this announcement came in from somewhere, i found this looking about their
website:
"The cosmopolitan dream of an open and worldly city ended in 1992 with the
violent clashes between Hindus and Moslems. The initiatives "majlis" and
"open circle", made up of lawyers, urban planers, artists and activists, is
trying to counteract this. They are unmasking the construction of seemingly
natural divisions of religious affiliation as a simplification of
class-specific, cultural and economic conflicts."
http://ersatzmedia.info/engl/veranst/bom_set.html
with sub-sections:
> Madhusree Dutta CONFESSION OF A SLUM LORD
> adhusree Dutta ALFRED CINEMA
> Flavia Agnes THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS
> Tushar Joag THE HAWKERS OF BOMBAY - A SUBSTITUTE EXISTENCE
I wonder about the remorseless ease by which our (mostly middle class)
lawyers, urban planners, artists, activists (and may i add
architect-planners) reduce their categories to these issues, here Bombay ==
cinema + slums (esp. hawkers). Architexturez has been in the past under
considerable pressures to do the same, and take on a language of
helplessness and despair (search around, we have statements like "bankruptcy
of something" and "nobody responded" and "this ended"), and speak
exclusively about slum and hawker issues, the "water problem" and so on. In
other words, speak a language of desperation, and we have entertained
elements of this exquisitely legitimated enterprise, will continue to do so,
as the issues they purport are of some importance.
What disturbs me is this reduction of Urban India to slums. People seem
quite eager to associate, to reduce Indian urbanity to just his and view the
phenomena in isolation. Slums are in foreground, there are books published
describing Indian cities just as slums (Slumming India), professors from
famous universities feel compelled to write papers about this (Traces of
Shit; Colonialism, Cleanliness, Coprology), people get to represent
themselves at organizations one never heard of before on the slum ticket.
The Architexturez Subject Gateway will have to contest with a number of
minute websites out to portray India as a bunch of slums (e.g.,
www.connectingflights.org).
Of course the issues are there, and of importance. At the same time, this
sole, single-minded insistence (that we speak only of _slums_) and a kind of
univocity underlying the discourse points at the collective spinelessness of
the architect-planner class. They would prefer to remain within an already
legitimated ambit, somewhat in the vain of, as Ashish Nandy describes them,
prefabricated modules of thinking. And grow them from within, by incremental
change, until their discourse becomes this vast, all-encompassing thing,
capable of drawing stuff from everywhere. Growing until these people appear,
as they have, only organs of something grotesque, bloated, a creature out of
Dean Koontz and authors of cheap horror tales. People who are not much, only
an instance of themselves. E.M.Forster, in A Passage to India speaks about
this, something "small, insignificant" that has inhabited this land since
old, always drawing upon its malice, and feeding. I first wondered if our
organizations are permeated by this, the "small, insignificant" reading the
Crisis of Institutions problematizations in Contributions to Indian
Sociology, and there are opportunities to think about it at times.
Slumming India, Slamming India. I would like to differ, and get inside
things that are not legitimated-or at least outside of the statues-quo
imposed on us-I would like to think of the issues they describe as
representations, or symptoms, of a wider, systemic set of faults. Structural
faults brought about, instantiated, by the participants in this entirety.
Take an example, on
http://mail.architexturez.net/pipermail/in-enaction/2003-May/000107.html we
read:
> e.. State is using repression to crush the spirit of people who have
>genuinely engaged to strengthen planning and implementation process.
Where an illusory opposition is created between the State and "people who
have genuinely engaged", as if there is an opposition. We read in the same
text (below) the means employed by these self-acclaiming "genuinely
engaged," and the means happen to be State means. They are _in_ the State
Processes, in other words, while begging to appear to be different.
Discussing the whole enterprise with an anthropologist yesterday, and we
noted the various obfuscations, the deliberate avoidance of facts, as if
pictures were being painted:
What is common amongst the fly-over and the demolished slum, concretely?
> The sign "Rajeev Gandhi".
