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Brigitte Kristensen/ Aarhus <mailto:brigitte@djk.nu>;
What I wonder is how directly political your approach is? I myself am not so much into `political art´ in a very direct way! And about the model - is there anywhere on the web I can find more information about this "Hafencity"-context and the intensions, plans, possibilities etc.
TanjaNellemann/ Aarhus <mailto:tanjanellemann@email.dk>;
How the Model would look like? What do you think about the concept of a model? Non reflective, clean, and smooth, expensive and for one kind of people only, hightech and easy living lifestyle. Brainstorming on "the" model: Make CityPlanning? on an individual plan.
Visible interfering, there on the visual plan looks a bit like our normal trafficable solutions, but underneath it has roots in different, individual subjective (maybe from the users) stories. We could manipulate pictures in Photoshop that show other ways of thinking and making "trafical" solutions that have roots in connections between people.
Did you see my "Parallelle Historier" (ParallelStories) in my material? A corporation with SixtenTherkildsen and JacobNielsen? from 1999, where we participated whit an art-project in a competition of architecture in the habour-arear in Århus. I think It would be good to transfer this project into your concept! I think my proposal would not get very functional in the normal way to use the word functional, but make people think in other solutions than the official one.
Brainstorming in a wide way, asking people: - What is your vision of a city? - What shall it offer, to whom? - The multiethnic city will be our future and how do we handle it? - What do you miss in your city? - How to live together? - Making a post card - the ultimate souvenir of your city. - How do you imagine your city? - Before the opening of artgenda we invite people creating postcards of their city (In the same time imagination and creations).
Answer from Anke Haarmann/ Tetrapak to TanjaNellemann/ Aarhus, 24.10.2001
> How is this area right now?
> Who lives there? / Or who uses the place now? Is it a non-defined area?
> What is this official model of HafenCity based on? And who build it?
> How do people in general react to this future expanding city?
Has there been any debate about HafenCity already?
> How to work together?
> Do you want to invite all the artists to work together?
> Which language do you want to use? "Their" Architectual Language or a totally different one? Do you want to make a model that looks like the other HafenCity official one on the surface but is quite different in its contents?
> On what level you want to build the model, - a realistic model or a more poetic or utopic model.
> How have you worked until now? Functional art? - Or questioning art? Sorry I'm a little squared!
> Which role do you see your self in? Protector of what and of whom?
> Which role do you see for yourself? How to be interactive? When you write that you want to build a model that embeds possibilities of participation. Could you deepen what you mean? I'm just curious if you want to aim at individuals or groups and how visible it would be.
> In Århus where I live, possible the same everywhere, you build or expand the shopping malls out in open air in places that have been commonplaces. People become only common in being consumers. It has become the main reason of being there. The main problem as I se it is; that whit the controlling of space you also control the sociality in this area, your behaviour and how to act. First of all I think I need to come and visit you, I really need to see the place/ experience the space.
> I think it could be good to take Newspapers, billboards, maybe lokal TV in use, to get focus on the problems that could arise with hte HafenCity plan.
SixtenTherkildsen/ Aarhus <mailto:partyskjorten@ofir.dk>;
I have read about your ideas at the artgenda web site and it seems quite interesting to me because the way you describe it, what is about to be done to the harbour area in Hamburg reminds me a lot of what the city I live in, Aarhus, has been through. The city of Aarhus is building a new container terminal and therefore there will be some left over areas close to the city. A couple of years ago the city council arranged a competition on ideas for the use of the harbour areas close to the city. Together with two other students, JacobNielsen? and TanjaNellemann, from the academy of fine arts in Aarhus, I made a project for the competition. Lots of architects and city planners handed in their projects and ideas as well, but the thing we worked on was very different from the others. I guess you can say it was not very resonable or rational, but it made sense in another way. Of caurse we did not participate because we had any whishes of winning the competition, but instead we wanted the politicians and the city planners, when they are going to redesign the area, to focus their minds on the people who already use the harbour, the people who now spend much time there and who feel conected to the places there.One of the things that we spend much time doing was to enter as many buildings as possible in order to talk with the people there trying to find out who they were , what they were doing and what the site was all about. And as our second step we worked on our proposals for changes of specific sites at the harbour, being aware of the conversations we had had with the people at the place. How is it going in Hamburg? Have you already begun to think about the model of the hafen city? I am wondering if a model can be anything that represents or incarnates the circumstances of social relations and the purposes of a place? Have you come up with any specific ideas about that yet? I am interested to hear more about that. I like the idea that the tetrapak artgenda information center will be close to the official one. In that way it will be posssible to reach a relevant public. I like the fact that your project deals with occurences that have practical and social relevance. Apart from the project we did about the harbour I have mainly been working with video and if you want to read a bit about some of the videoprojects I have done, you may want to have a look at the artgenda artist candidate database at http://artgenda.baltic-interface.net/db
Lone Haugaard Madsen / Lasse Krog Möller/ Aarhus (see: MadsenMöller?)
