Invincible Cities by Camilo José Vergara

Re-posted here form Flavorpill Daily Dose:

"Mapping the shifting landscape of urban America
An interactive website created by sociologist and photographer Camilo José Vergara, Invincible Cities presents "A Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto."

Vergara travels through time. Invincible Cities captures more than three decades of changing streetscapes in Harlem, NY, Richmond, CA, and Camden, NJ. Trace shifting communities via photographs shot from the same vantage point throughout recent history.

The site encompasses multiple journeys. By incorporating ingenious mapping software and thematic tags, Invincible Cities makes it possible to explore many facets of each urban area. Categories include religion, vegetation, people, and junkyards, along with panoramas, artifacts, and census information.

Its interactive potential is just emerging. The ability to post comments beneath each image allows both current and former residents to discuss their neighborhoods. However, the project's future lies in its utility as a tool to inspire community-centered revitalization."

Read a profile on the Richmond project

"There is nothing in a Caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a Butterfy"

by R. Buckminster Fuller

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index
http://challenge.bfi.org/ideaindex

The Whitney's Buckminster Fuller: Starting with Universe
http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_fuller/about.jsp

Urban Life Intervensions

Watch the Guerilla London 2007 set of 6 videos.
More here.

Localized and personalized cinema: "GPSFilms"

GPS Film is a new way of watching a movie that’s based on the viewer’s location. The system is a new media artwork from Scott Hessels and is released as an open source application that runs on any GPS-enabled mobile phone or PDA.
http://gpsfilm.com/
As the viewer travels by walking, bus, or taxi, the movie unfolds by passing through different areas. By exploring a park, a neighborhood, or even a city or country, GPS Film continually ‘reads’ the location of the viewer and plays scenes that are tied to those places.The more the viewer travels, the more of the film they see.

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, ShuddhabrataSengupta) is a collective of media practitioners based in New Delhi thatworks in art practice, new media, filmmaking, photography, media theory& research, writing, criticism and curation. Raqs are currentlyco-curators of the MANIFESTA 7 in South Tyrol/Trentino.
The origins of Raqs Media Collective’s practice lies in documentaryfilmmaking, and though they have traversed a long distance from theempiricist imperative of mainstream documentary making, documentsthemselves, and other forms that gesture to the notionally real,continue to intrigue them.Raqs are interested in documents because of the rhetorical spaces thatcan be prised open while handling documents. These include the elaboratedisguises and ruses that the rhetoric of documents sometimes carry withand within itself.
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.manifesta7.it

FINISTERRE by Saint Etienne

FINISTERRE from Plexifilm on Vimeo.
Presented by Saint Etienne, Finisterre takes us on a journey through London, from the suburbs into the heart of the city over an imaginary 24 hours. Featuring the observations and reminiscences of Lawrence from Felt/Denim, Mark Perry, the editor of original punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue, singer Vashti Bunyan, and many more...
http://plexifilm.com/media.php?id=77

EMOTIONAL ARCHITECTURE: AZIMUTH OF FISSURE WORKS BY CĂLIN DAN

Included in the exhibition are several works from the artist’s Emotional Architecture series, each related to a particular place: sony/wmf/pp (1994-2003) to Amsterdam, Sample City (2005) to Bucharest, Romania, Trip (2006) to Tallinn, Estonia, and the new work inspired by Charleston. Using documentary images from the 1886 earthquake preserved in the holdings of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, nineteenth and twentieth century photographs from area archives, audio from films such as The Patriot, and video material gathered on-site, Dan focuses our attention on the complex, mixing layers of time and experience left on our buildings, on our city, and on our culture—and what we make of them in our lives today. For Dan, these images contain the ghostly traces of the past that leave fissures on our present—like the post-earthquake fissures left on the landscape, the cracks in the structure of Randolph Hall, and the remnants of history that project into our present. Fissures > are also separating forces, cracks that open between spaces, allowing us to manipulate what we see and understand about our environment.
http://www.context.ro/dan/
http://www.halsey.cofc.edu/homepage.htm

