#(UN)WALL/// Turbo by Baptiste Debombourg

Here you will see the very impressive work of the french artist Baptiste DEBOMBOURG.
In this installations serie, the wall seems to come into the room, to attack the observer. The deformation of the surface is creating a tention between the solid and the void, and it blurs the limit of the the inner space enveloppe. The broken surface give a very strong materiality to the traditionnal clean walls of the "white cube" and the pieces of wood appearing under the white coating are like scars.



Ongoing show of Baptiste DEBOMBOURG here
Upcoming show here
More here, here and here.

# (UN)WALL /// Introduction

boiteaoutils' new theme is called (UN)WALL and will attempt to explore the architectural element that the wall is as a medium of political oppression - and one does not necessarily need to think of those famous borders of shame to think in that regard - and the several experimentations that has been led in order to try to unwall architecture.

The article I wrote about Gordon Matta Clark's unwalling architecture a week ago can thus be used as this theme's introduction.

# Deleuze's wave about Spinoza

The following short excerpt is extracted from one of Gilles Deleuze's classes about Spinoza in Vincennes (the Parisian autonomous University during the 70's) and, in my opinion, illustrates very vividly the philosophy of the great Portuguese/Dutch Philosopher.
The entire class transcript can be read either in French or in Spanish but unfortunately it has not been translated in English...I therefore tried to do the translation of this excerpt myself...once again I apologize for the low quality of my written English.

