Sunday, November 25, 2012

Shared Knowledge


The Art Between Ethnic Politics and Capital Flow
http://samiartfestival.org/participants/3

Northern Experiments (a publication)
http://www.0047.org/publications/view/8




PARTICIPATION


Colaboration and participation seem to be the trending topics of many discussions concerning production (this in the arts but also in any other disciplines). It is what theorists call the parcipatory turn (there also being an educational turn-the fever of museums and art institutions to have an educational program). The collapse of certain production and economic models has obliged us all to rethink how we do and propo- se, but of course collaborating is no new practice.Looking back we spot in the begining of the 1960s this same flourishing of collective practices, and also those were times when rethinking the models was necessary. The post-war reconstruction helped relax the national and ideological boundary concerns, which gave way to experimentation, the sexual revolution was at stake, art became projects, exhibitions became happenings and spectators became participants.This new spectator is very well spotted by french philosopher Jacques Rancière in his conference given at the International Summer Academy of Arts of Frankfurt in 2004 where he delevopes the idea of an spec- tator who is no longer a passive agent of recieving information (as it is undertood by neo-liberal powers today). He critizises the practices in which the artists or producers think about audience and do not permit this to generate their own process of intervening (this can be intelectually.) Also in The Ignorant School- master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, published in 1981 he depicts the idea of education asa parcipatory process, which i recond highly relevant for this discussion. In this text he gives the example of pedagogue Joseph Jacotot who revolutioned the educational systems by teaching a language he did not speak. He then started guiding the scholars through the language, but not shortening the way of learning by telling them the answers. Rancière developes through this book the idea of an emacipated scholar, spectator, and citizen who can be able to produce their own criteria by judging and comparing their own culture and what is offered from any other external producer. Therefore a participation takes places, not an imposition. Coming back to the spectator and the art production, Rancière critisizes the paradox of political art being faithful to the mimetical traditional art, and to think and use this for the pedagogical model and art practices.

Covers of Jaques Rancière's texts

Looking at this more theoretical example to see how this turn shares time with an educational concern, I am interested in the studies and theories Lawrence Halprin developed in the 1960s about collaborative practices. He tried to develope a method that favoured the process over the result and the communal effort over indi- vidual authorship called the RSVP cycle. It is organized into four parts: with enough Resources (R), a clear score (S) and faculties of analysis that he termed “valuaction” (V), and idea can be performed (P).
Sketches Lawrence Halprin did to explain his RSVP cycle.
Halprin saw this steps as necessary for collaboration, but not necessarily prescriptive of it, much more of an ethic as it is of a method. He planned a community on the west coast of California about 160 kilometers north of San Francisco called the Sea Ranch. In 1962 a group of architects was assembled including Halprin himself,
who convinced them that planning should begin through ecological scoring (one of the steps of the method-planning). Houses should have roofs pitched like the mountain slope to create a consistent wind movement;houses should be shingled or wooden; and the sixteen kilometers of shore line should be free of buildings. These rules were not followed as collaboration and eventually gave way to selfish desires.
To colaborate is to work jointly for a common goal. To participate is to take part in a project without the mandate to cooperate, in this project, with given time, common goals frangmented into individual needs. Halprin though of collaboration as a way of improving design.


