User:Alessia/special issue xxiv

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gleaning, gathering, collecting, extracting

List making

Overdosing.
This is my thing. Lists are my thing.
The strive to live in a systematic way, to find coherence in the chaos, creating patterns creating structures (to then forget them). Where is control? What about overwhelming sense of losing control? I don’t need to be so mean tho. I am a list. List.
This time as always I’ll try to think about lists without thinking about them?

from A Sand Book by Ariana Reines

One of the first thing I think about is a book: A Sand Book by Ariana Reines. It’s a poem book. She has a really raw and kind of occult writing style, she play with her own inner tension, in between different levels of realities. She plays with words, cutting them as she is using sharp knifes, soaked in lyricism. She plays with structures making them tangible, fresh meat to cut. Her poems look like intense lists of emotions, images, seemingly disconnected at times and overall they still punch directly your gut in the most brutal way.

Everyone their own style about writing lists, some people write them and follow them to the letter, some write them to forget about them soon after abandoning themselves to the gentle passage of time, some write them to feel as bad as possible, to spur themselves on with carrot and stick.
Or not, it's just a piece of paper, or a note on your cell phone, or a list of good resolutions that you already know you won't follow, that you won't have either the desire or the will to lose weight or read 100 books, but it's part of the ritual, of renewal, of really believing in something.
Writing lists of things to do, of objects, of dreams, of thoughts makes it all more tangible, neat, tidy, to buffer the incurable desire for control over time, it can get manic, and mania has been known to have a certain appeal, creative appeal, maybe not, maybe I'm just saying that to feel better for a moment with my manic tendencies for documentation and to-do lists to best box my life into smaller, more digestible bits.

I was looking for something cool to make lists about, something enlightening, I was thinking about myself and what would be interesting to list in my life, or how to make them extremely interesting or extremely boring, no half measures.

Then I found Kateřina Šedá.

Je to Jedno, It doesn't matter by Kateřina Šedá and Hana Šedá

First going through my notes, I found one from six years ago telling me to look for Kateřina and her work. I deleted the note. My phone's memory was, and still is, full.

A few days later, quite by chance, I found myself at Tent's closing party, in the Witte de Withstraat, on the second floor, far from the eyes of assailants of oyster stalls and fancy beer in cans drinkers, I found myself in front of 512 drawings by Kateřina hanging next to each other. An illumination. What a coincidence.

So I certainly can't not talk about it after encountering Kateřina's work three times in my life and not giving it enough consideration, this time I guess it's the right time, like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle it fits now perfectly.

Je to jedno, it doesn't matter, is the name of her work that I came across. The project started from Kateřina's desire to uplift her grandmother, who was sinking into depression following her husband's passing. Kateřina convinced her grandmother to draw the tools she had used in her shop for over three decades. In this act of creative list-making her grandmother wove a thread connecting past and present in a deeply therapeutic way, through a self therapy listing action. Archiving memory.
After rediscovering Kateřina , I have long wondered whether the very act of writing lists, of any kind, is a positive or negative act, and of course the answer is that it depends.
List of things to be grateful for?
Is this a good example of a positive list?
Why not lists of things not to be grateful for?
And immediately I thought of Pillow book by Sei Shonagon, and her courtesan lists. Hateful things is certainly a list of things not to be thankful for.

Red

Psychogeography and Non places

What I like about this special issue is that we got out, finally. I wanted to suppress myself at some point, the aquarium is an alienating space, wdka in general is. Concrete and glass is the best to make you feel discomfort.
Going around looking at the city in a bit of a different way is fun, refreshing.
I always say my favourite colour is red, so for my own list during a looting typical monday I decided to focus myself on everything red.

There is still the non places aspect I would like to explore directly, as I was living in a city that itself I feel is a non place so it was difficult to observe it as a “normal” active lively city.
Now that I am here I can see the differences, the little obscure hidden corners, I can see trash and not romanticise it as part of the landscape. What about blind sides? Sounds good as a title.

This got me into a rabbit hole anyway, nothing new I would say, as anything is great material to get into rabbit holes of information. It seems as a great hobby, to just get lost this way in the branches of a theme, swimming toward the horizon and forget what was even the starting point. I have faith every fragment, at some point, will merge together, revealing a nice magical mosaic trash,something cool.