DELEUZE / SPINOZA
Cours Vincennes - 17/03/1981

Personne ne peut nier que savoir nager, c'est une conquête d'existence, c'est fondamental, vous comprenez: moi je conquiers un élément ; ça ne va pas de soi de conquérir un élément. Je sais nager, je sais voler. Formidable. Qu'est ce que ça veut dire? C'est tout simple: ne pas savoir nager c'est être à la merci de la rencontre avec la vague. Alors, vous avez l'ensemble infini des molécules d'eau qui composent la vague ; ça compose une vague et je dis: c'est une vague parce que, ces corps les plus simples que j'appelle "molécules", en fait ce n'est pas les plus simples, il faudra aller encore plus loin que les molécules d'eau. Les molécules d'eau appartiennent déjà à un corps, le corps aquatique, le corps de l'océan, etc... ou le corps de l'étang, le corps de tel étang. C'est quoi la connaissance du premier genre ? C'est: aller, je me lance, j'y vais, je suis dans le premier genre de connaissance: je me lance, je barbote comme on dit. Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire, barboter ? Barboter, c'est tout simple. Barboter, le mot indique bien, on voit bien que c'est des rapports extrinsèques: tantôt la vague me gifle et tantôt elle m'emporte ; ça c'est des effets de choc. C'est des effets de choc, à savoir: je ne connais rien au rapport qui se compose ou qui se décompose, je reçois les effets de parties extrinsèques. Les parties qui m'appartiennent à moi sont secouées, elles reçoivent un effet de choc, des parties qui appartiennent à la vague. Alors tantôt je rigole et tantôt je pleurniche, suivant que la vague me fait rire ou m'assomme, je suis dans les affects passion: ha maman, la vague m'a battu ! Bon. "Ha maman, la vague m'a battu", cri que nous ne cesseront pas d'avoir tant que nous serons dans le premier genre de connaissance puisqu'on ne cessera pas de dire: ha la table m'a fait du mal ; ça revient exactement au même que de dire: l'autre m'a fait du mal ; pas du tout parce que la table est inanimée, Spinoza est tellement plus malin que tout ce qu'on a pu dire après, pas du tout parce que la table est inanimée qu'on doit dire: la table m'a fait du mal, c'est aussi bête de dire: Pierre m'a fait du mal que de dire: La pierre m'a fait du mal, ou la vague m'a fait du mal. C'est du même niveau, c'est le premier genre. Bien. Vous me suivez ? Au contraire: je sais nager; ça ne veut pas dire forcément que j'ai une connaissance mathématique ou physique, scientifique, du mouvement de la vague, ça veut dire que j'ai un savoir faire, un savoir faire étonnant, c’est-à-dire que j'ai une espèce de sens du rythme, la rythmicité. Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire, le rythme ça veut dire que: mes rapports caractéristiques je sais les composer directement avec les rapports de la vague. ça ne se passe plus entre la vague et moi, c’est-à-dire que ça ne se passe plus entre les parties extensives, les parties mouillées de la vague et les parties de mon corps ; ça se passe entre les rapports. Les rapports qui composent la vague, les rapports qui composent mon corps, et mon habileté lorsque je sais nager, à présenter mon corps sous des rapports qui se composent directement avec le rapport de la vague. Je plonge au bon moment, je ressors au bon moment. J'évite la vague qu approche, ou, au contraire je m'en sers, etc... Tout cet art de la composition des rapports.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Nobody can deny that to be able to swim is a conquest of existence, it is fundamental you understand: I conquer an element; it is not so obvious to conquer an element. I can swim, I can fly. Wonderful. What does that mean ? It is very simple: not be able to swim consists in being vulnerable to the confrontation with the wave. Then, you have the infinite ensemble of water molecules that compose the wave; it compose a wave and I say: it is a wave because its most simple bodies that I call “molecules”, actually they are not the most simple, one should go even further that water molecules. Water molecules already belong to a body, the aquatic body, the ocean body, etc…What is the first type of knowledge ? It is, come on I dare, I go, I am in the first type of knowledge: I dare, I wade like one says. What does that mean to wade ? To wade, that is very simple. To wade, the word indicates pretty well, one clearly see that it is some extrinsic relationships: sometimes the wave slaps me and sometimes it takes me away; that is some shock effects. They are shock effects, meaning, I don’t know anything of the relationships that compose themselves or decompose themselves, I receive the extrinsic parts’ effects. The parts that belong to me are being shaken, they receive a shock effect coming from parts that belong to the wave. Therefore sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep, depending if the wave makes me laugh or knock me out, I am within the passion affects: ha Mummy, the wave beat me up! Ok “Ha Mummy the wave beat me up”, cry that we shall not cease to do until we don’t come out of the first type of knowledge since we shall not cease to say: ha the table hurted me; it is the same to say: the other person hurted me; not at all since the table is inanimate, Spinoza is so much smarter than everything that one could have said afterwards, not at all because the table is inanimate that one should say: the table hurted me, it as stupid as saying: Peter hurted me than to say: The stone hurted me or the wave hurted me. It is the same level , it is the first type. On the contrary, I can swim; it does not necessarily means that I have a mathematic, physic, or scientific knowledge of the wave’s movement, it means that I have a skill, a surprising skill, I have a sort of rhythm sense. What does that mean, the rhythm, it means that my characteristic relationships, I know how to compose them directly with the wave’s relationships, it does not happen anymore between the wave and myself, meaning it does not happen anymore between the extensive parts, the wave’s wet parts and my body’s parts; it happens between the relationships. Relationships that compose the wave, relationships that compose my body, and my skill when I can swim, to present my body under some relationships that compose themselves directly with the wave’s relationships. I dive at the right time, I come out from under the water at the right time. I avoid the coming wave, or on the contrary I use it, etc… All this art of the relationships’ composition.

# Radio Broadcast about Michel Foucault

This week the French Radio program Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance was exploring Michel Foucault's system of thoughts through five interesting broadcasts that you can podcast during the next two days and listen online for the next two weeks.

- Foucault: l'ombre des Lumières 1/5 L'Histoire de la sexualité
- Foucault: l'ombre des Lumières 2/5 Les mots et les choses
- Foucault: l'ombre des Lumières 3/5 L'engagement politique
- Foucault: l'ombre des Lumières 4/5 Foucault et les Lumières
- Foucault: l'ombre des Lumières 5/5 Foucault et la folie

# Big Bambú by Starn Studio upcoming to the MET

From April 27th to October 31st, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Arts will host a giant work in progress on its roof. The installation called Big Bambú is designed by twin brothers artist Mike and Doug Starn and is composed by 3200 bamboo poles constituting a huge three dimensions scaffolding maze. One very interesting aspect of it is that the installation will be build up little by little during the exhibition time reconfiguring continuously the space that will be open for one part to the public to climb it up.

