Undigested Thoughts | In search of 'Memoirs Found in a Bathtub'

As the election campaigns make their final bang before whatever whimper they'll feel on Sunday when Albanians go to vote, I'd like to offer you a couple of the many ways I might convey what I think of this rat race and its self-inflicted climatic messages, in what has quite honestly been an overwhelmingly anticlimactic turn of events, online and in real life. New timelines on old promises, past futures aged and preached anew. Same old, some would say, still not being able to distinguish whether these things happen to us or for us.

I don't want to dismiss this dullness (of the 'same old', which takes its cue from the status-quo of the everyday life), far from it, I'd like to isolate and define it as a real and steady instrument of power that materializes as a soft violence on citizenship, one that refrains the citizen's freedom of choice (which is obvious if we just glance at and listen to the choices). Voting, no matter how it has been treated in times past, continues to stand as both, the citizen's voice and weapon of combat, their freedom and responsibility. The question that remains then, is how are these citizens able to proceed when those who speak for them, those who represent them - all of the political parties - practice such soft violence?

So, in light of this still undigested question, the first way of conveying my thoughts about the election is through the blunt dialog of untamed tongues:

 

And secondly, through another dialog of a more indirect approach (or sermon of sorts), via an excerpt from Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub:

" "And here you thought you were a prisoner in a labyrinth of evil, where everything was pregnant with meaning, where even the theft of one's instructions was a ritual, that the Building destroyed only in order to build, to build only in order to destroy the more -- and you took this for the wisdom of evil... Hence your mental somersaults and contortions. You writhed on the hook of your own question mark to solve that equation of horror. But I tell you there is no solution, no equation, no destruction, no instructions, no evil -- there is only the Building -- only -- the Building --""Only the Building?" I echoed, my hair on end."Only the Building," he echoed my echo, shivering."This is not wisdom, this is a blind and all-encompassing perfection, a perfection not of man's making but which arose from man, or rather from the community of man. Human evil, you see, is so petty and frail, while here we have something grand and mighty at work... An ocean of blood and sweat and urine! One thundering death rattle from a million throats! A great monument of feces, the product of countless generations! Here you can drown in people, choke on them, waste away in a vast wilderness of people! Behold: they will stir their coffee as they calmly tear you to shreds, chat and pick their noses as they outrage your corpse, and brew more coffee as it stiffens, and you will be a hairless, worn-out and abandoned doll, a broken rattle, an old rag yellow and forgotten in the corner... That is how perfection operates, not wisdom! Wisdom is you, yourself -- or maybe two people! You and someone else, that intimate flash of honesty from eye to eye..."I watched his deathly pale face and wondered where I'd heard all this before, it sounded familiar. Then I remembered -- that sermon, the sermon about choking, evil and the Devil, the sermon which Brother Persuasion told me was intended as provocation..."How can I believe you?" I groaned. He shuddered."O sinner!!" he screamed in a whisper. "Dost thou still double that what may be a harmless conversation or joke on one level doth constitute, on another, legal action and, on yet another, a battle of wits between Departments? Verily, if thou followest this line of thought, thou shalt end up nowhere, since here anything, hence everything, leadeth everywhere!"..."What are you saying?""You still don't understand? I'm an agent provocateur because I'm a priest. Only as your agent provocateur am I, a priest, allowed to say what I've said here. Of course, we expect you to cooperate..." (170-172) "

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Men, Monuments, Monsters, Memory (part 2) | In search of missing pieces

*(sort of a year in review, bits and pieces written on social media in 2015) 

More on what was previously defined as the relationship of Men, Monuments, Monsters, and Memory:

We expect too much of buildings and too little of ourselves. ~ Jane Jacobs

If it doesn't die, how does it age?