Navigating the Space of the Future

LIVE STREAM: http://www.montevideo.nl/st/player.php

What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one's immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one's body, one's senses, one's conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium 'Navigating the Space of the Future' will take these questions as its starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) through the use of sound.
Yolande Harris – Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk)Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one's environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal instruments “satellite sounders” developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. 'The experience of sound is internal, as a process that influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the two.
'http://sunrunsun.nimk.nl/
http://www.yolandeharris.net/

David Dunn
David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.”
http://www.davidddunn.com/
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5399

Atau Tanaka
Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating a shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and applicable to the growing practice of locative media.
http://www.xmira.com/atau

"Contrapolis; or, Creativity and Enclosure in the Cities"

"Displacement of residents, whether they are gentrifying artists priced out of Soho or the poor and unemployed excluded from New York altogether, is no random by-product of gentrification but its structural condition. Decay, disinvestment, abandonment . . .prepare the way for profitable reinvestment . . . Like all the social relations that art supposedly transcends, housing is one of the historical circumstances of its existence". Rosalyn Deutsche, "Alternative Space"

"And howsoever oppositional we architects may be, as long as we fail to challenge basic elements of society, such as the concept of private property, nothing will improve. This is a great paradox for me". Achim Felz, "IKAS: An Experiment in Extra-Parliamentary Architectural Opposition"
The core question of the event would be "how is art, and cultural production more broadly, at once driving capitalist valorisation in the city and able to project forms of social relations that do not produce value for capital?"
http://www.enoughroomforspace.org/projects/view/15

SOCIETE REALISTE

Société Réaliste is a Paris-based cooperative created by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy in June 2004. This cooperative manages the development of several research and economical structures in fields such as territorial ergonomy, experimental economy, political design or counter-strategy. Société Réaliste is researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht) and is represented by Galerie Martine Aboucaya (Paris).
http://www.societerealiste.net/
http://multitudes-icones.samizdat.net

BAVO

BAVO is an independent research office focused on the political dimension of art, architecture and planning. BAVO is a co-operation between Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels, both of whom studied architecture and philosophy. BAVO recently conducted research into creative city development and practices of embedded cultural activism. BAVO’s explicit mission is to enhance public debate by means of publications, symposia and interventions.

http://www.bavo.biz/#home

urbansquares

http://urbansquares.com/

:: italy - 19 squares
:: spain - 7 squares
:: canada - 18 squares
:: serbia & montenegro - 21 squares
:: portugal - 14 squares
:: australia & dominican r. - 2 squares
:: usa - 12 squares
:: croatia & greece - 5 squares
:: cuba - 9 squares
:: england - 12 squares
:: nederland - 13 squares
:: belgium & france - 11 squares
:: 7 special projects


objective of this collection/research initiative is to explore a visual and artistic aspects of public urban squares [plazas] as a nucleus of any neighbourhood. we are interpreting/translating their language about the urban morphology and fundamental values in the overall social integration and sustainability of the urban life.
over time we were inspired to start performing analysis of urban neighbourhoods and produce their "psychogeographical portraits" as a mental reaction to the visited space. see the map of all our [psychogeography performances].
urbansqares project is "walking on a very narrow path" between art and science. intention is to have artistic freedom in interpreting the facts, and provoke some action from interested and influential people. as an integral, and very important part of this project, classification system is developed, consisting of [evaluation method] and [types of city squares]. other even more important parts are our [activities related to urban issues and psychogeography, urbansquares art projects and documentation].

Otto Neurath (1882-1945)

The American philosopher and architectural theorist Nader Vossoughian investigates in this presentation the possibilities for a democratic and participatory approach top urban and social planning. He will devote specific attention to the work of the Austrian philosopher, sociologist and economist Otto Neurath (1882-1945).

Nader Vossoughian: Otto Neurath - Information and the Global PolisAbstract of the lecture (De Balie, Amsterdam, February 8, 2008).

