Didier Faustino: don't trust architects

Didier Faustino. Flatland. Fundaçào Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon. In Flatland, a spectator becomes an actor by projecting himself into the backside of a movie screen using a swing. The other spectators seated in the theater can see the surface of the screen frontside distorted by the swing of the body, as an empirical three-dimensional effect. Flatland questions what is reality and what is fiction, offering the possibility to a spectator to become the main character of his imaginary.Didier Faustino, such an architect despite the title of his exhibition: lots of brilliant talk while other little bods run around making the piece.  Click on the image above to take you to a short video of the setting up of this project. 

From the press release: '"Don't Trust Architects" by Didier Faustino at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation.  Didier Faustino is presenting a series of new pieces at the Calouste Gulbekian Foundation (Lisbon) from 14th January to 3rd April 2011. Five new installations produced for the exhibition will immerse visitors in the permanent confrontation of the body with architecture and architecture with movement, via visual and sound tools implemented by Faustino.'

the other seventies

Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention

Paul Robeson: Ô mon cher Canada

Passeig de Gràcia, 1908

Barcelona en tranvia, 1908. Filmoteca Española

oh for trams, trolleys, street cars.  oh for a slow city.

click on the image above and it will take you to Europa Film Treasures and a short film taken from the front of a tram when the streets were full of children, dogs, people going somewhere.

Henryk Górecki

Henryk Górecki (6 December 1933 - 12 November 2010)

Henryk Górecki.  Syphony of Sorrowful Songs.  Second part of the 3rd Movement - Lento e largo—Tranquillissimo

Bosnia

Grasscut: voices past

Grasscut. 1inch / 1/2 mile. 2010

Andrew Phillips and Marcus O'Dair of Grasscut do a lot of sampling of archival recordings and picking up sound on cell phones. The name of their most recent cd, 1 inch / 1/2 mile, is a map scale. They walked across southern England at one point. On this disc 'The Tin Man' mixes a metal-on-metal creaking of a sculpture at the Pompidou Centre and a 1927 recording of John McCormack recorded off a wind-up gramophone.  The results are haunting, as if one was listening to the past through light years of space and time, which of course, we are.

This piece is 'In Her Pride' – Hilaire Belloc in 1932 sings his poem 'The Winged Horse' where he flies over England, and Ezra Pound reads from 'EP: An Ode' of 1926 on the acceleration of interwar life.  Their voices are very robust.  This is the only video I could find: I wish the image was as lapidary as the music.

Mario, from Jonal & Malage de Lugendo

A couple of nights ago heard a radio documentary on Franco Luambo Makiadi on BBC World African Perspectives.  You can get it as a podcast from the African Perspectives website.

'Mario' was Franco's most famous song, the opening soukous guitar chords are unmistakable, as is his voice.  This is OK Jazz, from the Congo.  Aboubacar Siddikh has posted a 1985 version in two parts:  there's an interview and discussion in the middle between 4:16 - 6:30.  This is the link to Part 1, then it continues in Part 2.

African jazz was the soundtrack to my life in the early 90s where I would spend the summers in Calgary and drive to Austin Texas for the rest of the year.  The drive down in mid August was terribly gruelling: the temperature goes up 10 degrees each day, so one leaves Alberta at 15°C (5° at night) and arrives in central Texas at 45°C.  These were the days of cassette tapes, of which I had two shoe boxes.  By the end of the day when a campsite showed on the map and one could leave the relentless, fiery heat of the highway, I'd put on my African tapes — Salif Keita, the Malathini Queens, Franco: spirits lift, the pets would know we were about to stop, all would be repaired.  This is music for heat and high humidity where languid is the only way to move.

While looking for Franco's Mario, I found Scott Shuster's posting of Mario done by Jonal and Malage de Luendo.  This is long - 17 minutes or so, but just the thing to ameliorate the coming week of deadlines, deliveries delayed, and all that work to do.  

Shuster writes (on the original YouTube posting):

LOKASSA YA MBONGO rhythm break about 12:45-minutes into the clip, & great Franco-style solo work by Shiko Mawatu throughout. Also modern Congolese male dancing -watch the WHOLE 19-minutes! They play the Azda Volkswagen commercial commercial at the end, brining back radio memories of the 1970s for millions of Zairoise, Congolese, and others of the Central and East African region. Congolese rumba newbies can learn more about this music at africambiance.com and at tribes.tribe.net/soukousguitar

botswana: the only way to play guitar

how to do the Diski Dance

by the wonderful iSchoolAfrica World Cup Press Team:

iSchoolAfrica: Soccer's offside rule explained

red desert 2

Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. Il deserto rosso. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964

This is a trailer (which I can't figure out how to embed here) with the boppy kind of soundtrack typical of 1960s Italy.  It is misleading, as Giovanni Fusco's Il deserto rosso soundtrack is generally abstract and electronic, but if anything, this overly kooky music is the part of pop-Italy that also produced bright little Olivetti typewriters, the Isetta and Ettore Sottsass.
 
Antonioni's early films are black and white 1950s epics of bleak betrayal, then he did the black, white and red Il deserto rosso, then got to England and did Blow-Up in full colour – lots of decadent fun: the Red Desert party in Ravenna looks like kindergarten in comparison, then Zabriskie Point in Los Angeles where colour and consumer excess literally exploded all over the screen.   Italy hurtled from postwar, Carlo Scarpa sobriety to jangling technicolour instability so fast it lost its head and replaced it with Berlusconi. 