After reading quite extensively on heritage in ‪Albania, its ethics, aesthetics, authenticity vs. origins/originality, renovations, etc. I think, no matter the intentions, when it comes to buildings, the conversation on preservation vs. restoration has no real winners. Good enough results maybe, but no winners. Against time, we cannot win. if we restore, we erase a bit of that history, a well intended cleansing yes, but nonetheless a cleansing. there is no such thing as a perfect act of restoration that returns a historical object to its original self, even if it's done just right. that's why it is a historical object. It is supposed to be old and weathered, even wise in its survival. Why force it into youth? The kind of youth that as long as it looks youthful, we don't care if it feels that same way. Its context has evolved, be that surrounding landscape or urban fabric. Its own self has changed as well, renovated or repurposed, used and abused through the years. By restoring it, we impose a utopia, a nostalgic, even idyllic, memory that can now exist or be fetishized only in its renewed state, thus rendering itself irrelevant to the meaning of heritage and what(ever) it stands for. If it can be washed out (cleaned up) even reproduced, then what's its historic value? 

 

On the other hand, preserving it or just letting it run its course will, too, (without forcing back time) fade away its being and erase parts of its history. Weather, material degradation, and structure, will definitely take a toll on its ‘heritage’ standing, but as natural factors of its ecology, they preserve the legacy of its origins. We all know that a building doesn't last forever, and yes, it might turn into blight or might take other dystopian form, but it doesn't mean that its heritage has died. It doesn't mean that it is not authentic. It has simply evolved or mutated into something else. A new kind of heritage dare i say. One that doesn't ‘renew’ time thru aesthetically ‘accurate’ acts or interventions in the name of ‘heritage’ or for heritage's sake, but by simply letting its heritage become (along with rigorous documentation, research, expertise and so forth), whatever it might turn into. That is the beauty and consequent meaning of heritage, to not predetermine it, to not put an expiration on it, to not force its legacy. By restoring it, we renew it, we add something foreign to it, something of another time, another value, another meaning, even if it is aesthetically compatible. and yes, we can call it a mutation as well, but one of a different value and consequence to us, our culture, history and legacy.

So, if the race to find a solution or maintain a ‘sustainable’ (lack of a better word) heritage doesn't get past one-liners, be they about preservation or restoration, then our understanding and acceptance that they both erase a bit of history, will be delayed. we won't know when to use one instead of the other. There isn't much defense against time. All we can really do, is to not be offensive to our heritage. We can start by answering this question: if it doesn't die, then how does it age?

It’s time we stopped talking about our affluent society. We are an impoverished society. It is a poor society indeed that can’t pay for these amenities; that has no money for anything except expressways to rush people out of our dull and deteriorating cities.

~ Ada Louise Huxtable, Architecture: How to Kill a City, 1963

Returning home

Let's think of such objects as victimized ‪bodies‬ subjected to systematic abuse in two parts: violent expulsion, evident by their physical decay, followed by a glorified patronizing of their (now) ghastly abstraction. Making space where none exist, here, could mean reinterpreting then re-staging what we want these bodies to be or do for us, refusing to understand and accept (their independence) what they are, why they are.

The confidence to do arbitrary interventions (victimize) from within (the psyche and body) not to bother anymore with superficial cosmetics (that fall flat by shining too bright) only for public perception, tells the tale of frustration the private persona has with its public leash, and the public figure's overcompensation to show its other self who's in control (with all its meanings: contra, con and troll).

This reinterpretation (art) through abuse until the bodies are abstracted (tortured to erase themselves) becomes a fleeting moment of euphoria right before passing out.

How do we then slowly reintroduce these bodies, their vulnerability to the everyday society and life, without ‘accidentally’ killing them?

The ‘blind spot’ of any culture: the inability to conceive of its own devastation [...] If we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, perhaps we could find better ways to live with it.  

~ Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, 2008

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Appropriation of Public(s) | In search of missing pieces

The public is a realm of multitudes. Beings and becomings. Serving and being served, by humans and machines alike. Users and abusers. Polities and technologies. Historic memories and speculative futures. Infrastructures and social networks. Eco-systems and toxic sites. Invasive glare and ambient noise. Hardscape, softscape and software. Systematic edges* and absences. Multitudes that are truly deformed into a polluted totality.

A totality where social and spatial constructs are mobilized by forces of economy, polity, governance, capitalist, communist and everything-in-between ideologies. As conceptually subterranean systems, these forces are rendered invisible by their complexity, which then leads to lack of responsibility. The more complex the system, the harder it is to make sense of it and its reach - and when they do become visible, the problem is one of interpretation. [1]

Hence, the public spatiality where this systemic apparatus materializes is indetermined, unfinished and open to (mis)interpretation. Its original and traditional make as a democratic condition, is now a means for systemic pollution.

