Decolonizing Architecture is a research project initiated by the collaborative team of Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman. Set up as a studio working in Ramallah and Bethlehem, they explore how Israeli settlements and military bases in the Occupied Territories can be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by Palestinians at the time they are discharged. Decolonizing Architecture uses architecture to articulate the spatial complexities of decolonization, assuming that a viable approach to the issue of appropriation can be found not only through the professional language of architecture but also by inaugurating an “arena of speculation” that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives. Working within a spatial reality that Weizman calls “the politics of verticality,” the studio works on a broad spectrum of critically-engaged research projects with a range of experts, activists and organizations. For REDCAT, Decolonizing Architecture will develop an exhibition–their first presentation in the U.S.—that builds on their work over the last few years, alongside new projects. A program of lectures and presentations will be organized on the closing week of the exhibition. Check website for updates.

Decolonizing Architecture was founded by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman in 2007. PETTI 
is a research architect based in Bethlehem and is co-director of CAMP (Centre for Architecture Media and Politics) at the Bard/Al-Quds University in Abu Dis-Jerusalem. He curated Border Devices (2002-07), Uncertain States of Europe with the Milan-based studio multiplicity (2001-03) and Stateless Nation with Sandi Hilal (2002-07). HILAL 
works with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees. She is visiting professor at the International Academy of Art Palestine and holds research doctorate in Trans-Border Policies for Daily Life at the University of Trieste. WEIZMAN is based in London where he is the director of Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and human right groups in Israel/Palestine. His books include Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, the series Territories 1, 2 and 3, and Yellow Rhythms. Decolonizing Architecture was originally conceptualized and its pilot stage produced in dialogue with Eloisa Haudenschild and Steve Fagin, partners in thehaudenschildGarage, Spare Parts projects.

Due to overwhelming need, a new House opened in July 2009, with 47 bedrooms (compared with the previous 12) and a Family Care Center to help make life easier for families dealing with a sick child. The new Family Care Center at Ronald McDonald House is like none other in the world. It serves as a day resource for any family with a child in the hospital, providing necessities to make their lives easier as they go through the most difficult times of their lives. The new Family Care Center has the following services 365 days a year:

* Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Snacks
* Laundry Facilities
* Web MD Computer Resource Lab
* Three TV/Quiet Rooms
* Children’s Play Room
* Showers
* Teen Center
* School Room
* Chapel
* Exercise Room
* Day Resting Room
* 22,000 square feet of outdoor play space and separate healing gardens
* Living Room
* Beauty Salon

Our Purpose
Here at Ronald McDonald House, we are a home-away-from-home and more for families with seriously ill children in treatment at area hospitals. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, we provide lodging to family members of sick children who otherwise might sleep in hospital waiting rooms, in their car or drive long distances home and back. We also provide a Family Care Center for use during the day for anyone with a child in the hospital.

Last year, Ronald McDonald House provided housing for 43 families per month, and offered a reprieve during the day for 1,200 families per month. With our new 47-bedroom House, we expect to serve 20,000 families per year by providing bedrooms and a Family Care Center to those who need us. It costs $140 per night to provide a bedroom to a family, which often includes siblings and the sick child.

Studies show that when family members stay close their ailing child, the child heals better and family members cope better. A bed near the hospital, a warm meal, a hot shower and access to laundry facilities can make all the difference to those who sit by their sick child’s bedside day in and day out. Because of our new larger Ronald McDonald House, we can provide so many more families the comfort and necessities needed to cope when their lives are turned upside down by their child’s illness.

Please click here to visit the Ronald McDonald House San Diego’s website.

Opening reception at REDCAT on Thursday, September 16, 6–9 pm

About the Artists

Zhang Peili (b. 1957, Hangzhou) graduated from the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou in 1984. He has been called the “Father of Chinese video art” and is a leading figure in the Chinese contemporary art scene ever since the mid-1980s. His influence on his peers and his role as educator of younger generations of artists cannot be emphasized enough. As the main founder of the first new media department in the Chinese art eductation system, his pedagogical engagement has been greatly fruitful. He has had solo exhibitions at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2009); OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2008); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999). Zhang has also been included in ‘85 New Wave, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2007); China Power Station, Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Alors la Chine?, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Zone of Urgency, Venice Biennale (2003); Global Conceptualism, Queens Museum of Art, New York (1999); Cities on the Move, CAPC musée d’Art contemporain de Bordeaux and Secession, Vienna (1997-9); Inside Out, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1998). Zhang lives and works in Hangzhou where he serves as founding dean and professor of the New Media Department at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou.