Despite the bizarreness of this assemblage of segments, it has a shot of an industrial landscape (between 1:30 and 1:40 – even better watch it in full screen), illustrating why I find Burtynsky's photos of industrial landscapes so didactic, so condescendingly instructive.  

the red desert

Thinking about the Isetta and the 1960s and, despite its current reputation, the space and quiet of many things of the late 60s and early 70s.  I once used to spend hours watching French and Italian films in London at inexpensive, near-empty matinee showings.  The Red Desert is an existential classic: 1964, not much of a plot, just a troubled woman, her general anxiety in the world; the world pretty colourless but also surreal in its industrial, unforgiving, spare unbeauty.  Long stretches without dialogue, most of it shot with a telephoto lens – God how I loved this stuff.  It was my interior landscape, and often my exterior one as well. 
This very small clip is completely typical:

I must say, despite all those endless classes in the urbane civic landscapes of a Europe we were taught to aspire to, these grey streets were more like what I found there.  Even in the late 1980s, a train stop away from Barcelona landed you in streets like this: suspicious, empty, grudging.

war poets

A later use of Richard Jobson's Into the Valley.  Young men go to war, young men listen to punk, rap and metal.  Jobson has claimed an affinity with the British war poets, however, war poetry is not only Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but continues to this day.  There is work coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan by our poets and probably a huge amount written by Iraqis and Afghanis to which we have little access.
 
Now that everyone can write and be read, bypassing print publishers, record companies, editors and agents, I wonder if there will be a return to the inherent rigours of poetry, the honing of phrases and words, the close expression.  Poetry is the most powerful of all the writing arts, whether attached to music or not.  Perhaps desperate times ask for this kind of precision.  

Into The Valley

So here's some unreconstructed 1979 Scottish punk for you.  It all looks terribly neat today.  This song is now the anthem for Dunfermline FC – valleys are valleys, and Dumferline's stadium is called The Valley.  However, Into the Valley, written by Richard Jobson, the lead singer of the Skids, wrote it about young Scots recruited into the British Army, who were then sent to Northern Island.

Into the valley
Betrothed and divine
Realisations no virtue
But who can define
Why soldiers go marching
Those masses a line
This disease is catching
From victory to stone
Ahoy! Ahoy! Land, sea and sky
Ahoy! Ahoy! Boy, man and soldier
Ahoy! Ahoy! Deceived and then punctured
Ahoy! Ahoy! Long may they die

Armies are very attractive to regions mired in poverty, as Scotland continues to be.  Newfoundlanders and Maritimers have long been over-represented in the Canadian Forces.  The situation in Northern Ireland was as if they had been pitted against each other. 
We know, because we read a bit of Tennyson yesterday, for the first time in about 40 years, that Into the Valley is also from The Charge of the Light Bridgade.  The futility of the war in Ulster was just one of a long series of military futilities.
 
When last year we did On Site 22: WAR, I received some feedback that other than historical forts and things, war was irrelevant to architecture and design.  We live in peace, etc, etc.  Well, we might, personally, but we do not globally.  If a punk band can get it together to write a song about war that has become so anthemic it is still played thirty years later, so can we all, here in the luxury of safe everyday lives, write about war using the tools of our trade.  So many Paralympic athletes now are war amps – ex-soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They bring the war home.


Elemental in Santa Catarina

Alejandro Aravena. Elemental. Housing cores: a half-house on the ground floor and a two storey apartment above. The empty slot between the white cores are meantto be built into, shown here in a yellow example. Elemental, the Chilean architectural practice of Alejandro Aravena, has just won an award for a 70-unit housing project in Santa Catarina near Monterrey, Mexico.  Using government funding the expensive part of each house is built first: bathrooms, kitchen, stairs, party walls and roof.  This is the first half.  The second half is eventually built into the space between these cores.  Visual cohesion comes from a continuous roof over each set of units, and the placement and rhythm of the first halves.  There are 70 units on .6 ha; the area is middle class, not a slum, and half the project will be self-built.
 
Similar Elemental projects have been built in Chile, with less money and for poorer people.  It is a case of putting whatever funds are available where they are most useful, and leaving the rest to individuals who have some building skills and often innovative ways of occupying space, but not the wherewithal to build  a safe structure, a kitchen and bathroom, and then connect them to the utilities infrastructure.  Elemental SA is in a partnership with COPEC, a Chilean Oil Company to design projects with social impact through 'the development of complex initiatives'.  To get projects such as these in place requires more than a brilliant idea, it requires partners at all levels of urban development.  The city is their workshop.  

Formally built social housing all over the world is a landscape of regimentation; informal barrios and slums all over the world are landscapes of desperate invention.  Elemental's model allows the best from both: safe building standards and people's participation in their own dwellings. 

Arcade Fire's Intervention cut to Sergei Eisenstien's Battle Ship Potemkin of 1925.  The original YouTube posting might have further information on this video for those who know how to read it.  I certainly don't.

When you look back at all the American pop songs of the 1960s especially, not protest songs, but just ordinary songs, it is remarkable how many refer to distant war, to waiting for someone to come home, to letters, to loss and dying.  At the time it all seemed just like boy/girl romance, partings and such.  But now I can see how embedded the Viet Nam War was in American popular culture. 

Arcade Fire's Intervention has as its repeating chorus line, Hear the soldier groan, 'We'll go at it alone'.  Of course being a soldier can be a metaphor for many things – general desperate struggle, and it might be so in this song.  However, soldiers are also real soldiers, and metaphoric or not, they must be embedded in our society now at some level to keep reappearing in contemporary song lyrics.