BOOM WOW!

Notre volet estival sur le theme de l'union méditerranéenne debute avec une Utopie du siecle dernier: ATLANTROPA

Tue, 07 May 2013 12:26:45 +0300

Atlantropa, also referred to as Panropa,^[1] was a gigantic engineering and colonization project devised by the German architect Herman Sörgel in the 1920s and promulgated by him until his death in 1952. Its central feature was a hydroelectric dam to be built across the Strait of Gibraltar, which would have provided enormous amounts of hydroelectricity^[2] and would have led to the lowering of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by up to 200 metres (660 ft), opening up large new lands for settlement, for example in a now almost totally drained Adriatic Sea.

Sörgel saw his scheme, projected to take over a century, as a peaceful European-wide alternative to the Lebensraum concepts which later became one of the stated reasons for Nazi conquest of new territories. Atlantropa would provide land and food, employment, electric power, and most of all, a new vision for Europe and neighbouring Africa.

The Atlantropa movement, through its several decades, was characterised by four constants:^[3]

Pacifism, in its promises of using technology in a peaceful way;
Pan-European sentiment, seeing the project as a way to unite a war-torn Europe;
White-centric superiority (and even racist) attitudes to Africa (which was to become united with Europe into “Atlantropa”), and
Neo-colonial geopolitics which saw the world being divided into three blocs, America, Asia and Atlantropa.

Active support was limited to architects and planners from Germany and a number of other primarily northern European countries. Critics derided it for various faults, ranging from lack of any actual cooperation of Mediterranean countries in the planning to the impacts it would have had on the historic coastal communities left stranded inland when the sea receded. The project reached great popularity in the late 1920s/early 1930s, and for a short period again, in the late 1940s/early 1950s, but soon disappeared from general discourse again after Sörgel’s death.^[4]

The project

Outline map of the various hydroelectricity and land reclamation projects combined in Atlantropa.

Soergel’s proposed new locks at the Gibraltar Dam.

The plan was inspired by the coeval understanding of the Messinian salinity crisis,^[5] a pan-Mediterranean geological event that took place 5 to 6 million years ago.^[6] The contemporary geologists proposed that the large salt deposits surrounding the Mediterranean coast were the result of its partial isolation by a shrinking of the seaways connecting to the Atlantic. Today it is a majority opinion among geoscientists that the Mediterranean underwent a significant drawdown during that period.^[7]

The Utopian goal was to solve all the major problems of European civilization by the creation of a new continent, “Atlantropa”, consisting of Europe and Africa and to be inhabited by Europeans (who were supposed to flourish under the effects of the climate changes, as opposed to Africa’s native populations). Sörgel was convinced that to remain competitive with theAmericas and an emerging Oriental “Pan-Asia”, Europe must become self-sufficient, and this meant possessing territories in all climate zones. Asia would forever remain a mystery to Europeans, and the British would not be able to maintain their global empire in the long run – hence a common European effort to colonize Africa was necessary.^[8] The lowering of the Mediterranean would enable the production of immense amounts of electric power, guaranteeing the growth of industry. Unlike fossil fuels, this power source would not be subject to depletion. Vast tracts of land would be freed for agriculture – including the Sahara desert, which was to be irrigated with the help of three sea-sized man-made lakes throughout Africa. The massive public works, envisioned to go on for more than a century, would relieve unemployment and the acquisition of new land would ease the pressure of overpopulation, which Sörgel thought were the fundamental causes of political unrest in Europe. Sörgel also believed the project’s effect on the climate could only be beneficial.^[9] The Middle East under the control of a consolidated Atlantropa would be an additional energy source and a bulwark against the Yellow Peril.^[10]

The publicity material produced for Atlantropa by Sörgel and his supporters contain plans, maps, and scale models of several dams and new ports on the Mediterranean, views of the Gibraltar dam crowned by a 400-metre tower designed by Peter Behrens, projections of the growth of agricultural production, sketches for a pan-Atlantropan power grid, and even provision for the protection of Venice as a cultural landmark.^[11] Concerns about climate change, earthquakes, attacks and the fate ofAfrican culture were often ignored as being unimportant.

After the Second World War, interest was piqued again as the Western Allies sought to create closer bonds with Africa and combat communism, but the invention of nuclear power, the cost of rebuilding, and the end of colonialism left Atlantropa technologically unnecessary and politically unfeasible, although the Atlantropa Institute remained in existence until 1960.^[11]

Most proposals to dam the Strait of Gibraltar since that time have focused on the hydroelectric potential of such a project, and do not envisage any substantial lowering of the Mediterranean sea level.

In fiction

In Gene Roddenberry’s novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Strait of Gibraltar has been dammed. Roddenberry may have borrowed the idea from Sörgel via the popular works of Willy Ley, whose book Engineers’ Dreams describes both Atlantropa and Sörgel’s other grand design, the forming of an inland sea in central Africa.^[11]

A similar idea has a central role in the 1950 novel by Soviet science fiction writer Grigorii Grebnev The Flying Station, popular in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s and translated to Hebrew. It depicts a future where Socialist Revolution is triumphant worldwide and leads humanity to undreamed happiness and prosperity, but must still fight off neo-Nazi remnants who skulk near the North Pole and plot to sabotage the Revolution’s most prestigious project – the erecting of a huge dam at Gibraltar. The book took up the technical details of Sörgel’s idea while diametrically reversing its underlying geopolitical implications.

In Philip K. Dick’s classic 1962 alternate history novel The Man in the High Castle, mention is made in passing of Nazi Germany draining the Mediterranean as one of several gargantuan projects.

The Mediterranean sea is also mentioned as drained in Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, in the context of the spectacular archaeological discoveries it enabled.

David Mason’s The Shores of Tomorrow (1971), with the theme of conflict between numerous timelines of alternate history that found means of invading each other, includes a technologically-advanced world where a project similar to Sörgel’s had been realised thousands of years ago, with the former Mediterranean sea bed transformed into fertile agricultural land. During a cataclysmic power struggle the dam at the Gibraltar-analogue is blown up and the valleys flooded by the Atlantic waters, with immense loss of life.

Discussion of the project rates a chapter in John Knittel’s 1939 novel Power for Sale.

There is a passing reference to a huge hydroelectric dam spanning the Strait of Gibraltar in the alternate history novel Under the Yoke by S. M. Stirling. Although the word “Atlantropa” is never used and there is no mention of lowered sea levels in the Mediterranean, Stirling’s novels of the Draka are something of an inversion of Sörgel’s vision, in that it is Africa that subsumes Europe to create the new composite continental entity, with the guiding light coming from Pretoria rather than Munich.