Zhu Jia (b. 1963, Beijing) graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 1988. He has presented work at Trans Local Motion, Shanghai Biennale (2008); Not Only Possible, But Also Necessary, Istanbul Biennale (2007); World Factory, San Francisco Art Institute (2007); Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography & Video from the Haudenschild Collection, National Art Museum of China (2005); The Second Guangzhou Triennial (2005); Alors la Chine?, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003); Zone of Urgency, Venice Biennale (2003); Time After Time, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2003); Tempo, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2002); Living in Time, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001); Translated Acts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin and Queens Museum of Art, New York (2001); Cities on the Move, CAPC musée d’Art contemporain de Bordeaux and Secession, Vienna (1997-9); Every Day, 11th Biennale of Sydney (1998). Zhu lives and works in Beijing.

*Image: Left: Zhang Peili, Uncertain Pleasure, Right: Zhu Jia, Forever

The haudenschildGarage is working in partnership with the Migdalia Rubio Foundation. Its mission is to offer scholarships to economically disadvantaged elementary and high school students in Tijuana, Mexico. The Migdalia Rubio Foundation is committed to supporting students by providing all necessities for their academic success. Their intent is also to encourage the students’ families to become active and involved participants in the basic education of their children. The students will be selected in the summer of 2010 based on an economic study of the neighborhoods of Tijuana. The selected students will provide progress reports to the foundation during the school year on their grades and attendance.

The scholarship will provide students with the following:

- One year of tuition
- Uniforms and shoes
- Books and school supplies
- Daily school lunches
- Special school event clothing
- Sports equipment and activities
- Artists’ workshops

If you are interested in donating to the Migdalia Rubio Foundation, please click here to visit their page on the International Community Foundation’s website.

The works screened included:

After All I Didn’t Force You 1998, 2′30″
“After All I Didn’t Force You” (1998), are implicitly a reaction to the forms of individualism in a developing modern mass society. Yang Fudong strings together takes with different characters so quickly one after the other that they “lose face.”

City Lights 2000, 6′
“City Lights” is a mixture of the detective film and slapstick. A young, well-dressed office clerk moves in unison along the street and around the office. Like pre-programmed robots they fit perfectly into their apparently ideally organized environment. The day is entirely dominated by work, but the evening provides space for dreams and creative thinking, allowing a schizophrenic situation to arise. In their heroic conduct the two gentlemen sometimes develop into two gangsters who engage in a form of shadowboxing.

Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising 2001,13′
Four men engage in acts simultaneously. They smoke, yawn, massage themselves and practice military exercises in a city and in a park. The seriousness with which they perform these acts contrasts with their pointlessness, which creates the effect of slapstick. Yang Fudong reveals that because of social changes, certain rituals have become totally meaningless.

Look Again 2004, 3′
Two young men wear the uniform of 70’s policemen – sometimes they look like runaway criminals. They want to escape reality which is impossible to cast off. They yearn for the bright sunshine life, expecting the time to be captured, to exchange for a calmness of the heart.

The Half Hitching Post 2005, 7′
A beautiful panoramic landscape sets the scene for the narrative of “The Half Hitching Post”. Here, we see only fragments of two stories taking place simultaneously: Two different couples are being witnesses in their attempt to ascend a mountain on a sloped and steep road. The viewer is left unaware of the couple’s ultimate goal as they compete on reaching their destination. Focusing on the journey up-wards the shifting perspective of the camera depicts the mutual hindrances engaged by the couples to sabotage their opponent’s success on reaching their ？nal destination. Juxtaposing the race towards the top with the tranquility of the surrounding landscape lends the video a poetic vibe all its own.

My Heart Was Touched Last Year 2007, 3′30″
A work made for Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion. It perhaps to disscuss about the vacant of time.

First Spring 2010, 9′30″
Featuring young men gathered in Shanghai, dressed in Prada menswear, the black and white film portrays realm where anything is possible.
Inspired by the Chinese adage that “the whole year’s work depends on a good start in spring”, this bold and beautiful film represents an exciting new direction for Prada’s visual communication at the start of this decade.

