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SCAN #
00001
DATE
c. 2018
TITLE
PAST DISQUIET: ARTISTS, INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY, AND MUSEUMS-IN-EXILE
MUSEUM OF WARSAW
printed in Warsaw, PL
DESCRIPTION
The 1978 International Art Exhibition for Palestine was intended as the foundation for a museum-in-exile that would tour globally until it could be established in Palestine. The exhibition featured nearly 200 artworks donated by artists from around 30 countries, including seminal Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour, Antoni Tàpies (b. Catalonia), Shakir Hassan al-Said (b. Iraq), Nazir Nabaa (b. Syria), and even Joan Miró (b. Catalonia). Tragically, during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, the building housing the artworks was destroyed, and much of the exhibition's archival material was lost.
The most effective means of countering the trauma of the dispersal of the Palestinian people was to safeguard their identity through culture and the arts. If houses were usurped, the record of having had a home would remain alive in poem and song; if the land was removed from sight by distance, its depiction would retain its visibility in myraid forms. Through the creativity of artists, poets, filmmakers, musicians, and writers, the 1978 International Art Exhibition for Palestine was its own form of resistance against the erasure of individual and collective memory, despite the risk of immense loss. “We sent off our works knowing we’d never see them again.” (Mansour, pg. 68)
The introduction and excerpts scanned here from Past Disquiet reconstitute the story of how this exhibition happened, the context in which it took place, and serves as a nucleus of international solidarity. Despite the significant scale and impact, the presented collections have faded into near-oblivion.
“In English, the words ghost and guest are derived from the same etymological root; they are both invited and hosted. We invited ghosts to visit us, and we hope that, in recounting the histories to which they led us, we give an unsettled past its due.” Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti
TAGS
#decolonising museums
#decolonising practices
#exhibition #exile
SCAN #
00002
DATE
c. 2002
TITLE
OBJETS RÉINVENTÉS: LA CRÉATION POPULAIRE À CUBA ERNESTO OROZA
printed in Paris, FR
DESCRIPTION
Havana reinvents itself every day. For half a century the economic, if not political, situation has obliged Cubans to imagine another future than the one ordained for us - in an economic crisis exacerbated by the 60-year embargo, Cubans had to invent a system for creating and producing objects. These initially met the most basic necessities and then invaded all areas of daily life: household fan made from telephone components and vinyl LP records, discarded soft-drink cans that became vessels for kerosene lamps, taxi sign made out of an empty gas tank. These individual hallmarks of creativity did not exist in isolated practice – instead, they were passed on through word of mouth, spurring entirely new production and consumption models based on community and discourse.
Objets Réinventés: La Création Populaire à Cuba (Reinvented Objects: Popular Creation in Cuba) invites you into the Cuban home, laboratory of repair, restoration, and reinvention, encompassing eight years of Oroza’s research on the island’s material and industrial culture. By studying how Cubans invent and manufacture objects to overcome economic restrictions, Oroza showcases models of behaviour and reactions to technology itself, but above all to the authority and veracity that these capitalistic products supposedly embody. These practices are grouped together under the concept of « technological disobedience » - the way in which Cubans disobey and betray the object - they disrespect its original identity, the authority this identity holds and the truth it conveys.
In order to subvert the narrative of a society “ruined by scarcity”, it is critical to recognize Cuban objects as cultural resistance, as a form of ingenuity, as radical design and as a way to survive.
“Rather than produce art as either separate from or belatedly responsive to social conditions, Oroza’s work pivots around the collection of objects ‘that are at the same time an understanding of a need and the answer to it’ (Weiss, 2018). Described as an ‘impromptu ethnographer of Cuba’s DIY culture’ (Gil, 2016), Oroza’s work foregrounds the relationality of repair and invites an encounter with the world as repairable. Archiving instances of reparative intervention in the living environment of Havana, Oroza’s work moves towards a mode of aesthetic resistance, acting, as it does, against the logic of object utility and the incessant demand to ‘use it all up.’” From Repairability as a Condition of the World: Ernesto Oroza’s Archive of Dis/repair [*]
TAGS
#technological
disobedience
#radical design
#objects
#cuba
SCAN #
00003
DATE
c. 2014
TITLE
DISOBEDIENT OBJECTS
V&A PUBLISHING
printed in London, UK
DESCRIPTION
Disobedient Objects is about out-designing authority. It explores the material culture of radical change and protest - from objects familiar to many, such as banners or posters, to the more militant, cunning or technologically cutting-edge, including lock-ons, book-blocs and activist robots. Where previous social movement histories have focused on large-scale events, strategies or biographies, this book - and the exhibition it accompanies - shows how objects themselves can be revolutionary.