Pollution as a systematic disposition?

Active forms are makers of disposition, and disposition is the character of an organization that results from the circulation of these active forms within it. Since these forms are always changing, as is the complexion of disposition, they cannot be catalogued as elemental building blocks or terms in a glossary. Rather, identifying just a few among the many active forms that might be manipulated, redesigned, or rewritten only begins to crack the code, making more palpable the dispositions they inflect and providing some instruments for adjusting political character in infrastructure space. Still, as signs of ongoing processes - like the ripples used for river navigation - the practicality of these forms relies on their indeterminacy. [2] 

Lately, my research has been focused on these otherwise unknown agencies that construct and transform public space - those which make (im)possible today's public(s). I have become interested in identifying and understanding the “systematic absences that make something essential unknown, not understood, hidden, distorted or simply undiscussed.” [3] These ubiquitous forces are manifested and materialized in public space - they shape its (in)visibility by activating forms and behaviors. Their presence is divisive through privatization. Its intent is their interest. Thus, the task of designing public space cannot be approached by default and be reduced as simply architectural. It should be unpacked as a strategy, an all-encompassing matrix of values and logistics that is pushed, pulled, squeezed and overblown by social and spatial conditions within the urban arrangement. It is a process that rejects pre-conceived social and spatial notions. A method that seeks clarity, not in the form of the urban product (i.e. building), but how it searches for content, context and transformation within and outside of itself. How it releases, controls and extends social behavior to reach the common practice of the everyday life and an extraordinary disposition. A pollution disposed? 

Pollution as a paradigm shift?

The practices through which social structure is both expressed and reproduced cannot be divorced from the structuring of space and the use of spatial structures. Previously structured space both constrains and enables the reproduction of social practices and social structure. The social becomes the spatial. The spatial becomes the social. [4]

I am still very much interested in the territorial spatiality of public space, but more so as a critical concept  - an agency - whose capacity and activity is realized by everyday objects, such as: the plastic chair, the folding table, the bench, the curb, the balcony/veranda, the staircase, the placement of the air conditioning units, the clothes hung outside to dry, etc. Informal space, resilient because it is always changing. A shifting paradigm that always disrupts and challenges the predetermined threshold of the building envelope. One that cannot always predict if it is going to thicken or thin the architecture, hence the city. Public(s) as a gestural practice.

“This detailed spatial structure to social life takes time to form and is deformed in time.” [5]

Public space, then, becomes a structural consequence of social practice: an extension of domestic(ated) space and privatization. Public space (per se) doesn't exist. It is a myth. A conception and perception of a seemingly democratic city. So, in order to model it (or versions of it), we need to capture and enclose it, define it first, then investigate how and to what degree it can be open (or impossible to enclose). Open to everyone. But, the only way to model it, is to unpack it as a typology of privatized and domestic(ated) patterns in the city. Patterns of inclusion and exception as a paradigm of participation.

The spatial nature of the society we live in holds more than divisions and continuity, trends and correlations. It is intricately patterned. Social patterns of power, control, deprivation and monotony are all reflected in spatial mosaics: rings of the wealthy, holes of the poor, lines of accessibility, enclaves of distinction. However, none of this would be seen if we did not seek to see it. We must know something of what we are looking for before we can know how to look. [6]

How is the city used? Its everyday. Is it open to everyone? A perception, maybe. Built to exclude? Its architecture as an exclusive and excluded threshold. That's why, when talking about public space, most people immediately think of outside. (The existence of inside public spaces is definitely worth investigating, as well.) People's definition of public space, in this case, says a lot about their participation (or lack thereof) in the city. They see (or perceive) publicness as an outside, a denied access inside, an expulsion from private space. (Let's think about this for a moment.)  Public(s) as an impossibility of enclosure, yes - but as a lack of invitation to participate as well? Exclusion through a gesture of exclusivity - of the same, of homogeneity, of membership. And further maybe, ownership through membership? The exclusion of the other, of diversity, of democracy. Public space as leftover from privatization. A collective cleansing. 

