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Goodbye to London - Radical Art and Politics in the Seventies, edited by Astrid Proll (available on Amazon UK and USA.)

Publisher Hatje Cantz Verlag writes: In London of the seventies, a dynamic counterculture blossomed against a backdrop of unemployment, racism, and IRA bombings. This volume, a collage of texts and images, provides an overview of the radical political and cultural developments of the decade. Photographs by Homer Sykes and others document the Grunwick strike, when Asian immigrants stood up to their bosses; the squatters' scene, with its approximately thirty thousand active members; and the new gay liberation movement. Derek Jarman shot his first Super-8 films and Peter Kennard created trenchant collages, while Stuart Brisley's performances and Jo Spence's photographs on the body and women caused a sensation. An essay by the well-known journalist Jon Savage sheds light on the meaning of the protest movement and counterculture of the period.

View inside the book

View inside the book

While reading the book i was reminded time and time again of scenes and dialogues from one of my favourite tv series, Life on Mars. Different place (Manchester/London) but similar atmosphere of a bleak, run-down but feisty city that didn't care much for the rights of gays, immigrants or women.

The population of Greater London dropped by over half a million between 1961 and 1971 and it continued to decrease until the early '90s. Brutalism was still the architecture of the moment, Time Out was just an underground magazine, there were as many marchers on Gay Pride Day than there were policemen to monitor them, the Angry Brigade's bombs were targeting the establishment, art and film collectives with a social agenda emerged, and punks clad in Vivienne Westwood were about to call for anarchy in the country.

View inside the book

View inside the book

The strongest asset of Goodbye to London is the line-up of contributors. Each of them has played an active role in the alternative London of the '70s. Writer and editor Astrid Proll is probably the most famous because of her RAF fame. In the '70s, she fled Germany and hid in a London squat until someone recognized her at a petrol station. Jon Savage is now a well-established music journalist, Sacha Craddock is an art critic and curator, Peter Cross is a curator and author, Homer Sykes is a documentary photographer, Andrew Wilson is a critic and art historian.

They give a personal and engrossing account (so engrossing i didn't put the book down until i had finished it) of their life and struggles of the time. Many of them lived in squats. Numerous houses in inner London were indeed left by speculators to decay. Interestingly, the number of people living in squats in England and Wales has risen by 25 per cent in the last seven years. Unlike, in the '70s however, nowadays' squatters are often driven by financial necessity rather than by the desire to experiment with alternative lifestyles.

Squatters Poster 1970's

No matter how gloomy London might have been in the '70s, the texts leave a feeling of nostalgia. Many of the essays end with a brief and resigned mention of Margaret Thatcher's coming into power in 1979.

View inside the book

A bus brings strikebreakers to the Grunwick photo-processing factory in Willesden, North London, 1977

Frank Egan in drag at Gay pride demo. Photo HCA-Townson

Squatters in Tolmer Square, 1970's. Photo Nick Wates

Peter Cross and unkown woman at Brixton Gay Centre. Photo HCA-Townson

Goodbye to London is the catalog of the exhibition which closed last month at he Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst.

Last year, the UK government announced their plan to build new nuclear power stations in 11 locations in England and Wales in order to meet their CO2 emission targets. Nuclear offers a clean, near limitless energy solution that could allow the UK to meet its emission targets without having to moderate consumer's access to energy. The broad public however is everything but prepared to accept the move. Over the past few years, science have failed to assuage the public's unscientifically-based fears and sometimes irrational concerns over nuclear energy.

With his speculative proposal Nuclear is good. What will it take to convince you?, Oliver Goodhall is trying to shape convincing arguments in favour of nuclear energy. The project is in no way propaganda, it's more about opening up a debate about nuclear energy and energy policy in general. The video below gives a clear overview of Oliver Goodhall's project:

One of the outcome of Goodhall's research was walking and talking tour to the site of a potential power station in Bradwell-on-sea, in Essex, England. He enrolled nuclear engineers, environmentalists and designers to have a nuclear-theme picnic with plenty of mushrooms and toxic-looking icecream but more importantly, to exchange views about nuclear energy in a way that would not have been possible had the encounter taken place in an office meeting room.

Among some of Oliver's proposals is a protective barrage cloud hovering over the power station to respond to fears of a disaster incident that would release radiation into the atmosphere; benefits to citizens for accepting to take responsibility of their individual nuclear waste; a special emergency team always on call to intervene in case of a problem at the power station, etc.

After having watched the video for the project and seen Oliver's works at the Design Interactions show last June, i still needed to ask him a couple of questions:

Your research focuses on the UK, did you have a look at what other nations were doing to communicate, promote and roll out nuclear energy?
Did any of them came up with inspiring strategies and ideas?

My research was based on UK policy, partly because of the immediacy of some of decisions that need to be taken (the Department of Energy and Climate Change was running consultation on the new nuclear power stations at the same time as the beginnings of my project too) and partly because of the re-emergence of nuclear energy as a potential energy source after a long time out in the cold.

