Urban Adventure in Rotterdam

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Barcelona - first impressions

On Friday afternoon the trip form Barcelona Airport to the Ibis hotel takes 1,5 hours by bus, metro and foot. The tourist spends a lot of time orienting himself and figuring out the directions. But it is an interesting self-experiment in (psycho-) geography and topography.

One of the abilities a psychogeographer needs is reading the city. And driving from the airport to the hotel is a good exercise in studying the growth rings of the city. Below I record my first impressions and rough conclusions. Then I try to verify them using Wikipedia and the guidebook.

Emptiness next to the airport. The airport was built far away from the city and a highway was constructed. Now the highway and cheap land are attracting investors.

An area in stasis, waiting for future development. Nothing happens here because the paper plans have to be finished first. And the crisis has struck and all planning has stopped. This area will stay semi-wild for a long time to come.

Surprising how the airport areas all look the same. The country around Prague airport looks almost the same!

I was not totally right: The airport is surrounded by nature reserves!

Somewhat closer to the city big supermarkets combine with small industry and road infrastructure. This area cannot be used for anything else, like housing or office space. The small industry was here first but now it is being pushed out except in these useless enclaves.

Surprising how these areas all look the same. This could be Northern Italy as well! The country around Milano looks exactly the same.

Metro lines are stretching their tentacles towards the airport. Housing and offices follows in their tracks.

Before the metro arrived cheap mass housing was built here in the 1970's. There were no shops and only bus connections. But people came anyway because of the housing shortage.

Surprising how these areas all look the same. This could be Berlin as well!

I was right: The 1960s and 1970s saw a second population boom, caused by immigration from poorer regions of Spain: however this was not matched by construction of the necessary amenities and it was only in the 1990s that public investment resulted in additional schools, leisure facilities and housing.

An empty factory. Probably built in the 1900's when this was the outer edge of the city. Now it has been closed down but the area will be gentrified and the buildings will be re-used.

It is near the metro station Magoria la Campana. I could not find any other information.

Other factories in this area have been demolished. Modern housing and sports fields have taken their place. Bicycle lanes are a modern innovation.

Large housing projects from the 1950's. Now a stable, lower middle class area.
The scooter or motorbike is ever present. Helmets are worn but otherwise no protection, just sneakers, shorts and T-shirts. They pass the cars with just centimetres to spare.

My speculation - Plaza d'Espana. In nationalistic times - 1900 - this was the outskirt of the city. That's why the soccer arena was built here. And that's why the fairground and exhibition area was built here. These institutions are always built on the outskirts of the city.

I was mostly wrong: The square was built in 1929 for the international exhibition. And it's a bullring, not a football stadium.

My speculation - The 1900 areas of the city. A lot of Art Nouveau. Rich buildings with highly ornamental facades. The new upper middle class of a booming capitalist society. Important to remember that this style was very modern in those times. These were innovative areas of the city.

I was right: The late 19th century urban planner Ildefons Cerdà included this street as an essential part of his draft of the new "Projecte de reforma i eixample de Barcelona".

The metro teleports us to a totally different part of the city. You never know how it will look up there. The metro looks modern. It does not feel panicked by terrorism.

My speculation - On the map this looked spectacular, like a big round city park. But in reality it is construction site. The park on the left looks closed and dead. The roads and tramways on the right are so big that it's impossible to orient yourself. Everything is so new that nothing seems to work yet.

I was right: Plaça de les Glòries Catalanes is a large square in Barcelona, first designed by Ildefons Cerdà to serve as the city centre in his original urban plan, but nowadays relegated to quite a secondary position. Resembling nothing of what it was intended to be, most of the current Glòries was built in the 1960s, with further additions in the 1990s. Large portions of the square are occupied by parking lots and its central area is surrounded by concrete walls, part of the not very aesthetic elevated highways.

Extreme gentrification in an old part of the city. How much this looks like Berlin! The modern tower is generally called "The Dildo" or "The condom".

According to the architect Jean Nouvel, the shape of the Torre Agbar was inspired by Montserrat, a mountain near Barcelona, by the shape of a geyser rising into the air, and by the male genitalia.

This was an industrial area from the 1900's to the 1990's. Still a few car workshops are left. But some industrial property has been cleared. New and spectacular buildings are put inside the empty spaces. Hotels, offices, university buildings. Some small shops, bars and restaurants are still surviving.

