Rob Nixon’s groundbreaking new book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor opens up universalizing ecocritical prisms of understanding through which Space Calendar conditions may be understood as components, connections and crucial linchpins of comprehension in vast global networks across the many temporal orders human beings knowingly and unknowingly inhabit today. Indeed, in our neoliberalist time of transnationally externalized risks and internalized profits, the precise visualization offered up by the theories of space calendar conditions, may well become an important site of environmental justice. As neoliberal ideologies erode national sovereignties and diffuse answerabilities, Nixon argues that “We need to ask how directly, how forcefully a given community is impacted by the cycles of sun and moon; by ebbing and flowing tides; by shifts in the seasons, stars, and planets; by the arrivals and departures of migratory life; and by climate change in ways that are crosshatched with the migratory cycles of transnational capital, electoral cycles (local, national, and foreign), digital time, and the dictates of sweat-shop time” (61). In a global context, the space calendar condition can thus be viewed as just such a way of imaginatively visualizing relationships and recognitions of connection and consequence that Nixon calls for – and which monolithic corporations would prefer remained occluded. Allied with Nixon’s theories of slow violence, the frameworks of the space calendar condition when applied to relevant sites in the global south (and elsewhere), may engender some of the “imaginative definition[s]” (46-7) needed to provide a clearer picture of the long-term attritional damage to its ecosystems and their component communities, enabling a more realistic assessment of “the plight of the stationary displaced” (42″). Such visual and imaginative definition may in turn empower these disenfranchised communities to speak engage more efficiently with the dissembling “culture of doubt” and confounding “army of bewilderers” (40).
Latest
Calendars of Wrath
“In Inuit custom an angry person expends his or her emotion by walking straight across the landscape. When all anger is spent, the stopping point is marked with an object, indicating the length or degree of the person’s rage” (Ellen Meloy, The Last Cheater’s Waltz, 4)
The future of the human mind is urban: SCP at “The Environmental Humanities”, Day 3.
Unless something dramatic, perhaps even catastrophic, happens to affect global population patterns, the future of the human mind is the city. Statistically speaking they build a new city of one million people every ten days in China alone. This process of rapacious urbanization is projected to continue unabated at the very least until 2080. In the near future 22 megalopolises are expected to exceed populations of 10 million people. Global change is urban change. Whether we like it or not, the urban mind is the future mind. And an urban mind is always architecturally environed. Thus the role of architecture in shaping the human mind will only continue to increase in importance. This makes it more crucial than ever for humanity to explore architectural means of reminding humans about the natural processes that ultimately sustain them. Otherwise the processes on which we all depend will only continue to slip unnoticed beneath our increasingly urbanized horizons.
The Lost Snows of Kilimanjaro: SCP at “The Environmental Humanities”, Day 1.
I was deeply impressed today by Professor Sigurd Bergmann’s (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) account of the hydro-climatological space calendar condition affecting human lifeways and habitation patterns on the slopes of Tanzania’s most potent natural signifier, snowy white Mt Kilimanjaro. His paper discussed “the context of increasing water scarcity at the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania where the melting glacier functions as a central symbol of the impact of global warming in Africa, on the one hand, and where traditional local symbols of water irrigation are in radical change with regard to farming, ritual and belief processes on the other hand”. What Bergmann described, the way the meltwater dependant inhabitants of the slopes are being forced to adapt to increasing scarcity, is a space calender condition where the natural/cultural phenomenon of deglaciation is translated through a lived space into changing cultural patterns. Bergmann persuasively argued that this is the level at which climate science now needs to manifest itself. This discipline, so caught up in the global, needs to come down to the level of the local, where it may speak more persuasively to a persistently, even perversely, skeptical audience.
Showcasing his photographic documentation, Þorvarður Árnason (University of Iceland) discussed strategies for envisioning the impact of global warming on glaciers, such as photography, video, maps and computer simulations. Árnason made an impassioned plea for us to remember that through these methods “the ‘solid’ physical evidence of glacial recession risks becoming a mere abstraction and is perhaps thus ineffectual in communicating to others the reality of global warming”. As such, his argument seemd to leave open the space of how to cope with this almost unavoidable result of the process of documentation the way it takes form today. This is an open space that can be very profitably inhabited by the space calender building, which channels the vacuity of abstraction into the concreteness of an instrumental construction.
Interestingly, Árnason also referred to how deglaciation is in many ways experienced as a positive phenomenon across the world, at the level of the local, where people perceive only the classic sublime – how sterile ice yields to farmable and habitable land. This is the complete oppoiste of responses to rising ocean levels, because floods consume territory, whereas receding ice creates it. On a global level, the arctic sublime expressed in the art of painters such as Johan Christan Dahl, is perceived as threatened, and the classic sublime reversed.