My favourite examples of other strategies employed by other countries came from France. This probably stems from France being highly invested in nuclear energy, and it gets over 75% of its electricity this way. A couple of these examples formed the basis for some of my proposals - although I extrapolated them to a farther fetched conclusion.

One was the reporting of the Chernobyl accident in the French press whereby a supposed meteorological anticyclone effect prevented the radioactive cloud from settling, which was discredited more recently. If that story allayed fears about a nuclear accident in France for all that time, then could it be a solution to generate an artificial anticyclone to protect UK inhabitants from this perceived hazard?

The other example I enjoyed was about the channel tunnel. In order to meet CO2 emission reduction targets Eurostar switched is electricity supply from 50% UK 50% France to 100% France. As nuclear energy produces a tiny fraction of the CO2 emissions of the coal and gas-fired power the UK relies on, this slight of hand allowed them to easily meet their target. What if you scaled this up as a policy solution applied to parts of the UK?

I thought these were both fascinating examples, although not necessarily for entirely honorable reasons.

Bradwell Master plan

A part of your project involved a guided tour of the site of a potential new nuclear power station in Bradwell-on-sea, Essex. Do you know if the inhabitants of the area have a say in the installation of the power station? Did you go around Bradwell-on-sea to ask how people felt about the proposal?

Locally, they are consulted as part of the planning of the Government's proposed power stations and the local people I spoke to (although not many) were positive about Bradwell producing electricity again. It is a big industry, offering jobs and employment and local prosperity - before the current power station was decommissioned it provided a socio-economic stimulus to this part of Essex.

Interestingly, there were quite a few anti-windfarm stickers in the village protesting the nearby off-shore wind farm. So it's not that people are undiscerning about their energy supply choices.

What were the reactions to your project outside of the design sphere? Did you get feedback, invitations, critiques and comments from members of the governments or from scientists?

My proposals came from 9 months of research and investigation, and were heavily influenced by conversations I had with professionals from the fields of ethics, political science, materials chemistry and the Government's Department of Energy and Climate Change. Reactions were varied, but these other professional fields are engaging with the topics I was interested in; affecting policy choices and contributing to decision-making.

The practice I established, We Made That, has just been offered an opportunity to take forward a project on energy supply vs. demand - so I think that the approach has a broader value.

I'm a bit puzzled by your idea of a cloud hovering around station. i guess i'm not comfortable with the association between cloud and nuclear. Can you explain me what it would be made of and how it would work?

This was loosely based on the example of the Windscale fire incident; escape of radioactive particles through the containment being breached. Reactors now have containment and passive safety controls. But these are shrouded within a generic shed-type building - the cloud was about us considering a more conspicuous and obvious safety infrastructure. What would it take to convince you that this safety infrastructure was sufficient?

The conversations that stemmed from this proposal were very interesting - especially with the nuclear engineers - about the 'public understanding of' reactor safety, and what measures might be most expedient to convince an unsure public. Some of this debate can be seen in the documentary film of the guided tour.

Nuclear is Good, Protective Barrage Cloud

You mentioned that science didn't quite manage to convince about the benefits of adopting nuclear energy and that a reason for that was that science had to face argument that are "irrational or unscientifically founded". Can you tell us more about these arguments and why they are unscientifically founded?

Nuclear energy has been around for 60 years in the UK, but now we are at a point of dilemma; looming climate change alters our perspective on energy production. If the scientific arguments put forward are falling on deaf ears then how else can you go about convincing naysayers that difficult choices need to be made? On the guided tour there were both pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear participants - and the argument between them typically came back to;

"It's very very unlikely, imperceptibly unlikely, that something could get out of all that containment"... "But is that meant to comfort people?"

This reinforces that a shift in tactics or approach might be necessary - although not an admission that science might be very comfortable with.

Nuclear is Good, Concrete Emergency Services

You will present your work at the sustain 2010 exhibition. Are you going to present the project in the exact same way you did at the Summer show? Or has the content of your project or the way you communicate it changed over the past few weeks/months?

I'll actually be showing the project differently. I imagine it will remain fairly provocative in terms of sustainability, nuclear tends to be a divisive topic, but the implications of our energy choices still need to be addressed. Setting these energy choices against climate change leads to difficult questions.

I personally consider nuclear to be necessary as part of an eco-pragmatic energy agenda. My approach to the project considered nuclear the 'what if', but there's also a 'what if not?' choice available to us - but maybe this is less palatable than the nuclear option. As you might be able to tell, I question whether it is genuinely 'sustainable' to continue making more 'sustainable products' - and I would rather address the fundamentals at the root of our energy choices.

Thanks Oliver!

Last Saturday i finally dragged myself out of the armchair and visited the PAV, the Parco d'Arte Vivente (Park of Living Art - Experimental center of contemporary art) in Turin. Although i was appalled by the utter wrongness of the 'interactive' displays i saw in some of the rooms, I'll be forever grateful to the place for bringing to Turin exciting artists. Michel Blazy, Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna and now Brandon Ballengee.