In the Dan Simmons novels Ilium and Olympos the Mediterranean has been dammed and drained.

In the PC game Railroad Tycoon II: The Second Century, a dam is built across the Strait of Gibraltar in one of the missions.

In the Harry Turtledove novella “Down in the Bottomlands”, the area of the Mediterranean Sea is a desert through natural causes - the Strait of Gibraltar had naturally closed thousands of years earlier. The story has the protagonist try to stop a terrorist plot to open up the natural dam to the Atlantic Ocean with a nuclear weapon.

[edit]

Some of the first Nabhies i did. Exchanged them with eggs, good...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 21:24:00 +0300

nabhi, theopsy

Some of the first Nabhies i did. Exchanged them with eggs, good wine and great cheese in Greece (summer 2011)

KOM.POST/ L'ecran de la caverne

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:13:00 +0200

Streaming de l’écran de la Caverne
http://www.ustream.tv/user/cavernegrecque

Le symptoma grec avec la participation d’Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Toni Negri, Jacques Rancière, Frédéric Lordon, et bien d’autres. Trois jours de rencontres avec des nombreux artistes et des militants de plusieurs pays

http://www.univ-paris8.fr/Le-Symptoma-Grec

programme du colloque:

http://www.univ-paris8.fr/IMG/pdf_symptoma-grec-programme.pdf

« L’écran de la caverne »
« L’écran de la caverne » est le nom d’un lieu. Il n’est cependant ni plat, ni sombre. Il n’a pas non plus prétention à cacher, à enfouir ou à illusionner. Il se présente comme un espace à dimensions multiples : de rencontre et d’échange non moins que de lecture et de visionnage. Pensé en parallèle du colloque, il pourra tout autant s’en éloigner que le croiser ou le prolonger. A partir des paroles déposées dans l’amphi X, il déploiera sur ses parois des images rapportées des rues d’Athènes ou de Thessalonique, des mouvements de foule filmés dans des documentaires, des vidéos d’artistes ou des œuvres militantes, des flux de paroles qui peuplent les blogs et médias alternatifs grecs et dans lesquels vous pourrez naviguer à tout moment entre 10h et 18h grâce à des postes d’ordinateurs mis à votre disposition. Une table dédiée aux maisons d’édition indépendantes vous permettra de consulter les ouvrages associés aux principales thématiques du colloque et à leurs intervenants, tout comme elle vous donnera accès à certains textes inédits en français ou en grec. Enfin, et parce qu’une caverne ça sert aussi à se restaurer à l’abri des prédateurs : nous vous proposerons des boissons, fraîches et chaudes, ainsi que des douceurs.
Fonctionnement de « L’écran de la Caverne »
Dramaturgie et scénographie : Nicolas Fretté, Aikaterini-Sofia Georgiadou, Camille Louis, Coralie Rouet
18 et 19 Janvier, de 10h à 12h et de 14h30 à 17h
En parallèle de chacune des tables rondes, vous trouverez dans cet espace : une programmation associée de films et vidéos une sélection de documents et ouvrages à consulter sur place une navigation à travers des sites et blogs associés aux thématiques abordées une archive immédiate des portraits filmés, au même moment, en salle A029 un dispositif de discussions et débats à échelle réduite et hétérogène : la fabrique du commun des boissons chaudes et froides
18 et 19 Janvier, de 12h15 à 14h00 :
Dans la salle A029, sont convoqués des groupes de 1 à 5 personnes participant au colloque en tant que conférencier, étudiant, personnel de l’université, artiste invité…pour un moment de discussion «en rebond» des thématiques proposées par les demi-journées du colloque. Ces portraits sont filmés, collectés pour un film consacré à la question de «l’exposition hétérogène des savoirs» mais aussi et surtout retranscrits en direct dans la salle A028. Le texte qu’ils composent devient le terrain de nouveaux débats et discussions au sein des tables de la fabrique du commun que des visiteurs plus lointains peuvent aussi suivre par streaming.
La « fabrique du commun ». Ce dispositif de rencontres et débats invite les intervenants de la journée (ceux passés du matin et ceux à venir de l’après-midi) à échanger de façon plus informelle avec l’ensemble des participants du colloque (étudiants, professeurs, autres intervenants, visiteurs curieux…). 4 tables pouvant accueillir chacune entre 4 et 6 personnes sont disposées dans la salle A 028 et deviennent l’espace de travail temporaire de ces groupements hétérogènes. L’ensemble des discussions est archivé par l’équipe de la caverne et, afin que chaque visiteur puisse suivre le fil des discussions croisées, y compris lorsqu’il n’est pas à une table, « l’écran de la caverne » projette en temps réel les notes et synthèses de chacune des tables. Petit à petit, un mur polémique se dessine comme lieu d’une parole collective, recueillie depuis des singularités au travail. Une façon de rendre visible la charge « critique » et, de fait, créative, d’une pensée en temps de crise.
Politique, cet espace ne le sera que s’il est effectivement peuplé des polites que nous sommes tous. Il s’agira dès lors que nous occupions le terrain comme espace de travail et de dialogue. Vous êtes donc tous invités à peupler l’écran de la caverne en nous envoyant d’éventuels textes inédits, des liens vidéos, des photographies etc. ; choisis parce que pertinents pour l’occasion.
Écrivez nous à : symptomecaverne@gmail.com
COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL
Le Symptôma Grec
Université Paris 8 et École normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm du 18 au 20 janvier 2013.
Organisé par le Département de philosophie de l’Université Paris 8 et le Laboratoire d’études et de recherches sur les logiques contemporaines de la philosophie (LLCP EA 4008) Avec l’Université Aristote (Thessalonique), l’Université Panteion (Athènes), The Birbeck Institute of the Humanities (London), Kingston University (London), L’Académie des sciences / Institut de France.

