Postcards from Tirana | In Search of Missing Messages

Decoding the city through postcards.

I made a few simple postcards with borrowed imagery and text, which I now call Assembly/ies of the Entr-acte \\ The Albanian Public(s). Let me know what you think. ☺

An empty PUBLIC amusement makes a great PARK hide out

 

Frontier of Enlightened PUBLIC in Extinction

 

 Six Corpses in Search of a PUBLIC:

- Garden of Excess PARKED in the Abyss of Delight

The Six Corpses are the buildings that edge the main square. The history and character of which has shaped and filled the void of this space for over a century.

 1. National Historical Museum as the corpse of The Persistence of Memory •

2. "15 kateshi" / 1st Skyscraper (vertical typology) as the corpse of The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory •

3. Et'hem Bey Mosque / Clock Tower as the corpses of Old Age
4. Palace of Culture (Pallati i Kultures) as the corpse of Adolescence
5. City Hall (Bashkia) as the corpse of Infancy

6. Skanderbeg Monument as the corpse of The Artist's Despair Before the Grandeur of Ruins;
and its Park as the corpse of Public Skirmishes

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What is Happening? | In search of missing pieces

The text below could've easily been written for the neoliberalism (aka latent fascism) of present day, especially in Albania. It so clearly articulates a few cloudy sentiments I've been carrying around these past few days. This growing sensitivity has been more of a persistent bad taste in the mouth, one that usually becomes unbearably pungent after scrolling through social media newsfeed and the many (nauseating) reactions it provokes. The more it consumes my time with emptiness and distractions, the more it discourages me about any positive change I'd like to think about or even be a part of. The chances of it happening seem slim and insignificant, at least from my discouraged perspective. It is not self-doubt or pity for the efforts done by many until now, myself included, it is just the cynic announcing herself - optimistically staring at the abyss, the very shallow grave we've dug up. The very same whole (inhabitable cave?) we call future.

We have been made out to be monsters of progress. Whose progress?! As if our insistence for critical thought and public discourse were the real culprit of 'their' failure. Their schemes have set up their own failures. The forces that be. Or maybe they were meant to fail, and all along our criticism has been used as a diversion 'noise', while they've continued to do whatever's necessary 'to progress.' Does that make us accomplices? Naive, yes. Sitting ducks, maybe. But not quite accomplices, or as I'd like to define it piggybacking onto their 'accomplishments'. No, we're not parasites. Our polemic continues to be expelled and displaced, which means there is a (mis)represented distance (Bergson would be all over it) that keeps shifting and changing the paradigm (enough rope, i guess) without knowing towards which direction we're moving (migrating) at which speeds (the significant distance (in time and territory) between exit and escape). Or, as John Coltrane is famous of saying: "I start in the middle.. and go both directions at once."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that no matter the cloudiness and discomfort I feel about the many things that are happening (esp. in Albania) - which in my opinion are eventful only in their chosen documentation methods of (aka aesthetic capture through) PR photography and tagged praises/likes/comments - there is a strong feeling (a ghostly voice/specter) that my critical (thought and effort) is not without value and meaning. It is driven by a willingness (even though cynic at times) and curiosity of wanting to understand and articulate - to make legible why so many (seemingly) well-intended schemes for improvement or 'progress' are stalling or have gone so 'tragically awry'. And more importantly, what part might I and others play to undo it, while unfortunately (maybe not completely) aware that their potential disentanglement might be an act of continued unravelment in and of consequences. 

Lastly, yes, my feelings might have become jaded lately as a result of mixed signals / messages /emoticons sent (or received) from the newsfeed and other online conversations, but the more I read 'experts' talk and write nonsense about the art, architecture, and urbanism in Albania, the more I want to scream: Who are you? What is happening? Where does your expertise come from and do you see/feel/get the reality you live in? I mean come on. Start with common sense and work your way up the chain of thought. I don't mean to be mean, but I have the right to voice my opinion. On what I know. On what I study. On what I teach. I have a right to be critical and question someone's expertise if I feel they don't know what they're talking about. When they have it completely wrong. I am not against them. I could care less about who they are as people, I care about what they tell others that don't understand this expertise. I care when they're ethics are as wishy-washy as the knowledge they claim to impart. How else can anyone be capable enough to critically and constructively participate in the design and use of their own built environment? At the moment, I would trust landscape architects (are they any landscape architects in Albania?), farmers and/or local artisans to have a better grasp of the Albanian build environment social and ecological health and consequences than artists or architects. Until the latter have their act together, and get off the political ride (aka malfeasance). Many are misunderstanding the statement "Everything is political." Think about it. 

