Antarctica was born as a negative, starting from its very name. Antarktikos merely means "opposite to the Arctic" in Greek, and today the continent is still opposing the 21st century frenzy possessing the rest of the world by featuring the only stripe of land nobody on Earth is claiming. If we are yin, Antarctica is yang. If we're full, Antarctica is empty.
For being just a mass of ever-transforming ice and condensation, the South Pole has always been rather interesting to explorers and artists, who always went there to map its landscapes, both geographical and emotional.
Though maps are symbolic representations, and say what they need to say by cutting things out, thus huge gaps and ambiguities that artists can slip and play with as only artists can. Lately Antarctica's negativeness has been picked up by sound artists. Back in 1949, British composer Ralph Vaughn Williams created Sinfonia Antarctica, a metaphorical portrait of the continent, and today eclectic Dj Spooky - that subliminal kid - has come up with a crazy sound-oriented multimedia project titled Terra Nova, The Antarctica Suite.
The Antarctica Suite is a 70-minute long performance, a sound map strictly featuring only Antarctica sounds, recorded by Dj Spooky himself on site. To back up the audio, the artist does also screen images from the places he visited. Although his piece has a much more technological approach to the continent's atmosphere than Vaughn Williams', the two works pair in terms of striking an important nerve: Antarctica's negativeness.
Sound is negative too, it's a dense void, an integration to our experience, an invisible depth shaking beings with their own strength. A soundscape traces the perfect depiction of a still life's most distinctively platonic potential. The crackling noises of ever-rearranging ice, the quiet whistle of blowing wind, the squeak of a penguin - all along with burning-white images of snowy landscapes - are probably not enough to make you experience Antarctica, but they're maybe closer to make you feel it.
Antarctic Soundscape
The Singing, Ringing Tree and Panopticons - Not Just for Terrorizing Prisoners Anymore
We found this video of a rather peculiar public landmark project emerging from the Lancashire midlands, not far from Manchester. Abandoned and depressed since the industrial revolution revolved to Asia, with all the mines and factories shuttering into oblivion, the region has had to start getting creative about how to reinvigorate the local economy.
One of their methods of getting creative is by building a series of unusual monuments, readymade landmarks to drive any kind of tourism up into the English hinterlands, dubbed "Panopticons" with a peculiar interpretation of the word. The "panopticon" we know is the one developed by Jeremy Bentham to provide total isolation and awareness of prisoners, later picked up by Foucault and others to describe the terrorizing surveillance that governments inflict on their citizens. Which is to say, the word coined by Bentham, leaves a bit of a bad taste in our mouths.
One of the most peculiar of these "Panopticon" landmarks is the unfortunately named "Singing, Ringing Tree." Built near a site known for its history of witchcraft, the tree is made of twisted pipes that pick up the wind and thus sing, emitting a truly spooky sound, one that could be easily, and cheaply, used by a horror film for the sound of lost souls. The fanfare and the rhetoric surrounding the project are a bit weird, but the structure itself is so strange and unintentionally beautiful that it doesn't matter. I say unintentionally (given its name and the city press release) because seems an odd way to reinvigorate a dying region by giving voice to its lost souls.
But it works. We think it's truly worth a road trip to Lancashire.
NYC Waterfalls
Summer in the City can be pretty damn hot, so a couple of waterfalls might just do. Although it looks a little like shaman material by someone from the rain forest or Niagara, it actually took a Dane to provide the Big Apple with this spectacular - and refreshing - kick to its already iconical Brooklyn Bridge. New York's last public art piece, commissioned by the Public Art Fund to artist Olafur Eliasson, consists in this one waterfall in the picture and three more, falling from free-standing scaffolding towers on the East river. The artist is known for its past success at London's Tate Modern, the Weather Project, worth the museum 2 million visits, and has had the kind of meteori rise softened by green credentials that makes him almost smug seeming to other artists.
Being as tall as the Statue of Liberty, his new public installations will be temporary landmarks and, since the only thing more powerful than water in shifting our perception of a place is moving water, they're granted to shape the nearby area and its relationship with the passers-by. Rivers are the coolest thing ever, and there's no doubt vertical ones have a special appeal of their own.
Abandonments
Dotted across the globe sit, ramshackle, dusty, sometimes dangerous, sometimes beautiful, often unloved abandoned buildings. Wrecked and rotting, our forgotten buildings take on narratives heavier than if they were occupied. Sometimes these are cottages in the countryside, abandoned when the farmhands got pushed out by tractors or ghost towns of all sorts where broken dolls and empty beer cans mix with the dust and broken glass, to bigger buildings iron smelters and insane asylums, fortresses and coal mines, these buildings, sometimes built at great expense and sometimes simply beautiful as buildings have served their use, but exist in a part of the world where movement for whatever reason is slower, sometimes abandoned buildings sit in limbo because their caught in protracted court battles (see Dickens' Bleak House) or because it's more expensive to tear them down than to let 'em rot until the land is useful again. Anyway you cut it, the landscape is populated by ghosts of humananity's past endeavors, since failed.
In Europe you leave a nice building without people and chances are people will find it, and the stories if any will change dramatically with graffiti and punk bands, teenage squatters and middle aged shooting galleries. The buildings in the countryside in many ways take on the most ghostly presence, as the chances of their rehabitation, even by squatters, are minimal
The Opacity blog documents dozens of building in Europe and North America in states of beautiful decay, collapsing in on themselves, former mental hospitals and prisons, these grand edifices made of brick and steel for a permanence of the ages along with the giant industrial factories are the most breathtaking. One feels like a civilization, not so far away or different from our own, has collapsed. Creeping through these crumbling structures makes one feel as if some lesson about human frailty is to be learned, though often the approach is not unlike Romantic poets about empty abbeys in the 19th century. Sometimes this poetic becomes research, like the case with Industrial Archeology, but we at CIA feel there's nothing wrong with being a little poetical.
Though Opacity has many beautiful photos, the blog also links here to dozens other sites devoted to abandoned buildings.
Isola under the rain: a watered garden
We paid a lot of attention to the Salone last week, especially to the five quarters drawing the most public attention. Zona Tortona, Via Ventura, Rho Fiera (of course), Bovisa and Milan's little own special village, Isola.
As for the last one, we sent Serena Porrati (we already starred her as a photographer on our free press) and Corrado Tagliabue to shoot one of our videos, soon to be displayed on the Urban Screen in Piazza Duomo. Here's how Serena describes the quarter:
"There is a multitude of handicraft activities, small and 'trendy' independent eco-design stores mixed up with old commercial family-run businesses putting up a resistance. Slick yet cheap restaurants stand next door to Moroccan take-aways and a tabacchi bar run by South Americans. There are also a designer florist's shop and a book store gallery run by a young curator keeping an eye on new trends and sensibilities in international photography."
Check-in Architecture is interested in urban spaces turning green through community collaboration and critical gardening, so we sent Serena and Corrado to investigate and interview some of the people most aware of eco-interventions in Isola, Milan's central emerging counterculture district. Claudia Zanfi introduced them to the Green Island project she's curating and showed them creative interpretations of the local green. Stefano Massimello, one of the Stecca degli Artigiani guys, explained to them their urbanist projects, construction shenanigans and the pain-in-the-ass problems of neighborhood bureaucracy.
