Emerging arctic Landscape

Ecotope

Arctic Tipping points

Trajectory

Complexity/ Multiplicities

Tipping Point

Hammerfest VardøMurmansk

Arctic Landscape trajectory

Small-scale fishing industry-supports lomg term sustainable fish stock

-distributes wealth equally along the coast

Large-scale fishing industry

-whaling and the industrialization of the fishing industry

-distributes wealth less equally along the coast

Largest-scale oil and gas industry

-monoeconomy- vulnerable

Alta Nikel Kirkenes

Torvald was a source of in-spiration in Vardø. A former BAS student, bird watcher and general bird enthusiast, he moved to Vardø to estab-lish a framework for aviary tourism and information infrastructure based around arctic species of birds. The ap-propriation of the landscape for bird sanctuaries is a clever way of labelling the landscape as a biological heritage site, hence giving it more econom-ic ‘value’.

information overload

For the reflection and observations exercise, I mapped our experience and extensive information gathered on the trip on a rhizomatic map extending as a section through the study trip from Hammerfest to Murmansk.

The diagrammatic graphs represent the rise and fall of populations in towns lying on the trajectory of our trip. The overall outcome of this mapping exercise was the organic nature of the lives of cities and towns, going through cycles of growth, decay, collapse, boom, and death.

I ended up focusing my research on Murmansk which I found most fascinating.

RHIZOME MAP

Murmansk

Observationsresearch article

trend

Murmansk is an artificial city built from the central bureau in Moscow as a strategic outpost for industrial, military and navy purposes. During the cold war it functioned as Russia’s main harbour with most of the Soviet Submarine fleet stationed there.

It is a city planned around no-tions and nodes of the military and the industry.

The human is represented in obscure and paradoxical ways - from a 40m tall soldier to an estranged gestalt that fits into the mould of repeating blocks that were erected in masses.

Murmansk’s shrinkingPopulation: from 450,000 to 307,664

1989 2010

military Industrial complex

Military Architecture

1 Rafi Segal andEyal Weizman, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics o f Israeli Architecture

Nikel’s shrinkingPopulation: 12,771

1973 2010

trend

Mikhail Gorbachev

Boris Yeltsin

Nikita Khrushchev

Stalin

Leonid Brezhnev

Murmansk is the newest city built by the Russian empire, a city built in haste. Having sprung up so quickly it seems many qualities of the design seem to have been overlooked.

Murmansk reminds me of an architecture of control. The central planners of the Soviet Union designed the Dwellings of Murmansk in a rough and massive scale, where finer details of the design quickly faded into the background. In my view the project of Mur-mansk is one of the clearer examples of the brutality of such an approach to housing. From a sociological point of view, housing is an issue that depends on specific economic and social realities and needs to be understood in its full dynamics and complexity.

What are the expressions of an architecture of ideology? What are the typologies of architectural control? How does society battle the hardness of this space?How does public space function in these massive concrete blocks?How does the forgotten human intervene?

Control Architecture

‘The evidence, as is always the case, is in the drawing. It is by investi- gating the working methods and tools of architects — the lines drawn on plans, 'master plans', maps and aerial photographs — that the equation setting material organisation against the abuse of power begins to unravel. Formal manipulations and programmatic organisations are the very stuff of architec- ture and planning, and it is in the drawings that their effects are stated. “

Vulnerability Driving maps

New Hiearchiesa short film

L'absent De l'histoireThis 5 minute film is a research by-product composed of many stills taken at 3 differ-ent sites in Berlin and many spots on our trip through the Arctic. The investigation

in Berlin delves into city spaces reappropriated in different ways. First, the Soviet Me-morial in Treptower park as a space of commemoration. Second, the now abandoned CIA reconnaissance base on Teufelsberg. Third, the converted Tempelhof airport that now serves as a park and centre of recreation. The concepts of undoing and unwork-ing and of creating flexible networks, play a central role in the film. Research broadly covers philosophers and architects: Michel Decertau, Guy Debord, Bernard Tschu-

mi, Simon Sadler, Walter Benjamin, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Doreen Massey.

Flexibilityresearch Article

Sign

Historiography

Metanarrative

MythLogos

Mythos

Paralogy

PolisNomos

Democracy

Culture

Nature

Identity

Community

The real becomes a social construction.

Metaphor

Habitus

Semiotics

Doxa

IconSymbol

The culture industry forges an alliance of art and advertising and political propaganda. It involves the colonization of the psyche as the unconscious is manipulated for purposes of seduction and dreams are appropriated for profit (Arato 1987).

Thus there is a stimulation of a desire producing a market that is never satisfied: ‘The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises ... the diner must be satisfied with the menu’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993:35)

The aesthetic task is not the production of harmony but of dissonance, utopian visions that meet au-diences desires are seen as complicit with the dominant order( Heynen 1999:186-188).