How are events described around this?
> Circumstantially.
What is the claim to rigeour?
> Reportage by date, with some typographic devices and a rigorous style of
> writing.
So what is this?
> A kind of literature. Story telling.
Are there others like this?
> sure, there are the "non-western architecture" specialists (they teach it
> in America, you know?), there are guys writing books on the vernacular
> and history of Indian architecture, mostly of the "alas, alas, in the
> past type, there are guys talking about globalisation and so on
But this is "empty", no? or it is just me who senses the vacuity in here?
> a language of despair is constructed, a vast backdrop against which these
> guys silhouette themselves. It is basically empty, a backdrop is made
> to curtain urban phenomena we see (for example just before the Ahmedabad
> riots, when we worked on the Heterologies projects) and these guys,
> call them "actors" construct a stage in front of it. So yes, it is empty,
> like a theatre, the play might be interesting and it might make us think
> about reality in a certain way, but it is still just that-propaganda.
We wondered if there is a process in evidence, call it NGO-Genesis, or the
discourse by which one separates from the State and the "need" for a
"non-governmental" organisation is made "self-evident". He said "no" because
the NGO market is "saturated, well-developed," and we seem to see something
quite different in evidence. Something that needs to work far more
insidiously, with an orientation that says "neither the state, nor NGO," and
a client is created out of the slum-vote-banks. Superficially this seems to
be the case. I need to look more, and counter-representations should be
possible, it seems. That is, if one were interested in fouling the air, or
being "on stage".
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On Stage! On Air! On Tour! ErsatzStadt (SubstituteCity) presents two models
dealing with the substitute public arena:
KIOSK for useful knowledge Mobile Research Unit, Cinema & Archive Theme 1:
Space Control
Mon, June 2- Sat, June 7, daily between 9 and 11 pm at Villa Elisabeth,
Invalidenstrasse 4, Berlin
Admission 3 ? (limited number of seats available) With simultaneous
translating from English to German
In the 1920s, KIOSK designated a moveable Russian architecture model used as
an information booth and speaker's stand for propaganda purposes. The KIOSK
for useful knowledge (designed by Stephan Craig) is the mobile research unit
for the project ErsatzStadt / SubstituteCity and will go on tour to
alternating locations in public buildings starting June 1. KIOSK is, at the
same time, a cinema where live productions take place on a daily basis and
an ever-growing audiovisual archive with "Narrations of Spaces, Cities and
Territories". In curatorial discursive situations professional knowledge and
theory meets daily practice and individual narration. Documentation,
falsification, entreating takes place - a swap exchange, a public black
market of essential knowledge. The first entry in the archive, marking the
start of the KIOSK operations, will begin on June 1, 2003, and deal with the
theme: space control. International guests will thematize the use of
architecture, urban and landscape planning as a strategic and political
weapon. The dialogues of space control reflect a public debate that has been
going on in Israel for a number of years now, which critically questions the
role of planners and architects. The territorial fragmentation and
segregation in the occupied zones will be juxtaposed with examples of
post-Apartheid architecture in South Africa and the consequences of ethnic
segregation in Bosnia.
On June 29 (7:30 pm) the six dialogues in the archive of the KIOSK can be
viewed at the Volksbühne.
Participating in the KIOSK dialogues are:
Monday, June 2: Amos Gitai (Filmmaker/Tel Aviv) and Friedemann
Büttner(Middle East Expert/Berlin):
About Arabic and Israeli routes, political landscapes and traumas.
The relationship between places and identities that are in a permanent state
of war.
Tuesday, June 3: Sharon Rotbard (Architect/Tel Aviv) and Roemer van Toorn
(Program Director of the Berlage Institute/Rotterdam):
Urban planning: About urban myths in Israel and liberal ideology & design in
the Netherlands.
Wednesday, June 4: Eyal Weizman (Architect/London, Tel Aviv) and David
Campbell (Professor for International Politics/Newcastle):
About crimes that were committed at the drawing-board.