As I've said it before about the Albanian State and its politicians: "Edi Rama is as much an artist as Sali Berisha is a doctor." The same goes for many others. Let's call upon all the 'experts' to think about it for a hot second too, while the rest of us is introduced to certain failed schemes below. Happy hunting reading!

Owen: What is happening?
Yolland: I'm not sure. But I’m concerned about my part in it. It’s an eviction of sorts.
Owen: We’re making a six-inch map of the country. Is there something sinister in that?
Yolland: Not in...
Owen: And we’re taking place names that are riddled with confusion and . . .
Yolland: Who’s confused? Are the people confused?
Owen: And we’re standardising those names as accurately and as sen­sitively as we can.
Yolland: Something is being eroded.

—Brian Friel, Translations 2.1 (quoted in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed) 

An excerpt from James C. Scott's Introduction of Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed:

It is not so difficult, alas, to understand why so many human lives have been destroyed by mobilized violence between ethnic groups, religious sects, or linguistic communities. But it is harder to grasp why so many well-intended schemes to improve the human condition have gone so tragically awry. I aim, in what follows, to provide a convincing account of the logic behind the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century.
I shall argue that the most tragic episodes of state-initiated social engineering originate in a pernicious combination of four elements. All four are necessary for a full-fledged disaster. The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the mainte­nance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities.
The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.
High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term "ideology" implies, a faith that borrowed as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense. The carriers of high modernism, once their plans miscarried or were thwarted, tended to retreat to what I call miniaturization ; the creation of a more easily controlled micro-order in model cities, model villages, and model farms.
High modernism was about "interests” as well as faith. Its carriers, even when they were capitalist entrepreneurs, required state action to realize their plans. In most cases, they were powerful officials and heads of state. They tended to prefer certain forms of planning and social organization (such as huge dams, centralized communication and transportation hubs, large factories and farms, and grid cities), because these forms fit snugly into a high-modernist view and also answered their political interests as state officials. There was, to put it mildly, an elective affinity between high modernism and the interests of many state officials.
Like any ideology, high modernism had a particular temporal and social context. The feats of national economic mobilization of the belligerents (especially Germany) in World War I seem to mark its high tide. Not surprisingly, its most fertile social soil was to be found among planners, engineers, architects, scientists, and technicians whose skills and status it celebrated as the designers of the new order. High-modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people's work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview. Nor was this utopian vision dangerous in and of itself. Where it animated plans in liberal parliamentary societies and where the planners therefore had to negotiate with organized citizens, it could spur reform. Only when these first two elements are joined to a third does the combination become potentially lethal. The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people.
A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition.
In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.
I have not yet explained, the reader will have noted, why such high-modernist plans, backed by authoritarian power, actually failed. Accounting for their failure is my second purpose here.
­Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well. 

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The Destructive Character | In search of missing pieces

Thought I'd leave this here:

The Destructive Character by Walter Benjamin

It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character.

The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.

The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.

The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.

The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.

The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.
The destructive character is a signal. Just a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless.

The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip.

The destructive character is the enemy of the étui-man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.

The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive.

The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.

The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.

The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.


* my emphasis. text via. Original text published n the Frankfurter Zeitung, 1931.

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In search of | missing pieces

Containing multitudes (most of them flawed) ... indeed. 

in Albania

multi-s in search of their tude-s.
me in search of their relevance.

art in search of its authors.
authors in search of their institution.
institution in search of its responsibilities.
responsibilities in search of their exception.
exception in search of its evaluation.
evaluation in search of a narrative.
narrative in search of its language.
language in search of its jargon.
jargon in search of its pixels.
pixels in search of their image.
image in search of its recognition.
recognition in search of its identity.
identity in search of its future.
future in search of its past.
past in search of its territory.
territory in search of its capacity.
capacity in search of its occupancy.
occupancy in search of occupation.
occupation in search of its margins.
margins in search of a defense.
defense in search of justice.
justice in search of its visibility.
visibility in search of its aesthetic.
aesthetic in search of its ethics.
ethics in search of culture.
culture in search of its anthropos.
anthropos in search of their apology.
apology in search of its rhetoric.
rhetoric in search of its discourse.
discourse in search of its publics.
publics in search of their domain.
domain in search of its ownership.
ownership in search of its stake.
stake in search of its market.
market in search of its art.