Production of Meaning

image screen

the gaze

subject of representation

Jacque Lacan Diagram of the Gaze From The Four Fundamental Concets of Psychoanalysis

Can the monuments of Russia be hijacked?

Can we corrupt them, embezzle their beauty, misappropriate their technology of ideals?

Superstudio saw our world ob-sessed with objects and monu-mental architecture and created a series of collages to critique this crazed obsession.1

They argued for the construction of objects through metamorpho-sis. The object as a vehicle of social communication.

Through the psychological re-thinking of an object we can try for its “reconstruction” and through this discontinuous and il-logical action, refusing guarantees of value aspiring to identify with life and total reality.2

Continous Monument (Superstudio 1969)

The Invisible Monument

1Lang(2003)

reorientationsintervention

Or is the monument irretrievable in its ugliness ?

How do these monuments fit into the patterns of everyday life?

The monuments are re-dedicated, transformed, reinvented by everyone that sees them. Their meaning is reconstruct-ed with every glance. Monuments change their names, their histories, their faces.

Even the engravings are erased and re-written.They are absorbed by the language of the city. Some monuments sit anonymously, abandoned by time.

Can they exist as pure sculptures or do they hold deep symbolic power?Are they somehow holding onto an invisible sys-tem from the past - anchors to a time long gone by?Or are they places to lock up your memories, to forget?

Are they just stumbling blocks in the landscape?

Is there a way to free them from their historical significance?

And should we?

1Lang(2003)

Désoeuvrement

It’s not the flux of matter passing incessantly through the pattern of the city, but rather, the pat-tern’s newly acquired status as “message”.

The inhabitant’s self-identity, therefore, is not based on objects, but it is based on the transmissible body of information.

But how can an architecture which makes a strate-gic allegiance with the market even if at the same time disavowing the market’s practices, critiquing it be progressive or advanced, in other ways than just in advancing the cause of the market itself? How can the architect serve the interest of the greater good, rather than just the greater good of the market economy?

Furthermore, how do these monumental giants measure up against the superficial spectacle of ideology in today’s everyday - against the thin layers of ad-vertisement plastered around our modern cities of seduction?What is the overall pattern in such a city plastered with images, banners and ads?

Murmansk as Continous Monument

‘Nothing is as as invisible as the monument - only the sign makes it visible. ‘2

Time vs Prevalence graph for the occurence of the word sign(red) and monumentblue) from 1800 to present in popular literature (Google Ngram)

Pattern

2 Huyssen (2006)

The use of Melville’s story of Bartelby is useful to illustrate the pure act in its impotentiality.

His utterance “I would prefer not to” is the for-mal gesture of refusal -a political act. A “signi-fier-turned-object” , it brings about the collapse of the symbolic order.

Bartelby’s gesture is one of pure violence that has no violent quality in it. The violence stems in it’s very immobile, inert, insistent, impassive being. The ‘I would prefer not to’ does not ne-gate a system but rather affirms an a possibility for new framework.4

‘Bartelby (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the poli-tics of resistance or protestation which parasitizes on what it ne-gates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegem-onic position and it’s negation.’3

It is a radical passivity that acts through the non-actualizable reserve of desoueuvrement which lies outside all power. 5

In this landscape of the eye, we need to make the archi-tecture visible. We must strive to create an ‘authentic’ experience.

‘I would prefer Not to’

The Arctic Hotel in Murmansk entirely covered in Advertising

Older layer of ideology in Murmansk 2 Huyssen (2006)

3Zizek (2006)4Hugill (2011)5Dovey(1999)

FABRIC AS GENERATORCan the language of advertisement be re-routed to create a new implication, can it be mapped onto the monument to embezzle it with a new meaning?

In a public context, Christo’s veiling actually func-tioned to reveal what was hidden when the Reich-stag was visible. 6

The canvas in the public realm - not as an advertise-ment for a market good but as a catalyst for social change. The language of public art/street art.Instead of building another monument in 2016, why not celebrate and ‘reconstruct’ the already existing monument?

Aliosha is the icon of Murmansk.He looks over the city, and the city looks at him. In the daily drift through the streets of Murmansk, inhabitants get confronted by numerous things on the skyline. Smokestacks, cranes, housing slabs, and dominantly Aliosha. This visual connection to the city makes Aliosha the perfect site to celebrate the centennial.

There are a lot of plans for the development of Murmansk. Over the next few years there are plans to renovate Arctica Hotel, several sports facilities, garbage processing complex, a four lane road south and more. There is also a deal for the construction of a number of new dwellings.

