The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism is an experiment in global conversation based in the South. Located in Johannesburg, we seek to be a critical node in the re-territorializing of global intellectual production. We are a centre for theoretical work that takes seriously a position in the South while addressing international conversations and problématiques. We take the labour of theory and criticism to be significant political work that is crucial to the experimentation in social forms.
The Session will take place in Johannesburg, South Africa from June 23 to July 2, 2013 under the theme The Life of Forms. The 2013 participants come from various parts of the world, including Latin America, Asia, Europe, the United States and Canada, and the rest of the African Continent.
The Life of Forms. Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism
writing
Thanks to the generous support of Fondation for Arts Initiatives, we are taking some time to finally write a book centered around DAAR research and architectural projects. The book will be published by sternberg-press by the end of this year.
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Workshop rethinking “occupations” – Duke University
Thursday – Friday, March 28-29, 2013
FHI Garage – C105, Bay 4, 1st Floor, Smith Warehouse
Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University
During the last year a new type of political struggle has emerged in numerous places around the globe, in which activists of all kinds “occupy” public spaces, or turn private spaces public through their “occupation” for relatively long periods of time. “Occupying” has come to designate the main organizing practice of what seems to be a new type of non-governmental politic. It defines a space of action, a form of co-existence and partnership, modes of interaction with governments and media, and a basis for global collaboration. In the occupied spaces citizenship is re-imagined and re-thought, the multitudes emerge in new forms, the system under which they are ruled and governed are questioned with a long forgotten vigor, and power is both sought and challenged in new ways.
However, in this workshop we wish to think the “occupying movement” in relation to the more standard meanings of occupation, both as social role and profession that the market determines and distributes, and as a condition of rule in which the government is not accountable to the ruled population. Demonstrators in the Middle East and elsewhere carried posters saying “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine”. The contrast is simple and straightforward, but it points to a much more complex field of relation between the visible oppression and subjugation characteristic of Palestine, where military occupation has lasted longer than any existing occupation, and the more subtle interplay of freedom and oppression demonstrated in each and every occupied public (or semi-public) square.
Public Space in the contemporary mediterranean areas
Posted: 12.12.2012
Wake Forest University 15 e 16 dicembre 2012
Return to Jaffa and Right to Mobility
Posted: 08.10.2012
Finally on line the two latest DAAR@Berlage’s projects: return to jaffa, an architectural and archeological investigation on the Jaffa beach, and right to mobility , ideas for the re-activation of the Ottoman ancient railway once connecting the entire Middle East.
Can the camp be the new urban paradigm beyond the notion of the state?
Posted: 23.06.2012
In occasion of THE BERLAGE YEAREND PUBLIC EVENT AND EXHIBITION, roundtable discussion “Can the camp be the new urban paradigm beyond the notion of the state?” based on the second-year postgraduate studio entitled “Return to the Common” with Ole Bouman, Lieven De Cauter, Galit Eliat, Manuel Herz, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Dietmar Steiner (Tuesday, June 26 – from 11.00 am to 01.30 pm, DE DEPENDANCE, Rotterdam)
SYMPOSIUM, 26—27 JUNE 2012, DE DEPENDANCE, Rotterdam
On Tuesday and Wednesday, June 26 and 27, the Berlage Institute will host a two-day event of lectures, roundtable discussions, film screenings, and question-and-answer sessions inspired by the conversations taking place in its 2011–2012 postgraduate design research studios. An accompanying exhibition will open on Tuesday, June 26 at 7:00 pm, remaining on view until Sunday, August 12.
Transforming Assembly @ James Gallery, CUNY graduate center
Posted: 14.06.2012
Students of all ages from across New York City will come together to celebrate access to public education, in collaboration with DAAR’s exhibition Common Assembly. Through physical and digital archiving, printmaking, collaborative mapping, film and new media, poetry, performance, and anthropological field notes, participants will open alternative spaces for assembly and pedagogy.
Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/381535308554943
The James Gallery, the General Assembly of the Graduate Center, OpenCUNY, and the Center for the Humanities invite you to “Transforming Assembly,” a week-long collaborative installation curated by students of the City University of New York in collaboration with the James Gallery artists in residence, DAAR. High school, undergraduate, and graduate students from across the city will celebrate access to public education. Through physical and digital archiving, printmaking, collaborative mapping, film and new media, as well as performative readings of poetry and anthropological field notes, participants will open an alternative space of assembly.
Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal at Festarch, Friday 8th June 2012
Posted: 29.05.2012
Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal come back to Italy after some years to describe their work with the collective DAAR. The architecture becomes a real political practice and an instrument of decolonization.
Friday 8th June 2012
18.00
Teatro Morlacchi
Piazza Francesco Morlacchi 19, Perugia
Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Politics
Posted: 24.05.2012
Visual Culture | Politics
$36.95 | £25.95 cloth 978-1-935408-24-6
664 pp. | 17 color, 114 b&w illus. | 6 x 9
Available November 2012
“The Morning After: Profaning Colonial Architecture” by DAAR in the new book edited by Meg McLagan and Yates McKee
Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism considers the constitutive role played by aesthetic and performative techniques in the staging of claims by nongovernmental activists. Attending to political aesthetics means focusing not on a disembodied image that travels under the concept of art or visual culture, nor on a preformed domain of the political that seeks subsequent expression in media form. Instead, it requires bringing the two realms together into the same analytic frame. Drawing on the work of a diverse group of contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, Sensible Politics situates aesthetic forms within broader activist contexts and networks of circulation and in so doing offers critical insight into the practices of mediation whereby the political becomes manifest.
Campus in Camps: experimental educational platforms and practice-led interventions in Palestinian Refugee Camps
Posted: 06.05.2012
Campus in Camps is an experimental educational program that aims at transgressing, without eliminating, the distinction between camp and city, refugee and citizen, center and periphery, theory and practice, teacher and student. Every year, Campus in Camps brings together fifteen participants from West Bank refugee camps in an attempt to explore and produce a new form of representation of camps and refugees beyond the static and traditional symbols of victimization, passivity and poverty. This initiative stems from the recognition that refugee camps in the West Bank are in a process of a historical political, social and spatial transformation. Despite adverse political and social conditions Palestinian refugee camps have developed a relatively autonomous and independent social and political space: no longer a simple recipient of humanitarian intervention but rather an active political subject. The camp becomes a site of social invention and suggests new political and spatial configurations. The refugee camp is transformed from a marginalized urban area to a center of social and political life. More notable is that such radical transformations have not normalized the political condition of being exiled. For decades, the effects of the political discourse around the right of return, such as the rise of a resolute imperative to stagnate living circumstances in refugee camps in order to reaffirm the temporariness of the camps, forced many refugees to live in terrible conditions. What emerges today is a reconsideration of this imperative where refugees are re-inventing social and political practices that improve their everyday life without normalizing the political exceptional condition of the camp itself. After sixty years of exile, the camps are now viewed as the village of origin: a cultural and social product to preserve and remember. What is at stake in this program is the possibility for the participants to realize interventions in camps without normalizing their conditions or merely subsuming the camp within the rest of the city. Campus in Camps aims to provide a protected context in which to accompany and reinforce such complex and crucial changes in social practices and representations. We believe that the future of the refugee camps and their associated spatial, social and political regime force us to re-think the very idea of the city as a space of political representation through the consideration of the camp as a counter-laboratory for new spatial and social practices.
Campus in Camps is a programme by Al Quds University (Al Quds/Bard Partnership) and hosted by the Phoenix Center in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. It is implemented with the support of the GIZ Regional Social and Cultural Fund for Palestinian Refugees and Gaza Population on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in cooperation with UNRWA Camp Improvement Department.