Lasse and I have developed a way of (Methode) handeling questions within changing a big HarbourArea? nearby a city. In 2000 we took part in an architectural competition concerning the harbour areas in Aarhus. We focussed on the non-sites on the harbour and our aim was to keep the existing values within those natural created spots, also when something new would have to be built there. We ended up with a method based on theoretical research as well as field-research. We wrote a text which included our ideology, based on eg. some of R. Smithson and Foucoults main thoughts. And we developed three examples/proposals for new building methods capturing those above mentioned values. This investigation-work/ this project does still interest us and we could imagine very well to make a similar project for the harbour in Hamburg. So if i´ts not too late to take part in your project... please write us back. Also if you need more information...
PeterCallesen?/ Frederiksberg/ Copenhagen <mailto:petercallesen@yahoo.com>; - http://www.petercallesen.com
Answer from MalteWillms/ TetraPak to PeterCallesen?
> My first idea is floating castle on the water, but this is just a very vake idea. But as I see that they are planing to move it to the Baakenhafen, which is a part of Hafencity, I thought that my project still could be a part of your project.
> One could say that my castle is "mobile architecture" and in that sense it could be interesting to place that into your alternative model of a cityplan.
> Floating Castle. Temporary description and ideas for a project for Artgenda 2002 in Hamburg.
> For the rest of the period, I imagine that the King will start to develop a more social side of himself, which also will open up for the castle being a platform for different social and interactive activities.
> First step in that direction could be the King announcing for a princess (maybe on the homepage for Artgenda) and secondly arranging an audience in or a ball on his floating castle, as in traditional fairytales.
> The castle could also serve as a contemplative space, where one or two persons for an hour could stay alone on the castle using it as a place and time for dreaming yourself into a fairytale-world.
> On the castle will be installed a small outboard motor, which will make the castle mobile. This gives some possibilities; maybe the King can take people on guided tour round his Kingdom/ the harbor.
> As mentioned above this project is a continuation of my earlier works dealing with a return to childhood and fairytales. But where those projects was dealing with the confrontation between dream and reality, this project seems more about trying blur these two aspects into another- thought there still is a clash between dream and reality in the choice of building- material.
> The trashy second hand wood is very different from what castles normally are build of. Symbolic the floating mobile castle can be read in different ways. The mobile castle suggests an autonomy and something playful, as well as a contrast to the normal solid castle. The floating and the water also suggest something dreamlike, something which will disappear again, something which maybe just is a dream.
CUKT(Gruppe)/ Piotr Wyrzykowski/ Gdansk mailto:peter_style@cukt.ikp.pl
I guess the idea is to start some kind of discusion about the Hafencity. But is it a real one or just like it is a fasion right now to invite artist and let them do some show actualy to atract the investments and media attantion? What is a goal? Are you tryaing to creat some real alternative to the official plans? Do you alredy have any opinion about it? I guess you have to it is an important local investmant (not only) It is hard for me to take any position against your project I do need more information. I would realy apricite if you can sugest me some websites with some visuals of the region we are talking about. Or send me some jpg. This will help my mind to start working. I am a visual person.
What would be for me interesting is actualy not an alternative but coexistencs with the official plans. To work together with the system inside of it. lest keep the discusion go on maybe we will get the point
MarkusDegerman/ Stockholm mailto:markusdegerman@hotmail.com mailto:markus.degerman@uglycute.com
I'm therefore sending you some examples of my work. It's both works that I have made alone and also some that are made in collaboration. I have also included a text, both in the mail and also as an attachment, wich I wrote for an art and litterature reveiw and wich is quite descriptive for my interests, basically the ideas of style and taste and their functions - especially their relation to politics. I work with a lot of different things; my own art works wich can be in different materials and mediums, collaboration in a design group called «Uglycute», lectures, teaching, graphic design, printed media for example fanzines and posters. I hope that this in someway can help to get an idea of wat I do. At the moment I'm working on a project wich deals with these small green spaces between buildings and roads or parking lots and roads and wich you can find in the suburbs of a lot of cities. I'm attaching an image example, look for the «park and decoration» jpg, to make it a bit more clear. I think they are interesting because of their unclear value and vague idea but also in relation to current trends [high density]. I'm interested in participating in your project and mabye it's possible to combine my work with ArtGenda? with yours.