*definitely forgetting a few, or an infinitude. (warning: might not make sense as a totality to many)

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Coffee and Cigarettes | In search of missing pieces

I'm looking for the joke with a microscope. - Iggy Pop, Repo Man

Are we a coffee and cigarettes culture? Could the Albanian culture (misconstrued as tradition) be seen as a series of vignettes; skits of fragmented encounters (their awkwardness driven by boredom) with only coffee and cigarettes in common? Maybe with a recurring conversational stimulus (a reassuring or instigating line) : “That's not too healthy, is it now?”.
Same setting. Two subjects (maybe a third). Different people. Two objects. Same objects. Coffee and cigarettes. Held together (barely) minimalistically (to not be confused with an actual word: materialistically) by dialog. That necessary linguistic (mostly consumed and abused as the weakest) link.

Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing us to live in society, to be together. But since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thoughts divide as much as unite, and my words unite by what they express and isolate by what they omit since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me. (What is an object? 1967)

The chosen analogy (even though far-fetched to unbelieving souls), initially, made sense to me, literally and figuratively, on many levels. ☺☻☺☻☺☻☺☻☺☻☺☻☺☻☺☻☺☻

Obviously you’re not well suited for three-dimensional chess, perhaps three dimensional candyland would be more your speed. [...] It must be humbling to suck on so many different levels. - The Big Bang Theory, The Pancake Batter Anomaly

3D Chess, Star Trek

Such, is the (discontinuous) film Coffee and Cigarettes, or better yet the fragmented series by Jim Jarmusch. My reading(s) of it anyways. There is contrast in setting, but not in titles. Objects are black and white. Subjects are related. Coffee is black. Cigarettes are white. Characters feel incompatible. There is tension in contrast. There is tension in the conversation. Misfits placed in the scene as props. No clear link in dialog. It is the other, the objects of coffee and cigarettes that make possible their exchange. Their interaction. Their seemingly awkward confrontation. Two (in)dividuals that come together. That come out of themselves, only in this instance, when surrounded by dialectical checker patterns, in form and content. Their leap seems short in distance and depth. A hop, perhaps. 

Doubles seem to be a big recurrence in subjects and objects (twins, cousins, tabletops, dices, tea cups, refills, colors, etc.), lines of dialog, even soundtrack.

build[ing] a whole that's much greater than the sum of its parts. (via)

To dialog, both have to be present (minimally, at least). To show up, on all levels. Not remotely. A remote setting marks that which is not at all, an absence (abyss) of distance and depth. A perceived tabula rasa. 

People who object to the in-jokes should consider that they might be just part of a dialectic with what could be termed the out-jokes—the more populist and obvious bits of humor. (via)

A setting, or culture construed around two addictions, coffee and cigarettes. Jittery and gasping for air, the subjects seem to be more at ease once caffeine and nicotine enters their system. The high that conforms their freedom. Willpower becomes a Machiavellian negotiator. That which they consume, ends up consuming them. They try to control the awkwardness of the conversation by controlling the proximity, access and quantity of these substances (or objects). Back and forth, they alternate. In doing so, their intake becomes a stimuli for dialog, confrontation, a sort of communication. An attempt, really. Or what it really becomes, a controlled mass communication of public energy. The only thing free remains the fall. A free fall. A social void. A substance abuse. A miscommunication.

This paranoid misunderstanding is played for comedy, but the fear of a gaping void remains. (via)

A gaping void. Such is public space in Albania. And yes, the public energy, mentality & complexes it generates are indeed ‘played for comedy.’ Just as the 11 fragments or comic shorts below, the most successful public space in the country, the cafe, is taken out of context. It is abstracted. Removed from the rest of its publics' lives. It has become a misconstrued mise-en-scene, staged, a still life. We see and hear its subjects come and go, but where from / to becomes the unseen other (third) space. A space that seemingly falls out of the margins, into the cracks of the frame. But, we know that space. We live in that space. Everyday. We just can't see it from the cage. The one we've locked ourselves up in and call public, the cafe. The most unproductive public space in Albania.

This [other] space may be all the more menacingly threatening or tantalizingly luring for being unseen. (via) 

It is the impossibility of enclosing the everyday that makes it tantalizingly luring. It is the impossibility of our relationship with it. It is our lack of reach. Our stubbornness and resistance in seeing, understanding, living it. Our myopic vision and blurred capacity to focus the lens. We see the aesthetics (such as they are dangled near us), not the forensics. We see the spectacle in front of it, not the science behind it. We applaud it, not research it. We art (eh) it, not act it. The everyday mundane bores us. So much in fact, that we've constructed, staged the cafe, as our place for the only public that's worth our caliber, or just a second look. A place within a space. A cafe within a building. Doubling the distance, thus the effort to leave it. Doubling our stay, thus consuming our productive time and exponentially exhausting our brain activity - to find an excuse to stay. Dead labor. It's like we've shut the door on our relevance and turned our back to a potential significance. Dismiss it as mundane. The everyday and its labor - our critics, are not us. The cafe releases us. It has plenty of space, coffee and cigarettes - public stimuli- to rationalize the impossibility of enclosing the everyday, the relevance of those who criticize us, and the untapped potential of the mundane. Its publicness makes us someone. We can finally come out of ourselves, be our original self or an alternate(ive), anyone really. Freedom, at last.