Pollution as public resonance?

An outside, which is not a dwelling - has been domesticated by the extension of social practice. Not a house, only an extension of the home. Human instincts of (always) wanting to expand the self, one's territory into a cognitive dissonance (of sorts) - constitute a public space that interests me. It encourages (visibility through) engagement, an overlooked public asset that catalyzes potential and consequential spatial forms. The everyday making, occupying and collapsing the public. Through a chair, a table, a door, a window, outdoor appliances, uncovered domestic infrastructures (water tanks, hvac units, electric wires) - people leaning out: talking, yelling, watching, wondering. A different kind of user - a maker and breaker? 

One that doesn't have to leave the apartment to be in public. (Hmm..interesting.) One that doesn't consider designated public space truly public - and designs its own instead. A dérive. Merely a space, more of a drift, an act that disrupts the threshold by contaminating it, by hacking its imminent domain. A public that makes itself visible without pending approval from systemic forces to recognize its presence. One that challenges the public-private (ab)use of the modern city. One that realizes the only public that matters is sovereign, not appropriated through its public space. After all, when people think of public space, they think of a void in the city. A predetermined and already bound open lot. A void, how fitting. A public emptiness. A missing piece of urban context. A void for the masses. Avoid the masses. Masses as content fillers. Contained. 

I am being way too cynical here, but the point I want to make is that in designing such space - a public space - these things need to be considered and included in the process. Architects and urbanists should be designing a language of visibility, intent, value and resilience for the public user - within the context of a city - competing with forces so complex, that if they don't engage, they will become irrelevant and will end up serving the systemic apparatus instead, making a public only in (as) currency. They will not be worthy of change, of empowerment, of sovereignty - a territory of public(s) that unfolds further than what most people think is public space. It is much more than a park, a playground, a plaza, a recreational activity. (It can definitely be a pyramid!) It is a life. Or rather what makes (sovereign) life possible. And polluted. 

Pollution as public space?

A multifaceted pollution of many forces at play (or at war). Making visible the reach of these political, social, historical, economical, technological, urban, tectonic, and architectural forces thickens my interest and challenge in looking into and dissecting what public space is, really. The what then leads into the how - how it is made, maintained, funded, and used. What are its stakeholders? Private corporations. The state. The community. Foreign Investors. Who profits more from public(s)? Who owns the public? Apparently, ownership does not mean or determine responsibility. Who are these public(s)? Is it the public user, the public object or the public ideology? All of the above. They make up the public realm. It is their exchange; their play and war, their right and privilege, their incapacitated occupancy and membership, their promiscuity - that pollutes. 

The truly public doesn't exist. Not by a solid (and sovereign) definition or design. It has been taken over by complex systems. It has been expelled. It has been rendered invisible. It has become indetermined. It has been made, remade, rejected, reached and realized unstable. In our streets. In our city. In the routine and banality of the everyday. Drifting. Fleeting. An impossibility to enclose or escape the everyday. A vulnerable spatiality between improvisation and determination. Form and Content. Use and Abuse. An asymmetric existence between warfare and spectacle. Paranoia and Comedy. (‘A paranoid misunderstanding that is played for comedy.’) A defensive architecture made offensive. (Military sites as public spectacle.) An architecture of security fetishized as nihilistic desire to punish. 

[W]hat are the spaces of the expelled? These are invisible to the standard measures of our modern states and economies. But they should be made conceptually visible. [T]he space of the expelled expands and becomes increasingly differentiated. It is not simply a dark hole. It is present. [...] They are many, they are growing, and they are diversifying. They are, potentially, the new spaces for making - making local economies, new histories, and new modes of membership. [7]

It is the most ubiquitous, random objects and actions of the everyday, that can activate public space. Again, the plastic chair, the folding table, the picnic basket,  saying hello from across the street, the voyeur out on the window, the vagabond wondering aimlessly, the children climbing on trees, the leaves falling off trees, the car honking, people jumping to avoid puddles, falling into one, fallowing signs, reading signs, giving directions, etc. It is all in and about the exchange, us as critical capacity (as agency) - the interaction or stillness that we, as public, make possible, participate in and pollute. 

