Topology VI: Spaces of Transformation: The Vast Space-Time of Revolutions Becoming. A conversation with Drucilla Cornell, David Harvey and Achille Mbembe chaired by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera @ Tate Modern, London 12 May 2012

A barricade in the Paris Commune, March 18, 1871

Spaces of Transformation: The Vast Space-Time of Revolutions Becoming

Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium

Saturday 12 May 2012, 

With Drucilla Cornell on The Site of Revolution, David Harvey on The Spaces of Anti-capitalist Transition and Achille Mbembe on Zero-World. Chaired by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera.

This panel constitutes the spirit that opens up new potentiality spaces for human thought and action toward a transformative movement (abolishing the state of things) that is always there for the making and the taking – pushing human possibilities to their limits. This is what gaining the courage of our minds is all about: to take a speculative plunge into the unknown and the unknowable – facing up to a world of uncertainty and risk where the social and the ecological orders are unpredictable and unstable. What counts is open dialogue and practical interactions across multiple theatres on this long frontier in the vast space-time of revolutions becoming.

Drucilla Cornell

(The Site of Revolution) is Professor of political science, women’s studies, and comparative literature at Rutgers University and National Research Foundation Professor in Customary Law, Indigenous Ideals and the Dignity Jurisprudence at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Prior to beginning her life as an academic, Cornell was a union organizer for a number of years. She worked for the UAW, the UE, and the IUE in California, New Jersey and New York. She has written numerous articles on contemporary continental thought, critical theory, grass-roots political and legal mobilisation, jurisprudence, women’s literature, feminism, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and political philosophy. She has published several books: Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (1991, new edition 1999), The Philosophy of the Limit (1992),Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference (1993), The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (1995), At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality (1998), Just Cause: Freedom, Identity, and Rights (2000), Between Women and Generations: Legacies of Dignity (2002), Defending Ideals: War, Democracy and Political Struggles (2004) and Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory (2008) that won the Frantz Fanon prize. Her most recent book with Kenneth Michael Panfilio isSymbolic Forms for a New Humanity (2011). She is on the Board of Directors of the uBuntu Project.

David Harvey

(Spaces of Anti-Capitalist Transition) is a geographer and the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. Among other awards he has received the Anders Retzius Gold Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Vautrin Lud International Prize in Geography (France). He was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1998 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. He is the author of many books, including Social Justice and the City (1973), Consciousness and the Urban Experience (1985), The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), The Limits to Capital (1982), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), Spaces of Hope (2000), The New Imperialism (2003), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (2006), Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (2009), A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010), and The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (2010).

Achille Mbembe

(Zero-World) is a philosopher and political scientist. He obtained his PhD in History at the University of Sorbonne and a DEA in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris. He is a Professor of Social Theory in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University and a convenor of the Locations and Locutions lecture series. He is also a co-convenor of The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (Faculty of the Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand) and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University (US). He is a senior researcher at WISERInstitute in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a contributing editor of the scholarly journal Public Culture. He has written extensively on African history and politics, including Les Jeunes et l’ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985), La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1996), Du Gouvernement prive indirect (2000), and Sortir de la grande nuit – Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2010). He is the winner of the Bill Venter/Altron Award (2006) for his book On the Postcolony(2001). He has written on the artist Marlene Dumas.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

is a philosopher and cultural critic, as well as the award-winning author of ‘What If Latin America Ruled the World?’ Oscar teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, and often collaborates with such media outlets as the BBC, Guardian, Monocle Radio, Tank Magazine, Al Jazeera and RT, among others.

Read more on Tate M website

Topology V: Boaventura de Sousa Santos in conversation with Shiv Visvanathan, Suely Rolnik and Sarat Maharaj. Chaired by Brenna Bhandar @ Tate Modern, 28 April 2012

Topology V: Boaventura de Sousa Santos in conversation with Shiv Visvanathan, Suely Rolnik and Sarat Maharaj. Chaired by Brenna Bhandar

This panel explores counter-hegemonic transnational networks, global voices and cartographic practices that map the abyssal line between epistemologies of the North and the South. Reinventing social emancipation opens the processes of democracy to heterogeneous outside, de-territorialising universal topoi and spaces of power. These emancipatory processes are expressed in the struggles for participatory democracy manifest in the Arab Spring, the growing occupation movement and the landless workers movements. Another form of knowledge is possible.

