62 Urban productions

Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen-Interview

Maider Zilbeti —The understanding of globalization has been changing as new dynamics and subjects are part of it. How can we currently understand globalization?

Saskia Sassen —The most common defi nition of globalization emphasizes the growing interdependence of the world and the formation of global institutions. One key assumption in this type of definition is that the global and the national are two mutually exclusive conditions. This easily leads to the notion that what the global gains, the national loses, and vice versa. And it implies a correspondence of national territory with the national: that is to say, if a process or condition is located in a national institution or in national territory, it must be national.

This type of understanding of globalization is inadequate. The global —whether an institution, a process, a discursive practice, or an imaginary— can partly inhabit national territories and institutions. It is not only about that which transcends the nationstate and is self-evidently global.

Conceiving of globalization not simply in terms of interdependence and global institutions, but also as inhabiting the national, opens up a vast agenda for research and politics that remains largely unaddressed. Research on globalization needs to include detailed studies, including ethnographies, of multiple national conditions and dynamics that are likely to be engaged by the global and often are the global, but are so inside the national. Examples are global cities, but also particular state institutions. This does not mean that everything about these cities or those state institutions is global; it might be simply that they house or enable particular global dynamics and conditions. And as for politics, it opens up a series of political options centered in the possibility of national actors (legislators, courts, citizens, local NGOs, etc.) doing global politics from inside the national; it also suggests that the immobile, those who do not or cannot cross borders, may nonetheless participate in global politics.

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saskia_sassen_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 146Kb

María José Belbel

”Spivak se escribe con V”

Se ha celebrado en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao la exposición Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 45 años de arte y feminismo, comisariaza por Xabier Arakistain. Se trata de una de las primeras exposiciones feministas colectivas internacionales en el estado español que continúa el trabajo pionero ya realizado a principios de los años noventa, a escala más modesta, por otros proyectos expositivos como 100 x 100: diez artistas andaluzas, comisariada en 1993 por Mar Villaespesa, para el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla. En la década en curso, se han realizado diversas exposiciones individuales de artistas feministas estadounidenses y europeas, pero la mayor parte de ellas ha adolecido de la necesaria contextualización en el feminismo como movimiento político artístico colectivo, lo que ha minimizado la importancia del arte feminista como generador de discursos y apenas ha servido para visibilizar el trabajo realizado por las artistas feministas en nuestro país, así como para promover contextos y redes de trabajo locales, saberes/poderes productivos. La muestra ofrece «un recorrido por sesenta y nueve obras emblemáticas del arte feminista, realizadas entre 1965 y 2007 por cuarenta y cuatro artistas y colectivos de diversos países, y se ha estructurado en torno a cinco temas claves del feminismo: 1- Las luchas por los derechos civiles y políticos de las mujeres. 2- La construcción cultural del sexo, el género y la sexualidad, y la denuncia de los estereotipos sexistas. 3- Las luchas por la liberación del cuerpo de las mujeres. 4- La denuncia de la violencia contra las mujeres. 5- Los intentos de hacer visibles e incluir a las mujeres, como parte activa de la historia y la cultura».

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mj_belvel_espindd.pdf — PDF document, 109Kb

Apolonija Sustersic

”Re-programming disaster”

Report from New York Times, April 3rd, 2001: «Spain’s Minister of Education, Culture and Sports, Pilar del Castillo, and Manuel Fraga Iribarne, President of the Xunta of Galicia, today unveiled plans for the City of Culture of Galicia (CCG): an 810,000 square foot (75.250 m²), $175 million (145 mill. Eur) project designed by the world-renowned fi rm of Eisenman Architects. One of the largest cultural complexes now in development; world-wide, the CCG is evidence of Spain’s growing investment in culture as an economic development tool. Banking on the «Bilbao-effect» (so-called for the popularity conferred on that city by the Guggenheim Museum), the Autonomous Community of Galicia, in the Northwest corner of Spain, looks to its boldly contemporary City of Culture to spur tourism at the same time as it enriches local cultural and educational offerings».

We were driving up Monte Gaia. It was a wonderful November day. Visits to the building site of the new cultural center in Galicia named The City of Culture were canceled. The new government needs some time to think about how to continue. The project eats money beyond belief. It is not clear, or it is not yet public, who is going to program the new space, which includes the new Galician library, a museum of Galician history, a technology center, a music theater, and an archive of periodicals. Perhaps there is money to finish the building, but who is going to pay for the running of the new institutions once it is completed?