Let us define two [types of pollution] and clearly distinguish them from one another: first the hard, and second the soft. By the first I mean on the one hand solid residues, liquids, and gases, emitted throughout the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamis of writing, signs, images, and logos flooding rural, civic, public, and natural spaces as well as landscapes with their advertising. Even though different in terms of energy, garbage and marks nevertheless result from the same soiling gesture, from the same intention to appropriate, and are of animal origin. To be sure, the pestilential invasion of space by soft signs does not enter into the physical and chemical calculations mentioned above, for instance those concerning climate. But in combination with hard pollution, soft pollution proceeds from the same drive. Here is the result: of course, pollution comes from measurable residues of the work and transformations related to energy, but fundamentally it emanates from our will to appropriate, our desire to conquer and expand the space of our properties. He who creates viscous and poisoned lakes or garish posters is making sure no one will take away the spaces he has occupied, now or after he is gone. [8]

Again, the question for architects and urbanists screams: How do we design (for) a pollution - a public space - that has been so appropriated through privatization, domestication, expulsion and emission, it finds itself devoid of agency (or incapacitated by congestion)?

It starts with an investigation in making sense of it all, in understanding what's at stake, in identifying scope and establishing value, in critically engaging its social and spatial structure, and so on. Naturally, the unpacking of this process is an uphill battle and it requires strong ethics, strategy, consideration, patience and struggle, and maybe at times a fleeting will(power) to surrender, to be bored, biased (let's stay away from conspiracy), and (occasionally) distracted - but it rewards in the polyphony of experiences it challenges, communicates and exhibits, which will hopefully be present in the design. (And, if up for a challenge, why not design its use as appropriated through abuse.)

***

* As defined by S. Sassen in her book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy.

[1] Sassen, Saskia, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Harvard University Press, 2014, 215-216.

[2] Easterling, Keller, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso 2014, p.73.

[3] Thrift, N.J., On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 1,no. 1 (1983), p. 45.

[4] Pred, Allan, Place, practice and structure: social and spatial transformation in Southern Sweden: 1750-1850, 1986, p.198.

[5] Dorling, Danny, The Visualisation of Spatial Social Structure, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2012, section 2.7 Adding time.

[6] Dorling, Danny, The Visualisation of Spatial Social Structure, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2012, section 2.6 Population space.

[7] Sassen, Saskia, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Harvard University Press, 2014, 222.

[8] Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution? translated by Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon, Stanford University Press, 2011, 41-42.

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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. 

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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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A few thoughts | On Albanian National Public Lands

Lura National Park, Albania

 Public lands are all of those lands that belong to the public such as parks, forests, grasslands, scenic by-ways and waterways. These public lands include state parks, nature reserves, national forests and parks and other public monuments. [via]

As a kid, I was in awe of them, drawn to their vastness, history, habitat and pure magnificence. Always hopeful to visit and curious to get lost in them. Perfect backdrop for a child's imagination to run wild. Fortunately, not much has changed. My curiosity and imagination of such places, the wish to go back and explore still remain just as fearless, but not as innocent and trusting as before. They have become a challenge. A kind of post-apocalyptic challenge (if you will) in looking for these (now contaminated) lands. Recognizing them. Even finding them. The Albanian National Public Lands.

This article made me think of them earlier today. And I asked myself if I could still name or describe them. Sadly, I could not. Not for lack of remembering (or researching) but because their ownership (publicness), maintenance (management) and overall identity (natural habitat/cultural heritage) as such, has been successfully threatened (if not already destroyed) these past twenty (plus) years. 

After visiting a few of the bigger ones a couple of years back, I found it hard to grasp what they had been reduced to. Contaminated Lands. A trace of former self. A legacy passed on just in name. A future that weighs like a headstone. 

photo via diagstudio

The article defines National Public Lands as:

1. Land owned by everyone and no one, where each citizen has a stake in its health but no one person can claim it for his/her own.