In Spring and Summer the artist, activist and ecological researcher was in town for a series of field trips on the river Po looking for tadpoles and frogs.

The amphibians studied by Ballengee are praeter naturam, beyond nature. Because of pollution, parasites or predators, the frogs have morphological anomalies such as extra, deformed or missing limbs.

According to Ballengee, amphibians are environmental canaries in the coal mine. The state of this sentinel group of animals is rather worrying, they are not only declining all across the globe, they are also presenting increasing levels of deformities.

An article from the BBC, which quotes Ballengee as well as a series of scientists, looks into the reasons for the deformities. Many researchers believe the problem is caused by chemical pollution. Others say that predators or parasites might be responsible for the deformities.

Many amphibians with extra limbs were actually infected by small parasitic flatworms called Riberoria trematodes. The parasites burrow into the hindquarters of tadpoles where they physically rearrange the limb bud cells and thereby interfere with limb development.

Missing or deformed limbs are caused by dragonfly nymphs. The insect rarely eats the entire tadpoles. Instead, they grab it, chew at a hind limb -often removing it altogether- and then release their prey. If the tadpole survives it metamorphoses into a toad with missing or deformed hind limbs, depending on the developmental stage of the tadpole.

However, scientists don't completely rule out chemicals as the cause of some missing limbs.

For more information, check out this video interview of the artist by the Arts Catalyst:

Images of the field trip Ballengee, scientists and members of the public made on the river Po near Turin where, unlike in other regions of Europe, they didn't find specimens of deformed amphibians:

At PAV Ballengée shows a variant of Styx, a table where glass dish display specimens of "cleared and stained" deformed frogs. The body of each tiny frog has been preserved and chemically altered so that bone is dyed red and cartilage blue with remaining tissues transparent.

Cleared and stained deformed Pacific treefrog

In the same room is a series of Malamp Iris prints, large-scale portraits of deformed frog specimens.

Brandon Ballengée, DFA25 Promethéus, 2003/2007, Malamp series, Iris print

Also on view at PAV, the Turin Po River Eco-displacement, a portion of the aquatic ecosystem, small paintings made from polluted pond water, coffee and ash and two videos documenting Ballengee's field trips in the UK and in Turin.

Previously: Biorama Huddersfield and Living Materials.

Praeter naturam opens until September 26th, 2010

 at the PAV, inTurin.

Future Exhibitions is a thick and insightful yearly magazine dedicated to new forms of expression in the field of exhibition media. The theme of this year's issue is Spatial Encounters. As the editors explain: We will focus on the visitor as we move from the content to the receptacle. What does space really mean? How can the totality of the visitor's experience be enhanced by architecture, set design and technology? How does this influence the prerequisites for exhibition production?

The magazine doesn't provide clear-cut answers to the questions above but the contributors' conversations with inspiring individuals and visits to innovative exhibitions spaces offer plenty of clues, ideas, pointers and stimuli to further cogitate on the theme of exhibition media.

Three essays stand out from the magazine, they are written by people whose work i admire immensely: Rodney LaTourelle, Raqs Media Collective and Eduardo Navas.

LaTourelle, master in the art of creating mesmerizing spaces, lists and comments on exhibitions and spaces that challenge visitors' expectations and engage their senses and attention. The strategies adopted range from the subtle to the spectacular. Some curators chose to play with the atmospheric qualities of light, others subvert the sequence of space and artefacts (by having visitors wear rubber boots and have them experience physically the consequence of climate change or by inverting the service entrance and the monumental one to make the audience experience the volumes of the space in a different way), etc. I found LaTourelle's essay particularly interesting as he looked for innovation in the geography and the atmosphere of the exhibition space rather than in technology.

Klima X at the Norwegian Museum of Science & Technology in Oslo (photo)

Future Exhibitions asked the ever ingenious Raqs Media Collective to present a fictive future exhibition. They came up with Eccentric Orbits - The Biennale of Solar Systems. After all, the galactic space might very well be the only place devoid of any art biennale.

In his essay Exhibitions in spaces of flux, Eduardo Navas draws on its own experience and on interviews with the likes of Mark Garrett from HTTP gallery, Sean Dockray from TELIC and the Public School, artist and curator Gustavo Romano and Marco Garcia from Medialab Prado to explore the opportunities offered by 'interactivity' in all its guises.

"Zeigen", Temporäre Kunsthalle © Benjamin Pritzkuleit

Another key features of Future Exhibitions is the spotlight on cultural institutions they regard as "ahead of the rest": Laboral in Gijón, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Miraikan aka The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo and Temporäre Kusthalle in Berlin.