Streaming de l’écran de la Caverne
http://www.ustream.tv/user/cavernegrecque

About KOM.POST /

Founded in January 2009 in Berlin, kom.post is a nomadic interdisciplinary collective made up of 30 international artists and researchers. Kompost members base their research and actions on process. They attach less importance to the production of a collective work than on setting in motion a “terrain” for interrogation which activates creative “micro-groups”. As the work methods are diverse, each member is able to nourish, prolong, and counterbalance the research of another member or that of the entire group, following the principles which are dear to kom.post : the “exchange of knowledge” and the “reprise” - or re-take. The roles of author, contributor, and spectator are constantly exchanged, thereby maintaining the members in a continuous research on forms of creation, transmission and artistic sharing, still permitted and valid in these “2.0 times”. kom.post presents its creation (performances, new form of mediations, exhibition…) in various European and international events.

http://about.kompost.me/

DIMITRIS PAPADATOS On how the message fucks the medium

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:21:00 +0200

http://dimitrispapadatos.tumblr.com/

Stolen images, bended script codes, distorted web formats, ready mades
non-objects, and poetic trolling - the constant flow of “Dimensions
Variable” from ultra prolific Dimitris Papadatos expends, crystalizing
the beauty of a supra contemporary world, as perishable and
ungraspable as “here-and-now”.

Straight at the top of the rising wave of open source formatting and
web scripture, which provides everyone with the advantage and
embarrassment of a new pair of clumsy powerful harms that can reach globally,
Dimitri Papadatos has walked in the virtual world with the arrogance,
the sharpness and lucidity of a romantic enfant terrible - the curiosity
and perseverance of an artiste paysagiste, feeding himself with
everything perishable in an aborted eldorado, occupied until recently
solely by gold seekers and anonymous rioters.

The recipe of his tour de force:
- An absolute commitment to intangible forms - anti-matter that can’t
be bought, nor categorized or explained.
- A constant disdain for the Ego, powered by the contemplative
attitude of an erudite.
-The conviction that by brain processing the output of all
processors -and which ever algorithm is in use - the message fucks the
medium.

During this Week Boom-Wow! explores in a single post the latest works from the constallation Dimitris Papadatos.

And as a starter, Boomwow meets Dimitris on one of his favorite battleground at the occasion of his closing day on #000FF online gallery. Here is the transcription of his interview.
Enjoy

Saturday

INTERVIEW BY BOOM WOW, STATUS UPDATE,COMMENTS, DIMENSIONS VARIABLE, 2012

3Like · · Share

Mano Plizzi, Δεριζαματζορ Προμπλεμ Ιναυστραλια and 3 others like this.
52 of 56

View previous comments
#0000FF It all depends on the way you look at it. And by the way I actually mean the medium and format.

Saturday at 14:13 · Like
#0000FF I never use quotes such as : ‘It’s all in the eye of the beholder’ or ‘it’s not about looking but understanding’

Saturday at 14:13 · Like
#0000FF For this show ,what I tried to do was to keep a steady pace of posting and maintaining a natural process of being present. What you are looking at is a momentum of an avatar, the relics of time spent through endless browsing and an abstract illustration of a user, drawn by the self referential mechanics of online society systems.

Saturday at 14:15 · Like
Boomwow Theblog What about the ’ Super- art’ term?

Saturday at 14:16 · Like
#0000FF The ‘Super-art’ term does not apply to this volume of work, given the fact that what I am using here is not an extended overflow of computer graphics to create a wonderful ,never the less, image.

Saturday at 14:17 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Yes, I understand that, but would you ever use a term?

Saturday at 14:18 · Like
#0000FF I guess a theatrical term would be more appropriate. ‘Optimized realism’ and ‘super- theater ‘ could do the work. :)

Saturday at 14:19 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Will you define briefly few concepts that your recent work has unleashed?

Saturday at 14:20 · Like
#0000FF Ok!

Saturday at 14:20 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Greece vs the world

Saturday at 14:21 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW_O__uBHtA IT’S AN ORTHODOX XIAN THING.

greeks + serbs vs. new world order
www.youtube.com
greeks + serbs vs. new world order greece serbia greeks serbians brothers

Saturday at 14:22 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Virtual vs physical

Saturday at 14:23 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqQZIejCIVg WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ?

David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches …… Dessins sur iPhone et iPad
www.youtube.com
Video of film from exhibition at Fondation Pierre Bergé et Yves Saint Laurent, December 2011

Saturday at 14:24 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Dimensions Variable

Saturday at 14:25 · Like
#0000FF Yes please.

Saturday at 14:25 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Elitist

Saturday at 14:26 · Like
#0000FF http://mutant-sounds.blogspot.gr/

Saturday at 14:28 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Facebook online gallery.

Saturday at 14:29 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33TbR_1Mx7g WITCH HUNT

Warlock - Burning the Witches
www.youtube.com
This is how metal is supposed to sound kids. Evil dies by fire! Doro rocks!

Saturday at 14:30 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Nation

Saturday at 14:31 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6aS2NWcC6Y

Diavolitsi-panigiri-kagkoures!
www.youtube.com
Funnn!

Saturday at 14:32 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Copyright

Saturday at 14:33 · Like
#0000FF https://vimeo.com/48043838

CHANGE,VIDEO,DIMENSIONS VARIABLE,2012
vimeo.com
Vimeo is the home for high-quality videos and the people who love them.

Saturday at 14:34 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Middle class

Saturday at 14:34 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f224OWYcaAY

14 Human Design Generator Aura Type
www.youtube.com

Hawaii’s John Martin returns to explain the Human Design ‘Aura Types’ and how to…
live your design. Deepen your understanding of the free Human Design persona…
See more

Saturday at 14:36 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Haters

Saturday at 14:36 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ0xpAVcQRc

Man who killed 12 students in Rio left video (english subtitle)
www.youtube.com

THE POLICE JUST RELEASED A NEW VIDEO. IN THE NEW FOOTAGE THE KILLER, WITH LONG B…
EARD, SPEAKS MORE AND INCITES HIS “BROTHERS” TO COTINUE HIS WORK - WATCH HERE…
See more

Saturday at 14:38 · Like
#0000FF AND THIS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuIoWt5yiKw

Justin Bieber Elaborate Prank Shocks Fans
www.youtube.com

http://bit.ly/Wdsnsw - Click to see the full music video! http://Bit.ly/SubClevv…
erTV

- Click to Subscribe! http://Facebook.com/ClevverTV - Become a Fan! http…
See more

Saturday at 14:39 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Format vs message

Saturday at 14:39 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdzXkuTJFSQ

myopic cycle test
www.youtube.com

Saturday at 14:40 · Like
Boomwow Theblog China

Saturday at 14:41 · Like
#0000FF https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=uInbq5BcMzw

Chinese “eye exercises” not working
www.youtube.com
Despite daily “eye exercises” Chinese kids still have some of the worst eyesight in the world. The solution? Let’s drive the clinic to the school!