We've passed the facade (which has already been painted for us). We are inside the building envelope, inside a 3-dimensional facade - a public threshold (that which we don't think of as public space, but it most certainly is) - seated, surrounded by the comfort of our coffee and cigarettes, incapacitated to stand up to our everyday. We can't hear or see its definition or resolution fully because we're gated in, however, we're still present, even though it has evaporated into a gaping void of a whispered mirage, from which we only can make out a few choice words and offensive gestures (a mistaken defense, perhaps). We don't need the in-between. We can fill in the rest . After all, we have our own public inside, with whom we can put our heads together and continue this distant outside conversation. Multiple (incapacitated) minds at work are better than a single stubborn one. Two imaginations here are better than any presence out there. (Or, it might just be the crowd inside is hearing voices, thinking they're coming from outside. And, yes there is a definition for it: schizophrenia.) A dialectic of in- vs. out-jokes.

Such is our public culture. ‘A paranoid misunderstanding that is played for comedy.’

A subject, an object and their shadow walk into a cafe... to talk about the future. Better yet, to alternate (alternativate - should definitely be a verb) futures. Bored by the everyday mundane, they choose a spot, still, very still (sturdy and secure), still life still; a sizable table for the objects (coffee and cigarettes); chairs and immediate space for the awkward tic (a la mode, perhaps) of the subject; and proceed to mark the threshold of their elusive composition - a frame big enough to cast the entire shadow when it misbehaves egoistically while in dialog about the future. (Sort of premeditating a crime scene, no?) Without the recurrence of this linguistic link, there would be no public, no culture. No information exchanged. It is this communication that holds it together, minimalistically. A critical juxtaposition alternating difference and repetition between publics. (Borrowing Deleuze's ‘the interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior a projected interior’.)

What, then, are these / our publics?

Public space as a gaping void. Public energy as free fall. Public culture, checkered?

What is our public pattern? That is pattern as juxtaposition of social improvisation and political determination. Literally and figuratively. Forensically and aesthetically. Spatially and culturally. 

Yes, culture is public(s). 

That's why a closer look in defining the concept of publics, its depth and distance in name and access, would help us see and extract patterns of (ab)use in expression, exception, exploitation, exit, and extinction. 

How could/should/would we exchange in it, then? 

[T]here's the suggestion that inside every apparent improvisation is an element of determination. (via)

If all we're looking for is an opening or an invitation (an enabling, some would say) to exchange through participation, we have to keep in mind that there's a thin line between improvisation and determination, in form and content, in role and position, in contrast and pattern, in coffee and cigarettes. Otherwise, it becomes an urban warfare with just a simple move (like adding color, see the end). An asymmetric one that distorts the seen and the perceived, the lived and the construed, the protagonists and the antagonists. A free fall of alternates(ives). 

We can also choose to participate through play. (My favorite!) After all, the playground is the original public space. In this film, the table top (as pattern and content) fits that description. Those who do not believe the world is flat, may prefer to play 3-dimensionally, hence the composition within the frame, the mise-en-scene, becomes a playground.

The choice and nature of exchange (communication or action) - checkers or chess (as play / fight / bet) - is entirely yours.

Do we, then, play the subject (wo/man), the object (board), or the link (game)? 

The public, the space, or the culture? 

Is the culture check(ered/ed/mated) out?

Nine (of many) invitations to participate:
(ex. Opening, Game, Defense, Counter/Gambit, Variation, System, Counter/Attack, Reversed, Inverted, etc.)

** There are quite a few layers, scales, and readings to the questions and thoughts I've laid out here that I hope most make sense without being too cryptic, thus unclear. (The joke would be on me then, for failing on this many levels.) ☺☻

I have borrowed cinematic work, mainly Jarmusch's series of encounters in Coffee and Cigarettes (along with the in- and mostly out-jokes of each fragment), as an analogy, to illustrate what I've been rambling on so far. The coffee and cigarettes culture of/in Albania. Since, cinema is but a representation, consider this post one as well. A critical speculation of publics: spatial, social, cultural. A proposition of sorts, not a realization.

I perceive culture as a conductor of public resonance. 

(stolen from the film dialogue and adapted as this post's scope)

Strange to meet you.

What did you dream about? 

I can't. I don't have time to tell you this.

Twins.
Who's the evil twin? That's the way it works, right?