2. Land managed by civil servants (including local and/or state employees).

3. Land that is home to many wild creatures including threatened/endangered plant and animal species. 

4. Land that we are all responsible for, taking care of it and its habitat individually and collectively by not littering or removing necessary items. 

5. Special places that should be around for generations and visitors to enjoy.

Even after following this absolute minimum requirement list to define the Albanian National Public Lands of my childhood, I wasn't certain any of the ones I knew would classify as such. Not anymore. Many have been touched and brutally transformed beyond recognition. Man has left his mark. And what a permanent (beyond consequential) one that has been. It is time to hold him accountable. To educate him. To not blame climate change. Not in Albania. Not yet. It is time to stop celebrating the (so many) days dedicated to National Public Lands. There is nothing to celebrate. Man needs to stop throwing feasts in his 'honor'. His 'honor' is destroying his heritage. But wait, he is raising awareness... Well, in that case.. I'd like to ask when will he raise appreciation?! 

photo via diagstudio

My inner child is furiously disappointed. Weren't we all raised to appreciate and better what was given to us?! [Maybe my la-la land is not your land (pity!!)..or, maybe I'm just not good at this challenge.]

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Random Thoughts | Everyday Ruins vs. Monumental Archeology in Albania

What is the difference between 'ruins' and 'archeology'? 
Do we have the capacity to distinguish one from the other?
What's a 'ruin' and what's 'archeology'?
Are 'ruins' from a past (even) failed ideology (i.e. Piramida) part of our (heritage) 'archeology', or just urban excess/waste (i.e. entrepreneurial opportunities)?  

When speaking about history and heritage, why do we only mention/condemn the 'contemporary' vandal acts upon the 'physical' or 'visible' presence of history (such as mosaics, houses, monuments, i.e. architectural objects) and not the 'cultural' or 'intangible' heritage they have produced? The same cultural foundations that have birthed and enriched our national legacy?

I am (more) offended and shocked by the fact that these vandal acts (and condemning attitudes that follow) clearly manifest (or depending on your optimism suggest) that cultural heritage has already failed us (or it may have never reached us at all) because how else could we explain such disregard, disrespect and plain abuse of fundamentals that has made Albanians (more often than none) proud patriots?  

Why are we louder in condemning acts upon the physical, visible heritage than the acts themselves as a manifestation/product of our dissipated cultural heritage? An alarming symptom of cultural ruin indeed. So, let's not stop at the disgust we feel about 'those people that destroyed that beautiful amphitheater' but tap into our responsibility (as Albanians and their co-patriots) to (re)educate and make them understand the gravity of their ignorance toward what's left of our national legacy.

What worries me is not only how quick rapid 'transitional' modernity (if we dare call it that) have challenged (a better word would be destroyed) the presence of 'physical' historical heritage, but more so how they have castrated the weight of  their our 'cultural' production. We have failed our historical identity (and consequent national legacy) by paralyzing and even wounding a collective memory (supposedly so rich) dating back to antiquity. 

An unfortunate transitional lasting change: haunted by alienated historical 'ruins' and blinded by the glare of towers that now cover them.

Where do we go from here?

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Quick Thoughts On Slow Efforts

Watching the video below, a few thoughts and questions come to mind. 

What is the landscape of post-communist industry, more specifically chemical [or any for that matter] industry in Albania? 
Is it in use? Where? When? How? 
Who has control over it? 
What's its relationship with the 'Sustainability' Movement we're pushing for? 
What is the process from making to destruction dumping the unwanted? 
How do these dumping sites affect the city/life today? Its landscape? [here]
What about the future? How are they designed (if at all)? Can their present (state of being) sustain their future? 
What is their infrastructure? 
How does their artificiality co-exist with the natural bodies of water, land, air and civilization?
How can we start thinking about 'zones of exclusions', post-human error sites and their futures? 
What if this context was Gërdec? What is the future of tragic abandoned sites?

Of Monsters and Men.

Future city/life will grow from a ruined history.

Differently.

Humanity will be the Other.

Damaged as Species. 

Timid in Overexposure. 

Mis/scaled in Habitation. 

Quarantined in Contagiousness. 