Urban and military planning have been virtually indistinguishable for most of history. Ancient Roman towns such as Timgad and London were first conceived as military encampments. In the nineteenth century, Georges-Eugène Haussmann constructed his boulevards in Paris with the aim of stemming civil unrest. Given this past, are participatory or democratic approaches to urban and social planning possible? They are, at least in principle, and this lecture explores one such example.This presentation looks specifically at the ideas and achievements of the Austrian sociologist and planner Otto Neurath (1882-1945), a long- neglected giant in the history of the Information Age. A founder of the Vienna Circle and the Unity of Science movement, a collaborator of figures as varied as Paul Otlet, Cornelis van Eesteren, Gerd Arntz, and Le Corbusier, he had an indelible impact on discussions about the modern metropolis. He advocated informal or participatory approaches to urban and social planning and attempted to find ways of democratizing public space in the contemporary city. In this lecture, he is presented as a theorist of the global polis – as someone who attempted to reconcile the tangibility and intimacy of the ancient Greek city-state, a place that according to Aristotle fostered community and democratic exchange, with the anonymity and heterogeneity of the global metropolis.

More information and links:

www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?podiumid=media&articleid=208232
Website of the exhibition After Neurath – The Global Polis at Stroom, The Hague:
www.stroom.nl/activiteiten/manifestatie.php?m_id=8710842

www.stroom.nl/webdossiers/webdossier.php?wd_id=2615745
Live webcast www.debalie.nl/live

Nuage Vert by HeHe

Nuage Vert Dunkerque, 2002

A tracking system and laser beam projection, onto the vapour emission of a waste incinerator factory. The illuminated moving cloud will change colour - from pink to green - to show the level of waste being collected compared to the waste being recycled. This information is used to ask consumers to produce less waste and therefore contribute to a more sustainable environment. The results of the collective micro-actions will be visible over the course of three months.

Nuage Vert Helsinki, 2002

Every night from the 22 to the 29 of February 2008, the vapour emissions of he Salmisaari power plant in Helsinki will be illuminated to show the current levels of electricity consumption by local residents. A laser ray will trace the cloud during the night time and turn it into a city scale neon sign. Nuage Vert is a communal event for the area of Ruoholahti, which anticipates esoteric cults centred on energy and transforms an active power plant into a space for art, a living factory. In tandem, as a reversal of conventional roles whereby the post-industrial factory is turned into space for culture, Kaapeli (the cultural factory) becomes the site of operation and Salmisaari (the industrious factory) becomes the site of spectacle.
No other space, network, grid, community could better represent a city and it's activity as a whole. The physical dimension of the Salmisaari site, inhabits a special position in Helsinki; physically, visually and metaphorically. The vertical vectors of the architecture connect the underworld with the sky: the underground coal storage tunnels descend to 126m below sea level (the deepest point in Helsinki) whilst it's chimney reaches 155m into the sky with its cloud disappearing into the lower atmosphere. On the horizontal plane, the warm water tubes spread out like veins to heat the homes and offices of Helsinki. Since hot water cannot travel far, the factory is necessarily situated in the city centre, not in the periphery. The factory IS the centre. The extended space, vertically and horizontally, defines the sphere in which people live. In this sphere we are slowly becoming aware of the material and nonmaterial analogy between religion and energy. The factory gives us warmth, it is the provider of comfort and our lives increasingly depend upon it. Energy and religion are both visible and real, they shape our physical environment in the form of the enormous buildings that we build, and yet they are invisible. Since electricity cannot be stored, like religion, it is ephemeral and only exists in the moment of consumption. In February 2008 we will herd around this cathedral of energy and celebrate. http://www.pixelache.org/nuagevert/info.html

HeHe, the duo Helen Evans (British) and Heiko Hansen (German), live and workin Paris and initially conceived the project in 2003. HeHe was recentlycommissioned to make Champs d'Ozone at the Centre Georges Pompidou'sanniversary exhibition Airs de Paris. Their interest in air is also apparentin their 'Smoking Lamp' installation, which coincided with the Europe wideban on smoking in public space. Working in a variety of media andcontemporary technologies, their work has been described as poetic andpoignant, dealing with serious issues in a playful way. Their work engageswith the design and interpretation of urban space and the relationshipbetween individuals and their architectural and urban environment.HeHe: http://hehe.org.free.fr/