Saturday at 14:41 · Like
Boomwow Theblog 3 w 8

Saturday at 14:42 · Like
#0000FF 6 6 6

Saturday at 14:43 · Like
#0000FF https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150689957047494.458764.572047493&type=3

Saturday at 14:44 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Is a total event availabe in the age of online communities and multiple ‘events’?

Saturday at 14:47 · Like
#0000FF I think it is easier now. We just have to re- explore the norms of non-being.
The physical presence has a way to distort reality and be deceiving. My work is all about the spiritual presence that an avatar includes. And the only working transmission process is through repeatedly summoning this presence. In this case it’s like having a ghost party. Maybe better a host party.

Saturday at 14:51 · Like
Boomwow Theblog What is the average date of expiration and price of one of your online works for a possible consumer?

Saturday at 14:52 · Like
#0000FF My online work is not for sale. I was talking to this artist who immediately thought I was working for Facebook when I told him that.

Saturday at 14:54 · Like
Boomwow Theblog You release your LP on a record label. What motivates you to print your music on vinyl instead of choosing your usual ‘dimension variable’ immaterial format’ ?

Saturday at 14:55 · Like
#0000FF It is mainly because I want to see the cover of my LP at my friends’ collections. Plus I am a collector myself.

Saturday at 14:56 · Like
Boomwow Theblog At ‘Boomwow’ we usually end our interviews with a game…. Hum … what about trolling? Wanna play? Could be fun. So here we go: Say a number between 1-20. Select it on your fb chat menu. Let’s start trolling their wall!! Btw do you think trolling emancipates or kills the political debate?

Saturday at 14:58 · Like
#0000FF hahaha

Saturday at 14:58 · Like
#0000FF ok

Saturday at 14:58 · Like
#0000FF well

Saturday at 14:58 · Like
#0000FF 5

Saturday at 14:59 · Like
#0000FF ok i will post the trolling as screen shots :P

Saturday at 15:01 · Like
#0000FF Anyway, what I think about trolling is that its political enforcement is damned to remain biased.Of course it is always a matter of who you troll.The thing is that in a magical way , it can be a heavenly lie detector test.

Saturday at 15:06 · Like
#0000FF We, as species are not ready to deal with confrontation.

Saturday at 15:07 · Like
Boomwow Theblog Ok. Thank you for your time Dimitris. Tag me on the screen shots! :)

Saturday at 15:09 · Like
#0000FF Ok

Saturday at 15:09 · Like
#0000FF Thank you !

Saturday at 15:09 · Like

http://dimitrispapadatos.tumblr.com/

TWO LETTERS AND ONE SONG/Published in "L'Impossible - L'autre Journal"

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 16:12:17 +0300

TWO LETTERS AND ONE SONG/Published in "L'Impossible - L'autre Journal":

‘Lettre d’Athenes’ - published in “L’IMPOSSIBLE” N.1 14-03-2012

Cher Michel,

Je me suis assis au café pour t’écrire. Deuxième bière déjà. Myrto m’interpelle à dix mètres, du beau milieu de la rue: « Hey Greg… de retour ? Tu nous donne encore combien de temps de liberté. Deux mois, trois mois ? » Avec son grand sourire d’enfant, son visage peint de carnaval. Derrière elle, une troupe de joueurs de tambours, tous déguisés en ours marchent en cadence. Suivis de trois gamins gitans morts de rire.

Ils vont chez Elias, dit Anthropos (l’humain), un théâtre-bar fait main dans le quartier délabré de Metaxourgio. Un des nombreux collectifs improvisés du centre ville…feu d’artifice d’art de rue, musique, rakis, poésie…miel, alcool, gingembre, tabac. Tout est produit aux alentours, tout est partagé.

Les jeunes Athéniens cumulent les séminaires pour ne pas déprimer. Des séminaires pour tous et par tous. On apprend des langues, la musique, la photo, planter des arbres, danser. Les plus beaux sourires, au pays de l’avenir le plus gris d’Europe ! Le contraste te tire des larmes de joie et de tristesse à longueur de nuit, aux grés des histoires de ces enfants, coincés dans une ville dont ils ne peuvent plus s’échapper.

Myrto s’est approchée, elle me souffle à l’oreille l’air des Cyclades :

“Tes doux yeux me disent que je meure pour qu’ils me pleurent”

Tu connais ? Les chansons des iles, naïves et intègres, comme des cailloux polis par les vagues.

Athènes ville ruinée…Athènes ville d’espoir.

J’ai passe la matinée affairé dans le quartier résidentiel de Kolonaki… là-bas, on ne parle plus que d’argent. Les boutiquiers se plaignent, partout la protection policière, ca sent l’escroquerie, ou l’honnêteté misanthrope. On lit les journaux, on insulte la classe politique, on accuse les très riches, on attend la faillite du pays, et le retour des capitaux prives expatriés.

On parle toujours aussi fort ici, on travail, on pollue. Mais surtout on attend.

Les prisons sont pleines, j’ai croisé des connaissances mondaines qui, relâchées quelques jours, viennent déjeuner avant de retourner au trou. L’humour est acide.

L’idée d’un malentendu européen est à la mode dans cette partie d’Athènes. Un malentendu qu’il faut résoudre vite. Sur les téléviseurs dans les terrasses des cafés, s’alternent à longueur de journée des courbes de marché, des chiffres, des images de machines à imprimer les billets, de machines à trier des pièces.

L’impossible ; le droit pour chaque homme de vivre en respect avec les arbres, En respect avec les autres, de protéger la mer, de protéger ceux qu’on aime. Le désir d’être différent, d’être faible, d’étudier le vent, le désir

de justice, d’égalité, le désir d’être Humain. Pas riche, Humain.

Il y a une semaine, depuis le théâtre odieux du Parlement, le gouvernement provisoire à ré- expliquer aux grecs ce qu’est le monde. En deux mots : Il faut être rentable, surtout quand on ne produit rien. Il faut rentabiliser l’air, les dauphins…tout transformer en euro. L’euro c’est le sang qui parcoure les rivières de l’Europe. Le premier ministre a expliquer que la politique et l’économie c’est pareille. Et la loi dans l’Oikos Européen, ce sera dorénavant boire du

sang.

J’ai en tète ces garçons croises dans les émeutes du printemps. Ils dévastaient tout. Quand ils trouvaient de l’argent, ils le brulaient. L’un d’eux m’avait dit « si ma mère me voyait, ca la mettrais tres en colère ». Je me souviens avoir sondée ses yeux brulés par les lacrimos pour lire l’avenir…aucune colère. Autre chose.