Sea Ranch housing and workshop


Following with this “failed” example of Halprin, i am interested on talking about Chantal Mouffe ́s perspec- tive of participation and collaborative proyects. She is a Belgian political theorist born in Charleoir in 1943 concerned about the concept of ‘the political’, in proposing a radicalization of modern democracy – what she calls ‘agonistic pluralism’. She has recently developed an interest in highlighting the radical potential of ar- tistic practices. Her text Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces written in 2007 is where she mostly puts this concept through. She starts introducing the idea of activism and participation being neutralized by capitalist forces which makes these loose automatically its force, claiming that artistic critique has become and important element of capitalist productivity.
“What is needed is widening the field of artistic intervention, by intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the program of total social mobilization of capitalism.” In her ideas she talks on how polical decisions taken noawadays make us citizens make a choice between conflicting alternatives, being part of an uncontested hegemony of liberalism. She differenciates the social from the polical (being this an institutional hegemony). “The social is the realm of sedimented practices, that is, practices that conceal the originary acts of their contingent political institution and which are taken for granted, as if they were self-grounded.” I think also it is interesting how she sees art as there allways being to it a political dimension and an aesthetic dimmension in the political, “Artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order or in its challenging and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension. The political, for its part, concerns the symbolic ordering of social relations, what Claude Lefort calls ‘the mise en scène’, ‘the mise en forme’ of human coexistence and this is where lies its aesthetic dimension.” Here she starts introducing the idea of consensus and agonism explaining those proyects which activate agonistic public spaces have an objetive of unvealing the repressed by dominant consensus, confronting and opposing these ideas to a consenssus of parcipatory and artistic practices, thinking about this consensus as a way which tends to obscure and obliterate, and is again and again instrumentalized and silenced.
“To grasp the political character of those varieties of artistic activism we need to see them as counter-hege- monic interventions whose objective is to occupy the public space in order to disrupt the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to spread, bringing to the fore its repressive character”.
This pratice of subverting the dominant hegemony brings me back to Rancière ́s idea of constructing new subjetivities, non-passive actors which can intervine from a critical perspective.
Also she introduces the idea of the priviledge position of the modernist artist:“In fact this has always been their role and it is only the modernist illusion of the privileged position of the artist that has made us believe otherwise. Once this illusion is abandoned, jointly with the revolutionary conception of politics accompanying it, we can see that critical artistic practices represent an important dimension of democratic politics. This does not mean, though, as some seem to believe, that they could alone realize the transformations needed for the establishment of a new hegemony.” This last sentence is revealing to understand this practices as one of the ways to intervine, but necesarry to be accompanied by others.
Here there is a link to one of her lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wpwwc25JRU
To finish up I wanted to talk about the recent spanish movement of 15m, which took place in the entire estate and reinvidicated the rolle of citizens in political descissions. The most repeated slogan was “que no nos representan-we are not represented by them”. The social body asked for its autonomy “we are not represented by them” In this case, art does not need to give representations but give new forms of live and relations.

Spanish saying during 15m movement

This obliged us -and obliges us all- to rethink the concepts of multiplicity and happening in realtion to the contemporary artistic practices. If no one is to be represented by anyone, because the social body asks for its autonomy, art therefore must not represent anything but construct and produce new forms of live and new relations.
To exemplify this I wanted to use an artistic practice which took place in Madrid, in relation to the Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, in which a collective called Fast Gallery did an action called Futuro Imperfeto consisting of an open call inviting people to join them in the square with home made flags. This practice used the activism strategies also performing in direct action which by going to the streets and engaging people activated senses and spaces, also and most important, activated affections. They responded to the moment spain is going through with and action that permited to reinvent symbols in an imaginitive way and participation in this representation takes place.
So conecting to Mouffe ́s ideas of multiplicity, plurality and conflict being the nature of politics, we are here shown a public sphere conected to passions. Artistic practices are necessary in an esthetical and political sense, to reinvent and movilize affections.


Intervention by spanish collective Fast Gallery in Madrid


I would like to end up quoting a brazilian socilogist called Suely Rolnik, who speaks about this subjetivity and active espectator-citizen: “Artistic practices can raise in those recieving them not only the concience of domination and explotation, its visible face, macropolitic, as activism does, but the experience of those power relations in their own body, its micropolitical power and unconcius, which inteferes in the process of subjectivity there where this collective gets caught to participate.”








Resources

Gilles Clément: Gardens of Resistance

A DREAM IN SEVEN POINTS FOR A NEW GOVERNANCE
Key words as they appear in the text:

- the common good
- planetary stirring
- emergent ecosystems
- delocalization of production and distribution systems
- natural and cultural hybridization
- emergent economy
- evolution
- dependence
- self-sufficiency
- non-vital exchanges
- vital exchanges
- atomization
- networking
- planetary garden
- symbiotic man


A Dream in Seven Points for Gardens of Resistance


    •    A garden of resistance is an area, public or private, where the art of gardening – for sustenance, pleasure, parks or other programs of accompaniment,    urban or rural –is practiced in harmony with nature and man, free of market domination. Diversity, both biological and cultural, as well as the   preservation of water, soil and air is encouraged for the common good.


