artist who has worked on projects devoted to various socio-political themes. Since 1994 he has created projects in public space, made videos and organized exhibitions on issues of racism, migration, genetic engineering, economics, forms of resistance and social alternatives. His latest project “What Is Democracy?” has been presented at the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum in Egypt and at Siz Gallery, Rijeka, Croatia.

Berin Golonu: For a series of video interviews, you posed the question “What Is Democracy?” to activists and political analysts across the world. There are also a few artists in the mix. The ensuing recordings (eight videos in all) compose a video installation and a film of the same title. How did you choose these interviewees and why them? What can artists offer us in terms of remedying ineffective and unjust political systems?

Oliver Ressler: I carried out the interviews for “What Is Democracy?” during trips to cities I was invited to present work in, starting in January 2007. There are just three or four artists interviewed in the project. The majority of people are grass-roots activists; some are political analysts, media workers, committed teachers, or leftist unionists. I was interested in people who were able to talk about the problems of the system of representative democracy in an inspiring way, and about what else democracy could be. The profession of my interviewees did not play an important role; I did not even mention it in the film/installation. The idea was to bring together people across states and continents referring to the question, “What is democracy?” So the idea of a transnational democracy about which Derrida and others have written is embedded in the structure of the film/installation.

BG: Could you say more about what a transnational democracy may look like? The last video of the installation shows national flags as they burn, with a voiceover that talks about how the Western democratic model–that of representative democracy–is bankrupt. Would you suggest doing away with the nationalist model of governance? If so, what possibilities emerge in the post-national aftermath?

OR: Well, this is probably the core question: “what is to be done?” “Transnational democracy” as a term has been used in different discourses. I think it could build on the experiences of transnational social movements, which show that democracy does not have to be grounded in territorially limited units such as nation-states. In my opinion a transnational democracy has to be developed and shaped through political struggles that involve as many people as possible. It shouldn’t be about trying to implement a prescribed concept or idea someone elaborated. Principles such as self-governing, self-management and direct decision-making should be crucial. Delegates or speakers would try to carry out decisions local communities make democratically. If these local communities would decide that in certain instances, forms of representation would be necessary (maybe on a geographically bigger structure), then it would be. But even this representation would be completely different to anything we know as “representative democracy”. For smaller states it might make sense to keep their borders in order to bring together people who try to make decisions democratically. Other states could be dissolved and split into smaller entities, which find themselves through certain interests or projects. These are of course very hypothetical considerations. I think that a binding global contract would also be needed which would have to be decided democratically and would guarantee certain rights and liberties to all individuals globally, in order to hinder for example the development of racist, sexist or homophobic communities.

BG: One of the interviewees brings up Chantal Mouffe’s model of social and political dissensus as posing a positive alternative model to the challenges of globalization. This brought to mind an essay I recently read by Felix Guattari titled “The Three Ecologies” which addresses increasing environmental degradation tied to global capitalist expansion. Guattari believes that counter struggles must simultaneously become more united and increasingly different (through dissensus) to produce, what he calls “fragments that act as catalysts in existential bifurcations.” Is there dissent between the different voices that come together in your video?

OR: Definitely. There are several contradicting opinions in the film/installation, ranging from people who think “representative democracy” can be transformed so that it becomes truly representative for the people who live in it, to people who reject the idea that democracy and representation can go together at all, because these were contradicting ideas. There are activists talking about “direct democracy” but I have the impression that although they use the same term, they may have different ideas about what it means. I think it is extremely important to have a variety of different opinions and ideas in such a project, with the common understanding that the current system has to be overcome. The film/installation gives the audience the possibility to listen to the different arguments and to learn from those they find interesting. It is not really necessary to identify fully with each argument made in the film, as long as it contributes interesting aspects and viewpoints to the larger discussion. “Democracy” as a term and a system of rule is getting emptier and emptier and needs to be filled with new meaning, at least if we continue to consider it a valuable term not to be given up to the right wing.

BG: In the same essay I mentioned, Guattari proposes formulating new ecological practices to activate isolated and repressed singularities. He states that art and artists provide fertile terrain for bringing these new subjectivities and singularities into play. Do you similarly believe that art can provide a creative space for the production of new possibilities? If so, can you talk about how, as a work of art, “What Is Democracy” attempts to tackle such a goal?

O.R.: In the art world there are numerous spaces that can be used for raising dissent and even to think about alternative organizational structures for the future. That’s why art spaces are important for me and I don’t wanna give them up. “What Is Democracy?” occupies art spaces and tries to drag the audience into a debate about the foundations of our society. As an artist I don’t see myself as an expert on questions of democracy or how to organize society alternatively. There are many others who have a much deeper knowledge and understanding. But through working on long-term projects such as “What is Democracy?” you become kind of an expert on certain details you are interested in. I see my role as more of a catalyst, someone who does not offer technical solutions, but points to possible ways to find them, as curator Marco Scotini once described it. I hope this project points to certain relevant ideas, viewpoints and arguments.

BG: Have there been any past models of wide-scale political organization that you or any of your interviewees look to as inspiring models to build upon?

OR: Looking at the Western world, true democracy has not been achieved in history, at least not as a long lasting, stable model. There were some fantastic democratic experiments such as the Paris Commune in 1871 or the anarchist workers’ collectives during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Unfortunately the reactionary forces were able to smash both pretty soon. In “What Is Democracy?” First Nations People in the US and Australia argue that their original indigenous societies were a kind of true democracy, before these structures were destroyed by invading Europeans. Talking about indigenous communities, we also have the model of the Good Government Junta of the Zapatistas in the south of Mexico, an example of direct-democratic self-governing that still exists today and brings many advantages for people living in these Zapatista villages. I focus on these models in another, ongoing exhibition project titled “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” which takes form as sixteen videos and transcribed interviews with economists, political analysts and historians talking about a specific theoretical model each of these theorists has been working on.

BG: How does the “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” project differ from “What Is Democracy?” Do they form a dialog with one another?

OR: For “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” I produced sixteen videos with economists, political analysts and historians on one specific theoretical model each of these theorists has been working on. In “What Is Democracy?” representative democracy is being criticized from different angles in order to represent democratic principles at work. Both projects are independent from each other, but yes, I think they form a dialog. Hopefully the future will bring an opportunity to present them both together in an exhibition.

The film “What Is Democracy?” can be viewed at: http://www.ressler.at

“Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies”, Wyspa Institute of Art (Ed.), 240 p., 2007

Oliver Ressler

Oliver Ressler (born 1970 in Austria) produces exhibitions, projects in the public space and videos which blur the boundaries between art and activism. His projects have been exhibited in solo-exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade; Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, Germany; Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid and in Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum in Egypt. He participated in the biennials in Prague, 2005; Seville, 2006; Moscow, 2007, Taipei, 2008 and Lyon, 2009. For the Taipei Biennial 2008 Ressler curated an exhibition on the counter-globalization movement, “A World Where Many Worlds Fit”, which was also shown at Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Canada in 2010. Webpage: www.ressler.at