However, there aren’t any plans for the promotion of creativity in Murmansk. There is realistically a dire need for a creative outlet in the city. And there are already many actors working towards the goal. The main obstacle is the lack of infrastructure and support from above. One such actor is Evegny, who is building a youth art centre with the help of some friends. He has been working on it for years, with little or no support from the municipality.

6Huyssen (2003)

CATALYST

The intervention for the city of Murmansk is based on a collective social experiment on the city scale. By using the rhizomatic nature of today’s social net-works it is possible to organize and mobilize a city wide intervention for the hundred year anniversary of Murmansk. This event calls for the participation across the entire city of Murmansk to weave together a quilt to cover up the monument of Alyosha.

Murmansk is about to celebrate it’s 100 year anniver-sary. It has been a quarter century since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Yet, although the Soviet Union has dissipated 25 years ago, it’s legacy still lives on.

There is a need to celebrate the future of the city, but without forgetting its past.

The culmination at ‘Aliosha’

This project seeks to act as a catalyst for the creativ-ity underlying the surface of Murmansk.

STRATIFIED PLACES

The kind of differences that define a place are not the ordering or juxtaposition of subjects and objects on the surface- a field where bodies are arranged. The elements spread out on the surface can be enumerated, they are available for analysis - instead it’s what lies underneath, hidden by history, the invisible.

Everyday practices , based on their relationship to an occasion, that is, on casual time, are thus, scat-tered all along duration, in the situation of acts of thought. Casual time is what narrated in the actual discourse of the city: an indeterminate fable , bet-ter articulated on the metaphorical practices and stratified places than on the empire of the evident in functionalist technocracy.7

The job of the monument is not to lock away his-tory forever, or to let us forget, but it’s job is to confront us, to keep our past on our minds.

Currently, Alisoha still functions as a State appa-ratus showing military power, and the only way to show one’s respect is in an official ritual of bringing flowers.

7Hal(1983)

The centennial provides an opportunity for the re-invention of the monument and a reflection of the trajectory of Murmansk.

A collective action organized between dif-ferent agents in the city makes the monu-ment momentarily disappear under a veil, freeing Murmansk from the gaze of it’s military history.

The covering up of Aliosha, however, is only temporary, and after the celebration he is unveiled and revealed. When the monument is revealed everything seems unchanged, but the event has transformed the participants and the city.

The monument itself is the framework of the change, and the fabric becomes the visual technology of it’s transformation. The same technology used to plaster ideological advertisements all over the city is here used to create a moment of pause. By blankly covering up Aliosha, the fabric seems out of place, out of time, transporting the monu-ment to an unseen dimension.

What lies under the textile is obvious, but momentarily the imagination is free to wander, and it is allowed to dream.

RHIZOME MAP

Aliosha overlooking the city

The pattern: a rhizomatic assembly of the map of Murmansk after Guy Debord’s 1959 “The Naked City”

Aliosha overlooking the city

Constructing Situations

CARNIVAL

the 2016 Centennial

TRAJECTORY

The event creates a platform for a free exchange of ideas. The actors in the space are the people of Murmansk. If the event is used for protest or carnival, if it is used as a forum for the exchanging of skills and ideas is only determined by the participants, by what is called for.

‘ Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. ‘7

The question of the connection between action and reorientation has links to the work of Arendt, who defines power as a communicative agreement on collective action: ‘ Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group’7. Thus power is defined as a collective capacity, asserting the primacy of ‘power to’ while socializing it. The notion of communication about action unites issues of action and representation:

7Arendt 1958

Event Section

Aliosha

Film Screen

Stageworkshop

SeatingAssembly tent 1:500

Stage

workshops

lift

There is a lack of support infrastructure from the government for the funding of creative outlets for the youth

For the duration of the event, a number of workshops, talks, concerts, film nights and so-cial events will raise money for a youth centre.

Aliosha

Event Plan

Seating

Film Screen

BoothCar Access

Foot ACess

The concept is to engage young artist and creatives of Murmansk in order to create an event-intervention at the Aliosha Monu-ment to coincide with the 100 year anniver-sary of the city. The intervention involves the mapping of the city, in fabric, on the 35 meter tall Soldier.

0m

10m

20m

30m

40m

Film Screen

Stageticket booth

Dan dorocic

BanksInfrastructure

Private Investors

NGOs

Oil Fishing

Military

SocialMining

SecurityEnvironent

Youth Center

Government

Fundraiser

budgeting Concept:

Aliosha

Mapping Aliosha

Prototype surfaces 33 surfaces making up one side of Aliosha

The youth of the city of Murmansk need a creative outlet.Unfortunately, there is no existing framework in place to support a youth center in Murmansk. This project proposes a new hierarchy to create room in the municipality of Mur-mansk to fund a space within a short timeframe.