On The MASA

Shenoraavor Nor Dari yev Pari Gaghand, Ser salawe piroz be, Godt Nytår, Gelukkig nieuwjaar, Aide shoma mobarak, Bonne année, Aith-bhliain Fe Nhaise Dhuit, Gutes Neues Jahr, Chronia Polla!, Hauoli Makahiki Hou, Shanah tovah, Nyob zoo xyoo tshiab, elamat Tahun Baru
Buon Capo d'Anno, Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu, Godt Nyttår, Maligayang Bagong Taon, Szczesliwego Nowego roku, Feliz ano novo, La Multi Ani , Novym Godom, Es guet noisi, Feliz Año Nuevo, Wilujeng Tahun Baru, Gott Nytt År, Happy New Year, Yeni Yılınız Kutlu Olsun, Boldog uj evet, Blwyddyn Newydd Dda...

Vittorio Arrigoni

My apartment in Gaza faces the sea, a panoramic view that’s always done wonders for my mood, often challenged by all the misery that a life under siege can bring. That is, before this morning, when all hell broke loose at my window. This morning in Gaza we woke up to the sound of dropping bombs, and many of them have fallen a few hundred metres from my home. Some of my friends fell under them. So far the death toll is at 210, but it’s bound to rise dramatically. It’s an unprecedented bloodshed. They’ve razed the port facing my home to the ground, and pulverized the police stations. I’m told that the Western media have assimilated and are repeating the press releases issued by the Israeli military off by heart, according to which the attacks targeted Hamas’s terrorist dens only, with surgical precision....>

We are now spectators of the latest -- and perhaps penultimate -- chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less -- with marginal questioning -- mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it -- is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so.

John Berger

27 December 2008

Türkçesi burada

The Neoliberal Frontline - conference publication, pdf

Conference “The Neoliberal Frontline: Urban Struggles in Post-Socialist Societies” took place December 4-7, 2008 in Zagreb within a large space reclamation event Operation:City 2008. A host of urban scholars, architects, urbanists and activists from across the Balkans and from around the world discussed issues of neoliberalism, urban development, ideology and governance...>

The films of Stephan Dillemuth trace the changing habitat of artists from modernist bohemia to the culture industry. Through role-play and reflexivity, the film-maker's attraction-repulsion to romantic, modernist ideals of art and society is given compelling form.

By Maija Timonen

The three films by Stephan Dillemuth that were screened at London's LUX 28 space in September all take as their starting points phenomena specific to German history. Lichtmenschen im Sumpf der Sonne – Studien zur Lebensreform (Sunpeople in the Slush of the Light – Studies on the Reform of Lifem) (2002) is about a variety of groupings categorised under the heading Lebensreform, or life reform, that were prevalent in turn of the century Germany. The film considers the transposition of these groups’ utopian aspirations into the contemporary idiom of lifestyle choices. Gesetzt nämlich, dies wäre wahr, wäre es damit auch schon wünschenswert? (Assuming then, this would be true, would that make it desirable also?) (1998) is ‘a film about Richard Wagner and his circle’, as its subheading states. Elbsandsteingebirge (Elbe Sandstone Mountains) (1994) considers the position of the German Romantics in relation to the political events of their time, as well as drawing tentative parallels between the commonly ridiculed romantic sensibilities and contemporary formulations of artistic subjectivity. The press release for the screenings stated that this is the first time these films have been available to see with English subtitles, which adds not only to the sense that these are intently ‘German’ films, but framed the screening events as the re-introduction of something dug out from the archives...>

For "I'm Short, Your House" click here

We want first of all to say a collective yes! to the uprising in Greece. We are artists, writers and teachers who are connected in this moment by common friends and commitments. We are globally dispersed and are mostly watching, and hoping, from afar. But some of us are also there, in Athens, and have been on the streets, have felt the rage and the tear gas, and have glimpsed the dancing specter of the other world that is possible. We claim no special right to speak or be heard. Still, we have a few things to say. For this is also a global moment for speaking and sharing, for hoping and thinking together...>

Alain Badiou'dan

Of Which Real is this Crisis the Spectacle?