Salon des amateurs © Jerszy Seymour Studio

Finally, the magazine interviews 4 'oracles' or 'people worth listening to'. They are: Lebanon NGO Febrik who organizes art and design workshops for children living in refugee camps in the Middle East; Carina Ostenfeldt whose educational project All aboard - the Salutogenic museum in Stockholm ensures that children with any kind of functional challenge can enjoy the educational experience provided by the space; stage designer and artist Robert Wilson; and Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, who explains why, in his view, parametricism is the preeminent style for avant-garde architecture and urbanism practice.

"Zeigen",Temporäre Kunsthalle © Benjamin Pritzkuleit

MAK, Vienna © Jerszy Seymour Studio

This way to order the mag.

Review of the first issue of Future Exhibitions.

Another long-delayed post about the talented designers, performers, artists and curators i met in Stockholm in June, by courtesy of Iaspis, a Swedish network that supports international exchange for practitioners in the areas of visual art, design, craft and architecture.

Nille Svensson, former member of Sweden Graphics, was the first designer/graphic artist/illustrator i met and the guy is so absurdly talented he doesn't even have a proper website. See for yourself:

Svensson (ex-Sweden Graphics) has developed his own independent projects and collaborated on works for cultural institutions and international companies such as H&M, Sony and Ebay.

Fake China

A few years ago, Svensson designed a set of plates that comments on the fact that Asian and Western civilizations have constantly borrowed, adapted or copied each others designs over the centuries.

The willow pattern associated with Chinese ceramics was in fact invented in England in the early 1800s. The pattern was accompanied with made-up stories set in Chinese-style landscapes to give some authenticity to the design. The anecdote certainly puts into a new perspective our -Western- belief that contemporary China is a country were goods are produced and copied but not designed.

Svensson, in his turn, stole the design and added his own narrative to it.

As the designer explained in an interview*: "With all this in mind I went to the Museum of Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, stole designs and design elements from plates in the collection, and created my own "fake china" plates, while convinced that nobody can copy anything without adding something to the story."

Fake China

Svensson has also co-founded the specialist art magazine Konstnaren. The magazine has a very unique perspective: it focuses on the artists, not on their artworks. So there's a disconcerting lack of photos showing sculptures, installations and paintings. Instead of looking at the result of the creative process, the magazine goes backwards and asks artists how and why they got to chose to dedicate their career to art, how they manage to live on art, how they find galleries to represent them, who decides who gets the funding, who is connected to who? who is most influential? Everything we always wanted to know about art but were afraid to ask. Too bad it's in swedish, eh!

Konstnaren magazine with Bjarne Melgaard on the cover

One of his most recent works with Sweden Graphics was design of the identity and Post-it-style signage for the Kalmar Konstmuseum, a contemporary art museum in the South of the country.

Sweden Graphics designed a new typeface called Kalmar Sans and stenciled graphics directly onto the museum walls.

Testing the painting on the walls of a ventilation machine room

Kalmar Konstmuseum's Post-Its were not Svensson's one and only foray into the territory of interior design. Has also created the floor tiling of a supermarket in Stockholm:

* apologies for not linking to the source of the interview, each time i tried to access the page today i got a 'malware warning' message.

Other people i met in Stockholm: the curators of Building Blocks at Färgfabriken, Stockholm and International Festival.

The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, by Katharine Harmon with essays by Gayle Clemans (available on Amazon UK and USA.)

Princeton Architectural Press writes: Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form.

Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints.

Sarah Trigg, Frame 3, 2003

The British Library in London is running until mid-September Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art . The stunning exhibition demonstrates that ancient maps were far more than two-dimensional representation of geography, they were also instruments to intimidate, educate, or inspire pride. If that wasn't enough for a piece of paper, each of them also ventured into artistic territory.

Today's cartography is far more composed, and eager to present itself as objective. However, Harmon's book establishes in 360 maps that maps, plans, atlases and other topographical depiction still inspire artists.

Artists play with both the material and the content of the map. Paper plans are all over the book but so are maps made of artist's hair, drawn on the body, printed onto the sand or turned into large-scale installations. Some maps have a clear activist agenda, others are infused with mental visions, covered with alien-abduction sites, etc.

Although the book presents mostly map art from the past two decades, the introduction has a brief (way too brief) timeline that inventories some of the most famous artists who have used maps in their works, starting in the '20s with the Surrealists' Map of the World.

Lars Arrhenius, A-Z

Map As Art is a well-documented, surprising and fascinating book. There is just enough text (lazy bloggers like me jump in horror at the sight of image-less pages): a general introduction to the volume, an essay for each chapter and a brief description of the artworks included in the book. The rest is images over images.

A few map-related works i discovered in the book:

At the heart of Enrique Chagoya's lithograph, Road Map lays an egocentric American point of reference that dwarves neighbours Mexico and Canada as well as the rest of the world. The map is populated with images of cultural and ethnic stereotypes as well as tankers, whales, fighter planes, religious figures, dynamite, submarines and oil wells. The two figures in the lower corners represent "Hope" and "Hopelessness".