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apolonija_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 122Kb

Heejin Kim & 16 Beaver

”Testing turns, possible futures”

Under the sulky sunlight of a late August afternoon, thirty or so young people were crouching on the sloppy ground right next to a police checkpoint in Pyeongtaek, throwing reproachful looks at hundreds of riot police and soldiers who seemed to increase every minute. In contrast to the shocking array of the military guards, the group spotted with three foreigners was physically a fragile body of «unarmed» individuals whose consciousness and sense of communion, however, were just beginning to increase thanks t the extreme tension of the situation. While still feeling the sharp edge of confrontation with the police and their prohibition of entry to the local village, Daechu-ri, the group pushed the meetings and interviews with local village people and activists who had sustained themselves during a protest that lasted more than two years against the relocation and expansion plan of US military bases in South Korea. At the same moment, the vast range of green rice fields in this small rural village that had been reputed for its juicy rice was being dumped with incessant downpours of dirt only to be transformed into a military base.

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beaver16_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 324Kb

Jurgi San Pedro

In the city of Caracas the meaning of public areas is changing

Situated in the place where the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates collide (in the area of influence of the famous Boconò fault), protected by a Caribbean mountain range known as Sierra de la Costa with peaks higher than 2000 m and in a valley located 15 km from the coast and 900 m above sea level, Caracas is a mountain city. The Guaire is the main river that strives to bring the city to life.

In this city, on behalf of a new model of territorial development, a breakaway from the usual paradigms that guide human activity is taking place, in other words, from the paradigms based on economy, on spatial segregation and on social asymmetries, in the political context of a multidimensional liberation process that includes the entire republic. Awarding constitutional recognition of the Right to the City would be a significant symbolic gesture.

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caracas_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 183Kb

Carme Nogueira

Maps of the place

The projects I am going to present are based on the question of space as representation. My interest in this subject comes from previous work on identity, on an experiential subject, of representation. Accordingly, the context and subject are discursive elements and become interpretative frameworks of each other. The naturalisation of this relation, as the interpretation the context makes of the subjects is assumed as something natural (and, therefore, rendered invisible), is one of the goals of my work. That rendering invisible occurs because the discursive effect is often ignored.

Each space is organised with specific rules, with an «argument» and with a protagonist with whom we are supposed to identify. Thus, the text of the space, with the full range from public to private, since I do not see them as two independent realities, has been deconstructed, reinterpreted, read by many artists and theoreticians to reveal that off-field nature. A critique process that has appeared in all the spheres of representation. In the case of projects for the public space or the projects that hold space as a problem, these critiques are often assumed on a theoretical level, but not on a practical level. Giving up the monument is more complex than it seems. At least, that is what I have seen.

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carmen_nog_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 132Kb

Tony Chakar

”The Impossible War Memorial. Is shooting a cadaver considered a murder?

Text piece written for the project Memorial to Irak War organized by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. 23 May - 27 June 2007.

A good question with which to begin a refl ection on the project for a «Memorial to the Iraq War» would be this: why did the Hungarian refugee decide to destroy the original model of Reg Butler’s winning entry to the 1953 competition? The small text accompanying the current project remains very obscure about the incident; the story is told in passing, and it seems that it is only there as a footnote for the important issue, which is the destruction of the original model and the non-realisation of the fi nal monument. Furthermore, and judging from the short description of Butler’s work («… three women overshadowed by an abstract scaffold»), it doesn’t seem to be offensive to sensibilities to the extent that someone should decide to destroy it.

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chakar_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 42Kb

Hiria kolektiboa

Public space and places. The management of complexity

Public space and places: what do we want to talk about?

When we talk about the public space, we are thinking of places of coexistence. Plazas, streets, parks or corners where citizens carry out an endless number of activities throughout their lives. Imagine life in a village or a town and there will be thousands of places associated with shared memories, linked to the experience of living and coexisting. Public space and places.

We are always aware that urban spaces are creations that respond to society’s needs, a system of values, traditions and customs. They are the result of a set of cultural, social and political realities. Therefore, diversity and complexity are two premises that need to be assumed before trying to compose and propose solutions that respond to everyone’s needs.

Working in the public space implies a way of looking, a direct confrontation with life, a technical practice in which the details that make up our projects and images are based on empirical observation, on participatory processes and networks between professionals from various areas.

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hiria_kol_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 147Kb

Jaime Iregui

The spaces of the public space

   At present, it can be said that in almost all
large cities, the public space has changed from
being the place of encounter and socialisation to
one of mere transit from one place in the city
to another; its design appears to focus more on
optimising the flows of decidedly capitalist system
production that expands without apparent resistance
than on satisfying the citizens’ desire for well-
being and leisure.
   However, if we view the city as spatial production
and we ask ourselves about the authorities that are
responsible for it, we initially think of the state
and its regulatory function, which determines the
stability and permanence of the city in its physical
aspects and its feelings.

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iregui_engindd.pdf — PDF document, 197Kb