The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) is a non profit, comprehensive art center founded in Beijing by collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens in November 2007. Please click here for more information about UCCA.

About Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great ‘antiphilosophers’ (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou’s life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L’Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Unlike many of those schooled in the anti-humanist principles of Louis Pierre Althusser and Jacques Lacan , Alain Badiou has never been tempted to celebrate the apparent end of philosophy, to question the possibility of metaphysics, or to qualify the classical attributes of truth: rigor, clarity, and eternity.

As Alain Badiou explains in detail in his major work to date L’Etre et l’événement (1988), truths are militant processes which, beginning from a specific time and place within a situation, pursue the step-by-step transformation of that situation in line with new forms of broadly egalitarian principles. Only a pure commitment, one detached from any psychological, social, or ‘objective’ mediation, can qualify as the adequate vehicle for a truth, but reciprocally, only a properly universal truth qualifies as worthy of such a commitment. Only a truth can ‘induce’ the subject of a genuine commitment.

Badiou’s most general goal can be described, then, as the effort to expose and make sense of the potential for profound, transformative innovation in any situation. Every such innovation can only begin with some sort of exceptional (though invariably ephemeral) break with the status quo, an ‘event’. An event can occur at any time but not in just any place; an event will generally be located close to the edge of whatever qualifies as ‘void’ or indistinguishable in the situation, i.e. in that part of the situation where for literally fundamental reasons the prevailing forms of discernment and recognition cease to have any significant purchase. A truth then expands out of this ‘evental site’ (site événementiel) insofar as it elicits the militant conviction of certain individuals who develop the revolutionary implications of the event, and by doing so constitute themselves as the subjects of its truth. A subject is thus anyone carried by his or her fidelity to the consequences, as rigorous as they are haphazard, of an event, while a truth is nothing other than the cumulative collection of such post-evental consequences. The laborious, case-by-case application of these consequences will then serve to transform the entire way the situation organizes and represents itself, in keeping with the implications of the event.

An ordinary individual, or ’some-one,’ only becomes a genuine subject insofar as he or she is caught up in a materially transformative procedure of this kind. By the same token (for reasons sketched in Badiou’s most accessible short work, L’Ethique (1993), subjects only remain subjects insofar as their fidelity is in turn equipped to resist the various sorts of corruption it must inevitably face: fatigue, confusion, and dogmatism. For example, those mobilized by the civil rights, feminist, or anti-colonial movements remain true subjects insofar as these movements, initially sparked by certain events affecting particular groups of people in particular situations, call for the transformation of the situation as a whole in terms that can be directly and universally affirmed by its every inhabitant. But should such a movement seek simply the promotion of a particular group for its own sake, then its partisans act only as the proponents of an interest in competition with other interests. The identification of suffering victims is not by itself the sufficient basis, Alain Badiou insists, for a genuine political movement. Like all truths, politics must proceed in a sphere of rigorous universality, on the basis of statements that literally anyone could make or affirm.

This does not mean, however, that truth operates in the domain of consensus or communication. Every genuinely universal principle has its origin in an active and precisely situated taking of sides; every true affirmation of the universal interest begins as divisive. There is no philosopher more opposed to the ‘ethical’ coordination of opinions or differences than Badiou.

Alain Badiou distinguishes four general fields of truth, or four domains of subjectivation (which in turn operate as the four generic ‘conditions’ of philosophy itself): politics, science, art and love. These are the only four fields in which a pure subjective commitment is possible, i.e. one indifferent to procedures of interpretation, representation, or verification. Alain Badiou provides his most concise overview of the generic procedures in his Manifeste pour la philosophie (1989). True politics is a matter of collective mobilization guided by a ‘general will’ in something like Rousseau’s sense, and not the business of bureaucratic administration or the socialized negotiation of interests. Within the limits of the private sphere, genuine love begins in the wake of an unpredictable encounter that escapes the conventional representation of sexual roles, continues as a fidelity to the consequences of that encounter, and is sustained through an unrepresentable exposure to what Lacan famously described as the ‘impossibility of a sexual relationship’. True art and true science proceed in somewhat the same way, through a searching experimental fidelity to a line of inquiry opened up by a new discovery or break with tradition. Mathematics is then the most ‘truthful’ component of science simply because, thanks to its axiomatic foundation in the basic postulates of set theory, it is the most securely abstracted from any natural or objective mediation.