Intelligent Environments conference

Special Session on Social and Psychological Dimensions of Designing and Experiencing Intelligent Environments in the Urban Context.
session organizers:Dr. Dimitris Charitos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Everyday urban environments can be seen as complex spatial systems, which function as contexts for supporting communication. In the beginning of the 21st century, these environments are radically being re-ordered by technological systems and networks. These environments may also incorporate systems, which capture visual, auditory and other types of information regarding human activity and consequently utilize this input to affect the process of generating digital representations. Very recent advances in mobile, wireless, pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies have begun to transform the potential for social interaction taking place within urban public space. We can therefore put forward the hypothesis that the incorporation of ICT systems results in an electronic enhancement of our everyday urban environment since our communication with these environments and with other individuals who exist and act within them is mediated by these systems. The most advanced form of these mediated spaces incorporate intelligence thus affording a novel type of mediation. These intelligent environments could be regarded as spatial interfaces that expand in physical space and integrate with it, thus affording a hybrid (physical and mediated) spatial experience, in the context of which a novel form of social interaction may occur. Thus, the experience of interacting with/within an intelligent environment may affect the way that users perceive the relation between the physical world and the technologically mediated environment and consequently the way that they experience and conceive of urban public space and everyday life within it. The significance of these changes for social life in a 21st century city is the main motivation for proposing this special session. The focus of the session is on investigating the emergence of intelligent environments and the impact that the implementation and use of such systems has on their users, from a social and psychological perspective and ultimately on mediated communication taking place within the context of these spaces. Particular emphasis is given to investigating the manner in which the urban spatial context, where situated communication occurs, is transformed by the introduction of these technologies. Indeed, when we refer to multi-user intelligent environment systems, these could be seen as communication environments, which function as systems supporting interpersonal computer-mediated communication; within the context of these environments, communication amongst locally or remotely located, networked individuals is mediated. Intelligent environments are systems of situated, context-aware communication.They bring human-computer communication and human-computer-human communication back into the context of our physical world, instead of expecting humans to adapt to the needs of a computer environment. In order to understand the social ramifications of these mediated spaces, it is important to: investigate the impact that the kind of interpersonal communication they support has on our everyday experience within the urban context; propose conceptual models for understanding the use and impact of such systems; study the use and impact of these systems from a user perspective, regarding either the personal or the interpersonal aspect of this use. The proposed special session welcomes contributions that will spark discussions on the personal and social implications and effects of using urban intelligent systems, which may consequently be useful for informing the design of such interactive environmental experiences.
For more information please contact: Dr. Dimitris Charitos, vedesign@otenet.gr, UOA, Greece.
www.media.uoa.gr/~charitos
See: http://conferences.theiet.org/ie08/cfp.htm for more info

Post-communist public space

Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw calls for video/photodocumentation of artistic projects referring to post-communist publicspaces.

Selection of the documentation will be presented in Zacheta gallery spacein relation to the public art project organized between March and December 2008 in Warsaw

Please send inquiries or submissions to:

Joanna Sokolowska

Zacheta National Gallery of Art

Pl. Malachowskiego 300-916 Warsaw

www.zacheta.art.pl

j.sokolowska@zacheta.art.pl

Description of the project:

The dominant mode of production in cities is undergoing a fundamentalchange. From places of manufacturing and commerce, cities are becomingplaces whose focus is services and leisure, and creativity thus becomes amajor element in the production of wealth. This transformation goes handin hand with a destabilisation of hierarchies (those through which we makecategorise and make sense of knowledge, society, art, etc.) and aloosening up of social spaces, but at the same time makes them vulnerableto new types of appropriation and control. In the post-communist cities,this transformation is particularly striking. For these cities haverapidly moved away from a socialist modernity, which is often cast as amistaken or unfulfilled modernity, towards new social formations for whichadequate models, whether political or academic, have yet to be found. Weseem to be stuck between a past we can neither be rid of nor understand(much though some would want to cleanse it) and a West we can never be (much though some would want to embrace it).