Derrière les murs des quartiers riches il y’a une histoire réelle, un mariage dans les années 80 qui a mal tourné. La Grèce est en fuite, elle a jette dans une valise ses bijoux, s’est refugiée dans une villa des iles. Un mari, rendu fou par ses dettes…des lettres, des menaces, des procès. Les enfants ça ne les concernent déjà plus.

Athènes est ruinée Michel. Comme une barque de ferraille a l’abandon. Dans quelques mois sa surface sera couverte de cloques qui exploseront au soleil de l’été. Il y a quatre ans, les arbres des magnifiques collines de l’attique ont flambés. Suicide en masse des arbres : mauvais présage.

« Dans une démocratie, chaque génération nouvelle est un peuple »

Le début :

Alexis est assis la, avec ses copains et copines d’école, ils s’embrassent, ils rient. Deux policiers l’approchent. Des insultes volent. L’un d’eux sort sont flingue, il tire.

Je réécris ça…

A 21 heures, Le soir du 6 décembre 2008, dans une rue Piétonne du quartier d’Exarchia, les dieux indécis ont exigé -comme pour la guerre de Troie- que les hommes désireux de forcer le Destin se commettent à l’irréparable : assassiner un enfant.

Les habitants du quartier ont colles aux angles des façades des plaques qui rebaptisent la rue. Elles sont collées cote à cote avec les plaques officielles bleues de la mairie. Le nom d’Alexis, des dates, des détails…un peu moins bien coupés que les plaques officielles mais pareilles.

On pourrait tout imaginer, explorer tous les possibles, mais l’indignation s’est réduite timidement a l’imitation du connu et a déjà trahis son attachement a l’ordre. Ce sentiment sur lequel les professionnels de l’Etat s’appuieront pour appeler demain au vote.

Tu sais, je pensais à quelque chose. En fait, je ne pense qu’à ca : «Quand le peuple régnera dans la poésie, il sera prés de régner dans la politique aussi ».

J’ai vraiment l’impression qu’on est tout prés des fois. Qu’une larme, dans une réaction alchimique incroyable, va transformer la mer entière.

« Tu viens avec nous Greg ? » c’est Myrto…les gamins autour tirent sur ma veste. C’est une journée contradictoire, noble, bleue une journée qui ne connaît pas sa beauté. Une journée grecque.

t’embrasse fort

‘Lettre d’Athenes’ - published in “L’IMPOSSIBLE” N.5 June 2012

J’ai rencontré Marianne à l’angle d’une rue. Elle était assise et elle pleurait. Il faisait horriblement chaud. Au début elle m’a insulté, et puis je l’ai emmenée boire un jus d’orange frais.

Marianne, assise en face de moi, parle sans respirer:

“Je suis une traître. Quelqu’un qu’il faut arrêter immédiatement,qu’il faut faire passer aux tribunaux. Parce que moi, je m’en fous de ce système de merde…Sauver l’économie, quelle idée de naze. Sauver quoi? Penser la possibilité de la gestion de tout…Mais ça nemarchera jamais mon pote!” Elle crie. “Je déteste les petits bourgeois, c’est bien fait pour eux! bien fait! Regarde-les, regardes comme ils ont l’air bête maintenant. Regardes comme ils sont effrayés!”

A côté de nous un couple se lève, l’homme murmure quelques mots fâchés au dessus de Marianne. Elle continue à me parler comme s’il n’existait pas “Tu imagines…cinquante euros. Cinquante euros pour la montre en or de mon grand-père! Je pensais qu’elle valait plus. C’est quoi cette économie pourrie qui tient même pas compte de la valeur sentimentale qu’on attache aux objets?”

Je la regarde dans les yeux un long moment… Je me demande si les Grecs sont conscients en permanence de l’étymologie des mots qu’ils emploient. Des mots comme “Oikonomia”, il faut les prononcer une fois lentement, juste une fois en pensant à ce qu’ils signifient. Oikos-nomos… L’enjeu de l’Europe, ses problèmes, son avenir. Depuis trois ans, les mots comme “économie” et “politique”, on se les balance les uns à la face des autres, à longueur de journée. Marianne parle depuis une heure. Je regarde autour de nous…les habitants d’Athènes sont à bout. ils tiendrons à peine jusqu’aux elections.

Sueurs froides…Quitter la ville au plus vite.

Dans le port du Pirée à l’aube, le bateau manœuvre entre les tankers Chinois et les navires de croisière Américains. C’est un vieux bateau, un tas de ferraille tremblant et rassurant. Sur le quai, une jeune fille qui vient de se réveiller et son chien noir qui la regarde piocher des habits dans un caddy rempli de vetements, de sacs plastique et d’affaires de couleurs. Elle a l’allure propre aux marcheurs d’Espagne; Ceux qui ont traversé l’Europe à pied pour venir honorer le peuple grec. Que sont ils devenus? Pourquoi les ai-je oubliés? Je pense à Zizek il y a deux jours, en sueur tirant sur son Tshirt et arrondissant ses numéros préférés.. le café sans lait et le café sans crème, Tom&Jerry et la course dans le vide, la possibilité d’un “happy end” héroïque. Comme le bateau s’éloigne, je devine derrière les fissures des immeubles un monstre d’une taille et d’une force inimaginable, un monstre qui déteste la lumière, et qu’on a dérangé dans son confort.

Un large panneau publicitaire doré par le soleil du matin, donne le ton d’un rêve brisé: “On avance vite, dans le confort et dans le luxe.”

Ma soeur m’a dit de me tenir droit la derniere fois que je l’ai vu.Tous les conseils sont devenus bavardage, toutes les predictions sont fausses,cette droiture c’est tout ce qu’il me reste.

Île d’ Anafi - j’ai passé la nuit a kalamiotissa. C’est une petite chapelle perchée au sommet du second plus haut caillou d’Europe. Il faut deux heures de marche entre les rochers pour grimper ici. Le muret de la petite cour où je me suis assis se prolonge à la verticale par 450 mètres de falaise abrupte. J’ai passé l’après-midi à regarder la mer, et à observer un nid de fourmis. Et quand la nuit est tombée, Il a fait trop froid et trop noir pour dormir.

Les îles ce sont mes sœurs géologiques, l’Egypte, mon père. New York,mon frère, Athènes est ma maitresse. Paris est aussi ma maitresse. Ma mère, c’est la terre. La lune est un doux rappel de la mort. Avec la mer et les abeilles, on parle souvent et on tombe d’accord.