Thinking about colour in the city, on an aesthetic level, there is quite a lot to say. How much colour is used in urban preservation, and how much it affects people mentally and physically. It Would be nice to research palettes depending on the zones of the city.
While researching colors I got into Psychogeography.
Psychogeography as an art political movement was born during the mid of the 20th century, best time to create a niche artist environment, create a edgy collective with you mates. It was mainly influenced my anarchism and marxism.
Psychogeography is a different spacial approach to environments, that focuses on how the latter influence behaviours, emotions and the experience of the individual, developed thanks to the Situationists International, lovely avant-garde intellectuals.
It rejects traditional ways of mapping spaces for a more spiritual, curiously esoteric recherché vision of space. It encourages people to wander, thanks to key practices as dérive, walking around with no destination being guided just by intuition and curiosity, getting lost while getting engaged with the social cultural and psychological interconnectedness dynamics that shape constantly urban environments around us.

I’ve been reading The contemporary dérive: a partial review of issues concerning the contemporary practice of psychogeography from Cultural Geography, an international journal about environment, landscape, space/place while addressing the cultural political aspect of geographical issues. It got me a little bit more into psychogeography analysis.
The text explores occult or hidden psychogeographies, it gets an interest in uncovering deeper layers of meaning or experience within spaces, as the concept of the dérive, not just an individual experience but as a social one as well. Going around, getting lost while searching playfully for associations and emotions rooted in the urban structure of the city, disassembling the space. This can easily become performative, and that is probably one of the main aspects the International Situationists wanted to get.

While digging into Psychogeography I met Mythogeography.
Both are radical approaches to exploring landscapes, surely urban environments. But while Psychogeography is interested in the psychological and social aspect of space, following intuitive actions still subjective, maybe born to challenge the conventional perception of reality, Mythogeography focuses on the cultural and symbolic dimensions of space, mainly the role of myths and different stories that challenge the dominant narratives taking place, while drawing mainly from folklore and cultural heritage.
https://adventureuncovered.com/stories/mythogeography-radical-walking-and-counter-tourism-an-interview-with-phil-smith/ The rabbit hole goes on, unstoppable https://www.mythogeography.com/
Phil Smith always pops up anyway.
Radical walking, counter-tourism https://www.countertourism.net/lander, site specific performance, multiplicity of meaning, engaging imaginatively and being vulnerable to the space, putting your body at the mercy of the terrain (“hyper-sensitised” walking). Accepting curiosity and distractions. “use our bodies to ground our thoughts in the terrain” and resist the idea that we inescapably rely on technology for information”. Removing ego from space…

I tried my best to not return too much over themes I already studied, but Marc Augé is still returning back in any possible way again and again, and I cannot stop my mind connecting his studies to anything I am doing in XPUB.

Marc Augé was an anthropologist, not a traditional one. I feel Augé worked to anthropology as a way to analyse time and changes within space, more than going deeply into any society in particular, so he focus on surmodernity, the new world open to hyperconnection, to the new tech called internet, global development, at least in the last phase of his career. The local to him is no longer an alone ecosystem, the local is a fragment of the biggest global whole. At the endo of the 20st century he explored the increasing intensity of solitude despite the introduction of new communications technologies. The best known Marc Augé work is probably the one about Non places. The oblivion of space, the detachment of sociality and familiarity, conviviality from space.

I brought up Augé and non places because there are some common themes there with psychogeography. Both types of studies focus on the individual experiencing the contemporary urban environments. Augé explores the anonymity, impersonality of modern end of the century's spaces (such as airports, malls, highways), standardisation, and disconnections. It's an analysis and critique of the fast changes that technology and globalisation brought to how humanity lived in space. I believe it's quite a personal and subjective research, and even if I agree with some points he makes I can still question some others, as I believe Augé made his prophecies for the future and something came true, but not everything, after 20 years.
What I see is that humanity will always bring their own touch. An anonymous place, builded to not be a social place, will be used by the individual to socialise, in different ways, not socially accepted surely, but still used and lived. And that is a fascinating aspect of how you can’t really control how a space will be used after it is builded.
What is surely true is his analysis is connectet them to the concept of margins, and liminal spaces, so peripheries, spaces that get overlooked and ignored, the physical and tangible space that becomes the borderland, the borderland of the city where the monsters live, A thread might be possible between Non places and Leigh Star, as I won't get tired of her soon.
Lots of pain, overlooked pain, ignored stories. But I feel Augé sees them superficially, not really going into a more mytho geographical analysis, so addressing social and political issues and not just aesthetical, physical.