The multifaceted post-communist urban structure is characterised bysimultaneous mutual interaction of many processes of apparentlycontradictory logic: of shutting and opening. The politics of symbolic memory, the representation of power, a narrow definition of national andreligious values function at the same time as the opening of the city tothe flows of capital and economy based on knowledge and culture. The processes of opening and liberalization are accompanied by the emergenceof new regimes of surveillance, borders, exclusions (e.g. particular typesof migration, trade and leisure are actively encouraged, while others aremade illegal).What everyday strategies do the inhabitants of a city like Warsaw developto deal with the new configuration of possibilities and prohibitions, ofliberation and control? What are their expectations or memories; and whatare they unwilling or unable to see? The challenge of this project is to ask ’ÄúWhat, under such circumstances,can artists tell us about Warsaw or how can they impact in the publicspace of this city?’Äù For artists are not innocent in the processesunderway. Even as they attempt to critique and explore, their successesmake them spokespeople for the new economy: creation is capital. But perhaps it is only art that is supple enough to uncover the paradoxes andundiscovereds of the way in which the everyday life of Warsaw is now changing. It would be nice to think that art is not fatally compromised,but that it is possible for art to exploit the uncertainty of its positionin the processes of production, to turn attention away from a productionof status towards an intervention and experimentation with space, perhapsan epistemology of space, that could enable the production of thespecificity of spaces themselves, exploring and extending perhaps thetheoretical challenge set out by Henri Lefˆ®vbre in his book The Production of Space. The above text is a proposition or challenge to which we will invite arange of artists from Poland and other Eastern European countries, to makeinterventions in the space of Warsaw. These interventions will then bedocumented in the Maly Salon space of Zacheta gallery, less in the form ofan exhibition than in the form of a multi-lateral documentation of a workin progress: what can art tell us about contemporary Warsaw? How much of what it is undergoing is a unique local story, and how much simply aparticular example of wider global or regional processes? The documentation of artworks will be accompanied by archival informationabout interventions in the public space of different post-communist citiesand academic texts dealing with this topic published in a blog.

Curators

Joanna Sokolowska and Benjamin Cope

j.sokolowska@zacheta.art.pl

b.cope@zacheta.art.pl

Performance?

Place In Place Of: Alexandria‘Place In Place Of: Alexandria’ is a work in progress by Jeremy Beaudry that manifests itself as a set of site-specific interventions, performances, and documents based in Alexandria, Egypt. Equally important and essential, this project will be co-created as a collaboration with local art and architecture university students and recent graduates. The research and documentation will be collected, reconstituted, and recontextualized on the Web at alexandria.placeinplaceof.net

‘Place In Place Of: Alexandria’ is the first project in the series of events, workshops, exhibitions, and lectures collectively titled CLEOTRONICA: Festival for Media, Art, and Socio-Culture organized by Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), more information will be available on CLEOTRONICA in February.