Les nuages et les vagues me font rire. Les gens, je ne les comprendspas vraiment.

Au matin, la lumière a tranché d’abord le monde en deux, la terre et les cieux et puis une à une, a détaché toutes les autres choses.

Être grec c’est avoir la capacité de faire surface, d’avoir l’assurance innée que la surface contient le chaos.

La surface des peaux en marbre tendu des statues.

Les étages transparents du nouveau musée de l’Acropole,

la surface qu’on verrait de soi en se quittant.

La surface de l’Histoire.

La surface des mots de la langue grecque.

Des lieux d’équilibre improbable.

Vers midi je rencontre Tassos au village. On revoit une dernière fois les détails de notre plan. L’arrangement des terrasses de terres cultivables, l’angle du petit amphithéâtre, les matériaux des constructions éphémères, les lieux de fonctions. D’ici deux ans, sur cette île perdue au large de Santorin, des jeunes d’Athènes viendront créer, échanger, cultiver, présenter leur savoir faire.

Georges et Giannis s’assoient avec nous, ils sont couverts de taches de chaux avant l’ouverture imminente de leur petite ouzerie. Ils ont le calme et l’assurance prometteuse et si typique de leur génération. Giannis m’explique le parti communiste Grec. Il se souvient que dans son livre d’Histoire la guerre civile ne prend que trois pages. La blessure ne s’est jamais vraiment refermée.

“Deux générations gardent le silence sur les évènements del’après-guerre. Dans ces conditions, c’est très difficile d’imaginer un projet de gauche national. Nous, on essaye de se détacher d’une histoire qui prend notre génération en otage, parce qu’on sait qu’on ne peut pas vivre sans un projet communautaire, sans tenir compte du monde dans son ensemble. La gauche grecque, il faut absolumentl’inventer.

Il faut nous aider. Tu sais, Anafi était une île d’exil. Les communistes étaient envoyés ici pendant la dictature des années trente. A Anafi ils ont formé une communauté qui a activement participé à l’organisation de l’île. Ça, c’est terminé dans la famine, mais bon ça c’est une autre histoire”.

Ce matin, j’ai construit ma tente de tissu sous un arbre. Et puis j’ai passé trois heures dans la mer, seul.

J’ai ramassé quelques cailloux, les mêmes que ceux que je dessine et que j’échange a Athènes contre d’autres objets, des gâteaux..ou au café, chez les marchands de livres.

Je repars ce soir à Athenes. J’ai pris mon Kastoriadis ici, Thucydides aussi…

Mais je crois que c’est un moment d’action.

Je n’ai jamais été aussi fier de mon pays, de ses doutes, de la douceur infinie de sa lumière, de la patience de son peuple. Les grecs - sans démordre, sans lâcher prise et parfaitement sérieux, pausent sur la table du monde et sous le regard époustouflé de ceux qui n’y ont jamais cru, la question de la liberté.

Alors une fois de plus il faut choisir, être libre ou se reposer.

last day campaigning for a candidate that does not exist among...

Sat, 05 May 2012 21:45:00 +0300

last day campaigning for a candidate that does not exist among people that have no right to vote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9S1CiGPX2Q&feature=related

VODE is a virtual political campaign lunched by artist Theopsy...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:47:00 +0300

VODE is a virtual political campaign lunched by artist Theopsy in April - Mai 2012 during the national election in Greece.
In an attempt to infiltrate in real time an historical event and displace its content, the artist has used the means of a classical campaign to promote a fictional character through social medias, videos, speeches, press and posters.
During this campaign, Theopsy as constantly leaped between real and unreal, providing a diversity of contradictory but yet complementary actions ranging from a simultaneous exhibition of art works in two socially opposite venues, the art direction of a very real campaign for a very real eligible politician, and the active participation to radically opposite political think tanks.

“By hijacking the key object or event on which an historical sequence is based, by hijacking an historical “praxis” and transfer it into a non-historical context, i believe we can create a new point of observation, from which such an historical sequence would simply reveal its porosity.
The result of such an experiment could be to a better understanding of the synchronicity principles that relate each one of us to any Event, historical or not, and somehow initiate a process of taking back from history what belongs to us.”

Theopsy PERFORMS A VODE SPEECH AT CAMP FESTIVAL< ATHENS MAI 2012.

agatheathens: Theopsy Presents 40 of his posters in a...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:35:32 +0300

agatheathens:

Theopsy Presents 40 of his posters in a simultaneous show at Stigma lab and President Hotel - (April 1-27, 2012) and launches the Vode campaign around the city of Athens, an “absurd existential political campaign that echoes the National elections held in Greece during the same period”.
more in: boom-wow.tumblr.com

TOYS Platon “Laws” book VII

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:53:00 +0200

TOYS

Platon “Laws” book VII

Mihai Nicodim LA: THE PUNISHMENT OF LUXURY

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:58:00 +0200

Mihai Nicodim LA: THE PUNISHMENT OF LUXURY:

(Click on the title above)

Georgia Sagri

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:22:00 +0200

Georgia Sagri:

WE CAN HEAR YOU

http://www.magazineforte.com/

(click on the title or the link above)

"In other news, The Statue of Liberty has started taking MySpace photos of herself" Skye Nicolas

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 10:09:00 +0200

"In other news, The Statue of Liberty has started taking MySpace photos of herself" Skye Nicolas :

Skye Nicolas reporting from OWS http://twitter.com/#!/SKYENICOLAS

(click on the title above)

Emergency Room by Thierry Geoffroy

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:47:00 +0300

Emergency Room by Thierry Geoffroy:

(click on the title above)

LA CONQUETE DE L'ESPACE PUBLIC dans la societe du spectacle

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 15:01:48 +0300

LA CONQUETE DE L'ESPACE PUBLIC dans la societe du spectacle:

(click title to view video)

”(…) For in the overexposed city, the architectural organism is no longer opaque, occlusive, and inscribed with visible information, but, like the human body on which it was formerly based, porous and vulnerable to the intrusion of forces that are no more visible than an electron—and no less real.”

Paul Virillo -“La ville surexposee” from L’Espace Critique

MARINA SIOUTI&ROQUE DALTON We crossed today through the...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:49:00 +0300

MARINA SIOUTI&ROQUE DALTON

We crossed today through the immense crowd gathered at Syndagma square, the burning heart of Athens, and met Marina few blocks lower in Exarchia, at her studio. She was playing with her toys.