The understanding of the world by far exceeds the Western understanding of the world. Northern epistemologies draw abyssal lines between zones of being and zones of non-being, thereby committing epistemicide and wasting social experience in a massive scale. Mapping the lines is as much a search for absent knowledges as it is a search for absent beings. Knowing otherwise is also being otherwise. Knowing and being in a post-abyssal way involves a constant exercise of intercultural translation.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Self-determination as Sumak Kawsay, Hindi Swaraj and Ubuntu

Shiv Visvanathan discusses Knowledge and Democracy: Between the Imagination and the Imaginary.

Democracy which functions in linear time is illiterate. Without a multiplicity of time, the diversities of citizenship cannot be sustained. Distributive justice without cognitive justice cannot democratize democracy. Only the epistemologies of democracy can rescue politics from the tyranny of an official science. The explosion of citizenship has created an epistemic movement where democracy can be reinvented in terms of the new dialects of emancipation. 
Shiv Visvanathan, Knowledge and Democracy: Between the Imagination and the Imaginary

What is non-negotiable in my theoretical, clinical, curatorial and teaching practices? What is non-negotiable in my every day life practices? It is what demands to be embodied, the force that obliges me to think, that is, to create. This poetical force is the only non-negotiable element when the negotiation with economical or macro-political interests is unavoidable. In other words, what is non-negotiable for me is the force of desire in its negotiation with narcissistic or social recognition interests – be they my own interests or external ones. It is a kind of drive pragmatism oriented by an ethical compass. Isn’t that the fundamental meaning of sublimation, if we understand it as sublime-actions, the actions we are always trying to invent in order to actualise drives?
Suely Rolnik, Beyond Colonial Unconscious

Suely Rolnik instantiates the production of another form of knowledge, exposing the topological relations between affect and thought, disquietude and creation: an ethico-aesthetic resistance to the repression of the drive, unconscious in the endless process of invention of oneself and of the world. For her, such repression is the main colonial operation from a micropolitical perspective. Through poetics/analytics/politics she mobilises affect and shifts stagnation in the micro-spaces of the body, the folds of the soul and pleats of matter.

This keynote conversation will be followed by a seminar led by Bernard Burgoyne on Saturday 5 MaySecrets of Space Seminars.

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal), Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and member of the research group Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe) of the Centre. He has been a prominent intellectual-activist of the World Social Forum. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French and German. His books in English include Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition (1995), The Rise of the Global Left. The World Social Forum and Beyond (2006), Cognitive Justice in a Global World (2007), (co-edited with Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito) Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality (2005). He is the editor of the acclaimed series Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestoes, wide-ranging explorations of social struggle and progressive politics: Democratizing Democracy. Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (2005), Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon (2006), Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (2007),Voices of the World (2010). The last volume of the series, Epistemologies of the South: Reinventing Social Emancipations is forthcoming.

Professor Boaventura Sousa Santos at Birkbeck, July 2011

Shiv Visvanathan

is a professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. An anthropologist and Human Rights researcher his work has explored the question of alternatives as a dialogue between the West and India. Closely linked to his current work is the attempt to demystify modern science and social knowledge as legitimising categories of organised violence and exploitation. His writings have explored the psychological, cultural and political relations of science; the growing control of society by technology; and linkages between scientific establishment and authoritarian structures of state. He is the author of A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology and Development (1997) and Foul Play: Chronicles of Corruption in India (1999).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_wdd7D2iQk

Suely Rolnik

is a psychoanalyst, art and cultural critic, curator and Professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo, where she founded the Subjectivity Studies Centre in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program. Since 2008, she is guest Professor of the Programa de Estudios Independientes, MACBA. She has been a guest lecturer for the Official Masters Degree in the History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (2008-2009) and was guest researcher for the Fondation de France, at the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), in 2007. She remained in exile in Paris for ten years in the ‘post-68’ period (1970–9), where she did her studies in Sociology and Philosophy (Université de Paris 8) and in Clinical Human Sciences (Université de Paris 7); she obtained her Masters in Institutional Analysis and subsequently her DESS in Clinical Psychology at the same university (1978); she has a PhD in Social Psychology at the Catholic University of São Paulo (1987). Among her books, she is author with Félix Guattari of Micropolítica. Cartografias do desejo (1986; 11th edition 2010), published in seven countries (inUSA by Semiotext(e)/MIT, 2006 with the title: Molecular Revolution in Brazil). Creator of a research and activation project of the body memory of Lygia Clark’s work and its environment, in which she realized 65 films of interviews filmed in France, England and the United States by Babette Mangolte and in Brazil by Moustapha Barrat; a box with 20 of those out those 65 films and a booklet was produced in France and in Brazil (2011). This archive was the backbone of an exhibition she curated and the catalogue she edited with C. Diseren: ‘Nous sommes le moule. A vous de donner le souffle. Lygia Clark, de l’œuvre à l’événement’, at the Musée de Beaux-arts de Nantes (2005) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2006). Among her translations into Portuguese: Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (vol. III/IV). She has published numerous essays in books, journals, and art catalogues in Europe and the Americas and has lectured widely. Her research focus is on the politics of subjectivation and of creation in different contexts approached from a trans-disciplinary theoretical perspective, inseparable from a clinical-political pragmatic; since the 1990s, she has been intervening mainly in the field of contemporary art. She is currently based in São Paulo, Brazil, where she has a private practice in psychoanalysis.