Space, place, postcolonialism

This destabilization of anthropology and archaeology's relationship with its subjects, the status of place as an object of inquiry has to be reconsidered- as heterogenous and deeply politicized, contested and negotiated, fragile in its materiality, monumentalized to initiate state practices of appropriation, cleansing and collective forgetting. We should not consider places and non-places as absolute categories that exclude each other, but acknowledge the fact that even non-places have the potential to become places

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/archaeologiesofplace/7994.html'

'Here is a methodological question. Bourdieu's work on the Kabyle house demonstrates how complex the spaces in which we live are in their symbolic associations, everyday fluidity of their various functions, cultural meanings, social configurations, spatial hermeneutics. How does one get to know, excavate, arrive at such complexity of domestic spaces, houses, through ethnographic fieldwork? What are the possible methodologies that needs to be employed towards arriving at such a knowledge of the space of everday life? If we were dealing with an ancient house through excavation, how much of this body of knowledge we have access to? Here we could talk about the field of "ethnoarchaeology", the intersection of ethnographic and archaeological research. How does ethnography, ethno-history, anthropology and archaeology inform each other?

Rooting/Uprooting

Mapping

Work with maps, create maps as scrapbooks, cabinet of curiosities, trash bunkers. Lot of structuress, no purpose

Counter mapping was present in my explorations during these last months, and now, talking about how to wander around Rotterdam and how to perceive space in a different way I can, happily, return back to it.

Counter Mapping is made to challenge perception, exactly like drifting, loitering, psychogeography, counter tourism. It is an activist practice to challenge the dominant representations of spaces and places, in relation with identity, power and human rights. Spatial representation that challenges mainstream cartographies is involved, serving marginalised narratives and communities through empowerment, advocating for social and political change.

Quite a lot of new GIS (geographical information systems) are arising online, allowing communities to share interactive maps.
I randomly found this one some time ago: https://hoodmaps.com/rotterdam-neighborhood-map

Counter mapping was the main theme in some workshops I participated in, the Counter Mapping Autonomy Workshop, made by the The Autonomy Research Programthat investigates autonomy and self-organisations in The Netherlands as well as around the world. The second edition of the workshop was guided by Argentinian collective Iconoclasistas and was focused on the concept of autonomy initiatives in Rotterdam.
Always following the same thematics another workshop was organised in Roodkapje , How to continue self organisation?, an event about spaces, communities, collectives. The end goal of this workshop was create a collective map, here as well counter mapping is something present.
What I appreciated in these workshops is definitely the storytelling of communities, the talks about marginality, present in the city we live in, storytelling of projects and extraordinary inspiring energy. One can perceive a network, an underground structure of support and care, of resilience, serving the community in a very different way from the collectives that I am used to back in Italy.
And, obviously, counter mapping, mapping as an activity, is always present.
Brainstorming’s mapping, a crazy confused one, is the perfect way to visualise the complexity of reality, aesthetically and through the content shown.

Liminal

HERE! HERE! HERE! HERE!

Reading list, references

✰⋆Smith, Phil. “The Contemporary Dérive: A Partial Review of Issues Concerning the Contemporary Practice of Psychogeography.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2010, pp. 103–22. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44251315.

✰⋆https://hogeschoolrotterdam.on.worldcat.org/search?databaseList=&queryString=The%20map%20is%20not%20the%20territory%20&format=Book&subformat=Book%3A%3Abook_digital&changedFacet=format&clusterResults=true&groupVariantRecords=false

✰⋆Augè, Marc. "Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity"
✰⋆https://www.psychogeography.org/evol/index.html
✰⋆Guest Editorial by Bruce Kapferer 1, Victor Turner and The ritual process, ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 35 NO 3, JUNE 2019

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/archaeologiesofplace/7994.html

books/essays wishlist

• The Pattern: a fictioning ~ Helen Billinghurst & Phil Smith
• Appadurai, Arjun; 1996. "The production of locality," Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 178-199.
• https://hogeschoolrotterdam.on.worldcat.org/search/detail/1248759162?databaseList=&queryString=Cultural%20Geographies&format=Book&subformat=Book%3A%3Abook_digital&subformat=Book%3A%3Abook_printbook&changedFacet=format&clusterResults=true&groupVariantRecords=false
• https://alytusbiennial.com/constitution.html
• https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Art_practices/Situography

Made Be Not May or May That Project