theMterritory

Pseudocides

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:26:10 +0000

Since 1995, Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol have teemed together as Bik Van der Pol. Although this seemingly innocent decision is nothing more than just a nominal arrangement, it incites my imagination to firmly establish a Frankensteinian reality, one that invites us to step into a kind of radical and fragmented subjectivity with all the political implications attached to it. Listen carefully. «Loompanics», the publishing lighthouse that for 30 years had filled our bookshelves with the most extreme list of titles, went out of business at the beginning of 2006. «How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found» by Doug Richmond was on the list, and claimed to be a guide to endow oneself with a new identity after committing «pseudocide». Beautiful, no? In Bik Van der Pol’s «Disappearance Piece», the artists print 1000 copies of the scanned and personalized pages of one of the original editions, and the contents are openly available to an in site lecture. Wanna melt in?

«The Disappearance Piece» at The Kitchen, New York.

Erasing The Architectural Palimpsest

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:50:57 +0000

Joaquim Ruiz Millet, by now, a good friend of mine, published in 1995 the first edition of a book that seemed to go practically unnoticed. In 2002 he made a second edition proving, however, that the book indeed had built up a certain type of concerned audience. The publication was a catalogue of Francisco J. Barba Corsini’s considerable output in architecture, interior and furniture design, illustrated with photographs by Francesc Català Roca that by themselves are a generous treat. This kind of slow but determined dissemination was due mostly to the original reason for the publication. Embedded within the pages of the book, one could find a reasonable call for action, one that was aimed at preserving an existing architectural palimpsest, one that had marvelled many in the city, and one that prove to be embarrassing to others too. That’s why the hush-hush. In 1953, Corsini designed and supervised the construction of 13 apartments in the attic of Gaudi’s «Casa Milà» to make a profitable use of a space that was, at that point, unused and in an abandoned state. This interior architecture that, at the end, made no intrusion on the morphology of the building, seemed to testify to the fact that Gaudi had been finally digested and assimilated. It’s hard to believe that those spaces aren’t there anymore.

«Barba Corsini. Arquitectura 1953-1994», Galería H2O, Barcelona.
Fotos Francesc Català Roca.

Registered®

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:19:19 +0000

Sometimes a literal approach is a more profitable generator of meaning. This is specially true when the most popular meaning of a word is subjected to the definitions of the law, and it is submitted to the guidance of a proper usage. Sometimes, in addition, the meaning might be a compounder of endless tautologies. Once you write these words, you can’t escape their redundancy. Bravo! Here’s where figurative use melts finally with its background.

«Registered Blackboard», an exercice in tautology

Chewing Words

admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:06:07 +0000

My mother had to always remind me to chew slowly and thoroughly. Paper pulp, however, is specially indigestible. It’s for stuffing.
Comfortably posed to endured such ruminations, of course, as long as they last, one has to wonder invariably when printed literature will finally crash. So far, we know that it’s now a matter of speed, of short messages, of an advanced kind of telegraphy. It has to be produced and consumed fast. No more room for introductions, for easing things out. It’s now or never, already passed, irrelevant.
…and then, at one point, booom! …all stays standstill. The crash has made everything tight, densely packed. Now it’s really hard to swallow.

«Budgie stuffed with JG Ballard's 'Crash'», by Mark Edelman Boren, 1991. Appearing in
«Speed. Visions of an Accelerated Age»

Love in Contrast

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:44:29 +0000

Siempre he pensado que la fuerza y el amor son dos cualidades totalmente contradictorias por lo que hablar de «la fuerza del amor» puede llegar a ser bastante inoportuno. La manipulación del mundo siempre se ha hecho por la fuerza que no es otra cosa que esa magnitud física capaz de deformar cuerpos o de ponerlos en movimiento. La fuerza acarrea siempre esa especie de condición impositiva que solo es necesaria cuando el entorno se nos resiste. ¿Hay, en esas condiciones, lugar para el amor?
Si de algo puede presumir el amor es de defender el valor de la aceptación y la paciencia, de llevarlos al delirio. Querer modificar lo amado es, sin lugar a dudas, un sinsentido.
El marcaje de un territorio, sea conceptual o físico, conlleva la necesidad de un cierto contraste con su entorno que pretende siempre absorberlo todo dentro de un continuo indiscriminado y monótono. La aceptación de esos contrastes, de su multiplicación y expansión, es, en todo caso, condición exclusiva del sentimiento amoroso o, mejor dicho, es motivo de su pulsión. Sin ese contraste, sin esa distancia, sin el entrometimiento del «otro» no existe la posibilidad del amor.

Proposed cover for «La força del amor», Plataforma Editorial. Tags in Barcelona's streets.

Wearing Type

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:03:47 +0000

Actually, this is not mere coincidence. I suspect that branding, at its best, does just that. M is for “Macula”, for stain, blemish. In short, M is for evidencing an error, an accident. I’m featuring a scene of Fritz Lang’s “M” because there is a relationship with type that awakens a profound fear, one that we’ve learned somehow to trivialize. Wearing this grammatical layer can leave no one neutral. I guess that is because, under these circumstances, one always stands out.

Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's "M", and a trendy peepingMonster t-shirt.

Las fitografías del amor

admin — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:16:15 +0000

Sí, ya lo sé, otro neologismo, pero este creo que es merecedor de su etimología. Siempre ha existido cierta tensión entre el trazo gráfico y el sustrato sobre el que se aplica. Hay una cierta relación entre el esfuerzo mecánico que se ejerce sobre el soporte y la ansiedad que provoca la «impermanencia» de la palabra. Podríamos decir que el mayor grado de ansiedad se pone de manifiesto en las inscripciones sobre piedra. El caso que nos concierne ahora, el de la fitografía, es relevante, más que por su «impermanencia», por sus metamorfosis. Lo primero que debemos reconocer es que son palabras y heridas. ¿Quién nos va a negar que el amor no conlleva el padecimiento de cierta traumatología? Lo segundo que hay que admitir es que el sustrato, al estar vivo, aporta sus propias manipulaciones a la forma tipográfica y nos propone un continuo de versiones en constante mutación que sugieren por supuesto su inminente fin.

"Rosa quiere a Aitor"

Image of Ambiguity

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:56:49 +0000

When Jasper Johns told us that we “…cannot paint an image of the number seven” that we “…can only paint a number seven”, I was happy to have inherited a certain amount of discursive stability. Frankly, at the moment, I couldn’t agree more. Having bypassed somehow all those conflicts of representation, I had to agree that, indeed, the conventions of the sign seemed to introduce a tangible opportunity to better exploit certain ways of communication.

"One can only print ambiguity". Colección Actual. Plataforma Editorial, Barcelona.

The Luxor Garage

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:01:44 +0000

It doesn’t happen often, but, now and then, I see myself unwillingly practicing a kind of urban archeology. Most of the time, it happens around the contested territories of «street art» where the push and pull of prominence is delivered without mercy and erasure is a common activity. It’s only rarely that I’m surprised by another kind of loss, one that usually we consider out of that perpetually unsolved conflict. The rarest of cases takes place when, in addition, one has taken casual documentation of the lost object months or years before, and, in a kind of awakening scenario, one looks dumbfounded at what it’s now its absence. It happened the other day on «carrer de Neptú». The Luxor Garage is no longer standing. I remember taking a few shots of the great typography that announced its services.

The Luxor Garage at carrer de Neptú, Barcelona