‘To disobey in order to take action is the byword of all creative spirits. The history of human progress amounts to a series of Promethean acts. But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment entirely … I would say that there is good reason to study the dynamics of disobedience, the spark behind all knowledge.’ —Gaston Bachelard, ‘Prometheus’, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, 1961
TAGS
#radical design
#objects
#decolonising practices
SCAN #
00004
DATE
c. 2021
TITLE
DESIGN TO LIVE: EVERY DAY INVENTIONS FROM A REFUGEE CAMP
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
printed in the US
DESCRIPTION
Glimpses of our shared future may well be found in the present-day living situations of displaced people. Ninety kilometers from the Syria-Jordan border, a two-hour drive from the capital of Amman, the camp appears from a distance as an endless grid of white containers, bordered by an infinite fence, surrounded by nothing but sand. Among the 15 other refugee camps in Jordan, Azraq is the most representative eample of institutional humanitarian infrastructure.
One of the most prominent examples of technological disobedience is the camp itself. Conceived as “temporary” settlements, the camps face harsh restrictions from local regulation authorities when it comes to gardening, planting, and forming any real roots in the ground. Vertical gardens were invented as an ad hoc way of growing life - plant pots line the walls of sheds with flora and fauna reminiscent of their native land in Syria.
Design to Live is not a book about how to create better camps; it aims, rather, to contribute to the body of knowledge on the harms of encampment and advocate for a shift from the paradigm of aid toward self-determination. The excerpts scanned of these pages invite you to witness how art and design restore humanity within circumstances that deprive it. When you’re constantly being reminded “this is not yours”, when you exist in an environment where your home is a temporary structure that shakes with a strong gust of wind, when you’re not allowed to plant anything permanent in the ground, holding onto your home - if in memory alone - is an act of resistance.
“Placed in a timeless base, trapped yet alive, a living part of the world, here dignity is invented, inspired by heritage, overcoming scarcity, to exceed your comforts, living memories of home, still human.” Poem by Hanaa Ahmad, Muteeb Awad Al-Hamdan, Azra Akšamija, Omar Dahmous, Omar Darwish, Raed Suleiman
TAGS
#objects
#radical design
#decolonising practices
SCAN #
00005
DATE
c. 1981
TITLE
TROPICAL DECO: THE ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN OF OLD MIAMI BEACH
RIZZOLI
printed in New York, NY
DESCRIPTION
One day, Miami will be underwater. Climate risk is only accelerating while the governor prohibits the term “climate change” in state law, effectively eliminating any channel that would allow us to prepare for and mitigate its devastating impacts. Today, there is legislation advancing through the Florida Senate that would allow private developers to tear down historic buildings in order to build new, potentially erasing decades of the city’s character and cultural fabric.
In response, an expanding body of archival and documentary efforts has emerged in recent years in attempts to preserve and memorialize the city amid the threat of its disappearance. Projects like O Miami’s Waterproof: Evidence of a Miami Worth Remembering stand as poignant examples of anthropological records born out of the question, “What will you miss when Miami is gone?”
The same sentiment is retroactively embedded in Tropical Deco: The Architecture and Design of Old Miami Beach, a photographic documentation of the historic Art Deco district, from its pastel-colored facades to its porthole windows to its stylized lettering, published in 1981. More than just architectural record, the book reads as a love letter to a visual language that defines Miami and resists erasure through beauty, nostalgia, and a very familiar feeling for those of us who recognize it. Several of the photographs in this book were originally taken in conjunction with a project for the Miami Design Preservation League.
This digitized material is in honor of my hometown, whose visual language makes up so much of my creative heritage and whose spirit is singular and deeply woven into its echo.
TAGS
#miami
#architecture
#photography