Somewhere in California.
The beauty of quitting is that now that I've quit, I can have one, you know, 'cause... I've quit.

The willpower!

Those things'll kill ya.
- I can't help it. I'm fucking addicted. OK?
- So, coffee and cigarettes? That's your lunch? That ain't healthy, is it?
- So, I'm on a diet. OK? I ain't no fucking quitter.

Renee.

I wish you woudn't have done that.

No Problem.
- So, are you sure everything is OK with you?
- Yes. Everything is OK. And you?
- Me? Things are OK, not perfect, you know, but pretty much OK, yeah.
- Good. I'm very happy to see you.
- I'm happy to see you, man.
- I guess I'm going to go.
- Really? So soon?
- Yeah. But, listen. If you don't want to talk now, call me anytime. Maybe now it's not the right time for you. That's all.
So I was very happy to see you.
- Yes, me too. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but there's nothing wrong, really.
- That's OK. I understand. Call me.

Cousins.

- It's just... funny, don't yah think, that when you can't afford something, it's like *really expensive* but then when you can afford it, it's like, free? It's kinda backwards, don't yah think?
- Yeah, well... the world is a bit like that, I guess, in a lot of ways.

Jack shows Meg his Tesla coil.
It's an air transformer, with primary and secondary coils that are timed to resonate. It's basically a step up transformer, which converts relatively low voltage high current, to high voltage low current, at high frequencies.

- Without him, we wouldn't have alternating current, radio, television, X-ray technology, induction motors, particle beams, lasers, none of that would even exist if it weren't for him.
- Or, the rock band Tesla.

If we would've paid more attention to his ideas, the world would be a much better place. We'd have free mass communication, free transportation, free energy for everyone. That's why they discredited him in the end...for free energy.

- He perceived the earth as a conductor of acoustical resonance.
- Hmm. What a beautiful idea.

- Damn it. Something went wrong. It wasn't supposed to stop. It was supposed to keep working. I don't know what happened.
- You think, maybe you blew a capacitor?
- No, I didn't blow a capacitor.
- I think, maybe the spark gaps are too far apart on you spark coil vibrator.
- That's it. I didn't check that earlier.

Cousins?
- Likewise. I'm certainly very aware of you.

- And the reviews, ahh..
- They were pretty fucking great.
- I was amazed because, you know, it was... I didn't think many people would kind of get all, the sort of the cultural references..
- You'd be surprised. Yeah!
- But, a lot of people didn't have any kind of reference to mate to it... Let me try and put it in context. I've always had a big passion for history, you know, and peoples' lives, all the little events that you know, how you get from A to B, and all the small details in peoples' lives, and kind of, really, full of, sort of epic qualities, you know... and so, I've been doing all this research, and, um, anyway, I've come up with this.
- What stage is..this green lit? Or, is it just... What stage is it on?
- It's not some.. it's got nothing to do with work. It's not a ‘project.’ What I've discovered was..

[gets interrupted]

- Wow. I've been recognized.

Delirium.
- You a doctor now, or something?
- I've been studying alternative medicine for two years now. I mean, ancient healer techniques, and all that. I happen to know a certain procedure I can perform using a drill gun, an electric drill. But, you know, my hand's nice from being a DJ. 

Caffeine can cause serious delirium.

- You're a real caffeine junkie, aren't you?
- Just keep it down. Just between us.
- You know, before I gave it up, it used to make me dream faster. That's how my dreams were, just whizzin' by.
He specializes in alternative medicine. That is, alternative, to this planet.

Champagne. 

- I've lost touch with the world. Where are we?
The Armory. It sounds so heavy and ponderous.
Let's pretend this coffee is champagne.
- Why would we do that?
- Well, to celebrate life. You know, like the rich, elegant people do, the classy people.
- I prefer coffee, simple working man's coffee.
- Oh, you're so provincial. You know what your problem is?
- What?
- You have no joie de vivre.
- I don't?
- No! Besides, this coffee is awful. I propose a toast.
- So what should we toast?

*And now the news..*

(what color is the news?)

Twin Peaks, Beyond Life and Death, Episode 29.

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On the Beaten Track | In search of missing pieces

The intent of this post is to expose the (Albanian) public at large (or whatever narrow readership this blog has) to the work of Lucy Lippard, On the Beaten Track: tourism, art and place. A gesture that is meant more as an introduction to and understanding of travel vs. tourism, tourism of and as art, the implication of both these acts on space as “inauthentic attitudes to place”- and my (own research) interest in this space vs. place as one of expulsion (to borrow from Saskia Sassen) rather than inclusive in its difference.

photo credit: diagstudio.com _detroit, michigan

In order to begin comprehending the scope (and depth) of tourism industry in Albania, do we even know the entirety of developments going on in its name (to make the country visitor-ready)? Why are we not questioning and demanding public transparency when it comes to our public assets? Why are we more vocal and loud when it comes to destruction, but not construction? Why are we so timid in (wanting, and) requesting to be informed, when the rest of the world is already facing challenges of the same bureaucratic, industrial, political, and economical dealings with rapid anthropocentric consequences on natural resources, gentrification (social expulsion/land grabbing) and (planetary/public) health? 

