Winter Now

R.I.P. Trish Keenan.

Rhetoric

Time to take a short music break. This is a Public...Service...Announcement. With wobble....





Steinski, still the man.

On the Poverty of Student Life, Redux

"The spatial politics of the occupations themselves are obviously worth consideration," writes Owen Hatherly in an article about recent student unrest and the aesthetics of occupation in the U.K.. Via Afterall:

"It's also a reminder that students were encouraged under New Labour to be an ideal combination of indentured serfs and aspirant yuppies. The actual conditions of students' existence in the 2000s, from the poverty of their housing, to their catastrophic debt, to their part-time jobs in call centres, to their years of unpaid intern labour, were bleak indeed; but all was hidden by an oxymoronic language of inclusivity and privilege -- they might have been living in cupboards, but they were cupboards with plasma screen TVs; they might have felt underpaid, overworked and tithed, but were also constantly reminded of how lucky they were to enjoy the hedonistic student lifestyle. Suddenly, under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, one half of that bargain -- the expansion of education that accompanied its part-privatisation -- has disappeared, and we're now witnessing the fallout. So it's worth keeping New Labour's student architecture -- desperately private, paranoid, gated, restricted, securitised -- in mind when you think of the occupations of universities that have been such an important part of the student protests. Implicitly or explicitly, this is the kind of space they are reacting against. It is a protest against the coalition, to be sure, but it's also a magnificent rejection of the fear, quietism and atomisation that was the result of earlier policies. The students' use of space is equally fearless. ..."

Full article here.

Unintentionally Topical

Semi-lenghty guest post of mine up at one of the outboard venues. Something along the order of: "The Quest for Fame in the 'Me Decade': Political Assassination as Theater of the Absurd." Link here.

I wanted to work in something about Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme as well, but couldn't without it over-burdening the thing (re: "fact fatigue") or it veering into tangentiality. Shrug.

Habitat

As far as failed urban housing projects go, Le Corbusier's "Unités d'habitations" gets beat up on all the time. It's something of overplayed anti-Modernist cliché, innit?

Above, we have photos by Berlin-based photographer Tobias Zielony, images that accompanied his recent video project Le Vele di Scampia. The project takes its name from its subject, the "Le Vele" ("The Sails") public housing district in Naples. Designed by architect Franz Di Salvo, the project was completed and opened in 1975. Having been a reputed haven for squatters, drug trafficking, and various mafia activities over the years, the complex is apparently in the process of being gradually demolished, as it has been deemed a municipal failure.

As the exhibit's press release has it:

Only about a hundred families – the last remaining assignees and occupants – still live in the buildings, which have now been reduced to ghostlike ruins. Consisting of 7000 shots taken at night with a digital reflex camera, and edited at an artificial speed, the Le Vele di Scampia photographic animation uses the language of cinema to convey the deprivations of those who live in or frequent these places.

... As well as the subsidised-housing districts and the authorised private-cooperative “parks”, this part of the city is also home to a Rom camp – on the landings of the light-blue Vela (“housing units” for the designer) – with American sub-culture models (hip hop and breakdance, for example), which are local versions of global codes and the only means of reacting to boredom and urban decay, overlapping and interacting with a very strong local identity. ...This is why, more than in other metropolitan areas, [Zielony's] work has been influenced by the very particular characteristics of the context, which is afflicted by a staggering level of unemployment among the young (50%), in which there are both widespread forms of illegality and some sparse centres of cultural resistance which, through a pervasive system of associations, has led to social initiatives of various types.

The film also recently served as the setting for the 2008 film Gommora.

As a matter of fact, there's the Public Housing Archive blog, which appears to have stalled some time ago after a mere two posts. It's two entries? Le Vele,...and Chicago's Cabrini Green. So I suppose that means the two are/were worthy companions.



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(On a side note: Apologies for the dearth of posts recently. A couple of months ago, the opportunity popped up for me to net some desperately-needed income. I was pulled onto a publishing project, and it's kept me busy plowing through boocoo manuscript in recent weeks. That, and the holidays, plus I've been drafting some things for that guest-blogging venture I mentioned earlier.)

Perimeters

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"...It took a while for me to realise that much of 'After the Fall' is about battlefields: just not the traditional war zones, rich with the screams of men and the smell of death, which have been recorded almost pathologically on screen and print. Instead, it directs its gaze to the ongoing environmental struggle taking place beyond the boundaries of our cities, where the urban zoning system begins to blur and unravel. I identify potential locations throughout the world using Google Maps and have become increasingly experienced at 'reading' the terrain from a bird's (or more accurately, a satellite's) perspective."

Photographs and text by Hin Chua, "After the Fall."