I was right: During the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, Poblenou was the epicenter of Catalan and Iberian industry, earning it its sobriquet of the Catalonian Manchester. Surrounding the extensive cluster of factories stood mostly working class residential areas. After a period of decay, the neighbourhood has undergone a dramatic transformation.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Yet another countertourism tactic - 2

I had ordered the countertourism book but it had not arrived yet. But I had seen all the countertourism videos and I was very much motivated to apply the tactics to my own heritage visits. Unexpectedly one of our walks through the Green heart of Holland ended at the Muiderslot, one of the most touristic castles in the Netherlands. An ideal site to try to replicate some countertourism tactics. Below are the results.

1 - Do not approach the heritage site by the main entrance. Take a long detour. Take the most inaccessible route. Pretend you are an army coming to conquer the heritage site. Plan your siege.

2 - Don't be satisfied with the heritage materials that are presented to you. Try to do your own archaeology. See if you can find some ancient remains. Dig your own trench. Collect some remains, however insignificant. Do your own research. (I still have the archeological find somewhere, old brickwork and ceramics.)

... sculpture from before the iconoclasm, the period when mobs destroyed many images in the city's Catholic churches. Never before has there been a display of so many sculptures that escaped the waves of destruction unleashed between 1566 and 1580. [Catharijneconvent brochure - found "in situ"]

3 - Study the modern artifacts with the same attention you give to the ancient artifacts. In 10 years these will look different and you will have forgotten how they looked. Do you still remember the bakelite telephones? And later the curly extension cords? Aren't you sorry you have forgotten how they looked?

What happens when you put two objects from the museum next to each other. What kind of a story do they tell together? What do they say about the world of then and now, about image forming and contacts between different cultures? [Tropenmuseum brochure]

4 - Study the different signs with regulations. Try to find the oldest ones. Compare. Notice how modern times are more restrictive. Is it because we have become less tolerant of bad behaviour? Or were we better behaved in earlier times? (Many years ago a tiny "non-smoking" sign was sufficient.)

In order to establish the new Soviet state in the largely illiterate country of Russia, it was important to convince people that it was better to join this new order. ... The communist party established a separate department to win the hearts and minds for their ideology, the department for agitation and propaganda. [VanAbbeMuseum brochure]

5 - Try to find alien (UFO) artifacts. (I still don't know what this was. I suspect it was a kind of computer game. But it didn't work, I think.)

6 - Use leaks in the heritage site to wash the mud from your walking shoes. (My wife did this spontaneously. I had not told her about countertourism yet.)

7 - Try to correlate the old heritage signs with modern infrastructure. (In this case: privy = toilet.)

Don't imagine that the building is just an accumulation of bare corridors. Far from it. There are landscapes to be found in the building, inns, waiting rooms, barracks, studies - and yes, cities and mountains. / An optical illusion. / Actually you really are in a building with bare corridors. But you don't notice it, and that's what makes it so beautiful. [Armando quote in Museum Oud Amelisweerd brochure]

8 - View and analyse the non-heritage objects with the same attention you give to the heritage objects. Imagine you're looking at conceptual art. Is it any good? (Actually this is quite an interesting object.)

Otherworldly highlights the revival of interest among artists for miniature structures and the production of artificial environments such as small-scale, handmade alternate realities in the form of dioramas, models and specific on--site installations. [MUba brochure]

9 - Try to be an anthropologist. Study the population of the gift-shop as if it were an Amazonian tribe. What do the adults look at? The children? The foreigners? The locals? What do they really buy?
10 - Study the objects in the gift-shop as if they were object in the museum. What do they say about current culture? About our relationship with history? (Especially: what's depicted on the fridge magnets?)

I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own. - Barboncito, Navajo chief, May 1868 [Nieuwe Kerk brochure]

11 - Collect brochures for other heritage sites museums and art events. Read the texts. Try to correlate them with the current heritage site. See if it gives new insights. (Examples below and interspersed with the text above.)

