# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Dogville from Lars von Trier

Dogville, a film from Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), is somewhere in between nowhere (utopia) and elsewhere (heterotopia). The representation language is limited to its very minimal aspect: nil for the outside world, lines on the floor for walls, specificity of the houses symbolized by a unique element. This space is just like any other spaces in cinema, it exists outside the reality since it is representing this same reality. The heterotopia, here is thus questioning the relationship maintained between the subject and the representation in a comparable way that Magritte's painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe (This, is not a pipe). The aesthetic of the movie is therefore created by this minimal representation and provokes (at least for me) a strong feeling of claustrophobia.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Punishment Park by Peter Watkins

I already posted something about Punishment Park, not a long time ago, although it seemed that this movie should belong to HETEROTOPIA IN CINEMA...

Directed by Peter Watkins in 1971, Punishment Park is filmed borrowing the documentary vocabulary in order to create an ambiguity on the reality of this story. In fact, the movie introduces a "state of emergency" decreed by Richard Nixon (inspired by the real McCarran Internal Security Act) and authorizes federal authorities to detain people who could "represent a risk for society" without referring it to the American Congress. In this regard, arrested people can choose either to spend some time in prison or to participate to Police training in Punishment Park.
Punishment Park is a remote place in the Californian desert where young dissidents have to walk for 60 miles without being recaptured by the police. The pseudo-documentary dramatizes a session which turns to human hunting after a cop is being killed. Dissidents are shot one by one.
Punishment Park is therefore an heterotopia in its extraction from the "real world" and the total abolition of law it implies, bringing human to a state of cold violence between predators and preys.

# Passages through Hinterlands LECTURE

Following the two former posts about the RIBA winners and the Passage through Hinterlands book, here is an event related to them. Wednesday 9th December, Ruairi Glynn (of Interactive Architecture) will be giving a lecture at Bartlett at 6:30PM with this years’ President’s Silver Medal Winner, Nicholas Szczepaniak, the Bartlett’s Christian Kerrigan and Ric Lipson, AA’s Adam Nathaniel Furman, AA DRL’s ‘Shampoo‘ Group and RCA’s Jordan Hodgson.

picture: Chris Kerrigan's graduate project

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Werckmeister Harmonies by Bela Tarr

Werckmeister Harmonies is the seventh movie of the brilliant Hungarian director Bela Tarr. One of the main characteristic of it, is that it is composed only by thirty nine shots (for a two hours movie).

The plot is set in a small village of Hungary which can already be considered as an heterotopia thanks to its remoteness and the extreme filtration of exchanges between the outside world and the village. In fact, the only foreign element is a strange circus troupe carrying a whale inside a truck and lead by an evocative character called The Prince. Just like in Lars van Trier's Dogville, the outside world seems barely to exist, or at least does not endure representation and when the main character wants to get away from his world, he is being chased by an helicopter which definitely recalls Francois Truffaut's Farenheit 451.
Anyway, the real heterotopia here is represents by an hospital which is being attacked at some point of the movie in a long shot visiting the entire building and observing a group of people beating up patients. The "real world" is taking over this "other space" until assailants meet the human in its nudity, in its fragility, in its pitifulness.

# Interview of Teddy Cruz on Archinect

Power and powerlessness is the title of Archinect's interview of Teddy Cruz I recommend you to read for its description of the Estudio Cruz' s archi-political work on San Diego/Tijuana's border zone. Teddy Cruz was participating to November conference of Oppositional Architecture and declared that he believe in a long term work to make institutions evolve rather than a resistance based on the non-respect of established rules.

# Salvador Dali's Dream of Venus

Here is Salvador Dali's Pavilion for the New York World Fair of 1939. It is officially called Dream of Venus but Dali calls it Twenty thousand legs under the see in reference to Jules Verne. Inside it, is a pool where a lot of representation of femininity are exhibited.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Avalon by Mamoru Oshii

Avalon is a movie by Mamoru Oshii created in 2001, just before Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. This film dramatizes a uchronian dowdy world -we can recognize Eastern Europe- in which some people make a living by plugging themselves on a virtual reality and fighting as free-lance or team soldiers against each other.
This whole virtual world -the movie is actually tackling the even notion of reality- can be considered as an heterotopia for its entrance/exit protocols (see picture below), and the juxtaposition of several worlds. Although some territories are even more increasing this notion of "other space". Ruins and abandoned factories are often hosting the scenery of this movie from which an atmosphere of strangeness is created.