Enrique Chagoya, Road Map, 2003

Ingo Günther has been using illuminated globe sculptures as mean to investigate and represent "global" issues, from access to drinking water to rain forest leftovers, from nuclear explosions to death from tobacco use, etc.

Ingo Günther, Worldprocessor, 1988-2005 (image)

In June 2005 Francis Alÿs walked through divided Jerusalem leaving behind him a trail of green paint from a leaking can. His route was the Green Line, drawn on a map after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, indicating land under the control of the new state of Israel. The Green Line has since been considerably altered, mostly by the Israeli invasion of 1967.

Btw, the best thing you can do if you're in London,is to run and see his retrospective at Tate Modern.

Francis Alÿs, The Green Line, 2007

Abigail Reynolds's Mount Fear series gives a physical, tangible visualization of police statistics relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain.

Abigail Reynolds, MOUNT FEAR East London Police Statistics for violent crimes 2002-3, 2003

Harriet Russell sent herself 130 letters. Each envelope was a challenge for the Royal Mail, the address was written in an eye chart, as a colour blind test, a crosswords, on a hand-drawn map, in dot-to-dot drawings, experimental fonts, anagrams and cartoons. Only 10 failed to complete their journey back to her. (more images.)

Mark Bennett draws blueprint architectural renderings of the homes of American sitcom and film characters. For cult tv series The Fugitive, he broadened his field of investigation and tracked Dr. Richard Kimble's relentless quest for the one-armed man all over the United States.

Mark Bennett, Home of Richard Kimble (The Fugitive), 1999

In 1988, Cheng installed a giant concrete roller on the beach in Santa Monica. The roller is engraved with inverse 3D plates that print a map of Los Angeles in the sand.

Carl Cheng, Santa Monica Art Tool, 1988 (image)

Related stories: Conflux 2008: notes from the panel Cartography of Protest and Social Changes, Situation Room, You Are Not Here, Exploded Views - Remapping Firenze, Real Time Rome.

Related books: Book Review - An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism.

Millions of people around the world are type 1 diabetics. Most of them are otherwise healthy, and enjoy a perfectly normal life if they are disciplined enough to keep their blood sugar level constantly under check.

James Gilpin, who recently graduated from Design Interactions in London, suffers from type 1 diabetes. He has used his own experience of the condition to explore but also discuss the consequences of using science to alter our bodies' abilities.

The designer's project, Gilpin Family Whisky, is inspired by the fact that large amounts of sugar are excreted on a daily basis by type-two diabetic patients, especially older people. Processing old people's urine to produce whisky of high economic value is not a scheme sponsored by the government to solve Britain's looming pension crisis, it is the starting point for a discussion with health care professionals about the everyday problems caused by diabetes.

James had lined up bottles of various whisky blends for visitors to taste during the Design Interactions show (which closed in late June i'm afraid). Although the liquid smelled nothing like urine, I wasn't as brave as other people and refuse to drink any of it.
I caught up with James last week to ask him a few questions about his project:

How did you approach the diabetic patients and ask them for their urine? How did they react to your request?

I began by working with people that I know personally so my grandmother was the first candidate to sign up for the trials. I went through lots of my process with her and worked out where people were likely to feel uncomfortable. This helped to avoid lots of awkward moments. (I should say that not all my collaborators were diabetic some just had dilapidated endochrine systems due to old age.) I then heard a story about a pharmaceutical factory based in a community of elderly people and they would send representatives door to door exchanging cushions and soft toys for tubs of urine. The factory would then take the urine and process it to remove all of the chemicals that they had originally been selling their customers on the shelves of pharmacies. I took this model and adapted it for my own purpose. The only problem was that people then mistook me for an innovation designer and the project would be misunderstood. I am of course not suggesting that this process should be in anyway commercial although the idea of old peoples homes with distilleries in the garden in a funny one.

Can you describe the process of turning urine into whisky? Did you do it yourself or did you just bring the 'ingredients' to a brewery?

So the urine is cleaned using the same techniques that we use for purifying our mains water stock. This process itself shares much of the distillery process. The thing that made life easier is that the sugar molecules are large and will form crystals which can then be removed and purified separately.

This sugar is added to the mash stock and used to accelerate the fermentation process. This is sort of a bit of a cheat as traditionally the sugars would be made form the starches in the mash. During the brewing process I make a clear alcohol sprit. This is again not the traditional method for making whisky but I adopted a commercial technique for cheap whisky and used whisky blends which I added to the sprite to give color, taste and viscosity.

Could people do it themselves with the kind of household equipment they already have home?

You can make the alcohol at home but purifying the sugars requires far more understanding of clean lab processes and chemistry so I definitely wouldn't recommend doing this at home. Distillery equipment can be bought legally but you will need a licence to actually produce alcohol.

Home distillation equipment

Can the diabetic safely drink the whisky?