Sarat Maharaj

is currently Professor of Visual Art & Knowledge Systems, Lund University & the Malmö Art Academies, Sweden. He was Professor of Art History and Theory 1980-2005 at Goldsmiths’ London University where he is now Visiting Research Professor.  Maharaj was Rudolf Arnheim Professor, Philosophy Faculty, Humboldt University, Berlin (2001-02) and Research Fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht (1999–2001).

His publications focus on Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Richard Hamilton and cover Monkeydoodle, Visual Art as Know-How and No-How, Textiles, Xeno-Sonics and Xeno-Epistemics, Cultural Translation, North/South divisions of work, manufacture and ‘creative labour’. Recent publications include studies in Non-Western modernities: ‘Small change of the universal’: beyond modernity? (British Journal of Sociology, 2010), ‘Hungry clouds swag on deep’: Santu Mofokeng at Kassel 2002: Chasing Shadows, Prestel, 2011.

His image, sound, dance and consciousness studies are exemplified in exchanges with Francisco Varela, the neuroscientist and Buddhist scholar, and have been explored in Knowledge Labs at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, 2005 and 2006, with Liu Sola, Beijing, and Kofi Koko, Paris/Benin), New Media Art Lab (Banff, 2007) and Visual Arts Knowledge Lab (York University, Toronto, 2009).

He was co-curator of documenta XI, 2002. With Ecke Bonk and Richard Hamilton, he curated retinal.optical.visual.conceptual… at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2002. He was co-curator of Farewell to Postcolonialism(Guangzhou, 2008) and Art Knowledge and Politics (São Paolo Biennale, 2010).  He was the chief curator of the Gothenburg Biennale: Pandemonium: art in a time of creativity fever, 2011

Read more on Tate M website

Pic: Monument by Oscar Niemeyer dedicated to the Landless Workers Movement (MST)

Pushing the Limits of the Affective Workspace: Revolts, Absorption, and Ecologies of Waste @ University of East London, March 21st 2012

University of East London
Centre for Cultural Studies Research
Presents

Pushing the Limits of the Affective Workspace: Revolts, Absorption, and Ecologies of Waste

A symposium with Jussi Parikka, Stevphen Shukaitis and Tony D. Sampson
Chair: Jeremy Gilbert, CCSR

Wednesday March 21st 2012
2:00pm-5:00pm
UEL Docklands Campus
Room EB.G.10
(ground floor, main building, turn left upon entering the main square after leaving Cyprus DLR
Cyprus DLR is literally situated at the campus)
Free, All welcome. No need to book.

The boundaries of capitalist workspaces are continuously stretched to new limits. Work is pushed into the home, the obsolescent and the unconscious. Focusing on affective labour, new materialism and neuromarketing, this seminar looks initially beyond the media screens of the digital industries to the wasteful ecologies of obsolescent technology. It then explores resistance to contemporary capitalism extending to, for example, the refusal of caring labour. Last, it repositions the attentive subject of cognitive capitalism in a neurological space of absorbent and mostly unconscious consumption.

Media Matters as Ecology
Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton).

This talk investigates “new materialism” through the context of media ecology – but ecology understood literally and through electronic waste, and the various temporalities and materialities of obsolescence. It argues, following Sean Cubitt’s and German media theory lead, for such a focus to technical media that accounts not only what’s on the screen, but what enables “media” as content to exist. German media theory has been successful to track this back to the engineering and scientific roots of modern entertainment media, but this talk focuses on electronic waste, and its relation to information technology work, but from a slightly alternative perspective. As such, the talk also touches discussions of “affective labour” as well as non-representational approaches to contemporary media culture.