After four hours of torture, the Apache and the other two cops threw a bucket of water at the prisoner to wake him up and said: “The Colonel has ordered us to give you a chance to save your skin. If you guess which of us has a glass eye, you’ll be spared torture.”

After gazing over the faces of his executioners, the prisoner pointed to
one of them: “Him. His right eye is glass.”

The astonished cops said, “But how could you guess?

All your buddies missed because the eye is American, that is - perfect.”

And the prisoner, feeling he was going to faint again, “it was the only eye that looked at me without hatred.”

Of course they continued torturing him.

———-

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky blue
landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

THE CERTAINTY and LIKE YOU by Roque Dalton,Translation: Jack Hirschman

HETEROTOPIA

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 05:59:21 +0300

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.

This text, entitled “Des Espace Autres,” and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault’s death. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec.

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history.

Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement.

This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo’s work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. as it were; a thing’s place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization.

Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as a problem in contemporary technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications.

In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.

In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space,

Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo’s work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.

Bachelard’s monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space.

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary relaxation -cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest - the house, the bedroom, the bed, el cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types.

HETEROTOPIAS

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description - I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and ‘reading’ (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology.

Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two main categories.

In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place “elsewhere” than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the “honeymoon trip” which was an ancestral theme. The young woman’s deflowering could take place “nowhere” and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.

But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.

The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another.

As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become ‘atheistic,’ as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead.

Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an ‘illness.’ The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.

Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).

Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these’ marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums. for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the„ rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge,

Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas.

There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into thew heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion- we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to ope this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family’s quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open.

Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery-, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set out that another crossed at fight angles; each family had its little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign.

The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o’clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty.

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

THINK GREEN/ CARPET,FLAG etc

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:49:00 +0300

THINK GREEN - mixed media 240x160 cm 2011

C.D-Gregos Theopsy, your latest work “Think Green” - which i could briefly describe as a Nazi green carpet covered with frenetic cheap Chinese electronic toys- is presented this week in Athens at Bulb, a symposium around ecological awareness. What exactly is the connection here?

Why a Nazi flag, why toys, why there…what does it represent?

G.T-It’s an allegory covering a large spectrum of ideas ranging from a specific collective project that consists on making the world a better place, to specific phobias, such as xenophobia and international conspiracy. I used a naive and provocative combination of well-known symbols and ready-mades to reflect the immaturity and dangers that generally accompany every collective project of this sort, as well as every fear of this sort.

I changed the color of the Nazi flag from red to green and used it as a sort of playground on which I set my “actors”; a couple of kids, trapped in a glass box and surrounded by cars driven by E.Ts.

it’s not my first work with toys.

I usually bend the toys am working with, but for “think Green” I though to keep them raw, fresh from the hands of some lady in a Chinese factory. To tell you the truth, I even wear gloves when I touch them…to be totally sure that they keep their original vibe.

C.D-In what is this work related to the home made bomb that you presented at Palais de Tokyo in Paris?

“Revolution Now” was a bomb that i displayed in a museum as an art object. I really tried to make it as beautiful as I could, so that people would walk by and say: “Wow, that looks really nice!” before they even realise what they were confronted to. For “think Green” the process was kind of similar. There are many ways to read this piece. I brought elements on the scene and let the viewers do the narrative. That gives a certain space for people to imagine all sorts of interpretations. It gives them space to imagine things. And simultaneously it gives me an occasion to provoque a distortion of what they believe is true. For these two pieces I worked with History – as a collective absolute truth- as if it was some modeling paste.

C.D-Think green is clearly a politically oriented work, and you also recently are very active on the blog Boom-wow! which aims to generate a feedback between arts and politic. What made you focus in this direction?

G.T- I don’t perceive anymore politics as the struggle between some ruling organ and the people. I perceive politics as the relation between every individual and the rest. And it is somehow a similar situation you face in art. The relation between each one of us and the totality is what interests me in both fields. At Boom-Wow we’re trying to create interaction between these two fields in order to find new ways to communicate and promote integration.

C.D -What would be for you the ideal society, the right place to be?

G.T - The united states of poetry.

C.D - Do you intend to do more bombs and fascist flags?

G.T- You know, in the roman empire it was forbidden for most of the people to wear purple..a color that was solly reserved to the emperor’s family.

Am simply trying to show that historical events belongs to us, that History is not some stream that simply unfolds away from us. Am trying to take back the event, because it has been taken away from us and redistributed as a spectacle on Tv, movies, and everything that is between us and the world. Between me and you.

C.D- Are you eco-friendly?

G.T- I don’t like packaging very much and i think that cars are ridiculous objects.

”SCROOGE YOU! And all your friends” The bridge...

Thu, 19 May 2011 04:03:00 +0300

”SCROOGE YOU! And all your friends”

The bridge between art and politics seams to be Artist Gregos Theopsy’s latest favorite playground. Since the beginning of the social crisis that ravaged his country of origine, the artist uses popular subversive technics, objects, messages and medias to producing fake Journalistic Videos, poster prints and savage installations with the purpose to force art into politic and politic into art.After displaying a real bomb of his fabrication at the museum of modern art Palais de tokyo in Paris, Gregos Theopsy projects a new iconoclastic happening in the beginning of Mai, in the center of Athens.
Abusing this time of a monument dedicated to the “filiki etairia”, the historical symbol of Greece’s struggle for national independency, in Kolonaki square. The monument - as for now composed of three identical bases holding two busts of the brotherhood founders -skoufa and Tsakaloff- - will be “complete” by Theopsy with a third marble bust placed on the central base that till now remained empty.To take this central place, the Artist chose the fictional character of Uncle Scrooge, the famous Duck kindly obsessed with gold and money.

“I walk by very often and it’s really obvious to everyone that the central figure of this monument was missing. Although the central column is obviously deliberatly empty and dedicated to the famous Oath written upon it: (I voluntarily swear before the true God, that I will remain faithful during all my life and above all circumstances to the Company). Scrooge represents the patrons of Independence and freedom, and today, the same dehumanized institutional figure from which we all want to be freed from. but on who we depend, because it’s made of our own flesh and blood.