The ‘architecturally modern’ models and renderings, advertised to us via marketing campaigns that promise visions of simpler, puritan (plastic) times and idyllic havens to escape to, have a surgical feel, a put-off quality and determined attitude (more of a regimen) that screams urban cleansing and renewal (which in itself can have some serious repercussions). We should remind ourselves that there is no real urban regeneration or development in these acts (or mindset). They have the aesthetics of what is called boutique and the ethics of social (economic) cleansing. This model of the future not only reinforces tourism as an “inauthentic attitude to place,” but it marks the site as a generic “non-place,” a space of uncertain citizenship. 

There are people who think this is a good move, looking to the West as inspiration and precedent for our development. Sure, we want to be included, be part of EU and so much more. But, is it the smart way of going at it? EU and the West are coming undone. The weaknesses and instabilities of their financial system, surveillance and control of a deep fractured social structure (with prejudice), foreign and biological (not forgetting nuclear) threats, just to name a few. Will we be able to withstand all this? We've come undone ourselves, spiraling (down + out of control) really, for quite some time now, a quarter century to be exact. We are in desperate need of something catalytic, not catastrophic. What is it? I don't know. Something just short of resurrection, maybe? Well, I might be a bit harsh in wording this specific need for a miracle, but I definitely insist on it not being constructed as a monumental, modern, puritan mise-en-scene act of the beautiful. The beautiful needs to be sustainable, contextualized, to infiltrate social complexities, to inform mentalities, thus become realized in the everyday acts of the mundane, and not as a perceived abstraction of an icon or image (unresoluted pixels) only for a chosen / selected few (locals or tourists). Don't let the beautiful be an inside joke of a (pseudo-bourgeois) club membership, but a shared engagement within public interest - as its most fundamental public asset. 

photo credit: diagstudio.com _hamtramck, michigan

In tourism, development's been built on maximizing the potential (aka exploitation) of our public assets, our natural resources, which of course, is standard procedure. But, to me, first and foremost, our public assets are people. Us. Why are we not maximizing our potential first (through education and information) to increase the capacity of making the decision if and how to maximize the potential of our natural resources? It has become a very diplomatic battle (and when I say battle, I mean strategy in planning it as such, and tactical in its implementation) between thinking minds and natural resources - in deciding which is a more immediate investment (in terms of returning profit) and important in being seen (perceived) as beautiful (aka. useful as a commodity) 1) by the entities (i.e. visitors) we so much need the approval of (and be accepted by) or 2) by our own people, the valued identity (i.e. heritage) we've so much fought for, well pretty much since the beginning of times. Diplomatic because it has felt very docile. Docile because it has been overwhelmingly one sided. We are serving our (tangible) crown jewels on a platter. With a bow on top, for kicks. A catered party where the real crown jewels (our thinking minds, our people) are not invited to, but (yet again) linger outside, by the door and windows looking in. Their heaviness imprinted on the glass. An unbearable lightness of being, indeed.

photo credit: going west | the happy hermit via 

Don't get me wrong, I am all for travel and exploration - but as Lippard tells us, there is quite a difference (and displacement) between travel and tourism. And, I would like us to realize that, to understand the definitions given, so we can challenge their intended use (aka. all shades of transparency) when addressing the public. Tourism is not bad, but it has been vilified and used as a commodity tool to advance financial agendas to devastating consequences for the masses. 

Who doesn't want to escape the everyday slumming, even for a fleeting moment in a well packaged promise? We all do, right?! Who, then, dares say that reality and imagination are two different things? Reality has indeed become fiction. What I'm trying to understand and unpack is the kind of fiction it has become, other than what it already was. A well designed perception (algorithm) for those who can afford it. Not the expelled, the poor, the electors, but the opportunists, the preferred, the elected. 

I'll stop my thoughts here and let you read a few paragraphs from Lippard's, On the Beaten Track: tourism, art and place. As always the reading and emphasis is mine. I strongly recommend you read the book to draw your own conclusions. 