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). His books include Digital Contagions (2007), Insect Media (2010) and the forthcoming What is Media Archaeology? (2012). He has co-edited The Spam Book (with Tony D. Sampson, 2009) and Media Archaeology (with Erkki Huhtamo, 2011).

Learning from Affective Revolts: Social Reproduction & Political Subjectiviation
Stevphen Shukaitis, University of Essex / Autonomedia

Despite the importance that autonomist feminism has played in the development of autonomist politics and struggles it is commonly relegated to little more than a glorious footnotes of figures emerging out of operaisti thought (such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno). Organizing around gender, affective labor, and issues of reproduction posed numerous important questions to forms of class struggle that focused exclusively on the figure of the waged industrial worker. Revolts of housewives, students, the unwaged, and farm workers led to a rethinking of notions of labor, the boundaries of workplace, and effective strategies for class struggles: they enacted a critical transformation in the social imaginary of labor organizing and struggle. By drawing on the history and of these struggles (such as the various Wages for Housework Campaigns and current organizing such as Precarias a la Deriva) and ideas of those involved (such as Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Mariarosa Dallacosta, and Alisa Del Re) this paper will explore some lessons that can be learned from these a(e)ffective insurgency.  Taking seriously the questions posed by these struggles are extremely important because as Alisa Del Re argues, attempting to refuse and reduce forms of imposed labor and exploitation without addressing the realms of social reproduction and housework amounts to building a notion of utopia upon the continued exploitation of female labor. Furthermore the often cramped positions that organizing forms of affective labor and social reproduction (housewives, sex workers, etc) occupies becomes all the more important as these processes are further integrated into the composition of contemporary capitalism. How does one refuse caring labor? Strategies for organizing around affective labor, what Precarias a la Deriva have called a “very careful strike,” are important to learn from to find ways “not a high productivity of domestic labor but a higher subversiveness in the struggle.” (Dallacosta/James)

Stevphen Shukaitis is a lecturer at the University of Essex and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009, Autonomedia) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

Following the Glint in the Eye of the Consumer
Tony D. Sampson, University of East London

New developments in marketing techniques not only aim to sidestep the self-reporting of consumer experiences, but also look beyond the explicit cognitive realm of visual representation to exploit instead the implicit, unconscious affective systems of consumption. Like this, the neuromarketer measures the streams of affect the consumer somatically absorbs in the atmosphere. As the enthusiastic CEO of one US based neuromarketing company puts it, these techniques help the marketer to go beyond conscious consumer engagement with a product and actively seek out what unconsciously attracts them. “Absorption is the ideal,” he claims. This is because it “signifies that the consumer’s brain has not only registered your marketing message or your creative content, but that the other centers of the brain that are involved with emotions and memory have been activated as well.” Along these lines, persuasion and absorption seemingly involves priming the sensory experiences of consumption so as to achieve a number of design goals intended to influence purchase intent.

Tony D. Sampson is a London-based academic and writer. He lectures on new media at UEL where he also leads the new media degree programmes. He is the co-editor (with Jussi Parikka) of The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Cresskill, Hampton Press, 2009) and the author of Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press) to be published later this year. His current research focuses on the latest applications of noncognitive psychology in studies of human computer interaction.

On Rhythm: Paul Klee pattern - Monument on Fertile Country + Aerial view of the river Nile

       Paul Klee's "Monument in Fertile Country" (1929) and an aerial view of a location near the river Nile


Paul Klee’s strata and the transition to complexity


It does not take much intuition or imagination to relate Paul Klee’s “Monument in Fertile Country” (1929), to an aerial photograph. As the painting comes from a period right after the artist’s trip to Egypt in the winter of 1928 – 1929, it does not take much research either to find a location bearing from above a striking resemblance to Klee’s painting: almost any area around the Nile displays the same interplay between dark fertile plots and bright, blank blocks of desert lands. Yet the “Monument” is only an example of a more general idea with which the artist experimented at that time and, though simple, is purely mathematical at its core.  Beyond the immediately obvious, what is clearly different in the two pictures after only a little inspection is that Klee’s “Monument” is not a nearly random arrangement of colored stripes and blocks but rather a careful composition of mathematical nature. And just as the same abstract mathematical law can often be applied in a variety of different situations, Klee extends the same abstract idea in a series of similar paintings beyond the aerial view explanation, providing new imaginative ways of interpreting the colored blocks pattern.
Read more on Peacock's Tail blog