” SCROOGE YOU! Και όλοι οι φίλοι σου”

Η γέφυρα μεταξύ τέχνης και πολιτικής είναι για τον καλλιτέχνη Gregos Theopsy ο πιό πρόσφατος αγαπημένος του τόπος διασκέδασης . Από την αρχή της κοινωνικής κρίσης που ερήμωσε τη χώρα καταγωγής του, ο καλλιτέχνης χρησιμοποιεί δημοφιλείς ανατρεπτικές τεχνικές πχ γκραφίτι, αντικείμενα, τα μηνύματα και τεχνητά μέσα,  για την παραγωγή πλαστών δημοσιογραφικών βίντεο, εντύπων και παραβατικών εγκαταστάσεων με σκοπό τη δυναμική ειχώρηση της πολιτικής στην τέχνη και αντίστροφα.
Μετά την έκθεση μιας πραγματικής βόμβας δικής του κατασκευής  στο μουσείο σύγχρονης τέχνης Palais de Tokyο στο Παρίσι, o Gregos Theopsy παρουσιάζει ένα νέο εικονοκλαστικό έργο στο κέντρο της Αθήνας.Αυτή τη φορά χρησιμοποιεί ένα μνημείο για τη Φιλική Εταιρία, ένα ιστορικό σύμβολο της εθνικής ανεξαρτησίας, στην πλατεία Κολωνακίου.
Το ”ανολοκλήρωτο” κατα τον καλλιτέχνη μνημείο - το οποίο αποτελείται απο τρείς ίδιες βάσεις που φιλοξενούν δύο προτομές των ιδρυτών της αδελφοσύνης Σκουφά και Τσακάλωφ, θα ολοκληρωθεί απο τον ίδιο με μια τρίτη μαρμάρινη προτομή που θα τοποθετηθεί στην κεντρική βάση που παρέμεινε μέχρι τώρα κενή.
Για να πάρει αυτήν την κεντρική θέση, ο καλλιτέχνης επέλεξε τον πλασματικό χαρακτήρα του θείου Scrooge, τη διάσημη πάπια που είναι εμμονική με το χρυσό και τα χρήματα.
” Περνώ απο το συγκεκριμένο σημείο πολύ συχνά και είναι πραγματικά προφανές οτι το κεντρικό πρόσωπο αυτού του μνημείου έλειπε. Αν και η μεσαία στήλη είναι προφανώς επίτηδες κενή αναγράφοντας τα παρακάτω ’ Ορκίζομαι ενώπιον τού αληθινού Θεού οικειοθελώς, ότι θέλω είμαι επί ζωής μου πιστός εις τήν Εταιρίαν κατά πάντα. ’ σκέφτομαι οτι θα ήταν άδικο να μην δίνει μια ελάχιστη εύφημο μνεία στους χορηγούς του μοντέρνου κόσμου μας. Ειδικά όταν μιλάμε για την Ανεξαρτησία και την Ελευθερία, ο χορηγός είναι σήμερα ο ίδιος θεσμοποιημένος,μη-ανθρώπινος ”χαρακτήρας” απο τον οποίο όλοι ζητούν να απελευθερωθούν… Έτσι, βρίσκω το θείο Scrooge αισθητικά και συμβολικά πολύ σχετικό, πρώτα επειδή είναι καρτούν και δεύτερον επειδή είναι αυτός που στηρίζει οικονομικά όλη την οικογένεια του.  Εάν θελήσουμε πραγματικά να πάμε παραπέρα, θα σήμαινε πως πρέπει να αποδώσουμε τα του Καίσαρος τω Καίσαρι. Και δεν νομίζω πως κανείς απο εμάς είναι έτοιμος να κάνει κάτι τέτοιο”

MICHEL BUTEL et L'IMPOSSIBLE

Mon, 16 May 2011 07:34:00 +0300

MICHEL BUTEL et L'IMPOSSIBLE:

Pourquoi je crée L’impossible ?

1 – Parce que des journaux m’ont donné, dès mon plus jeune âge, des informations sur l’état du monde. Du monde entier. Sur l’état de la société dans laquelle je vivais. Parce que certains de ces journaux ont façonné mon esprit – mon esprit critique, parce que certains journalistes dans ces journaux – ou parfois certains écrivains, certains penseurs, certains artistes, certains intellectuels, certains chercheurs, certains photographes, certains dessinateurs, certains inconnus dans ces journaux, ont bouleversé fugacement ou durablement mon état d’esprit. À l’égal des œuvres d’art ou de pensée. À l’égal de certains livres, de certains films, de certains manuels ou traités, à l’égal de certaines pièces de théâtre, à l’égal de certains films, à l’égal, parfois, de l’art entre tous énigmatique – la musique. Et aussi à l’égal de certaines rencontres, de certains voyages, à l’égal de certains amis, à l’égal de certains enfants, à l’égal de certains sages, à l’égal de certaines amours.

2 – Parce que je veux changer le monde. Je pense qu’on ne peut pas décider, préméditer, organiser le changement vrai du monde. Mais on peut changer l’état d’esprit de ceux qui habitent ce monde et qui, un jour, si les circonstances le permettent, contribueront au vrai changement du monde. Qui, pour être vrai, devra être inspiré par le souci de justice dans l’ordre de l’organisation des sociétés humaines, par le souci de loyauté dans l’exercice de la pensée, par le souci de célébration de la beauté de la vie sur terre dans toutes ses manifestations y compris les plus folles, les moins imaginables.

3 – Parce que l’information est morte, c’est-à-dire illisible, inaudible, invisible, si elle n’est pas animée-ranimée par les mots, par une langue, par un style, par une pensée, inédites. Un journal doit être un événement, au sens radical de ce mot, dans la vie de chacun. Il doit troubler. Il doit inquiéter. Il doit émouvoir. Il doit transmettre l’énergie vitale sans quoi nous nous effritons de jour en jour. Ainsi, drogue entre toutes bienfaisante, il créera une addiction.

4 – Parce que tout part toujours d’une communauté qui se forme et qui s’identifie, puis qui, progressivement, forme une autre communauté, plus vaste qui se forme et qui s’identifie. Qui, elle-même, se forme et qui, progressivement (ou soudainement – qui sait ?) forme une autre communauté. Ainsi d’une vague, ainsi des vagues, ainsi de la mer (ainsi parfois de la tempête). Ainsi de la première communauté de ceux et de celles qui créent ce journal. Ainsi de la communauté à venir de ses lecteurs : à l’impossible, nous sommes tous tenus.
Rejoignez-nous.

Michel Butel
janvier 2011

ANTONIS VATHIS “Xeironomies” , handmade book, 2010

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:43:00 +0200

ANTONIS VATHIS “Xeironomies” , handmade book, 2010