Markus Miessen

Zoë Ritts

Para-Platforms' investigates the social, spatial, and material reality of right-wing populism. Three case studies--presented in a symposium organized by Markus Miessen at the Gothenburg Design Festival in November 2017--form the core of this collection of essays: journalist Hannes Grassegger on Trump and Brexit; architectural theorist Stephan Trüby on spaces of right-wing extremism in Germany; and Christina Varvia on Forensic Architecture's investigation of the murder of Halit Yozgat, a young German man of Turkish descent, at the hands of a far-right group in 2006. The presentations are reproduced along with the ensuing conversations with Miessen and the audience members. An essay by design scholar Mahmoud Keshavarz opening the book discusses the capacity of design to create conditions for certain politics to occur. Among the other theoretical, artistic, and historical contributions in the reader, editor Zoë Ritts interviews artist Wolfgang Tillmans regarding his pro-EU poster series, the ongoing project truth study centre, and guest-edited volume What Is Different? The volume concludes with a comic by artist Liam Gillick animating a block of granite--culled from the Swedish quarry responsible for extracting the red granite intended for the Third Reich's architectural ambitions--as the messiah of spatial and material politics.

On the Spatial Politics of Right-wing Populism

Para-platforms

crossbench practice as a mode of criticality

The nightmare of participation

Using the analogy of the crossbencher the independent politician in the uber-conservative British House of Lords he proposes a reframing of architecture practice as one which operates on the basis of alternative and self-governing political parameters, hoping to open up a fresh debate on ways of acting politically. Preface by Austrian philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian, introduction by Swiss journalist and author Hannes Grassegger and Miessen, and postscript by Canadian artist, writer and designer Patricia Reed.

Toward Participation as Critical Spatial Practice

Crossbenching

A curatorial approach towards deliberative cultures of assembly and a realistic scenario of decentralized power and decision-making. This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city. It calls for a revised form of spatial politics. Miessen’s ongoing research trajectory Cultures of Assembly was initially kicked off during a Harvard GSD fellowship in collaboration with Joseph Grima, in which the two architects investigated the sociopolitical dimension of (urban) spatial design. Observing the Kuwaiti cultural and social landscape with a specific interest in the politico-spatial phenomenon of Diwaniya, this distributed urban form of para-institutional assembly established a starting point for a long-term body of research. Diwaniya can be understood and interpreted in multiple ways. Beyond a techno-futuristic idea of progress, it presents a showcase of an alternative that attempts to imagine a model of a (more) solidary city. On the scale of a city, and in fact small country, it interrogates how we—as a society—can learn from and produce alternative formats of physical exchange, working towards realistic scenarios of decentralized decision-making and spatial justice. Agonistic Assemblies asks: how can spaces—both physical and virtual—be envisaged to create publics? How is collectivity and society being generated spatially and in terms of policy? How do we “practice” society as a bodily, spatial form, and how does this practice contribute to spatial justice? Are there specific spatial settings that can intensify these practices? What kind of spatial design can we imagine as platforms for change? Central to this project is the reflecting on and rendering of the underlying driving forces of informal institution building at the interface of agonistic (urban) spatial politics—in a global political climate facing what Mark Fisher famously framed as “capitalist realism” in conjunction with the social-ecological transition while, arguably, also facing a crisis of imagination. This project articulates a curatorial impetus towards urban policy making in conjunction with spatial proximity as a tool to mediate between the individual, the collective, the neighborhood, the city, state politics, and society at large. If we understand assembly as a form of spatial gathering, and the bonfire as the prehistoric space of assembly, what constitutes its contemporary equivalent?

On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality

Agonistic Assemblies

Miessen argues for an urgent inversion of participation, a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, Miessen candidly reflects on the limits and traps of its real motivations. Rather than breading the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, he argues for conflict as an enabling, instead of disabling, force. The book calls for a format of conflictual participation-no longer a process by which others are invited "in," but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.