The Space Calendar Project at “Design and Nature”.
The Space Calendar Project’s paper proposal has been accepted for the 6th International Conference on “Relating Design in Nature with Science and Engineering” to be held by the Wessex Institute of Technology in 2012. The conference venue is the Spanish city of La Coruna.
http://www.wessex.ac.uk/12-conferences/designandnature-2012.html
Participating in BAR International artists-in-residency program
Christian Hummelsund Voie and Jan Gunnar Skjeldsøy have been attending the BAR International artists-in-residency program in Kirkenes for the past three weeks.
The first week was spent hiking along the coastline of the Kola-Pensinula, in the northernmost part of Russia. The remaing weeks were spent working in Kirkenes developing issues related to the Space Calendar themes. In Kirkenes the space calendar team has completed its work on an 18 page project document, as well as an English translation of said document. Two articles and a lyrical essay have been comprehensively drafted, as well as a project proposal to an international symposiom on nature and design. Thematic lines have been drawn up for the textual realization of the project, a book to be published at a date provisionally set three years in the future. A very productive and lengthy meeting with innovation Norway has been completed, as well as minor excursions to sites of interest. The project’s anchoring in the arctic township of Kirkenes has in this, and other ways, been further explored and our partnership with the art curators in “Pikene på Broen” has been more firmly consolidated. While as mentioned above, the third exploratory excursion was successfully completed in the overwhelming beauty of the Russian arctic prior to our arrival in Kirkenes, concrete lines have already begun to be drawn from Kirkenes towards the fourth, and most ambitous expedition so far, to sand-belabored Shoyna, one of the most poignantly expressive calendars of our present times.
Arctique Tactiques
ARCTIC TACTICS /// LISTENING SESSION
A sonic immersion into political, economic, geostrategic and urban issues of the contemporary Arctic.
ARCTIC TACTICS
Festival Barents Spektakel, February 2011, -25°.Kirkenes, Norway,
The Queen, ministers, ambassadors, politicians, a diplomat, architects, artists, journalists and researchers.
The Space Calendar project was part of the Barents Spektakel, and the lecture is part of the sonic piece.
Arctic Tactics was produced with the great support
of the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Paris.
Palais de Tokyo
Friday 22nd April.
At the occasion of the broadcast on France Culture
of “Arctic Tactics” a radio essay by Magali Daniaux & Cédric Pigot – a listening session
and a work presentation in the presence of the artists
at Palais de Tokyo on Friday 22nd of April at 7pm
The sonic piece will be on air April Sunday 24th at 11pm on France Culture 93.5 FM
and on the website of the Radio Creation Lab :
http://www.franceculture.com/emission-atelier-de-creation-radiophonique.html-0
Species, Space (Calendars), and the Imagination of the Global
The Space Calendar Project will be contributing to the 9th Biennial ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) conference in Bloomington, Indiana, June 21-26. The conference theme is “Species, Space, and the Imagination of the Global”, and the somewhat unwieldy working title for our paper is “The Space Calendar Project: Visualizing Global and Local Processes through an Architectural and Ecocritical Ecotone”.
http://www.indiana.edu/~asle2011/call.shtml
“The conference theme seeks to engage with questions of humans’ relation to nonhuman species, both plant and animal, and to explore intersections between work on nonhuman species in disciplines such as biology, anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience, literature, and art. Our goal is to do so in a transnational framework that will allow us to reflect on how different historical, geographical and cultural contexts shape our encounters with the natural world and with environmental crises”.
The Space Calendar project at the Barentstriennale 2011
The project is being motivated together with PIKENE PÅ BROEN in Kirkenes at the moment.
Friday 04.02.2011 there will be a lecture by Jan Gunnar Skjeldsøy and Christian Voie introducing the project.
Visionary Arctic is a must for those who are interested in contemporary art, architecture and new thinking.
We focus on the Arctic future perspectives.
Where is Norway in relation to the other countries around the North Pole? Why is the industrial development at its peak, while the settling level is very low in the High North? Do we primarily cultivate the Arctic nature or do we also aim at developing urban qualities? Visionary Arctic 2011 will especially focus on sustainable architecture in the north and its impact on life quality.
Contributions from future scientist Eirik Newth, diplomat Hans Wilhelm Longva, artist Lars Ramberg, architects Sami Rintala, Jan Gunnar Skjeldsøy, Reiulf Ramstad, Ilya Mukosey, Ina Bakka Sem-Olsen, investor Arthur Buchardt, researcher Christian Voie, and others.
Language: English
See the proghram at: http://2011.barentsspektakel.no/