    •    A garden of resistance is part of  a life style that, in a larger sense,  reflects the relationship between man and his socio-biological environment . As in the Garden in Motion,   this relationship, or the economy of life , does as much for and as little against existing energies. This applies to daily acts in all domains and is relevant at all levels. However, a constant state of alert must be maintained in order to avoid confusing consumerist values with ecology.


    •    Environment friendly practices emerge from gardens of resistance. They propose a way of life that is not wasteful of the common good as a basis for a new economy.

This economy is the confrontation of two processes:
- One is the  planetary stirring of all living things  and of distant exchange systems, leading to a series of biological and social readjustments : emergent ecosystems. 

- The other, delocalization of exchange and distribution systems, minimizes global production and management costs, hence controlling pollution and carbon balance.

Planetary stirring multiplies exchanges and encounters between beings and cultures traditionally apart.  These encounters produce the natural and cultural hybridization involved in the global process of evolution.
The delocalisation of exchange and distribution systems resulting from planetary stirring is an important aspect of the emergent economy, composed of  new patterns of exchange (emerging ecosystems) and of new priorities: spend less and better, consume less and better, establish a dynamic sharing process.

    •    The emergent economy of gardens of resistance consolidates two opposing forces:

    •    One is connected to distant exchanges, generating dependence


    •    The second , connected to local exchanges, allows self-sufficiency

The emergent economy of gardens of resistance does not favor one or the other with      regard to bulk exchange but establishes the frontier between dependency and self-sufficiency affirming that :


    •    Non-vital exchanges are tied to distance and dependence. A distant accident would only have an incidental impact upon the emerging economy and would not place it in danger.
    •    Vital (or highly necessary) exchanges are linked to proximity, hence to self-sufficiency. 

A distant accident would not modify performance.
    •    None of the exchanges that could occur in gardens of resistance should, in principle,   contribute to the deterioration of the biological or social balance
    •     Gardens of resistance already exist on the planet in dispersed form. This dispersion    (“atomization”) is the logical consequence of self sufficiency but does not necessarily require a network. 


A policy favorable to the emergent economy, originating from gardens of resistance and in a larger  sense from the Planetary Garden, should federate a system with no legislative curbs  in order to:

    •    establish fair exchanges
    •    establish forums for high level artistic and scientific exchanges
    •     encourage the exchange of immaterial goods derived from planetary cultural diversity

Dispersion  (“atomization”), difficult to apprehend, operates in favor of resistance
    •    As long as the belief persists that capitalism is the only possible model, its destructive presence must be energetically challenged by multiplying “resistances” on the planet, forming a Milky Way that gains in force and intensity with time.
The substitution of one system by another is not necessarily a deflagration but an implosion, an  irreversible shift from unjust to fairer distribution of imposition , from unjust to fairer  distribution of goods – at least statistically – and from the privatization of the common good towards their municipalization.
It then becomes possible to federate a dispersed “(atomized”) system and establish a political project in harmony with the planetary garden.

    •    The Planetary Garden merges the Gardens of Resistance into a single concept. When resistance operates on a planetary level, a plan for humanistic ecology becomes possible.
The Planetary Garden is based upon the notion of diversity, underlining humanity’s dependence  upon biological and non biological heterogeneity  and hence its vulnerability. A key question is “How to capitalize from diversity without destroying it?” Indeed, any modification of the ecological balance through human behavior, causing the disappearance of non human species, ultimately condemns mankind. A scientistic vision of the future, substituting technology for circumspect management of natural resources, could only precipitate the “garden” towards destruction.