To know a little more about it, you can read the New York Time's article about it.

# Complement to dpr-barcelona's article about Brodsky & Utkin

Last September, our friends from dpr-barcelona published an interesting article about Russian artists Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin. I, therefore won't publish any etchings that have already been but instead bring some more of those magnificent Borgesian architectures created by Brodsky and Utkin.
The wonderful etching above reminds me of Zarathustra's funambulist (this word does not exist in English but I find it much more beautiful than the regular tight-rope walker) that I posted earlier.
Brodsky and Utkin makes us feel the beauty of a monumental world (i.e. a world that is a monument) that the individual has to experience alone and continuously just like in a Kafka's novel.

# Death in Gaza by James Miller

"Such precision is combined with the tactics of medieval siege warfare adapted to the networked sprawl or urban refugee camps. An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy's societal and urban infrastructure networks complements the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources. Critical to these techniques of disabling the enemy is bulldozing."

Achille Mbembe. 2003:29

"Houses are destroyed, olive trees uprooted, orange groves laid waste...to improve... visibility...The bulldozer one runs across at every roadside seems as much a part of the strategy in the ongoing war as the tank. Never has such an inoffensive machine struck me as being more a harbinger of silent violence. The brutality of war. Geography, it is said, determines war. In Palestine, it is war that has achieved the upper hand over geography."

Christian Salmon quoted by Stephen Graham in Cities, War and Terrorism. 2003

This image is excerpted from the film Death in Gaza (2004) and carries according to me an important symbolic value about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It actually comes from a film that makes no compromise to the Hamas' violence, despite the fact that its director James Miller was killed by Israeli soldiers while carrying a white flag. This symbol is therefore not a unilateral propaganda from an activist director but the bare reality of an asymmetric conflict. Palestinian have stones, Israeli have armored bulldozers -transforming and claiming the land- that shoot back to the stones every once in a while with real bullets.

# SEA /// WWII Mulberry Harbour in Arromanches

Mulberry Harbours were unfoldable harbours developed during the Second World War in order for the allies to constitute a basis able to make all the cargo land in Arromanches (Normandy). Apart from the bridges and piers, what is very interesting here is the constitution of a seawall in order to break the waves that could have -and that actually had- avoid the harbour to function. This seawall was composed by ships in the surface and enormous concrete caissons (called Phoenix) that was filled with water or sand and sank in order to break the deeper currents.

If you are interested to know more I recommend this US Navy's history's website.

This article seemed relevant within the frame of Transit-City's next workshop in Paris on February 19th which will discuss about the military understanding of urban issues and design.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// The secret life of words by Isabel Coixet

The secret life of words by Isabel Coixet is a beautiful film that take place on a offshore oil rig situated in the West of Ireland. The rig's characteristic is to combine the ship's language with an obvious link to the ground and therefore the island's static aspect. Foucault's favorite example of heterotopia is the one of the ship probably in a historicist concern, nevertheless the rig has the advantage not to imply any arrival that would not depend on the human when the oil rig implies an entrance and an exist that are absolutely dependent to the considered character.
The small basketball field and the swings on the deck definitely participates to the sedentary aspect of the territory itself.

Thanks Ethel !

# Silent Light (Culture) by Matthieu Kavyrchine

Matthieu Kavyrchine is a young French artist-with an architecture background-who released several interesting photographic series including one called Habiter that introduces himself living a whole week alone in the Villa Savoye intepreting the Corbusean space as a kind of hostile territory...
The work that I chose here is a series called Culture that would be exhibited starting March 7th in the Parc Culturel de Rentilly near Paris. The photographs dramatizes a frightening forest occupying the stage of a theater if it is not a theater's bleachers lost in the middle of a forest. The fictitious space introduced makes me think of a representation of Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot in a scenario in which Godot would have actually arrived ! In his information note, Matthieu Kavyrchine evokes the representation of childish fears that makes me recall the epileptic forest dramatized by Berdaguer & Pejus (see former post).