# RIBA Presidents Medals Student Awards 2009

RIBA Students winners 2009 have been announced and are visible on the President's Medals website. Like every years projects reach a very high degree of representation which still seems to be an important point in Great Britain schools' pedagogy for which architectonicity serves narration.

projects on picture: Nicholas Szczepaniak (University of Westminster)/Silver medal, Selvei Al-Assadi (London South Bank University), Stephen Townsend (University of Nottingham), Pascal Bronner (Bartlett), Paul Durcan (University College Dublin), Wen Ying Teh (AA)/ Silver medal, Biten Patel (University of Brighton), Robert Taylor (University of Sheffield)

# 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio by Perry Ogden

7 Reece Mews is a book of photographs by Perry Odgen taking place in Francis Bacon's workshop in London just after he died in 1992. Odgen spent three days alone in the studio in order to understand (or desunderstand) how his photographs should exists. The result is a description of a space by a juxtaposition of pieces assembled in the reader's imagination in order to compose a whole.
This chaotic subterranean - the studio is on first floor but the side window is clogged, only the ceiling window is furnishing natural light - fits perfectly with Deleuze description of Bacon's attitude in The Logic Of Sensation (see former post for an excerpt) about a new painting starting not with a white canvas but with a fulfill canvas that the painter has to free from superfluous elements.
The photographs transcribe well the influences and references used by Francis Bacon in his work. In this sea of documents, you find book on Velasquez or Seurat, pictures of wrestlers, of himself, of nude models, of his former paintings, chronophotographs etc. just like this mess was nothing else than Bacon's mind itself materialized on the floor and on the walls, and the painting just being a selected frame of this monad.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Introduction

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

[...]

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.

Michel Foucault. Of other spaces (1967)

For the next two months coming (December + January), we decided to explore the notion of heterotopias in cinema. According to Foucault, the cinema (building) itself is an heterotopia in its ability of allowing several overlapping spaces to exist. A room with a two dimensions screens where a three dimensions world is able to exist. Heteropias in cinema (films) are therefore increasing the amount of overlapping worlds and thus question the status of reality of any of those worlds.
Foucault distinguish two main types of heterotopias. The first one is called crisis heterotopias ie. privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc. The second one is called heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.
We will probably focus more on this second type of heterotopia through cinema and try to observe in them their poetical and political aspects.

picture: Stalker from Andrei Tarkovky (1979)

# Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands by Ruairi Glynn & Sara Shafiei

I usually don't review books I did not read, but since this one gathers projects I more or less know, I am pretty sure that it is a very interesting one.
The name is Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands and it has been created by Ruairi Glynn (redactor of Interactive Architecture) & Sara Shafiei (remember the famous Theater for Magicians ?)who are both very close from the Bartlett. This book follows the eponymous exhibition which was developed this year in London. The coherency of this compendium comes from the territory of practice (London) and the generation (young). Graduate students' work comes from what I would call the three best narrative schools of architecture which are the Bartlett (with Christian Kerrigan's 200 years architecture project for example), the University of Westminster and the Royal College of Arts, thus justifying such a evocative title (Passages through Hinterland).
Other projects comes from talented people such as Usman Haque, Mette Thomsen, Philip Beesley, Tobias Klein, Marcos and Marjan etc. Foreword is unsurprisingly from Neil Spiller.

You can see a 40 pages preview on the book website

Kenny Tsui

David Greene & Samantha Hardingham

Michael Wihart

Nicolas Szczepaniak

# Dystopia : Architecture in the clouds.

Here is a serie of artworks of the French artist Christophe Dessaigne , his work is a mixture of pictures texture and photographic effect. He's playing with the scale of the original object to create a new dimension, each of his pictures is telling a story and creating a new fantastic world. In his dark visions you can notice that his favorite movies are Dark city (Alex Proyas) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott), some of his works appears on books, CDs or magazines covers.

What follows is a selection of the more architectural ones.

More here & much more here
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