The Nightmare of Participation

Kenny Cupers

Wie hat sich die Berliner Stadtlandschaft im Laufe der Verwandlung von einer geteilten Stadt zur Kreativmetropole verändert? Trotz des gewaltigen Erbes und großer Entwicklungsprojekte ruft Berlin immer noch Bilder von Lücken und innerstädtischer Brachen hervor. Das Buch macht die leicht veränderlichen und komplexen politischen Zusammenhänge dieser unbestimmten Orte deutlich. Fotografien von Orten aus den Jahren 2001 und 2016 zeigen, wie aus Niemandsland neue Wohnbauten und wie aus Untergrundtreffpunkten Geschäftszentren geworden sind. Sie zeigen aber auch verbliebene Nischen unerwarteter Wildnis und Freiheit. Die begleitenden Texte renommierter Urbanisten untersuchen diese wichtigen und oft stillen Reserven und fordern dazu auf unseren Einsatz für die Zukunft der Stadt zu hinterfragen.

Potenziale urbaner Nischen

Spaces of Uncertainty - Berlin revisited

Shumon Basar

A report from the front lines of cultural activism that looks at spatial practitioners who actively trespass into neighboring or alien fields of knowledge.

An Atlas of Spatial Practice : a Report from the Front Lines of Cultural Activism Looks at Spatial Practitioners who Actively Trespass Into Neighbouring Or Alien Fields of Knowledge

Did Someone Say Participate?

How has Berlin’s urban landscape changed in its remarkable transformation from divided city to creative capital? Despite the monumental heritage and grand development projects, Berlin still conjures up images of urban fragmentation and vacant inner-city land. The book reveals the changing nature and complex politics of this open space. A rephotographing of sites between 2001 and 2016 shows how no man’s land has made way for new apartments and underground hangouts have changed into commercial hubs, but it also transports us to remaining pockets of urban wilderness and unexpected freedom right next to the city’s most iconic squares. The accompanying essays by noted urban thinkers explore this little-known but vital reserve—forcing us to reflect on our unrelenting efforts to chart the future of the city at large.

Armen Avanessian

Lietje Bauwens

Wouter De Raeve

Alice Haddad

"Our decision to start the series of conversations with you is based on your implementation of the "xeno" in your perspective practices. Perhaps it is high time for a xeno-architecture to match aims to unpack the prefix xeno, probing what it entails -not merely rhetorically but also as a means of practice- in an attempt to bring the ideas it contains more concretely into the domain of architecture. It proposes to link the more philosophical discussions on the notion of xeno with the questions of instrumentalization and governance that are necessarily involved in the praxis and geopolitics of architecture. And it relates the significance of legal architectures and technologically driven transformations in the metaphysics of law back to the agenda of xeno-architecture."

Perhaps It Is High Time for a Xeno-Architecture to Match

The future of the State depends, at least in Europe, on the realization that the State of the 20th Century (the National State embodying internal and external sovereignty) does no longer have any future. Erhard Eppler, Auslaufmodell Staat? (2005) Is Europe a place, a space, or a temporary community of shared interests? As a political space, Europe is as conflictual as its debated constitution. It is a construct that must be continuously negotiated, and its longing for an architecture of strategic encounters parallels an increasing economical power of the private sector, while the sovereignty of European nation states attenuate. This book, edited by London-based architect and author Markus Miessen, marks an extension of the discursive space he has produced as contribution to the 2007 Lyon Biennial. He has pulled together a heterogeneous group of interlocutors to lead conversations on alternative notions of participation, the inconsistence between democratic concepts, and what it means to live in Europe today. Contributors Shumon Basar, Ute Meta Bauer, Celine Condorelli, Erhard Eppler, Nikolaus Hirsch, Rem Koolhaas, Stéphanie Moisdon, Ingo Niermann, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ralf Pflugfelder, Karl Schlögel, Eyal Weizman, Tirdad Zolghadr, et al.

The Violence of Participation

Yann Chateigné

The applied research project from University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe, and resulting publication, The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict examines archival practice and its spatial repercussions in an open conversation among over 80 artists, architects, writers, theorists, educators, designers and others. What are the spaces involved in making archives productive? Conventional archives tend to define themselves through content-specific accumulation of matter, subscribing to an existing order. The structure of archives has not evolved in response to its cumulative model. A productive archive would offer an open framework which actively transforms itself, thus allowing for the constant production of new and surprising relationships and new perspectives on archival practice. Contributions by Stuart Bailey, Bless, Beatriz Colomina, Cline Condorelli, Armin Linke, Dexter Sinister, Nav Haq, Nikolaus Hirsch, Christoph Keller, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Walid Raad and Alice Rawsthorn.

Markus Miessen

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