This is one of the reasons I choose whisky as an output. No, diabetics definitely shouldn't drink whisky and it's not a product intended to be consumed by diabetics only produced by them. That being said if you read the online diabetic forums you will find it is often the drink of choice as whisky will give you an artificial low in sugar levels shortly after drinking it. This is not because its is forming some biochemical miracle, it is simply that the high alcohol quantities mean that the sugar cannot be processed at the same time.

Are you planning to show Gilpin Family Whisky in other contexts than the RCA show?

The piece was designed as a public engagement piece that would exist outside the gallery context and act as an educational tool. That said the next two venues of the Whisky shop are in a gallery context. I am showing at 100% materials in September and at the AND festival (Abandon Normal Devices) in Manchester in October. This is a festival organised by FACT and curated by Professor Andy Miah.

What do you hope that your project can teach to someone who has no experience of diabete?

I show a film trilogy at the same time as serving whisky and these each of these outline one aspect of living with diabetes. I had originally hoped to show people that although Diabetes is a medical condition it could be possible to consider this break from our genetic norms as a state of enhancement and not just an illness in need of constant attention.

Thanks James!

All images courtesy of James Gilpin.

Last part of my report from that 10 hour long marathon that was Postopolis Day 5 (see previous posts: Postopolis DF - notes from day 5 (first part) and Postopolis DF - 2 activists from Mexico.)

That afternoon we were all very curious to hear what Capitán Remigio Cruz, the curator and guide of the Museo de Enervantes, had to tell us. His presentation wasn't exactly the one we expected but we did get quite a show. First we got scolded for calling it the Museum of Drugs, its official name is Museo de Enervantes.

Preppy, dynamic Capitán Remigio Cruz came to Postopolis with an agenda. He wasn't there to show us images of the museum nor did he spend much time commenting on his work as a curator. He was there to educate us about how bad drugs are. Any kind of drug, even marijuana which, the Captain explained, inevitably leads to the use of hard drugs. His statement raised a few eyebrows in the audience. Especially as more voices in the country are calling for the legalization of cannabis.

Nothing these voices could ever argue can dampen the Captain's enthusiasm for the mission of military authorities. He told us that the army is working extremely hard at fighting drug barons and that their efforts have paid off. According to the World Drug Report of the United Nations, Mexico is no longer the number 1 producer of marijuana. The U.S. have beaten up to the top spot.

I was a bit frustrated not to hear more about the museum. I could not even go and make my own opinion of it since the museum is not open to the public. Schools are welcome, otherwise you have to be a military officials, counternarcotic cadet or visiting diplomat to be allowed entrance.

I've gathered below a few facts, links and images about the Museo de Enervantes.

Open in 1985 and located on the seventh floor of the Mexican Defense Ministry building, the private museum documents the country's drug culture and the government's battle against the drug cartels. It appear that the main raison d'être of the museum is to teach military personnel about the tricks and strategies deployed by drug barons to hide, smuggle and sell their merchandise.

Many of the pieces on show demonstrate traffickers' almost unlimited inventiveness:

Drugs hidden in a framed print of the Virgin of Guadalupe

A section of the museum highlights the connection between religions and drug trafficking. A bust of Jesus Malverde is enshrined in one exhibit. According to the legend, the bandit was killed by authorities in 1909. He is revered in the country as a patron saint of traffickers and a Robin Hood for the poor.

Model of a shrine to 'narco-saint' Jesus Malverde

The "narco-culture" room is packed with over-the-top bejeweled cellphones, gold and silver-plated pistols (one of them is even engraved with "Better to die on your feet than live on your knees"), jackets with hideaway armor plating, etc.

Confiscated gold- and silver-plated gun

After Capitán Remigio Cruz's presentation several people in the audience questioned President Felipe Calderón's brutal strategy to fight drug mafias. I didn't know the exact facts they were referring to until i read Daniel Hernandez's report which pointed to children caught in the line of fire and human rights violations.

More images: terra, almamagazine, Washington post, newsweek. Reuters has a video report.

And now for something completely different...

Cassim Shepard from Urban Omnibus had invited architect and designer Eduardo Terrazas to tell us about his awe-inspiring career. The name Terrazas might not sound familiar to many readers but i'm sure that anyone can remember or recognize the identity program he designed for the Olympics Games in Mexico in 1968. He was very young at the time but nevertheless came up with a unique and quite revolutionary design that involved every single element that would represent Mexico to the whole world during the Olympics: from a logotype for the Games to the urban-scale communication and wayfinding system. The design was very modern but it also recalled patterns used by the Huichol Indians.

Eduardo Terrazas, Pedro Ramirez Vasquez and Lance Wyman, Mexico '68 Identity (via open studio)

Photo Eduardo Terrazas

The architect and designer reminded us that Mexico '68 is not just a synonym of the Olympics but also of the Tlatelolco massacre, a government massacre of student and civilian protesters and bystanders which took place ten days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Gabriella Gómez-Mont had invited Antonio Vega Macotela to tell us about the hundreds of hours he has spent inside the Santa Martha Acatitla prison striking deals with inmates.