        
The Planetary Garden must federate comprehension of the living with intelligent use of technological assistance. It presumes a level of knowledge sufficient to run the garden by offsetting  removal and return to the  milieu. Symbiotic man is in a key position to maintain this balance while biotic potential continues to obey the evolutionary process.
Theoretically, these seven points open the way to new governance and, implicitly, prepare a new political program leading to the establishment of a novel government, complete with ministries and their responsibilities. As in a dream, the outline of a Constitution whose introductory articles establish the foundation for a society in which sharing and growth of knowledge supplant competition emerges.


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"the principle of the recyclable city"

"Another crucial question is production, what I call the principle of
the recyclable city. Can society continue to live in a limited space
with a high population density without destroying that space? Yes, by
recycling everything the way it should be done, locally. For a
gardener the model is obvious – you know how to make compost, sort
things, recycle organic material without using complicated containers
or plastic bags. But if we force a consumer society to recycle
everything, we would have to redesign the consumer objects to make
them recyclable. We wouldn’t have at all the same goals, the same way
of life. For that, I think that vegetable gardens and gardening can
become a model for society, for energy management.
In a place like Aubervilliers, we face the typical problem of limited
space. It’s surrounded on all sides, it’s not very big, but then
neither is the planet."


Gilles Clément in "Conversation between Gilles Clément, Marjetica
Potrč and Gillain Roussel" (Oct. 4, 2011),
Gilles Clément is a landscape architect, gardener and writer, known
for such concepts as "Gardens of Resistance", "The Garden in Motion",
"The Planetary Garden", and "The Third Landscape"

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R-Urban

R-URBAN is a bottom-up strategy of urban resilience involving the
creation of a network of locally closed ecological cycles linking a
series of fields of urban activities (i.e., economy, habitat,
mobility, urban agriculture, culture) and using land reversibly.


* AAA Atelier d’architecture autogérée is a research led practice
founded by Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu in 2001 in Paris to
conduct actions and research on participative architecture.

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"to produce what we consume and consume what we produce"

* André Gorz, in Manifeste Utopia, Ed. Parangon, 2008
André Gorz was one of the leading social philosophers of the 20th
century and a pioneer of political ecology.

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The Transition Network

The Transition Network, founded in 2005, is an international
community-led response to global warming and declining oil
reserves. It continues to grow exponentially: more than 200 cities,
towns and villages around the world have adopted the Transition
principles. The movement is committed to adopting self-sufficient
solutions to prepare communities to withstand the impact of, and
thrive in a world transformed by an event known as “peak oil,” when
demand for cheap energy outstrips supply, fundamentally altering the
global economy and the way we live.

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"from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"

Kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally
based on agriculture. Kibbutzim began as utopian communities a
society dedicated to mutual aid and social justice; a socioeconomic
system based on the principle of joint ownership of property, equality
and cooperation of production, consumption and education; the
fulfillment of the idea "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs".

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The Garden City

"As the famous magnet diagram shows, Howard wanted to combine the
attractions of urban life (employment, intensity of civic life) with
those of the countryside (abundance of cheap land, natural beauty),
thus ameliorating the shortcomings of both.
Howard's scheme was aimed at appropriating the appreciation of land
values for the municipality and residents themselves. The proceedings
would make it possible to both repay the long-term debt of the initial
loan with added interest, to construct and maintain municipal
infrastructure and to build up a local welfare state consisting of old
age pensions and insurance. In this way, incrementally, and through
cooperative means, the land would become the property of the
municipality and inhabitants themselves. During this process, the
control of the municipality would be progressively handed down to the
inhabitants, in what was almost a form of direct democracy. In
Howard's eyes, this was the path to peaceful reform as referenced in
his book’s first title: an incremental way of bringing all the land
under municipal ownership.
Thus the Garden City as proposed by Howard was one part political
utopia, one part feasibility study."