Does a person's location determine their identity? Imagined Places is not about the significance of physical place, it is about our sense of connection to places elsewhere. [Tropenmuseum brochure]

Monday, June 24, 2013

The Kittlerian horror of Fritz Leiber

Recently I noticed how perfectly the bleak theories of Friedrich Kittler resonate with the bleak phantasies of Fritz Leiber. Below I quote a description of (one of) Kittler's theories. Now in your mind replace "language" by "technology". And then read the two excerpts of Fritz Leiber:

Kittler’s analysis presupposes that we are not masters of our language. Language was there before us, we grew up surrounded by it, we grew into it, it colonized us – whatever “us” was before it was framed, carved up, and identified by language. ... We do not speak language as much as language speaks us. To phrase it in the shortest way possible, language subjects us. [1]

In the first excerpt, oil / petroleum is not the servant of mankind but its master. And it permeates our whole society and is ever present and all knowing. And it is communicating with (some of) us:

Daloway's theory, based on his wide readings in world history, geology, and the occult, was that crude oil — petroleum — was more than figuratively the life-blood of industry and the modern world and modern lightning-war, that it truly had a dim life and will of its own, an inorganic consciousness or sub-consciousness, that we were all its puppets or creatures, and that its chemical mind had guided and even enforced the development of modern technological civilization.

Created from the lush vegetation and animal fats of the Carboniferous and adjoining periods, holding in itself the black essence of all life that had ever been, constituting in fact a great deep-digged black graveyard of the ultimate eldritch past with blackest ghosts, oil had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams, sluggishly pulsing beneath Earth's stony skin, quivering in lightless pools roofed with marsh gas and in top-filled rocky tanks and coursing through myriad channels and through spongy rocky bone, until a being evolved on the surface with whom it could realize and expend itself. When man had appeared and had attained the requisite sensitivity, and technical sophistication, then oil-like some black collective unconscious — had begun sending him its telepathic messages. [2a]

And in the second excerpt, electricity has a mind of its own. And this "medium", this technology is also ever present and all knowing. It might seen friendlier than oil, but in the end it will prove just as lethal:

“Yep, I hear voices in the electricity,” Mr. Leverett said dreamily. “Electricity tells me how it roams the forty-eight states — even the forty-ninth by way of Canadian power lines. It's sort of pioneer-like: the power wires are its trails, the hydro-stations are its water holes. Electricity goes everywhere today — into our homes, every room of them, into our offices, into government buildings and military posts. And what it doesn't learn that way it overhears by the trace of it that trickles through our phone lines and over our air waves. Phone electricity's the little sister of power electricity, you might say, and little pitchers have big ears. Yep, electricity knows everything about us, our every last secret. Only it wouldn't think of telling most people what it knows, because they believe electricity is a cold mechanical force. It isn't—it's warm and pulsing and sensitive and friendly underneath, like any other live thing." ...

Mr. Leverett, silently rocking, said, "Electricity tells me about all the work it does and all the fun it has—dances, singing, big crackling band concerts, trips to the stars, foot races that make rockets seem like snails." ... "Electricity doesn'tmind working for us. It's generous-hearted and it loves its job. But it would be grateful for a little more consideration—a little more recognition of its special problems." [2b]

I'm also very much reminded of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon and William Vollmann. Now the question is: If writers from 30-40 years ago feel so extremely modern ... then who are the writers that correctly predict our current future? How can we find them?

Sources:
[1] Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, Kittler and the Media (TM - Theory and Media)
[2] The Black Gondolier and Other Stories, Fritz Leiber: [a] The Black Gondolier, [b] The Man who made friends with Electricity
[3] Cascade, Joep van Lieshout, http://www.dezeen.com/2010/03/05/cascade-by-atelier-van-lieshout/
[4] Electricity pylons in the "green heart" of Holland

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Yet another countertourism tactic

Yet another tactic for countertourism at heritage sites:

Collect as many brochures of other musea and exhibitions as you can.
Put them away, do not read them now.
Take pictures of anything that strikes you as significant and interesting in this museum or exhibition.
At home smash the brochures and the pictures together vigorously.
See if the collision produces any meaningful fragments.
Create your own imaginary museum exhibition.

Variation:

Read the texts from the brochures out loud in front of the exhibits. Thereby baffling your companions and other visitors.

Another example:

Here, when I didn't know the name of what I was doing. Only later did I discover countertourism and its tactics.

Raising children is an art. In all ages all people have tried to prepare and equip their children for their future lives. In the media the theme of childraising is often presented as a problem. But raising children is fortunately often connected with love, humor and tradition.

Slow Burn will centre around two themes that can be considered characteristic of both developments in contemporary art and the redevelopment of space: time and entropy. The combination of these two themes can provide insight into the possibilities or impossibilities encapsulated in an area like the zone.