On Rhythm: Noise Painting Pattern - Suzung Kim

Read & See more on Suzung's website

On Rhythm: Grid pattern - Suzung Kim (particolare)

On Rhythm: Visualogue pattern - Suzung Kim

On Rhythm: Andrea Verrengia, "Prologo a "Ljub-Ljub""

Andrea Verrengia, "Prologo a "Ljub-Ljub"". Teatro musicale - Azione drammatica di musica e poesia. Atto unico da camera per recitante, canto, violino e live electronics. Testo poetico : Ljub-Ljub - progetto di VideoPoemOpera, di Gianni Toti. Libretto ricomposto da Andrea Verrengia. Prima rappresentazione assoluta : Roma, XI Festival di Musica Verticale "Eumusica" - Palazzo della Cancelleria, Dicembre 1988. Interpreti : Gruppo di Ricerca artistica Poiein diretto da Andrea Verrengia Bianca Maria Stanzani Ghedini, attrice Joan Logue, soprano Massimo Coen, violino Andrea Verrengia, drammaturgia musicale, live electronics e regia del suono. Tutti i diritti riservati - All rights reserved Ulteriori informazioni in - All information also in http://www.andreaverrengia.org

On Rhythm: Andrea Verrengia - Dedans

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On Rhythm: Sinevibes pattern (Audio-Unit rhythmic pattern) - Intensified Graphic Scheme

On Rhythm: Apple pattern - Piano Roll (Apple Logic Pro 8) - Intensified Graphic Scheme

On Rhythm: Sonia Delauney pattern

On Rhythm: Paul Klee pattern - Giardino meridionale/Southern Garden + Ancient Sound, Abstract on Black

La libertà dell'artista in quanto poietes è qui, nell'occasione di creare mondi possibili, nell'accostarsi al ritmo del cosmo essendo pienamente consapevole che nella simultaneità di tutti i movimenti nel quadro, quel ritmo si ricostituisce.
(Paolo Cappelletti - L'inafferabile visione - Jaca book)

On War Pattern: The Boneyard, Tucson, Arizona, Usa.

AMARC, or the Aerospace Maintenance And Regeneration Center, is a joint service facility managed by the US Air Force Material Command located in the town of Tucson, Arizona, USA.

Often referred to as 'The Boneyard', AMARC is an aerospace storage and maintenance facility adjoining Davis-Monthan Air Force Base which provides a service to all branches of the US military (Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard and Army), as well as other national agencies.

Currently controlling over 4,200 aircraft as well as many other types of military equipment, AMARC works very hard in promoting itself as not just a 'Boneyard' and takes every opportunity in explaining how it operates it's cost effective, tax saving operations. Many of the stored aircraft can be returned to an operational status in a short period of time and there is a continual process of anti-corrosion and re-preservation work which keeps the aircraft in a stable condition during their stay.

The reason the Boneyard reference exists is due to other work that AMARC carries out, that of reclamation of spare parts and the eventual disposal of spent airframes. The Center can be divided into 2 distinct areas, the RIT (Reclamation Insurance Type) area located to the east side of Kolb Road is littered with aircraft in various states of completeness. The junkyard appearance belies the fact that these aircraft are controlled by a process of careful part reclamation, both to a schedule and to ad-hoc requests. On careful examination many of these aircraft can be seen re-sealed to protect the remaining components from the dirt and heat.

There are many times that aircraft from the RIT area leave AMARC to become instructional aircraft, targets on Army or Air Force ranges, museum exhibits or display pieces, although most end up being smelted down into ingots by nearby metal processors.

AMARC has also been heavily involved in the elimination of B-52 Stratofortresses under the Strategic ffArms Reduction Treaty (START). (Click here to see more on this aspect of this work) and were also responsible for the eliminiation of 445 Ground Launch Cruise Missiles (GLCM) and their launchers under the INF Treaty. 


Read more on The AMARC Experience

Greg Constantine - Nowhere People - 2011/2012

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Galjeel were stripped of their Kenyan identity documents and evicted from their land. All forms of identification were taken from this 43-year-old Galjeel woman as part of a screening process to identify irregular migrants from Somalia.  Now her children have no identification either.

Discriminatory changes in migration and citizenship legislation in the Dominican Republic have denied or stripped tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry of their Dominican nationality. Denied documents and citizenship, they will not be able to to go school past the 8th grade or obtain legal employment, and are vulnerable to arrest and deportation to Haiti, a county they have no connection to.