* Merijn Oudenampsen, in 'The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their
Neighbour', Marjetica Potrc and Wilde Westen (Lucia Babina, Reinder
Bakker, Hester van Dijk, Sylvain Hartenberg, Merijn Oudenampsen, Eva
Pfannes, Henriette Waal), edited and published by Wilde Westen,
printed by Dijkman, Amsterdam, 2010.
Ebenezer Howard is known for his publication Garden Cities of
To-morrow (1898), the description of a utopian city in which people
live harmoniously together with nature. The publication resulted in
the founding of the garden city movement.




Exercise1: gathering






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The commons and Elinor Ostrom

Elenor Osrom saw "the tragedy of the commons" turned into "the comedy of the commons". Meaning that she does believe in the power of humans to organize themselves and find ways to manage common goods well and not having them privatized.


"Best of all, they (the rules) were not imposed from above. Mrs Ostrom put no faith in governments, nor in large conservation schemes paid for with aid money and crawling with concrete-bearing engineers. “Polycentrism” was her ideal. Caring for the commons had to be a multiple task, organised from the ground up and shaped to cultural norms. It had to be discussed face to face, and based on trust."
"The best-laid communal schemes would fall apart once people began to act only as individuals, or formed elites." Source: http://www.economist.com/node/21557717


"Tragedy of the commons" is thought in a way, that people overuse or underuse goods that are not regulated from above or owned by someone. Like fishery: the fisherman knows he should leave some fishes for keeping the population alive, but he's fishing as much as possible because he knows as well that if he does not take the fish someone else will take it.
In opposite of that is the "comedy of the commons" thought. Wikipedia is an example: the more people read and work on the articles, the better the Information gets. An not virtual but physical good could be the idea behind food cooperatives: the more peep use the cooperative, the easier it is to produce and think long term for the farmer.
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Allemannsretten (Everyman's right) in Norway:

Allemannsretten is the right for anyone to use someone else's owned property.
The main part of the right is the right to pass or travel over it.
Other parts included is the right to swim in owned water, if not to close to settlements, pick berries, mushrooms and nuts and also put up a tent for one to two days. Right to fish or hunt is usually not included. Fire is also usually prohibited, though in Norway and Sweden it can be allowed with proper safety precautions.

Important to notice is that the right is only applied to "utmark" (outer grounds), meaning it doesn't apply to areas around houses, cultivated land (although allowed when frozen and snow covered) and such where it could disturb someones privacy.

Allemansretten does not come without responsibilities. Everyone using it is expected to treat the nature surroundings and people in the area with respect, not to litter or in some way harming the environment.

The right also exist in Sweden, Finland and Island, if with some differences.


Further reading:
Freedom 





Buliding a stove

Our idea for Tromsø was to built a stove simply and effectively in the use.
Moreover, it should needs less wood as possible to spare resources but also still provide for warmth in the job the whole day.
After a long research we discovered a stove, to which exactly this applied.



how to build a rocket stove mass heater

"The rocket store mass heater is innovative and efficient space heating system developed from the rocket stove, a type of hyper-efficient wood-burning stove."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mass_heater)



  • rocket mass heaters in a nutshell
    • heat your home with 80% to 90% less wood
    • exhaust is nearly pure steam and CO2 (a little smoke at the beginning)
    • the heat from one fire can last for days
    • you can build one in a day and half
    • folks have built them spending less than $20


(http://www.google.de/imgres?imgurl=http://www.richsoil.com/images/rocket-mass-heater-diagram.png&imgrefurl=http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp&h=439&w=770&sz=175&tbnid=GNyKDh2Yar7k9M:&tbnh=68&tbnw=120&prev=/search%3Fq%3Drocket%2Bstove%2Bmass%2Bheater%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=rocket+stove+mass+heater&usg=__duitus7OkvvmegfFkzNdqAlGiG4=&docid=QKYX1Uu5MFYtnM&sa=X&ei=XLH1UKqOKczDswbAhoGADw&ved=0CEMQ9QEwAQ&dur=604)

Working on the stove

…take time to think about it!
…and then it simply acts!



Aetzel Griffioen

  Tine De Moor Institutions for Collective Action
 
 
http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/2011/07/21/common-rights-humans-as-nature-nature-as-human/