Posted on Jan 11, 2008
In what sense does my presence in Alexandria constitute a performance? (And if it does, what does that mean? Is it even all that significant?)
I think I’m wrestling with a definition of performance here. Admittedly, as a discipline with a unique history, my knowledge of performance is weak. Is performance dependent on some degree of intentionality? Or can performances be staged unknowingly by actors in the course of everyday actions and movements? What is the frame that is drawn around a particular body (or bodies) in a particular space and during a particular time to distinguish a performance? Must there be a receptive audience in order to legitimize the action(s) as a performance? What role does documentation fulfill in the reception and validation of a performance? Must a performance be made public?
I know this is happening: My movement through the city is conspicuous; it is noticed by the inhabitants of Alexandria. I can’t remember the last time I have been so aware of my own visibility in public spaces. Merely walking down the street elicits curious stares, smiles from children, excited greetings in English. (”Hello! Welcome! How are you?”) If I happen to be taking photographs of the funny things that I take photographs of, or walk through the market pointing a microphone in every direction, then I sometimes achieve the status of spectacle. It is this attention that I’m not used to and that has me considering my stay here as a performance.
Back to (dictionary) definitions. Perform is somewhat ambiguous, oscillating between “carry out, accomplish, or fulfill” and “present to an audience.” Similarly, performance: “action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function” and “act of staging or presenting a play, concert, or other form of entertainment.” Well, these aren’t very helpful at all actually…
Precedents come to mind: Mierle Ukeles washing the steps of the museum or shaking hands with every sanitation worker in NYC, Ulay and Marina Abramovic walking towards each other and the end of their relationship on the Great Wall of China, Gordan Matta-Clark and friends running the Food restaurant, Vito Acconci following strangers on the street, Alan Kaprow’s downtown happenings, Sophie Callie having her mother hire a private investogator to take surveillance photos of her, Situationist drifting in Paris, Francis Alys carrying a gun through Mexico City or a leaky can of paint, Joseph Beuys living in a NYC gallery with a coyote for a week, Alex Villar occupying public niche spaces, Bas Jan Ader sailing out to sea and never coming back, Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire in protest, terrorists flying planes into buildings… There are countless others.
That I would consider my presence in Alexandria as a performance has, essentially, to do with my body in space, and how the presence of my body changes that space, changes the people in that space. And what that presence might mean. My otherness here produces a kind of emanation that people visibly sense. My otherness stems from my appearance as a white western-looking male which, as Bassam (ACAF curator) notes, carries with it a degree of cultural power: my body is draped in the garments of western (mostly American) hegemony. If I do acknowledge the effect that my body has on the spaces I move through, I wish to do so without placing too much importance on these small changes. But they have significance in their own right that I am trying to come to terms with.
Finally, relating to the more modest sense of performance, I have thought about the pedestrian histories of the city as being performed by its inhabitants. My mundane performances in Alexandria—my own pedestrian histories—are compiled alongside theirs as we live out so many routines, paths, stories, etc each day.

Related Links:
http://meaning.boxwith.com/
http://thinktank.boxwith.com/
http://alexandria.placeinplaceof.net/
Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF)
http://www.acafspace.org/

ISTANBUL: Roma, Roms, Gitanos NEED URGENT INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT!

Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 21:30:13 +0200
From: "Pelin Tan" mailto:Tpelintan@gmail.com>
To: aslikiyak aslikiyak@celikdizayn.com>
Subject: ISTANBUL: Roma, Roms, Gitanos NEED URGENT INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT!

The historical Romani district of Istanbul, Sulukule, is to bedestroyed under the name of "urban renewal" and the Roma living thereare to be expulsed out of the city. Please react and show your supporturgently!...

Sulukule PlatformLe quartier historique des Roms d'Istanbul, Sulukule, sera demoli souspretexte de "renovation urbain" et ses habitants gitans serontexpulses en dehors de la ville. S'il vous plait reagissez et montrezvotre soutien en urgence!...

La plateforme de Sulukule
El barrio historico de los gitanos d'Istanbul, Sulukule, seradestruido con el pretexto de "renovacion urbana" y sus habitantes vana ser expulsados fuera de la cuidad. Por favor protestar y manifestarvuestro apoyo de urgencia!...

La Platforma de Sulukule
Istanbul'un tarihi Roman mahallesi Sulukule, "kentsel yenileme" adialtinda yikilmak ve mahalle sakinleri kentin disina surulmekisteniyor! Lutfen acil olarak tepkinizi ve Sulukule sakinlerinedesteginizi gosterin!...