Here is a short text introducing the Exhibition Silent Light:

A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville and of Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Matthieu Kavyrchine is interested in showing in his artwork the relationship between mental space and constructed space. For the project Habiter (2003), the artist spent several nights alone in the Villa Savoye.1 In the resulting photo self-portraits, the iconic architectural space, so often treated as a mere museum piece and stripped of presence, ends up blending into the mental space, becoming a shell.
We find this idea transposed to a completely different world in the project Culture, designed at the CPIF (January–March 2008), in which skillful photomontage combines the natural space of the forest with that of the stage. The theater becomes a metaphor for mental space: a physical and enclosed site, it opens possibilities for the imagination. Yet the forest, the archetypal open space, tends at night to become closed off, to transform into a cocoon in which one can come to curl up.
From the dark halls of the forest at night, a hybrid space is set up. As with John Cage’s silent room2, a dimension of silence becomes visible in Matthieu Kavyrchine’s images: a bed of ferns, a carpet of leaves or lichen, a circular halo of protective light are reminiscent of a cocoon. They offset the phantasmagoric and murkier universe of the pitch black associated with childhood fears.
In these scenes stripped of human presence, the position of the image’s viewer is equivalent to the point of view of the invisible audience (from his purple armchair the viewer observes a dead tree) or to the point of view of the actor (the tree onstage faces several rows of red seats). Through this infinite regression, the empty orchestra seats open the possibility of identifying with the viewer of the image.
In the series D104, which followed Culture, a choreographer is pitted against the space of the forest by introducing an element that is natural, certainly, but cultivated (potted plants). These frontal tableaux recall the landscapes of Corot more than they do the scenery of Waiting for Godot. By introducing human presence in which the subject attempts to become a part of the natural landscape, the mental space evolves from projection to embodiment.
Audrey Illouz, Centre Photographique d’Ile de France, 2008
1 Architectural project designed by Le Corbusier.
2 “Silence does not exist. Go into an anechoic chamber and listen to the sound of your nervous system and listen to the

circulation your blood.” John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press).

# Unwalling Architecture with Gordon Matta Clark

"By undoing a building there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I am gesturing: first, to open a state if enclosure which had been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for insuring a passive, isolated consumer-a virtually captive audience. The fact that some of the buildings I have dealt with are in Black ghettos reinforces some of this thinking, although I would not make a total distinction between the imprisonment of the poor and the remarkably subtle self-containerization of higher socio-economic neighborhoods. The question is a reaction to an ever less viable state of privacy, private property, and isolation."

Gordon Matta Clark. Interview by Donald Wall for Arts Magazine. May 1976

As I have been observing before on boiteaoutils, a wall is at first nothing more than a line drawn on a piece of paper. This line then acquires a materiality and thus own a violence that prevent bodies to a freedom of movement (the climax of this violence is obviously achieved in prisons were four walls surround the body). A wall here is not necessarily to be understood only as a vertical panel but also every kind of built surface that prevent the body from a freedom of movement (floors, walls, fences etc.) Any process of “unwallization” is therefore a resistance to this violence. It is difficult to find some architecture that succeeds to apply this kind of processes; nevertheless, several artists did work on that issue and produced various propositions in that regard. Gordon Matta Clark’s work is both the precursor and the quintessence of them, piercing, sawing, digging, rending, rotating, splitting, tearing apart, Matta Clark mistreat the wall as much as he can and the latter almost loss the totality of its violence this way.

The wall as a separation device but not necessarily as a surface needing more energy to be penetrated than a human owns, can also be seen in the example of rows of sheets on clothes lines. The wall thus loose its violent status while conserving most of its other characteristics.


All the following pictures come from the great book. Gordon Matta Clark. Phaidon 2003

# Talking about the Walled City...

Talking about Kowloon Walled City, I would like to offer you this incredible and tremendous section (click on the picture it is super high resolution). This masterpiece of life abundance and urban inventions has been drawn by a group of Japanese authors who released this book, 大図解九龍城. In that regard, if anybody knows a way to buy this book for less than ￥5,000, I would really appreciate if he/she writes how in the comment section !