As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we call the "cinema". Nothing is missing, the spectacle of mounting disaster, the feeling of being suspended from enormous puppet-strings, the exoticism of the identical – the Bourse of Jakarta placed under the same spectacular rubric as New York, the diagonal from Moscow to Sao Paulo, everywhere the same fire ravaging the same banks – not to mention terrifying plotlines: it is impossible to avert Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything will collapse....>

Paul Virilio'dan

on the financial crisis

Gerard Courtois/Michel Guerrin:
In 2002 you have produced an exhibition at the Maison Cartier under the
title “Ce qui arrive” (’that what occurs’); It was about the accident in
contemporary history: Tchernobyl, 9-11, the Tsunami… A statement by
Hannah Arendt was the marker of your demonstration: “progress and
catastrophe are the two faces of the same coin”. Is this where we have
come to with the ‘crash of the stock exchange’?

Paul Virilio:
Well, of course. In 1979, at the time of the mishap at the Three Mile
Island nuclear plant in the U.S., I did mention the occurence of an
“original accident” - the kind of accident we bring forth ourselves. I
said that our technical prowess was pregnant of catastrophic promises.
In the past, accidents were local affairs. With Tchernobyl, we have
entered the era of global accidents, whose consequences are in the realm
of the long term. the current crash represents the perfect ‘integral
accident’.Its effects ripple far and wide, and it incorporates the representation
of all other accidents....>


Brian Holmes is speaking for Democracy in America: The National Campaign



FINANCIAL CRIMES

The hardest thing for an American to remember is that there are better ways of living in the world. The first reason why this is so hard to remember is that throughout your existence the government and the corporations have been telling you the American way of life is simply the best there is. And the second reason is that throughout your experience you’ve seen how this one best way of life inexorably divides the winners from the losers, leaving wreckage in its wake and producing monsters on both sides of the divide. The hardest thing for an American with a conscience is not to wake up every day feeling cynical to the core. But there are better ways of life, that allow people to take care of each other, to avoid war and destruction, to recognize necessary limits and to organize social relations for the common good....>


David Harvey is speaking for Democracy in America: Between Financial Crisis and Urban Crisis

What makes a biopolitical space? A discussion with Toni Negri

Toni Negri discusses the significance of urban space for new forms of opposition. The city, he says, is where the “political diagonal” intersects the “biopolitical diagram” – where people’s relation to power is most pronounced. Negri’s interlocutors are involved in exploring “soft” forms of activism, urban projects that create collectivities on micro, neighbourhood levels. Negri is critical of “soft” forms, however, preferring rupture and revolution over accumulation and gradual change.

Toni Negri: As we have seen in the urban struggles that have recently taken place – I am thinking about the reaction to the closure of the Ungdomshuset social centre in Copenhagen last August, or this incredible thing that happened in Rostock on the margins of the G8 summit last June – the watchword of the European autonomous movements today is “take back the metropolis, take back the city, take back the centre”. This has become a widespread rallying cry: these movements, which have begun in the cities, are, from a political point of view, extremely important. Then in February 2007 there was the huge mobilization in Vicenza – this old catholic stronghold – against the expansion of the Nato airbase there. Nato is transferring all its resources for potential military intervention – particularly aimed at the Middle East – to Vicenza and Udine. And this is what people – not only those from the movement, but the city residents in general – refuse. The struggle has thus spread across the board: no-global movements, neighbourhood groups, Catholics, pacifists, ecologists. It is a new urban political activism, a different way of looking at of the city. People are saying: we don’t want war established in our cities. Clearly, this has nothing to do with social centres in the form that they take throughout Italy and elsewhere, Christiania in Copenhagen for example. But it is exciting. I believe that something like five hundred people were arrested last summer in Copenhagen. It is a model of resistance. At first there was no desire for provocation or direct confrontation, the protesters were called “pink”. But because they were fighting for their space of freedom, they became “black”! What is fundamental is the passage from the idea of constructing countercultural spaces to the idea of active resistance....>

Gazeteci Ali Bayramoğlu, profesörler Baskın Oran ve Ahmet İnsel, Dr. Cengiz Aktar'ın ilk çağrıcıları olduğu kampanyada imzalanması istenen metin.
"1915'te Osmanlı Ermenilerinin maruz kaldığı 'Büyük Felaket'e duyarsız kalınmasını, bunun inkar edilmesini vicdanım kabul etmiyor. Bu adaletsizliği reddediyor, kendi payıma Ermeni kardeşlerimin duygu ve acılarını paylaşıyor, onlardan özür diliyorum."