For the past six years, photographer Greg Constantine has worked on a long-term project called “Nowhere People.” The project documents the struggles and plight of minority groups around the world who have had their citizenship stripped or denied from them and are stateless. While people can become stateless for any number of reasons, “Nowhere People” focuses on how citizenship is used and manipulated as a tool to exclude people from belonging to mainstream society, mostly because of discrimination. More importantly, the project documents how the denial of this fundamental right to belong impacts the day-to-day lives of individuals, families and entire communities.
The World’s Stateless, an exhibition featuring a large selection of work from “Nowhere People,” is currently on view at the United Nations. From Sept 20th to October 4th, the exhibition (sponsored by the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee organization, and UPS) will stay up at the UN for the the 66th annual session of the UN General Assembly, so that diplomats and delegates can be exposed to the work. It will also be shown at the BBVA Bank Gallery in Madrid (Oct 19-Nov 7) then Royal Albert Hall in London (Nov 14- Dec 7th).  The in a series of books from Constantine’s “Nowhere People” project, Kenya’s Nubians: Then & Now, will be published in October, with the second book Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya published in April 2012.


All pics by Greg Constantine


Read & See more on Nowhere People website

Olafur Eliasson by Chris Gilbert @ BOMB 88/Summer 2004

Conceptual art’s shift away from the traditional art object—sometimes dubiously referred to as “dematerialization”—was more or less an idée reçue in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when Olafur Eliasson was beginning to make art as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen. Though it was probably a dead end as a formal aesthetic proposition, “dematerialization” provided Eliasson with an open mandate to reach beyond the confines of specifically artistic concerns as he evolved a body of work that ranges from discrete interventions to room-size installations and massive, museum-wide environments—all of it employing shifting frames of reference that are shared with science, psychology and architecture. In this growing body of “objectless” works, experience and perception, rather than a supposedly unmediated thing-in-itself, have become Eliasson’s elusive subject. The physical components of these works—fog, light, ice and earth as well as steel, plastic and glass—are as heterogenous as the structures themselves, though the work shares a central function: fostering an engagement with an environment simultaneously with reflection on that engagement. When I spoke to the artist this spring, I was keen to discuss one of the most unusual moments in his varied oeuvre, his recent installation in the Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall, titled The Weather Project. This was a giant artificial sun placed in a mirrored arid fog-filled environment that droves of people came to see and took ownership of in an aggressive, sometimes cultish manner. I also wanted to explore how the interstitial position of his work, which is both equally engaged and equally distant from science, poetry and politics, could be compared to the role that modern philosophy—the “handmaiden” or the “queen” of other disciplines, according to Immanuel Kant—has occupied in the critical tradition that stretches from that pre-Romantic philosopher through G.W.F. Hegel to the present.

Chris Gilbert You often use the phrase “seeing yourself seeing” or “sensing yourself sensing” to describe the way your work functions. It is interesting that this proposition—namely, that the experience of nature is at least partly a human construct—could be taken as a summary of Romantic philosophy’s central idea. Immanuel Kant often referred to his work as effecting a reversal of the Copernican revolution that had put the sun rather than human beings and the earth at the center of the universe. Like the Romantics who followed him, Kant returns humanity to the center with the claim that we are co-creators of the world that we appear to encounter. It seems to me that a similar dynamic, accompanied by an ethics that likewise emphasizes human responsibility, operates in your work. It is indicated with particular clarity in both the title and the function of the work Your spiral view, which puts the viewer in the center of a light-refracting tube.

Olafur Eliasson If so, I hope this happens in a non-normative way. The problem with putting the model of the person seeing at the center is that it often results in normative ideas of spatiality and personhood. I would like to have the model of the subjective and singular experience at the center, but I would also like it to function non-normatively, which I suppose is a paradox. Kantian epistemology always seems to me inescapably normative. As I use these ideas of seeing-yourself-sensing or sensing-yourself-seeing, they are about trying to introduce relationships between having an experience and simultaneously evaluating and being aware that you are having this experience. It’s not about experience versus interpretation but about the experience inside the interpretive act, about the experience itself being interpretive. You could say that I’m trying to put the body in the mind and the mind in the body. Although I am still proposing a model—a way of seeing and engaging and a way of evaluating our surroundings as a human construction—it can operate with an extremely high degree of singularity. And the important thing is to acknowledge that it is merely a construction, which means that we are not offering a higher state of truth or truthfulness. I can’t say, “Now I’ve got the right model.” It’s not about utopia or anything final. (....)

Read the complete Eliasson interview on Bomb website