So, in our attempts to design the [future] smart city, let's not focus [only] on technological advances but the possibility of [its] destruction and [re]mutation from a failed relationship between man and machine. 

A Mis/communication. 

A caprice. 

An accident. 
A coup.
Incompetent Bureaucracy.

Fear that leads to Consequential Possibilities. 
An awareness that covers [more] ground beyond self [interest].

#FutureEcologies
#PostApocalypseLife
#DesigningFutures

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Open Invitation | SIMA 2014

FYI!!

Now in its second year, SOCIAL IMPACT MEDIA AWARDS or SIMA, a global documentary and educational impact media competition and showcase honoring members of the independent film and global humanitarian industries.

Dedicated to advancing global awareness, social justice, human rights, and humanitarian development, SIMA champions the works of independent FILMMAKERS, ACTIVISTS, and CHANGE-MAKERS, amplifying creative media that exemplifies excellence in its potential to inspire change.

Invited are all international DOCUMENTARY FEATURES and SHORTS that provide deeper insight into the realities of global development, global activism, and the human condition, as well as EDUCATIONAL IMPACT VIDEOS that illuminate "How Aid Works", i.e. the process behind innovative development programs.

For more information about Awards, Jury Prizes, Eligibility Requirements, and to

visit the SIMA website or find them on Facebook / Twitter.

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Gentle Manifest | Syria's Chemical Arsenal To Take a Dump in Albania

The much debated and protested civic movement in Albania at the moment is the overwhelming presence (online and on the streets) against dumping Syrian chemical weapons in the country. Even though the process of disarming and disposing the stockpile of chemical warfare is supposed to be supervised by international experts and not affect the security of Albanian life or health for that matter, I am defining it as ‘dumping’ because we know better. We have experienced botched up jobs and shady operations for similar warfare agents, such as arms and ammunition, and we haven't been quick to forget or recover from the devastating consequences of the ensued tragedies. (Gerdec anyone?)

Understandably the immediate concern people have is their health, followed by a long list of possible side effects from the possibility of exposure (those invisible toxins can be easily spread through transportation or on site). Environmental prosperity is another main concern, because it affects the quality of life including air, water, land, crops, as well as economy, employment, health care, etc. Remember Chernobyl? We know better than to rule out ‘accidents’ (be that human error, corruption, theft, etc.) especially in a quasi-stable, still developing, slowly-post transitional country such as ours. Fearing a hazardous future, will disrupt the present stability in Albania. Even if things go as planned (when does that ever happen?) when destroying the waste, we should take into account the unpredictable life span of its materials and possible byproducts in the long run. A lingering latent threat. Future generations beware.  

As one recent article puts it: “It will be much harder to dispose of the chemical agents themselves.[...] Eliminating such a large stockpile will require creativity.”

It's a fact that Albania doesn't have the necessary means to destroy these weapons, and I can convincingly state that we ain't got the creativity either or better yet the responsibility to take on such a task. Our general knowledge about chemical warfare is vague. We have been mere spectators. It's always been somewhere far away, in countries seemingly distant from our own. That's why we're panicking. In shock just to be considered and selected as a possible dump site for such waste. But why? Does the world have faith in us, or simply doesn't care? We not only lack the expertise on the subject, but the relevant (no bullshit) information to educate and voice our civic capacity on this matter (shape opinions and inform decision-making). Since the story broke a few days ago, we (think) have become overnight experts, but are we able to continue this somewhat constructive dialog about options, possible actions and educational decisions, and not be blindsided by political agreements that exclude us this civic right? We've started the conversation with NO (and rightfully so) but how do we continue it? What are we willing to do, to see it through? 

In today's Albanian fragile climate, be that political, economical, infrastructural and even social, it is hard to maintain a sustainability of sorts (markets, networks, technology, growth) and slowly build upon it as a stable status-quo, let alone contemplating about chemical waste. It can easily kill this post-election upward momentum we got going on. A disruptive move that has blindsided us, just as a war would. We're just getting back on our feet. We are not ready. We are not even prepared.  

