This essay was written as a response to “Territory” a Fabrica Workshops project (May 2008) directed by Kevin Slavin from Area/code. This is a new program of research and education activities based around the environmental, social and relational. With special thanks to the students whose work inspired this essay.
‘Joseph Beuys’ project to raise the Berlin wall by one centimeter for “aesthetic” (proportional) reasons [w]as a way to subvert it, to overcome it “with interior laughter”, to displace the viewer’s attention towards its conceptual dimension, beyond the physical wall.’ (Vincent Pécoil).
Aesthetics and city space
Walls are built to define and defend territory – to keep people out or keep them in. Bridges are built, both literally and metaphorically, to make connections. Historically they have been one of the first targets of military attack. A compelling news image of recent years is of a Lebanese man bungee-jumping off Mudayrai Bridge, east of Beirut following Israel’s summer offensive on Lebanon in 2006. In the image, the man is minute against the bridge’s monumental pillars, with their bomb-blasted concrete splaying innards of meshed steel.
The Berlin wall, in Pécoil’s interpretation, was first internal and so it could also be overcome by the imagination. ‘Everyone is an artist’ is Beuys’ most quoted saying and the intention here was not that they should become practicing artists but that they could apply creative thinking in their own spheres. The Lebanese man’s gesture – reduced to the visual equivalent of a soundbite by its world media image - seems to tell us that this conflict too can be deflected with similar irreverence. Yet this time with the kind of exteriorised laugher thrown up by urban play?
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This essay is an extract from a brief for ‘Territory’, a Fabrica Workshops project. This is a new program of research and education activities based around the environmental, social and relational. Treviso, Italy, May 2008.
“The Berlin Wall should be 5 centimeters higher, for aesthetic reasons”.
(Joseph Beuys)
You can see the walls plainly in Treviso, from the ground, from the map, from Google’s big optics. For those of you who live here, your primary forms of engagement with these walls are probably aesthetic. You might think, like Beuys, that they should be 5 centimeters higher, or 2 meters lower, or you might find the stone lovely, or the forms well articulated. But every wall has a history, and cities learn to build them from their enemies, not their friends.
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[Metahaven]
We, the undersigned.
This sounds like a manifesto.
We take the manifesto to be a Utopian form.
Fredric Jameson distinguishes between Utopia as a genre (as, for example, a written text, or a building, or a Utopian programme of revolutionary change) and a Utopian impulse in daily life.
The etymology of the word ‘manifest’ dates back to 1374, meaning ‘clearly revealed’, coming from manifestus – ‘caught in the act, plainly apprehensible, clear, evident’ – and manifestare – ‘to show plainly’. It refers to manifesto, 1644 Italian, as a ‘public declaration explaining past actions and announcing the motive for forthcoming ones’ – ‘originally “proof”, from the Latin manifestus.’
Manifestos are publicly stated decisions. They are written by those who have made up their minds and shall now do as they have openly declared. To write a manifesto is to put all of one’s cards on the table. To write a manifesto is to draw up and sign a covenant with a self-declared truth.
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