Sulukule Platformu
URGENT CALL FOR SULUKULE ROMANI COMMUNITY
Your support urgently needed against exclusion of Roma from historic Sulukule!One of the oldest Romani communities in the World, the Sulukule Romani population is being forced to leave their historical neighborhood.The Sulukule neighborhood, situated in the Historic Peninsula of Istanbul is being depopulated through a gentrification project implemented by the Metropolitan and Fatih municipalities of Istanbul. As it stands, the project, promoted as an "urban renewal" is in its last phase. In February 2008 the demolishing of the houses will be started.Despite the efforts of the local people, of the Sulukule Association for the Enrichment of Roma Culture and for Solidarity, of the academicians from several universities, and of the NGO's, the project is developed by local authority under non-transparent conditions, without consulting the community and without considering their demands, needs and feedback.The alleged "urban renewal project" is a reconstruction plan which involves the complete demolition of the current neighbourhood, home to more than 3000 Roma, and its replacement with housing which is unaffordable for most of the original inhabitants. The Roma will be forcibly moved from their 1000 year-old historical neighborhood to an area 40km outside the city. Moreover, as the municipality wants them to pay for the public housing they will receive, this forcible move is accompanied by a debt obligation that they will not be able to meet.Because it will evict the Roma of their home, annihilate and assimilate the Roma culture in Istanbul, the project needs to be stopped. Your support is crucial to carry out this feat.The 1000 year-old home of the RomaThe Roma first came to Istanbul from India in the 11th century when the city was still the capital of the Byzantine Empire. And they spread around the World from here. Following the conquest of the city by the Ottomans in 1453 and with the permžssžon of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, they were settled near the city walls in the Sulukule as well as in the nearby Ayvansaray neighborhoods. For hundreds of years, Sulukule acted as a pilgrimage location for Roma from all over the world. It is one of the most important cultural centers of Roma music and dance as it continues to be a crucial worldwide resource for training musicians and dancers.Your support is needed for the cessation of the "urban renewal project"Because;The Sulukule urban renewal project is a non-transparent non-participatory project.It is against the clauses of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.It is implemented in the buffer zone of the ancient land walls of Istanbul, which are on the World Heritage list. As such, it fails to abide by the principles of the Vienna Memorandum and the Convention regarding the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.
To help prevent the forced exile of the Sulukule Roma,
To protect the historical and cultural values of Istanbul, which are on the World Heritage List,
Please express your objection to this project by writing to the following officials,

Abdullah Gül
President of Turkey
Mail Address:T.C. Cumhurbaskanligi
Cankaya-Ankara
Turkeye-mail: cumhurbaskanli_i@tccb.gov.tr

Recep Tayyip Erdo_an
The Prime Minister of Turkey
Mail Address:BasbakanlikKžzžlay
Ankara
Turkey

Ertu_rul Günay
Minister of Culture and Tourism of Turkey
Mail Address:T.C. Kultur ve Turizm Bakanligi
Ataturk Bulvari No. 2906050 Opera
Ankara
Turkeye-mail: ertugrul.gunay@kulturturizm.gov.tr

Kadir Topba_Mayor of Istanbul
Mail Address:Istanbul Buyuksehir Belediye Baskanligi
Sarachane Istanbul Turkeye-mail: baskan@ibb.gov.tr

Mustafa Demir
Mayor of the Fatih district of Istanbul
Mail Address:Büyük Karaman Cad.No. 53
Fatih Istanbule-mail: mustafademir@fatih.bel.tr

Contact Persons:Hacer Foggo (hacerfoggo@gmail.com)
Derya Nüket Özer (deryanuket@gmail.com)
Viki Ciprut Izrail (vikichco.@hotmail.com)
Pelin Tan pelintan@gmail.com
Ph.D cand. / research assistant
Institute of Social Sciences
ITU Architecture Faculty, Taskisla 34437 - Istanbul phone: +90 2122456631
http://www.tanpelin.blogspot.com/
http://www.slowfood.com
http://www.sulukule.org/

SARCHA (school of architecture 4 all)

http://www.sarcha-architecture.blogspot.com/

http://urbanpilgrims.org/

http://urbanpilgrims.org/ Angela Dorrer

Urban Pilgrims are travelling from city to city to find out what places and its people are really about. The project is an examination of urban spaces on various levels: an online questionnaire among inhabitants about legends, rumours and personal experiences in their city, continuously growing online archives and guided tours in public using collective performance with behavioural instructions.

Urban Pilgrimages are poetic urban extracts. They dig their way into the grain of cities to find out what places and its people are really about. Participants get involved in individually tailored, dramatized performances about their city, based on an online survey, a blog and continuously growing internet archives.

Urban Pilgrimages can take on various forms, such as behavioral instructions or procession-like journeys with collective movement, gesture, sound, props, food, music and personal encounters. The personalities and communities within the given place with their stories and emotions become the artistic material. Individual experience becomes a public field, which generates a new cartography of a place - the essential toolkit for the 21st century voyager.

Interview: Angela Dorrer (dansk).