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Let's zoom out for a moment and take a look at data from United States: (in an effort to put things into perspective and maybe shake up the undecided)

Stepping away from the overwhelming unease and speculative future that has taken Albania by storm, I want to introduce a U.S. project that takes a close look at these weapons, as materials that ‘can cross jurisdictional lines, bend political, economic and environmental realities around themselves, reshape geologies and reconfigure landscapes now and into deep futures. And they do so almost entirely without notice.’ (via)

Look Only At The Movement explores and examines the relationship between the American Highway system and nuclear waste transport, disposal and remediation. It aims to increase civic awareness and encourage new angles of exchange in regards to ‘contemporary material realities that are simultaneously of us, and far beyond us.’ 

“It invites imaginings, curiosity, and logistical questions about how contemporary life, landscape, and infrastructure design will, for foreseeable futures, bend their realities around the need to contain and indefinitely move-with nuclear materiality.”

Here is an excerpt of the findings: 

(my emphasis) (original article)

“What you do not see is the material itself: the vast quantities of spent nuclear fuel, uranium mine tailings, radioactive medical waste, and contaminated soil, debris, clothing, tools and equipment transported routinely along [...] streets, highways and railroads.

Seventy years into the Atomic Age, designers, engineers, governments and the public have not been able to adequately imagine or build infrastructures for the long-term containment of materials that are too dynamic to be named, or understood, merely as “waste.” The United States is currently processing, shuffling and storing nuclear byproducts at some 20,000 sites throughout the country. About 70,000 metric tons of spent reactor fuel are held at power production sites in 33 states, an amount that increases annually by 2,000 metric tons. Another 13,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste is left over from weapons production and other military activities. You could say that high-level waste is “sheltering in place,” waiting for the first infrastructure capable of containing it for the span of time mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency: one million years. No such storage options are expected to be available for at least the next century.”

I believe that sending chemical warfare to a country such as Albania, with no adequate facilities, technology or infrastructure to demilitarize this hazardous artillery, is not only an Albanian concern but a threat to the stability and peace everywhere. 

Can these protests take us a step further (or backward if you will) into the existing state of our territory, rundown infrastructure, outdated technology, questionable factories, unhealthy sewers, old building systems and realize that an update is imminent? We can't catch up to today's fast paced, super advanced world, or even consider hosting chemical waste if we can't stay relevant to our own society.

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The above article is written as a follow up on comments I had made earlier:

Politicians are not experts, and political predictions of what is 'safe' can be proved far more damaging than what they promise today and are willing to admit tomorrow (when faced with the consequences). #DontDumpChemicalWasteInAlbania

What worries me, other than the devastating consequences on people, environment and the obvious fact that Albania doesn't have the necessary means to destroy these weapons, is the physical security of the chemicals. As in most unstable countries (Albania being a semi or pseudo stable one), this product might be (is) in high demand on the black market and as we've previously experienced (with arms & ammunition) somehow through corruption or inadequate secure systems, it might be stolen and sold to the highest bidder. Consequences that go beyond the geopolitical territory of our small country to threaten peace at a much larger scale.

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Featured Presentation & Exhibit | Besnik Aliaj, Dean of Polis University & AlbaniaNOW

Earlier this month, Dean of Polis University in Tirana, Dr. Besnik Aliaj spoke at Lawrence Technological University about the condition of Architecture and Urban Planning in Albania from Communism to today's (Post)Modernity. 

** [In my opinion, a condition of quasi-futurity where multiple utopias struggle to fight a lingering and somewhat symbolic asymmetric civic warfare, that materializes in an urban setting as a political power game for the 1% and survival to make ends meet (more of a fear to live) for the 99%. 
The era of appalling architecture, towers built to satisfy fetish appetites of the greedy has plateaued. It is over. 
Slums (or informal settlements) have increasingly claimed territory in the outskirts of cities, slowly gaining more power (of a latent kind) that is based not on removal but on transformation of these communities, thus shifting the articulation of urban territory and changing the civic format. 
So the questions to ask are: Are we there yet? What is the future of this paradigm shift? How will it manifest itself in urban form and engagement?] **

Check out the lecture below:

The lecture was followed by the exhibit AlbaniaNOW at Studio Couture in Detroit.

Here are a few snapshots I took from both events: 

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