Cooking grill made by an inmate

The artist is interested in the concept of time and the way it has been appropriated by institutions and rules outside of us. Work-time is converted into salary, and leisure-time into consumption. Bills and coins have come to represent time better than hands on a clock. For Marcotela the prison is the perfect embodiment of this idea of hijacked time.

In his project Time Divisa [Time Currency] , the artist explored the possibility of substituting money for mutual favors.The deal he offered prisoners was the following: I would use a certain amount of my time to do things in their representation at a specific day and hour. At the same time they would do whatever I asked them to do as an artist.

Macotela made a total of 365 exchanges with inmates. One asked him to stay with his wife and witness the first steps of his child; another told him to go to his brother's party and get drunk for him; he also to say a few words on the tomb of a brother; ask a father for forgiveness, etc. He registered everything on video for the inmates.

In exchange, Macotela asked them to measure time using their body. The artist gave many examples. One had to hold his hand to his neck for 3 hours and register each heartbeat on a paper for the artists. Another had to map every step he made in the prison voer a period of 3 hours. Sometimes the artist would ask them to teach his their particular "skills" in exchange for his time (how to kill someone with a shoelace for example.)

More photos and details about the project in both toxico and viceland.

Since this was my last story about Postopolis, i'd like to thank the organizers and sponsors for enabling us to participate in this wonderful experience: Storefront for Art and Architecture, Museo Experimental El Eco, Tomo and Domus Magazine of course but also our sponsors Mexicana, the British Embassy, Urbi VidaResidencial, UNAM, Difusión Cultural UNAM, el Museo Experimental El Eco, Cityexpress and XXLager. And a huge muchas gracias to Daniel Perlin for his bananAs energy, patience and enthusiasm.

More notes from Day 5 of our Postopolis adventures in Mexico DF.

One of the speakers i invited to participate to our blogathon is hackarchitect Ehécatl Cabrera. I'll never thank Geraldine Juarez enough for introducing me to his work.

Ehécatl Cabrera Franco is an architect, he's also the founder of the collective of the digital media and urban activism group MANGUM and an independent researcher of various urban phenomena. Whether he is busy doing graphic/architectural/industrial design, developing interventions in public space, organizing happenings or shooting videos, Cabrera is interested in making fissures into architecture. The hackarchitect believes that since architecture isn't able to answer the many issues that a city has to face nowadays, we should raise and 'make the city ourselves'.

In 2007, Carbera created MANGUM, an independent agency of digital media and urban activism. While MANGUM pays homage to MAGNUM it also differentiates himself radically from the photographic cooperative by encouraging a more bottom-up approach in which the very people who were so far only the subject of photos must now be recognized as critical actors.

MANGUM questions traditional models of cultural management, its objective is to generate answers to existing but inadequate institutions. MANGUM doesn't just portray the "otherness", it interacts with it.

MANGUM seeks to build an urban culture characterized by action and critique, to find opportunities in underused or intermediary spaces, to inhabit public space. The members of MANGUM believe that interacting with the city is an important form of daily communication that shouldn't be left in the sole hands of artists, activists and architects. They believe that a city is produced day by day through critical encounters, relationships, actions and events.

One of MANGUM's projects is PÁPALO PAL TACO, a series of workshops about urban gardening that aim to disseminate alternative forms of participation, diversify the use of space and create environmental awareness among participants. Some of the activities were especially designed for children such as a workshop about 'vegetal activism', eco-cine, etc.

MANGUM built the miniLAB, a mobile station built with cheap materials that travels through the streets of Santa Ursula Coapa (in the area of Coyoacan, DF, Mexico) to promote the activities of PÁPALO PAL TACO and explain passersby that instead of just buying fruits and vegetables, they can also cultivate them and while doing so contribute to the construction of a more participative public space.

Basurero de Tlatel sobre Chimalhuacán, Estado de México. Photo by Dante Busquets

Tomo had invited Raúl Cárdenas to close our last day at Postopolis. Cárdenas is the founder of Torolab, a collective workshop/laboratory for territorial research and contextual studies, based in Tijuana. The artist was in Mexico city to present his ongoing project Instituto de la Basura (The Institute of Waste.)

The city of Mexico produces 12.500 tons of waste every day, only 12% of it is recycled. Raúl is proposing to set up a platform that would encourage a dialogue and exchange of ideas between citizens and experts on the issue of waste.

Sed. Tlatel, Municipio de Chimalhuacán, Estado de México. Photo by Dante Busquets

Called Instituto de la Basura (The Institute of Waste), the proposal is part of a wider project called Residual. Artistic Interventions in the City. Residual addresses the problem of garbage from different points of view and aims to raise awareness among residents about the shared responsibility associated with its generation and management. The projects attempt to interact with the local community, and are developed in collaboration with a multidisciplinary group of university experts.

