Whether in the form of transnational politics, global economies, new working
conditions or urban social movements, networks have become the most powerful
figure of thought operating on the way we conceive the organisation of
the world. Networks have changed our forms of cultural interaction and
coexistence just as they have the way in which we produce and experience
spaces.
The engagement with these developments on the part of art and architecture
in recent years has resulted in a new form of praxis founded on collective
production, process-guided work and transversal project platforms. Such
a ‘disciplineless’ praxis of unsolicited intervention in spatial
contexts renders legible the dysfunctional rules of planned spatial and
cultural containment and creates an avenue for generating new forms of
circulation amidst the political efforts to conceal this failure. It makes
use of existing networks, expands and changes them, gives rise to new
circuits and thereby sketches a mobile geography of self-determined utilization
of space and culture.
The project Networked Cultures aims neither to present
this development as a contained movement nor to localize it within the
particularities of a specific geographic or institutional context. We
are far more interested in its propinquity to a plethora of other self-authorized
structures, irregardless of their scale – gray markets, informal
commerce, alternative economies and migratory practices as well as the
innumerable, minor, barely discernible attempts to establish self-determined
sociality in the midst of the reconfiguration of our environments.
www.networkedcultures.org
SAHARA
CHRONICLE | 2006-2007
a collection of videos on mobility and the politics of containment in
the Sahara
video (23 min.) and cartography
Sahara Chronicle encompasses an undefined number of short
videos documenting the present sub-Saharan exodus towards Europe. Taking
a close look at the modalities and logistics of the migration system in
the Sahara, the project examines the politics of mobility, visibility,
and containment which lie at the heart of current global geopolitics.
The material is gathered during three fieldtrips to major gates and nodes
of the trans-Saharan network in Morocco, Mauritania and Niger where migratory
intensity is bundled. No voice-over narrative strings these stories together.
Meaning has to be extracted from the interstices between the documents,
from the stretch of the journey that is most invisible to the eye.
In their loose interconnectedness and their wide spread geography, Sahara
Chronicle mirrors the migration network itself. It includes documents
on Agadez in Niger, capital of the Tuareg and gate to the Saharan basin
for the main migration routes coming from West Africa; Nouadhibou, the
northern port of Mauritania located on the border to the Polisario Front/Western
Sahara from where migrants leave on boats to the Canary Islands; Oujda
on the Algerian border where desert crossers enter Morocco; and Laayoune
in the Western Sahara, departure point for boats leaving to Spain.
CARTOGRAPHY
OF THE STRAITS OF GIBRALTAR | 2004
cartography by hackitectura.net el al
hackitectura.net is a group of architects, programmers
and activists based in Seville (Spain), whose work deals with the creation
of connected, participatory public spaces and infrastructures. Their performative
Cartography of the Straits of Gibraltar presents alternate visions of
the border region connecting Europe and Africa.
It presents a map of “imperial” and “multitudinal”
flows in conjunction with a strategic/tactical map showing socialgeopolitical
networks and their common political project for the next years. The map
is a communication and operation tool jointly authored by a large collaborative
network which was part of Indymedia Estrecho, an activist and media network
focussing on the “post-border” territory between Western Europe
and Africa.
SKINSHIP N°1 – HAUTNAH | 2008
vestimentary installation
Judith Augustinovic focuses in her work on the territorialisation
and narrativization of spatio-bodily entanglements of (s)ex, trans/gender,
sexuality and intimacy. Her installation skinship N°1 – hautnah
traces a cartography of Luana Muniz, Travesti, Rio de Janeiro. Eu sou
travesti. O travesti em si é uma invenção artística.
A travesti é pura arte.
The vestimentary series is a close portrait of Luana Muniz: Travesti and
citizen, prostitute and Mãe, activist and showgirl, shop owner...
Inspired by the ambivalent, partially anachronistic, symbolic and intimate
connotations of aprons as sexuated and sexual garment, the collection
generates a snapshot of Luana Muniz’ transforming body and her parallel
identities. Piece by piece, it draws a portrait of Luana Muniz and her
spaces, and gives birth to a clandestine spatiality: the closet. The inversion
out of/beyond the closet leads us into the closet: into the egocentric
territoriality of clothing – part and supplement, expansion and
presentation of the body – and its mobilisation as Nomadic Closet.
A persistent trans-border construct, it refers to a movement outside heteronormative
territories, to the loose threads that join together self-organised networks,
and to Luana Muniz’s own migration across state borders on her extended
business trips to Europe.
NETWORKED CULTURES | 2007
FOUR VIDEOS ON NETWORKED CULTURAL AND SPATIAL PRACTICES
video, chapters:
Network Creativity, 25 min.
Contested Spaces, 24 min.
Trading Places, 25 min.
Parallel Worlds, 31 min.
The worldwide movement of populations, burgeoning social mobilizations
and the incessantly changing form of the neoliberal economy are generating
the energies of a new world order in which we are all constantly challenged
to negotiate reality and make deals. Amidst this disintegration of traditional
orders, access to networks and the development of connectivities are assuming
an ever greater significance for the way we inhabit and configure our
environments: The question as to what forms such connectivity should take
is not only theoretical in nature but above all a question that points
to the self-induced multiplicity of spaces that is continually generated
by connectivities throughout the world and that in the process changes
our own spaces of action and continually generates them anew.
The Film Networked Cultures interrogates the meanings
of this change together with the meanings of artistic, architectural and
cultural engagement in these dynamics. It traces a variety of strands
along which the Networked Cultures project itself has developed. First,
attention is focused on the phenomenon of network creativity by following
the routes of networks laid out by artists, architects, urbanists, curators
and activists. The site that is hereby opened up marks an arena of engagement
with the relationship between space and conflict and leads to an interrogation
of contested spaces across Europe and beyond, examining the architecture
of conflict, and discussing models of geo-cultural negotiation.
Investigating their modus operandi, the focus then shifts to governmentality
and self-government by examining the organizational matrix of black markets,
informal settlements and the accompanying parallel economy. Responding
to these global realities, the parallel worlds of mobility and migration,
'traveling' communities, digital worlds and other counter-geographies
are discussed in relation to a politics of connectivity and the emerging
'archipelago of peripheries'.