In the end, every truth is ‘founded’ only on the fundamental ‘inconsistency’ that Alain Badiou discerns as the exclusive and insubstantial stuff of pure being qua being — the generic being of all that is simply insofar as it is, but that is only exceptionally accessible, through the rare commitment of those who become subjects in the wake of its evental exposure.

*Biography as posted on the European Graduate School EGS

A Cloud of Hope is a feature length film, developed in conversation and funded in part by the haudenschildGarage, that wishes to address the hopes/dreams, actualization, and eventualities of the African Independence Movements of the 60s.

The project will take three countries as case studies. The first is Guinea, a French Colony, which was the only country in West Africa to declare independence. The other twelve voted for a common wealth relation to France. One of the main elements utilized by the newly independent Guinea at forming solidarity was through the initiation of major cultural initiatives. As in a country I have previously explored, Cuba, in my feature length film, Tropicola. I will examine the role of popular music in the construction in the evolving political scene in emergent independent Guinea.

The second of my examples will be Nigeria, a former British Colony that in the aftermath of independence went through a great ethnic divide ending up in Civil War and the secession of Biafra. This conflict will be explored through the Nigerian and then Biafran middleweight boxing champion, Dick Tiger. Through this case study I will try to examine the role of ethnic conflict in an emerging nation.

My third example will focus on the former Belgian colony, the Congo. Subject of the wonderful novel about colonization by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, and the journalistic coverage of the Lumumba moment in the Congo by Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinkski. This section will focus on the European imagination of Africa. - By Steve Fagin

About Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) a is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as Creative Consultant for the haudenschildGarage and Commissioning Editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as Commissioning Editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

Éduardo Abaroa (Mexico City), Yto Barrada (Tangiers), Ursula Biemann (Zurich), Bureau d’Études (Paris), Öyvind Fahlström, (Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm & New York), Goldin + Senneby (Stockholm), Mark Lombardi (New York), Steve McQueen (Amsterdam & London), Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro), George Osodi (Lagos & London), Bruno Serralongue (Paris), Mladen Stilinović (Zagreb), Yang Zhenzhong (Shanghai).

Curated by TJ Demos and Alex Farquharson (Director, Nottingham Contemporary). Click here to visit Nottingham Contemporary’s website for more information.

Globalisation is the name given to the new integrated world economy, where money, products and people all move between countries faster than ever before. It is an economic system so complicated that it is almost unaccountable. Who makes the things we buy? Where do they do it? And who takes the financial decisions that affect our jobs, housing and public services? The media often struggles to explain relationships that are so removed from the consumer. How can we ensure that no child labour is used in the goods we buy, for instance, when our branded products pass through a whole series of outsourced companies? And why is it that war and natural disaster now offer yet more opportunities for hyper capitalism?

The artists in Uneven Geographies all depart from the conventional methods of current affairs journalism. They do not pretend to be completely objective, and they aim to represent the fabric of lives affected by global flows, rather than capturing the instant, sensational image. Whether using film, installation or sculpture – or experimenting with maps, flow-charts and diagrams – all aim to make the networks of power, profit and exploitation very visible. In the process they are helping to devise a new language to confront globalisation. The images in the film Gravesend, made by the Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, reveal the disparity between mining the valuable mineral coltan in the impoverished and war torn Congo, where it is hand hewn out of bare rock, to its eventual processing by pristine machines in Derby, before it is used in all mobile phones and computers.

Some of these interventions into global networks are playful, such as Cildo Meireles’ 1970s Coke bottles and bank notes, doctored with anti-US slogans and put back into circulation – at a time of military dictatorship in Brazil, and of contentious US influence in Latin America in general. Öyvind Fahlström, another early pioneer of geopolitical art, was also born in Brazil. His Garden – A World Model is installed in a glowing green room where visitors can relax on cushions amongst the plants, deciphering the stories of injustice on their leaves.

The Mexican artist Éduardo Abaroa contributes beautifully ragged globes, perforated by thousands of pins, or draped with globally produced clothes. His other surprising art work is a tank of African clawed frogs that relates to the colonisation of language by invaders.

