Saturday, November 21, 2015
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Why Jihadists Write Poetry
On
October 11, 2014, according to Islamic State-affiliated Twitter
accounts a woman going by the name Ahlam al-Nasr was married in the
courthouse of Raqqa, Syria, to Abu Usama al-Gharib, a Vienna-born
jihadi close to the movement’s leadership. ISIS social media rarely
make marriage announcements, but al-Nasr and al-Gharib are a jihadi
power couple. Al-Gharib is a veteran propagandist, initially for Al
Qaeda and now for ISIS.
His
bride is a burgeoning literary celebrity, better known as “the
Poetess of the Islamic State.” Her first book of verse, “The
Blaze of Truth,” was published online last summer and quickly
circulated among militant networks. Sung recitations of her work,
performed a cappella, in accordance with ISIS’s prohibition on
instrumental music, are easy to find on YouTube. “The Blaze of
Truth” consists of a hundred and seven poems in Arabic—elegies to
mujahideen, laments for prisoners, victory odes, and short poems that
were originally tweets. Almost all the poems are written in
monorhyme—one rhyme for what is sometimes many dozens of lines of
verse—and classical Arabic metres.
By
Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel
Read
more :
Thursday, November 12, 2015
What Foundations Have Been Laid for Them: The Building and Burning of Knowledge
We
are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza,
the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But
in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship is
more intimate, not just linguistic or metaphoric but concrete (often
marble). If a stanza is a room for words on the page, a library is a
series of rooms for words—and the books that hold them—on the
ground. And ground is often disputed, desecrated, possessed and
dispossessed. It is always political: just as it is the site for the
building and projecting of knowledge, it is often the site of its
destruction as well. Consider three examples:
The
Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, opened in 1779 as a library and
public museum, one of Europe’s earliest. Along with the art
collections of the Hessian landgraves, it held more than 100,000
books. The Fridericianum’s construction was funded by Friedrich II,
Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who made his fortune by selling local
mercenaries to Great Britain to fight in the American Revolution.
After briefly becoming a parliamentary building under
Napoléon’s brother Jérôme, then King of Westphalia and
Kassel, the Fridericianum was returned to its original function;
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm would work at the library there. The museum’s
collections were relocated to Berlin under Prussian rule, and by the
early twentieth century the building became a state library only.
Thus marks some of the nascent stages of Fridericianum’s building
of knowledge, but burning would come.
On
May 19, 1933, approximately 2,000 books were burned on
Friedrichsplatz, reportedly attended to by enormous crowds. The
bonfire was held in conjunction with book burnings in university
towns across the country, a nation-wide “Action Against the
Un-German Spirit,” as it was termed, that aimed to rid Germany of
“Jewish intellectualism.” Nearly a decade later, in 1941, the
Fridericianum—still a library at the time—caught fire during the
Allied bombing raids that flattened Kassel. In images taken after the
bombing, we notice not just the thousands of burned volumes leafing
out palely from the dark rubble, but the now naked Neoclassical
armature of the building’s columns; indeed, the eighteenth-century
structure was designed in the “spirit of the Enlightenment” by
Huguenot architect Simon Louis du Ry.
The
main architectural embodiment of that spirit, and of the classical
ideal more generally, was, of course, the Parthenon in Greece. Built
during the rule of Pericles in Athens between 447 and 432 BC, the
temple was dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, civilization,
justice, and war, among other attributes. And the Parthenon would
become the architectural model that has most often inspired the shape
of Western public institutions’ edifices of knowledge, among them
libraries, museums, universities, government buildings, courts, and
banks. Though built to shelter a monumental gold-and-ivory statue of
Athena, the Parthenon would also house the city’s treasury. Indeed,
the temple was funded by taxes derived from both the Athens treasury
and tribute from cities across the Aegean after the Athenian
victories in the Persian Wars (Plutarch famously offers a story about
Pericles wasting allies’ money on “sacred buildings”).
Transformed into a mosque during the Ottoman Empire, and partially
destroyed and rebuilt many times in the interim, the deconsecrated
Parthenon of the modern period became an emblem of Western cultural
hegemony, not exclusively democratic.