***

Introduction: On Rubbernecking

photo credit: amazon.com

Most literature about tourism is written from the viewpoint of the visitor (the supposedly “fresh eye”), rather than that of the visited. Immigrants and the internally displaced are rarely asked how they see their surroundings. Yet every place is both local and foreign. The same place is the site of two very different experiences. Domestic tourism [...] rests precariously in the gap between the familiar and the strange, the close at hand and the far afield. It is a metaphor for multicenteredness, offering experimental approaches to change.

Some sources suggest that tourism will soon be the largest global source of employment; others say it already is. Add that to the subcategory of armchair tourism via print and electronic media, and we're on our way to becoming a society of visitors and voyeurs on one hand, and commodified actors or targets of strangers' fantasies on the other.

Critical tourism may sound like an oxymoron. We don't “tour” to exercise our brains. A vacation is literally an emptying out, a voiding of daily experience and responsibility. Vacations are supposed to be fun, but then some of us get off on critical thinking. It raises questions about other people's lifestyles and value systems and opens us up to reciprocity as we re-invent them for our own delectation.

John Urry suggests that the “tourist gaze” uses “difference to interrogate the normal,” whatever that is. This is of course what artists do as a matter of course.

Since teaching people how to see is the artist's business, it seems odd that tourism as activity (rather than as an image or a symbol) has piqued so few progressive artists' imaginations, despite its heady vortex of cross-culturalism, mixed signals, disjunctive codes, faked authenticity, deterritorialization, and other hot topics. While scholars in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies have feasted at this classic pomo trough, artists with ambitions outside the current market system have only sporadically recognized the affinities, realizing that they could have some effect on these ways of seeing. 

If there is little art about tourism, there is still less art within tourism. Monuments, museums, parks, and tourism itself have hitherto been thought of more as frames than as forms. But they can easily be seen as covert art forms, effectively practiced, like advertising, by official and commercial “non-entities” rather than by celebrities more interested in art fame than in social power. The current art system, for all its “critical” trajectory, encourages this kind of real-world timidity. Just as tourists often deplore situations brought on by their own presence, so artists are complicitous in the way the world is seen.

Tourism (like art) has been touted as a form of transformation, even cannibalism - the consumption of other places, other cultures, or the digestion of their powers. [...] Complex cultures, wildly oversimplified for mass production/consumption, are celebrated with a certain relief and disappointment. (“They're really just like us!”)

Traveling can be a kind of performance piece. We can reinvent ourselves instead of our surroundings. We can surprise ourselves as well as of being surprised.

Travel is between a beginning and an end, a circular form in which the point of departure is as influential as the destination. Victor Turner and Nelson Graburn have pointed out that the structure of tourism resembles all ritual behavior - a beginning, a change, and a return to the normal. When we travel, we “cross over,” as in Turner's notion of liminality - the experience of being on the threshold, in the throes of passage. We cross not only from place to place but also from time to time, and sometimes we are changed in the process.

On a local level, tourism is both additive and subtractive. Although its parasitic role is often remarked, today it is widely perceived as a cure for regional economic woes. Tourism has become a kind of caulking that fits in the cracks of a supposedly unsinkable economy.

The bottom line of leisure travel, after all, is enjoyment, which for many means comfort. “Paradise is a place where all your needs are met effortlessly. Paradise is a place where you are not allowed to feel pain.” Some talented souls actually know how to rest and relax on a tourist vacation, as advertised. For most, “doing the sights” is hard work.

Class and gender are salient components of travel's contradictions. [...] Tourism is by expectation constricted, while travel is by implication freer, partaken of by the well-heeled or by the down-at-the heel (“drifter tourism”). 

A better distinction might be between passive and active tourism, with artists falling in the second category. Passive or active, loud or courteous, affluent or working-class, tourists' behavior stems from a wide range of motives. They may be asserting their right to dominate, or rebelling against being dominated, or passing on the unwelcome experience of being dominated, or simply struggling with ambivalence about new roles in unexpected social situations. [...] Such situations can bring out the best and the worst in people. Some identify with those serving them and are able to perceive tourism from both sides. Others switch roles with dexterity and become irrational dictators.

If you have pretensions to being a traveler rather than a mere tourist, it is intensely embarrassing to be perceived as a visitor at all. 

Tourists who perceive themselves as “sensitive,” capable of appreciating the finer points while traveling [...] are still separated from those of us who lack the resources to know all those right things.

For those educated into a sense of social superiority, kitsch can generate a delicious sense of betraying one's class and educational expectations. Believing that nothing is real, some have trouble recognizing the real when they see it. [...] Despite a prevailing political indifference and the tendency of tourists to see no evil, lived experience comes first and theory later, once we realize what we should be thinking.

