Recover the Streets

September 4, 2013September 4, 2013 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Recover the Streets arises from the need to interconnect different European projects that work with urban art in their respective cities; the need to offer artists the possibility of interacting with other European creators, of improving their visibility and finding new expression formulas; the need to boost urban art as a regenerator of new city visions; to create participative processes that bring culture, and in this specific case, urban art, closer to population sectors that do not normally participate in cultural events.

Recover the Streets is a collaboration project between five European cities that, using urban art as a tool and common language, purport to interconnect artists and cultural agents from all these cities, promoting the exchange of artistic and social experiences; recovering, in each one of them, a debased space by means of a collaborative process that engages the social agents of the neighbourhoods where the activity takes place, and providing citizens with a new perception of urban art and its ability to activate social and cultural dynamics.
A project that will last for 8 months, which has united a total of six cities from different parts of Europe, where institutions and cultural agents have committed to promoting urban art, thus offering an open and diverse collaboration framework which has already given rise to sporadic collaborations outside the programme, among some of the cultural agents involved:

• Zaragoza (Spain): Sociedad Municipal Zaragoza Cultural
• Besançon (France): Association Juste Ici
• Toulouse (France): Mairie de Toulouse
• Colonia (Germany): Association artmx e.V / Cityleaks Festival
• Zagreb (Croatia): Association Centralna Jedinica

Know more HERE

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Philosophy · Social/Politics · Theory

Does Europe Exist?

July 24, 2013 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

The Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, in a chapter she contributed to a book published in 1992, stated with some confidence her view that there was no such thing as European culture. There was certainly, she wrote, Italian and German music, and Florentine and Venetian painting, “but there is no European music and no European painting”.

It is true that the history of art and culture was not really Heller’s field, but it would seem that those who, in the same year as she wrote her essay, framed the Maastricht Treaty, signalling the transition from European Community to European Union, at least partially agreed with her. The treaty was the first time the community had taken for itself significant powers in the cultural field. European cultures (note the plural), the relevant article stated, were to be understood as requiring “respect” – by which one understands freedom from too much supranational interference (“The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity …”). At the same time however, the Community was to be entrusted with the task of “[b]ringing the common cultural heritage to the fore”.

Excerpt from an essay written by Enda O’Doherty at DBR. Continue THERE

Human-ities · Social/Politics

What Is the International Community?

June 8, 2013 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Despite the frequency with which the phrase “international community” is invoked, its precise meaning – like its origins – is difficult to discern. And, as France’s recent intervention in Mali has shown, this ambiguity lies at the root of many of today’s most urgent foreign-policy problems.

For some, an international community simply does not exist. For others, the term refers, more pragmatically, to all countries when they decide to act together. Still another, more accurate definition encompasses all countries with international influence – that is, any country whose identity and sovereignty is recognized, and that chooses to participate in global discussions and decision-making.

Beyond semantics lies the more consequential, but equally ambiguous, question of the international community’s role and responsibility. Just as too broad a definition could undermine a country’s sovereignty, too narrow a definition – like that which seems to predominate today – allows violence and instability to proliferate.

Excerpt from an article written by Michel Rocard, one of Europe’s leading statesmen, was Prime Minister of France from 1988-1991.
Continue HERE

Human-ities · Social/Politics

The History of Debt

March 8, 2013 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

What follows is a fragment of a much larger project of research on debt and debt money in human history. The first and overwhelming conclusion of this project is that in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state.

Excerpt from an article written by David Graeber at EuroZine. Continue HERE

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Social/Politics · Videos

Time-lapse map of Europe

May 15, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Fast forwarding from ca 1000 AD until 2003 showing Europe’s shifting borders, alliances, unions, territories, occupied land, etc.
Software: Centennia
Music: Inception OST

Human-ities · Public Space · Social/Politics · Theory

Europe invents the Gypsies. The dark side of modernity

March 5, 2012March 5, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Social segregation, cultural appropriation: the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, as recorded in literature and art, represents the underside of the European subject’s self-invention as agent of civilizing progress in the world, writes Klaus-Michael Bogdal.

Is Europe anything more than the remnants of a grand political delusion? Is there a cultural bond that unites the nations and peoples of this fragmented continent? From Max Weber to Norbert Elias, the greats of European intellectual history have described and re-described Europe as the birthplace of modernity; not, like the other continents, as the “heart of darkness”, but as the energetic center of civilizing progress. Their attention has focused on the “grand narratives”: industrialization and economic productivity, state and nation building, science and art. Yet might not an examination from the other side – through an investigation of the marginal – provide essential insights into Europe’s development over the longue dureé? Might not the history of the Roma, a group marginalized like none other, reveal a less auspicious aspect of Europe’s grand narrative of modernity?

The tendency of existing research to treat the Roma as having first entered European political history with the Nazi genocide disregards a unique six-hundred-year history. It is indeed the case that the Roma, who over long periods of time lived nomadically and possessed no written culture of their own, have left almost no historical accounts of themselves. The heritage and documents therefore do not permit a history of the Roma comparable to that, for example, of the persecuted and expelled French Huguenots. What is available to us, however, is evidence – in the form of literature and art – of the way in which the settled, feudally organized European population experienced a way of life that it perceived as threatening. Despite consisting solely of stories and images that are defensive “distortions”, this evidence provides a far from unfavorable basis for an examination of the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, insofar as it is a history of cultural appropriation characterized by segregation. We encounter the traces of the reality experienced by the Roma almost exclusively through depictions by outsiders, and must use these to imagine those parts considered impossible to represent. The extraneous cultural depictions of the Roma – variously referred to as gypsies, zigeuner, tatern, cigány, çingeneler, and so on – have created heterogeneous units of “erased” identity and cultural attributes. The “invention” of the Gypsy is the underside of the European cultural subject’s invention of itself as the agent of civilizing progress in the world.

Excerpt on an article written by Klaus-Michael Bogdal for Eurozine. Continue HERE

Architectonic · Art/Aesthetics · Social/Politics · Theory

The Battle for Bauhaus: How A Movement Failed to Protect Its Name

January 17, 2012January 17, 2012 Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Germany’s famous Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933 forged new boundaries in the art and design world and remains highly influential today. But its brand and legacy has been under threat for five decades from a large German-Swiss home goods retailer that took the title and trademark “Bauhaus” in 1960 and now has 190 stores around Europe.

Architect Walter Gropius and his group of communal craftsmen put a radical stamp on architecture, design and art education during Germany’s Weimar Period between the two world wars. He even claims he coined the term “Bauhaus” as the name for his atypical art school.

Along the way, though, he forgot an important thing: to protect the name.

As a result, up to 40 companies in Germany and myriad others abroad have taken the word “Bauhaus” as a brand or title. The imitators include a furniture label in the United States, a rumored bordello in Japan, a chocolate variety that touts its form and function, a real estate company and the early British gothic band led by Peter Murphy.

“Bauhaus sells,” says Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Museum in Berlin. “That’s the point.” When someone is copying you or your name in a corporate context, she says, “then you see that you really have a brand.”

But the greatest squatter of the moniker is a do-it-yourself retailer based in Mannheim, which trademarked the Bauhaus during postwar divided Germany. It happened before Gropius and others moved to established archives and museums — in Dessau and Weimar (in the former east) and Berlin — to explain and protect the historical Bauhaus and its legacy. Now, it’s causing confusion to the general public and frustration to Bauhaus design aficionados.

Written by Paul Glader at the Spiegel. Continue HERE