Sed. Tlatel, Municipio de Chimalhuacán, Estado de México. Photo by Dante Busquets

The themes, questions and problems explored by Instituto de la Basura are restricted to the context of Mexico city. Waste is an international issue, the pollution generated by an inadequate handling of waste knows no boundaries. Therefore, Torolab suggests to create the Embassy of Waste. The Embassy is the traveling branch of the Institute, it would move from location to location, adapt its approach to local contexts and reflect on themes closely related to the issue of waste (which should not necessarily be regarded trash.)

Both the Institute and the nomadic Embassy actively attempt to develop an international and interdisciplinary network of experts who would share their knowledge and look for -technical, legal, urban, social, environmental, or economic- solutions to problems related to consumption, and to the generation and management of waste.

The Museo del Estanquillo is currently lending its terrace to the project. There, the Instituto de la Basura has not only started to archive the information provided by specialists, it is also organizing and recording talks, interviews and working sessions around the issue of waste.

Image by Tomo

The furniture that the Instituto is using for its office in the museum is made mostly of wooden crates used to pack and transport art works, tetrapacks and other recycled materials.

Raúl Cárdenas "Torolab", video animación of plastic bags

You can visit the Instituto de la Basura until September 5, 2010 at the museum. After that, the institute will move to San Francisco, California to follow the discussion in a different context.

Image on the homepage snatched from Dante Busquets's flickr pages.

The last time i blogged about Postopolis was two months ago. The idea of getting to grips with a report that had to chronicle a criminally long day was a bit intimidating. The fifth day of our blogathon in Mexico DF started at noon and ended at 10 pm. We were braced for the worst but the whole day was over in no time, thanks to some brilliant presentations and a friendly weather. No time to yawn nor complain. Since the schedule ran without a pause, we either came with picnics or ran down the street between two presentations to grab snacks and drinks.

Street market...

at the other side of the street....

of Museo El Eco where Postopolis was taking place

I'll kick off the report with Julio Cou Cámara who gave what turned out to be everybody's favourite presentation. Cámara is part of an emergency team that regularly dives into the liquid garbage of Mexico City.

Photo: AP

He is one of the two men who dive into the sewer system to clear blockages, repair pumps, take out debris and ensure that contaminated waters don't overflow and inundate city streets, subway tunnels, or people's homes.

Once he has entered the stinking sewage, Cámara can't see anything. The water is so black and thick with all sorts of garbage, excrement, even corpses of murdered people, dead animals, car parts that any light would be useless, its beam can't go through.

(Image by Tomo)

At the request of Nicola Twilley who had invited him to Postopolis, Cámara brought his equipment with him. The diver has to wear a suit thick enough to protect him from any sharp object (syringe, bits of glass, etc) that might cut through the garment, harm and infect him as well as a heavy-looking helmet embedded with a microphone and headphones to allow him to receive instruction from the surface.

Photo: AP

Photo: AP

Photo: AP

Photo: AP

Nicola at Edible Geography has a much better write-up of Julio Cou Cámara's presentation. And if you'd rather read the text in spanish, Tomo has translated it for you.

Postopolis brought also a fascinating talk by architect and researcher María Moreno Carranco about Santa Fe or City Santa Fe, one of Mexico City's major business districts. Built some 20 years ago on the site of a garbage dump, Santa Fe consists mainly of highrise buildings surrounding a large shopping mall. The district also includes a residential area built like fortresses, luxury condominium towers and college campuses, among other facilities.

(image)

Although some would say that Santa Fe is a resounding success, more critical voices raise their concerns over the streets devoid of passersby and other activities, the inadequate public transportation network, insufficient public spaces, street lightning and pedestrian areas, problems with water infrastructure not solved. Santa Fee seems to be a dysfunctional island, its glass and steel corporate towers of the new Santa Fe are surrounded by modest neighborhoods of cinder block apartments.

Image by Rodrigo Díaz

Ethel and Cesar from dpr-barcelona had invited Rodrigo Díaz, an architect originally from Chile and expert in urban planning, to tell us about his experience as a militant pedestrian in Mexico DF.

Image Rodrigo Díaz. The text says "Beware! Don't park your car. Passage for pedestrians. Thank you"

Díaz has never owned a car and he argued quite convincingly that living the pedestrian life in Mexico DF might be much easier than most drivers think. Especially with a network of buses and metro that keeps getting more efficient. Although Mexico is presented as a metropolis asphyxiated by traffic and car exhaust where some people spend up to 4 hours per day stuck in their car on their way to and from work, only 1 in 4 people actually owns a car. Yet Mexico was built for the motorized minority, the city lacks sidewalks and infrastructures for pedestrians. There isn't either any governmental measure inviting people to use their car only when it's wiser to do so. As the architect explained in one of his posts, a higher percentage of the population in countries such as Denmark or The Netherlands own a car but people would rather bike or walk to move over short distances. Or use public transports at peak traffic hours.

Previous Postopolis stories.