A wide-ranging selection of icons will be displayed in a fascinating exhibition illustrating the iconographic differences and similarities between the art of Orthodox and Western Christianity. Life-sized examples of 500 years of Russian painting will be on show besides highlights of Western art.

Thirteen artworks have been created in 's-Hertogenbosch in 1632. The artist visited his nephew, the reverend Johannes Junius. In this short time he made several sketches of cityscapes and church interiors.

The title of the exhibition, The Moonlight Garden, refers to the moonlight garden of the Taj Mahal in India. In recent years the garden has been a major theme in the work of the artist.

Sources:
Countertourism - http://www.countertourism.net/books.html
Museum - Het Markiezen Hof - Bergen op Zoom
Brochure - www.slowburn.nl
Brochure - Museum Catharijneconvent Utrecht, Goddelijke inspiratie
Brochure - Dordrechts Museum, De kunst van het opvoeden, 28 April - 15 September
Brochure - Noordbrabants Museum, programme May - September 2013

Monday, May 20, 2013

The brokenness of sheds

Elements of the Dutch landscape - 9

We have met many sheds while walking the Dutch landscape, too many to include them all. Each one was a unique individual with its own personality. The sheds were more human than the farmhouses, more human than the livestock.

Often they were in advanced stages of disrepair and I was moved by their brokenness. But they didn't need my sympathy, they had a tough, proud character and were still useful (and used) in their state of dilapidated beauty.

Our walks often led through the Dutch "bible belt". Radically Calvinist terrain, empty streets, silent Sundays and people staring behind curtains. This set me on a meditative path about life, brokenness and the human condition.

In the Christian tradition, and especially in the Calvinist tradition, creation was broken from the start. When Adam and Eve chose to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil they deviated from Gods plan and were banished from paradise. Today we still live in the ruins of original sin.

In the scientific tradition things are more simple. Everything is explained by the second law of thermodynamics and ever increasing entropy. The human condition. A given.

But when I think about brokenness I prefer the Kaballistic metaphor about "broken vessels that could not hold God's light". There still is hope for redemption. Obviously this is also the core of the Christian tradition, but we are often blind for well known teachings. Fresh metaphors clear the eyes.

Next time you see an old shed look at it with awe and respect. You are looking in a mirror. This is your life, your world. What is your answer?

Dordrecht
According to Jewish mystics the infinite God had to withdraw a little bit, create a little space, sort of like a womb in the heart of God’s being where the finite, physical universe could exist. This withdrawal of God is called tzimtzum. [1]

Schoonhoven
And, according to the myth, in this womb-like space there were a set of vessels designed to receive the divine light. God sent out a single beam of divine light that was supposed to be contained by these vessels. But things didn’t go according to plan. The divine light was too powerful and so the vessels shattered. Everything is broken. This shattering is called shevira. [1]

Zundert
Brokenness is not a condition we usually desire, want, or even admit to. We typically associate brokenness with weakness, being incomplete, or something out of order. We don't strive to be broken. We don't pursue brokenness like we would wealth or fame or love. Yet, we are all broken. We are all weak, imperfect and in need, regardless of economic position or social status. Brokenness is the common denominator in all of humanity. We all come up short of perfection or wholeness. But no one seems to admit their brokenness. This is truly sad because there is beauty in brokenness. [2]

Lopik
According to the Kaballistic myth, most of the light returned to God – but not all of it. Some of the divine light became trapped in the material world. And so the job of humanity is tikkun – the healing and restoration of creation. According to the myth, we heal this broken world by finding those divine sparks, bringing out the good that exists in everything and everyone. [1]

Hazerswoude
I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.

Hardinxveld
On the first day you are to take branches from luxuriant trees—from palms, willows and other leafy trees—and rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days.

NederHardinxveld
Then the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, "Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?" Thus says the Lord of hosts: "Consider your ways. Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the Lord."

Hardinxveld
Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before.

Hazerswoude
Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet?

Hazerswoude
His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

NederHardinxveld
Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble, the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets.

Hazerswoude
Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!

NederHardinxveld
I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.

Sources:
[1] Quote about the "breaking of the vessels":
http://tommurphe.blogspot.nl/2008/11/saints-brokenness-and-second-chances.html
[2] Quote about beauty in brokenness:
http://transitiontocommunity.com/Potters_House/broken.htm
Bible search:
http://www.biblegateway.com/keyword/