İmza kampanyasına katılmak için

“We don’t forget, we don’t forgive” – day of internationalaction against state murders,
20 – 12 - 2008

Today (Friday), the assembly of the occupied Athens Polytechnic decided to make a callout for European and global-wide actions of resistance in the memory of all assassinated youth, migrants and all those who were struggling against the lackeys of the state. Carlo Juliani; the French suburb youths; Alexandros Grigoropoulos and the countless others, all around the world. Our lives do not belong to the states and their assassins! The memory of the assassinated brothers and sisters, friends and comrades stays alive through our struggles! We do not forget our brothers and sisters, we do not forgive their murderers. Please translate and spread around this message for a common day of coordinated actions of resistance in as many places around the world as possible.

http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog

Staš Kleindienst, Between Resistance and Commodity (Reartikulacija, Part 2 of 3)

Dieter Lesage, The Next Documenta Shouldn't Be in Kassel

Carol Yinghua Lu, Accidental Conceptualism

Metahaven, Brand States: Postmodern Power, Democratic Pluralism, and Design

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Blame It on Gorbachev: The Sources of Inspiration and Crucial Turning Points of Inke Arns

Simon Sheikh, Positively East Village Revisited: The Problem with Puerilism

Jan Verwoert, The Boss: On the Unresolved Question of Authority in Joseph Beuys’s Oeuvre and Public Image

On Saturday December 6, 2008, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year old comrade, was murdered in cold blood, with a bullet in the chest by a cop in the area of Exarchia...>

Eksarhia için...>

Democracia, Welfare State (2007).


Brian Holmes'dan

Megagentrification; Limits of an Urban Paradigm

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
David Harvey

What is the city for? The response of neoliberal urbanism has been extraordinarily coherent: the city is a living and breathing machine for maximizing the return on investment. The frenetic gentrification of attractive city neighborhoods over the course of the last decade and the dramatically swelling real-estate bubbles that came in its wake have provided the most obvious illustration of this primary rule. Behind the urban scenes, the transnationalization of municipal bond offers has been widely used to raise capital for the infrastructure of the real-estate boom, opening up lucrative financial markets and reconfiguring the links between municipal and national governance in the process...>

David Harvey'den

The Right to the City

We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city...>

Judith Butler'dan Obama ve Sol Üzerine

Uncritical Exuberance?

Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to "redemption" or that "the country has been returned to us" or that "we finally have one of us in the White House." Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief...>

Dan S. Wang'dan

A Response to Judith Butler: Working the Optimism

Judith Butler’s commentary Uncritical Exuberance? continues what the left has been doing for so long it is now almost second nature: distance itself from the power structure. Critical voices on the left are always the first to see the likelihoods of cooptation, neutralization of radical elements, assimilation of grassroots formal innovation into the institutional sphere, misreadings of a political figure as a messianic force, looming conflicts and frustrations with erstwhile allies, and all the various pitfalls of politics at the mass, national, mediated scale. But when Butler asks, to where is our wholehearted and emotionally-rewarding identification with (first) the Obama campaign and (now, maybe?) this president leading us, I cannot help but think, there is a slightly different set of questions the critical left needs to be asking right now...>

"Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art" 2 Aralık'da sona erdi. Bu yıl küratörlüğünü Adam Budak, Anselm Franke / Hila Peleg ve Raqs Media Collective'in üstlendiği Manifesta, İtalya'daydı ve Emre Hüner de Panoptikon isimli animasyon videosuyla yer almıştı.

Görseller için...>

Masa kitabında da Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards A New Critique Of Institutions adlı makalesi ile yer alacak Brian Holmes'dan

The Affectivist Manifesto: Artistic Critique for the 21st Century

"In the 20th century art was judged with respect to the existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal elements it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Today all that has changed, definitively...>

Masa Projesi 2 yıllık süreçte yaptığı sergileri, sergiler üzerine yapılmış konuşmaları, söyleşileri ve makaleleri kapsayan bir kitap hazırlıyor. Bu kitapla birlikte Institutional Critique başlığı altında yazılmış metinlerden oluşan bir seçkiyi de kitabın bir bölümü olarak sunacak.

Institutional Critique bölümünün içeriği;

John R. Seorle, What Is Institution?

Paolo Virno, Anthropology And Theory Of Institutions

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From The Aesthetic
Of Administration To The Critique Of Institutions

Alice Creischer /Andreas Siekmann, Models For Reform

Andrea Fraser, From The Critique Of Institutions To An Institution Of Critique

Jens Hoffmonn, The Curatorialization Institutional Critique

Boris Buden, Criticism Without Crisis: Crisis Without Criticism

Isabelle Grow, Beyond Institutional Critique

Brian Holmes, Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards A New Critique Of Institutions

Gerald Raunig, Instituent Practices Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming

Suzana Milevska, Internalization Of The Discourse Of Institutional Critique And Its Unhappy Consciousness