The underlying contradiction of tourism is the need to see beneath the surface when only a surface is available. However, peeps behind the stage set, or the wizard's curtain, offer just another layer of artifice. Destinations are chalked up rather than savored. Some places are merely “famous for being famous,” and some of them don't even exist. [...] Few would argue that much tourism is anything but frankly superficial, what Armand Mattelart has called the “shop window effect,” in which visitors' consumption patterns are taken on by those visited.

The historical roles of pilgrimage and curiosity have been filled (though hardly fulfilled) by tourism and museums.

Having discovered how attractive this toe dipped in freedom is to most people, the tourist industry has also gotten into the off-the-beaten-track business, usually more expensive and fundamentally more snobbish in its appeal for places where “the rest of them” won't be. In fact, we expect it to be a place where the rest of “us” or “you” will be - and we know who “we” are. We are unpleasantly surprised when we find we were wrong, and find ourselves lumped with “them.” At this point we are involuntarily back on the beaten track.

It's useless and hypocritical, though not difficult, to be generally “against” tourism. [...] Progressive people in regions that are economically dependent on “visitors” (sounds like they are from outer space, and they often seem to be) are struggling to imagine a progressive tourism that doesn't exploit local people or places and doesn't create rifts between personal lives and economic goals, history and spectacle, genders, races, and classes. A few artists are wondering what role progressive visual artists might play in facilitating, even creating, a responsible, critical, perhaps even satirical tourist industry - or alter-industry.

Must tourism be [...] an “inauthentic attitude to place?” Must it be [...] “something insidious...the sucking of difference out of difference [...]?” Or will the consciously multicentered person-artist eventually be able to challenge her own pleasures and discomforts, to create a responsible tourist as well as a responsible inhabitant of unfamiliar places?

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2014 Wrap-up

A few words to wrap up 2014:

I am thankful for all the superb (and equally tough) conversations I've had this year with artists, curators, architects, students, writers, filmmakers, and all other creatives (be they intellectuals, professionals, or enthusiasts) near and far, in Albania and abroad. There are a lot of individuals and groups that care about the tiny creative scene in Albania. I am one of them.

In the past few months, I have witnessed and been a part of (I admit, not as much as others) a great deal of fight and passion (in social media) to re-value the Albanian artistic thought, process and product, so it can re-merge (ever so slightly) stronger in quality and not be reduced to a political institution's agenda. We all want and are trying to help it gain ground and (re)establish itself, but part of the challenge has been the dialog.

Dialog between creative content and the event it is a part of. Dialog between this content and how its event is promoted. Dialog between artistic intent and media mediocrity and speculation. Dialog between artistic thought that wants to educate the masses and media ignorance that misinforms. Dialog between accurate historical inheritance and adopted social hipster(ic) trends.

I noticed a trend this year. Most (if not all) anticipated cultural events in previously communist hideouts, turned out to be hipster(ic) parties (at least that's what they looked like from afar). As in, there was a faint interest among the public, old and new, but only in the 'kept hidden from us' allure of its materialism (and selfie opportunity) than in the 'let's roll up our sleeves, dig deeper into its purpose, the fear and paranoia of those who built it, hid it, the intentions of those who opened it, and truly study the consequences it had on the lives, ideologies, labor, prosecution and the making of the same society who now participates only as a visitor, a hipster commodity.

Dialog between the new of the past, the new of the future, and how the new of now 'suspends historical consciousness while desperately fills itself with content'.(1) Dialog of whatever happens (or needs to happen) between the quality of means and the value of ends.

Dialog between artists' skills and institutional (public and private) relevance and co-dependence. Dialog between useless conferences and much needed workshops. Dialog between art as a professional practice, a part-time fancy and propagandamotional tool. High. Medium. Low. Underground. Abroad. Self-loathing. Naive. (un)Commissioned. Original. (in)Visible. etc. etc. etc.

Most importantly, the dialog between artists and other artists. Artists and curators. Artists and critics. Artists and the public. Artists and academia. Artists and buyers, sellers & decision-makers. Who are the real patrons of the Albanian arts? Its stakeholders?

And lastly, the most necessary dialog that unfortunately, has been behaving badly: Albanians and Albanians living abroad. What gives?

As we head into the New Year and pick up where we left off the conversation with our peers in Albania, let's consider this: We might be outside, but we have shown up for the exchange..

“There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in order to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one’s own, and view the culture through the eyes of this foreign culture. This idea, as I said, is one-sided. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes, is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this where the only aspect of this understanding, it would merely be a duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding - in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others.

In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly (but not maximally fully, because there will be cultures that see and understand even more). A meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise for itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths.” - Bakhtin, 1986, p.7.

Wishing you all a Happy Holiday Season!! 

Let's strive to restore the faith in the arts and integrity of our art scene in 2015!!

via

♥