Thursday, June 5: Jeff Halper (Professor for Urban Anthropology, Ben Gurion
University/Jerusalem) and Lindsay Bremner (Architect and Professor for
Architecture at the University of Witwatersrand/ Johannesburg):
Architecture of violence in post-Apartheid Johannesburg and in East
Jerusalem.
Friday, June 6: Meron Benvenisti (Geographer, Historian, Author/Jerusalem)
and Milan Prodanovic (Architect, Professor for Urbanism at the University of
Novi Sad/Belgrade):
The morning after: post-war cities.
Saturday, June 7: Alexandre Kedar (Law Professor at the University of Haifa)
and Eyal Weizman:
Paragraphs programme space: About the legal background of a territorial
conflict.
limited number of seats available
Booking:
Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
Linienstrasse 227, 10178 Berlin
Booking by Telefone: +49-(0)30-247 67 72 or +49-(0)30-247 76 94 Fax:
+49-(0)30-240 65 631
e-mail: <
mailto:ticket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ticket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Box Office hours, daily: 12-6 pm
Tickets: 3?
Evening Box Office from 8 pm onwards
Villa Elisabeth, Invalidenstrasse 4, 10115 Berlin, Germany
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ERSATZRADIO (SUBSTITUTE RADIO)
Seven days of Space Control on 104.1 UKW
Sunday, 1st - Saturday, 7th June 2003, 24 hours non-stop
Live stream: www.ersatzmedia.info
Based on the seven dialogues in the KIOSK, the topic of "Space Control" will
be commentated on and popularized using a temporary radio station that is
transmitting live from the studio in the Prater of the Volksbühne. 80
telephone interviews with specialists all around the world, global regional
reporters, weather forecasters and traffic correspondents from
Bombay/Mumbai, Lagos & Taschkent as well as international independent radio
stations will map out an atlas of fundamental and imaginary space concepts.
ERSATZRADIO/SUBSTITUTE RADIO will commence on June 1st with a live stream by
Multitude e.V., coming straight from the G8 summit meeting in Evian. Under
the direction and program supervision of Klaas "stream minister" Glenewinkel
a 24 hour program will be transmitted. In the studio: 10 interviewers, the
Israeli guests from the KIOSK, the presenters Jürgen Kuttner, Lilo Wanders,
Wolfgang Müller, Manuela Krause and RP Kahl.
Two projects by:
<file:///C:\Ersatzstadt\Herkenrath\MFE\teilnehm\hurtzig.html> Hannah Hurtzig
and <file:///C:\Ersatzstadt\Herkenrath\MFE\teilnehm\franke.html> Anselm
Franke (Tulip House) A cooperation with the exhibition Territories at the
KW, in collaboratin with the bootlab, twenfm and the cultural office
SOPHIEN.
ErsatzStadt/SubstituteCity is a project initiated by the 'Kulturstiftung des
Bundes' (federal cultural foundation) working in cooperation with the
Volksbühne at the Rosa Luxemburg Platz.
Yours sincerely,
Kirsten Herkenrath
(Public Relations ErsatzStadt/Volksbühne)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ErsatzStadt ist ein Initiativprojekt der Kulturstiftung des Bundes
in Kooperation mit der Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
Kuratoren:
Jochen Becker/Stephan Lanz (metroZones)
Hannah Hurtzig/Anselm Franke (Tulip House)
Bettina Masuch/Christoph Gurk (Dramaturgie, Volksbühne am
Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz)
Ersatzbüro im Prater der Volksbühne:
Ellen Hofmann (Organisationsleitung)
Katharina von Wilcke (Produktionsleitung Tulip House)
Kirsten Herkenrath (Öffentlichkeitsarbeit ErsatzStadt)
Jenny Helch (Assistenz)
Kastanienallee 7-9, 10437 Berlin
Tel.: 030-44 03 73 62 oder 030-44 23 78 19
<
mailto:info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<
http://www.ersatzmedia.info/> www.ersatzmedia.info