Fashionable Resistance
It's a lot of talk about doing resistance, to stand up and be politically committed. But you could in some sense say that it has become the same as to read and then correctly follow the contemporary expectations. After all, can resistance really be comme il faut and in that case, who are you turning yourself against? The social structure and peoples values has changed since the sixties, but to some, these changes seems to have passed without notice. Like if the old struggle between high and low, popular versus highculture still is of any interest. It is probably convenient to believe that it's old men in Mercedes and high-culture ladies who, in Somme odd way, personify power and oppression. For others the polarisation has grown into an acceptance; things are what they are and it's OK. But then there are also growing numbers of those who actually try to react, however there's unfortunately among a lot of these a lack of selfctitizism. Which is not suprising, It's no news that some sort of ideology usually is developed as a justification of one's own actions and selfish interests. Examples of this is noticeable in the criticism of the mainstream-culture, the sudden tendency to avoid all animal products, in parts of the feminism or in the interests in the exclusive and the alleged individual. The question that's coming back is therefor; who is it that this kind of resistance in reality is against. The answer could be: the dumb, i.e.those with less knowledge of what's right and wrong in terms of taste. It could sometimes help to now and then ask some simple questions. Is it really necessary to complain on the so called mainstream-music and how is it possible to declare that mainstream music is bad or even ugly which sometimes is written? Is the decision to become a vegetarian really based on a wish to end an oppression, which is even reaching outside of the realms of ones own species? Or is it just an adoption of a trend which presents the believer an inner satisfaction? Is it an expression of individuality to name drop esoteric record labels? And do we have equality when everybody says that they are feminists? The hierarchical changes in the sets of values which has taken place and which probably has had it's major impact during the nineties has led to a shifting in power. From the fine-culture, the must of a fortune and the old men in their Mercedes to an emphasis on a knowledge of contemporary taste, from the bourgeois to the noveau-bourgeois. I consider the concept noveau bourgeois to be an appropriate term to describe the social context to which you could say that I myself am part of. The context constitutes by young people, preferably living in big cities, who are for example working with advertising, art, design, fashion, journalism and music. They are persons who have the power of the production and the mediation of the aesthetics which later becomes normative.
The class of the noveau-bourgeois could also be said to be the class of counter-culture, and that is something completely different from sub-culture. After all, who is really sub-cultural in a time where you can spot people in their forties, all dressed up in skate ware with key-chains and everything, walking around in some fancy park with their kid in a designer pram? The only sub-culture movements that exist in Stockholm in terms of standing for something that is collectively considered as being the ultimate bad taste and are fought by all institutions are the neo-nazis and also maybe the new candidates in the genre; the Satanists. Anarchism, graffiti, skate, veganism, hip hop and so on, are examples of counter-culture and therefore possess a different status. It is rather so that counter-culture has become something that is rewarded and supported, that is, a modern radically fit for the drawing-room. The logic that follows is; if you're not counter-culture then you're not original and if you're not original then you're common and if you're common then you're uninteresting and invisible. This raises on the other hand the question of who is original in such a context where everybody is an individual. The anxiety of facing unsympathetics and be left out of it is leading to a longing to belong to a collective, the result is paradoxically conformism. With this in mind should the discussion about resistance lead in opposition against the correct. This should in other words mean a resistance against the (noveau bourgeois) context in it self. It is therefore important to have a clear formulation of the contemporary social system. Conflicts, like the slightly terrifying image of someone who's claiming to stand up for the cause of the good but then through his/her actions promoting the opposite, occur when there's a lack of this idea. Resistance becomes a reference among other references who shows that you have understood and are supporting the prevailing sets of values which defines your social group. Sets of values that in one category consequently includes an articulation of an opposition and political engagement. The only question is; what does this politics actually imply? It is for this reason important to have a discussion about the results of the replacement of old values with new, especially when these are justified with moral.
MarkusDegerman for Uglycute.
Published in the resistance-theme-issue nr 2/3 - 01 of the art and litterature review «00-tal»
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