In the globalised world it is difficult to pinpoint power. Sprawling corporations evade effective control by democratically elected governments. Yet they may have close ties to political parties, particularly those that advocate “neo-liberalism” – deregulating financial markets, privatisation and the massive scaling down of public spending. Goldin+Senneby’s Headless is a quest for an anonymous corporation, headquartered in the Cayman Islands tax haven. Mark Lombardi’s intricate diagrams are the outcome of his painstaking research into hidden lines of power – unearthing historical ties, for instance, between Osama bin-Laden and George Bush Senior. Made after five or six research stages, his works are not so much trees of knowledge as dense root systems. If maps were originally made to take power, to control territory and subdue its occupants, Uneven Geographies features a counter-cartography – one that draws to the surface tangled and concealed power relationships. The Fool’s Cap map of the world, a disturbing image dating from around 1580, lent by the Ashmolean Museum, is an early forerunner of this creative cartography.

Ironically, global corporations often enjoy optimum conditions in authoritarian countries where markets may be free but human rights violations are rife. In Yang Zhenzhong’s video Spring Story workers at a hi-tech electronic factory recite a famous speech of Deng Xiaoping’s. Given in 1992, it announced the Chinese communist party would adopt the principles of the market economy.

Wherever it is situated globalisation has created gross inequality – staggering wealth alongside abject poverty – whether that is between countries, or inside them. The writer Saskia Sassen has shown how “global cities” have marshalled an army of low paid immigrant workers to service the luxury lifestyles of the international financial sector. Mladen Stilinović’s art work 3 starkly demonstrates how the combined wealth of the three richest people on the planet equals the combined income of 600 million of its poorest people.

Mirroring the movements of products and money, people move too. Ursula Biemann’s Sahara chronicle maps desert migration to North Africa across several screens. Yto Barrada’s poetic photographs portray Tangiers, where lives are routinely risked crossing the narrow straits of water that separate Europe from Africa, in a waking trance of waiting.

Lastly Uneven Geographies offers signs of hope, as well as resistance. Azzellini and Ressler document the rise of worker’s co-operatives in Venezuela, while Bruno Serralongue’s photographs follow the grass roots campaigns of farmers in southern Mexico. A second series of his photographs document the World Social Forum and its offshoots. Set up to oppose the World Economic Forum, the movement has now become a global affiliation. Its motto could equally apply to the Uneven Geographies exhibition: “Another world is possible.”

For more then seventeen years inSite has commissioned and facilitated place-based art practices at the US-Mexico border of San Diego-Tijuana. In 2006, inSite launched a new curatorial initiative designed to make this rich history more accessible, entitled the inSite Archive. Over a three-year period organizers systematically compiled and cataloged ephemera and documentation charting the development and realization of over one hundred art works in the public sphere. These works, which frequently developed out of extended artist residencies in the region, include monumental sculpture, site-specific installation, performance, actions, interventions and participatory engagements.

The early 1990s through to the 2000s is an especially compelling period in the evolution of place-based art practices. This is a period when the concept of site as a fixed location shifted as artists began to re-imagine place as a fluid, evolving entity produced by social, economic and cultural processes. Likewise, artists challenged the notion of the public as audience by engaging various constituencies as active co-producers of their work. A new model of place-based art practice emerged that, while context specific, is also dispersed across place and time. Often performative, this work frequently includes a temporary event, situation or unfolding process. While responsive to site, it also disrupts the idea of place as an immutable concept. A sense of location is re-conceptualized as a wandering position – always in the process of becoming and extending beyond temporal and geographical boundaries.

This uniquely time-based practice erases the traditional divide between the archive and the artwork. Since it is non-object based, archival material is the primary means through which the work continues to communicate beyond its original context. What was once durational gains symbolic status as it circulates as texts, photography, video, artifacts, and artist notes and sketches in the art economy.

Highlights of this work from the inSite Archive are organized here according to the following five groupings: circulating objects, public address, co-producing event experiences, performance interventions and recording trajectories. -Donna Conwell, curator

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tijuana Projection: Centro Cultural Tijuana, 2001

Yukinori Yanagi, Proposal for Wandering Position, 1994

Silvia Gruner, Untitled (La Mitad del Camino), 1994