Libero Andreotti

Ivan Chetglov

Museu d'Art Contemporani (Barcelona, Spain)

This much-needed anthology, the accompanying volume to the exhibition publication Situationism, brings together key texts from this important movement in 20th century architectural theory, art, and politics. The writings included in Theory of the Derive, many published here in English for the first time, are predominantly critical texts, revealing Situationism's aims, focus, breadth of vision, and development. Begun in 1957 by various artists and writers representing avant-garde organizations, the Situationist International was, from its inception, a revolutionary cultural organization. Seeing its project as one of merging art and life in practice, it developed over the next decade, implementing incisive critiques of post-war consumer culture and proposing radical projects of urban utopian design. Against the oppressive, stifling conditions imposed in technocratic city planning, the Situationist International sought to develop new forms of collective action and agitation that would promote free use and transformation of the urban environment. Its tactics, slogans, and visions of an alternative OEnitary urbanism' were especially influential in the events of the May 1968 uprising in France and have since been important influences on radical currents in many countries.

Theory of the Dérive and Other Situationist Writings on the City

Nadir Lahiji

In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

Libero Andreotti

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