Text
by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis,
Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
Architecture and Labour
We
must start speaking about workers again, with programmes and projects
that concern them directly, existentially.
Mario
Tronti, ‘Politics at Work’, 2008
In
her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes labour from
work. While work is the production of things that may be more
enduring than the life of its producer (like a pot or a poem), labour
is the sheer unending business of life reproduction: cooking,
cleaning, giving birth, raising kids, taking care of the household.
According to Arendt, labour is merely a performative activity
confined within the space of the house that does not leave anything
material behind. With the rise of industrialisation and the
increasing division of labour, the distinction between labour and
work does not exist anymore and the subjectivity of animal laborans
becomes the fundamental datum of modern society. Within modernity
labour no longer addresses a specific sphere of the human condition
but the totality of life, since under capitalism it is life as bios
that is put to work and made productive. As Karl Marx wrote in a
crucial passage of Das Kapital ‘labour power is the aggregate of
those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form,
the living personality, of a human being’. This means that what is
at stake in the concept of labour is not the production of things,
but the production of the most crucial commodity within a
capitalistic economy: subjectivity. Production of subjectivity
becomes the fundamental goal of a capitalistic economy.
In
this sense it is impossible to define the modern city and its
architecture without understanding it through the lens of labour. And
yet until today, with very few notable exceptions, very little has
been written on the relationship between labour and architecture.
While issues such as public space, politics, capitalism,
neoliberalism and the commodification of the built environment are
widely discussed, labour has rarely been confronted by the culture of
architecture. The reason for this lack of discussion may be the
ubiquity of labour itself as both spatial and social condition of our
life. The symposium gathers for the first time a group of researchers
who will attempt to read the relationship between labour and
architecture in different contexts, from the intimacy of domestic
space to the abstraction of post-industrial forms of production, to
the role of the architect as producer. Rather than offering a
comprehensive historical mapping, the symposium will offer critical
insights towards a new understanding of architecture through the
concept of labour.
- Pier Vittorio Aureli
A
Symposium organised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and the PhD programme
‘City/Architecture’
Pier
Vittorio Aureli, Fabrizio Ballabio, Peggy Deamer, Fabrizio Gallanti,
Maria S. Giudici, Peer Ilner, Francesco Marullo, Andreas Rumpfhuber
13/11/2015,
Architectural Association School of Architecture
Thursday, November 5, 2015
House Model
Monument Dedicated to the Exercise of Sovereignty of the People in Primary Assemblies
This design for a monument to popular sovereignty was produced by the French artist and designer Jean Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) at the time of the French Revolution. After gaining a solid education as an architect and making a promising start to his career, Lequeu failed to channel his architectural and philosophical ideas into concrete projects that would ensure him fame. Lequeu was a man of his times in his faith in science and his religious eclecticism, but he was also a troubled visionary, known to be unorthodox and eccentric. He designed several projects that were inspired by the new revolutionary era, none of which he managed to complete. Lequeu’s semicircular design is dated, in the title above the design, June 24, 1793, and, in the lower right-hand corner, Messidor 9, Second Year of the Republic. In its efforts to eliminate traditional influences from French life, the French Revolution instituted a new calendar that featured a set of renamed months, divided into three ten-day weeks. “Messidor 9” refers to the ninth day of the month of Messidor, the first month of the summer, named after the Latin word messis, meaning harvest. Years were numbered starting with the proclamation of the French Republic in September 1792. Napoleon abolished this system and restored the Gregorian calendar with effect from January 1, 1806.
Monday, November 2, 2015
Unions (Life Without Tragedy Series)
Unions (Life Without Tragedy Series) 2015
Plywood,
wood, acrylic
63
x 19 x 19 cm
Brotherhood
Each
and every thing cuts wounds,
and
neither of us has forgiven the other.
Hurting
like you and hurtful,
I
lived towards you.
Every
touch augments
the
pure, the spiritual touch;
we
experience it as we age,
turned
into coldest silence.
Ingeborg
Bachmann
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