The series invokes the term exhibitionism as a spatial site of departure, a methodological angle and a point of view from which a whole series of events can be seen differently, a kind of site from which a critical gaze [of multiculturalism] becomes possible. Playing on the fetish of exhibition making over the last 25 years each session in this series will proceed through a different terminological frame from object to thing, apparatus-exhibitionism, represent-present, document-evidence, act-agency, collect-collectivity, archive-testimony, ending in the eighth session with profane-play. The idea here is textual, tied to language, written, spoken and uttered that once circulated and absorbed into discourse, can itself begin to shift the way in which curating architecture is practised and ultimately understood.

In this way this lexical work is set up as a mirroring device to distill a series of turns implicit in the way in which we speak about curating architecture and curating within architecture. This is a political project and the question of where the agency lies within Exhibitionism will form the base line of this measures framed by readings by Giorgio Agamben, Ariella Azoullay, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciere, Alan Badiou, Walter Benjamin and paradigms by Tomas Saraceno, Eyal Weizman, Hito Steyerl, Jeremy Deller, Mirza Butler, Patricia Reed, Cyprien Gallard and Wolfgang Tilmans. The form and orchestration of each session will be considered as content and thus vary. The image will be considered as a spatial construct through a scripting of utterance and text.

DLDwomen will shed light on the “Female Decade” and its high-tech, high-touch approach. The conference identifies new opportunities, female markets, new lifestyles, and future developments in the role of women influenced by today’s digital age and social transformation. This year’s other topics will include cultural change, art & design, consumer behavior, (online) fashion, gender medicine, education, social entrepreneurship, future developments in tech and female markets. We are expecting 50 international high profile speakers and 400 opinion-forming, “by invitation only” participants – women and men – as well as more than 100 journalists from German and international media.

DLDwomen is an event of Hubert Burda Media (one of the key drivers in the European media world) and builds on the creative network and competence of the DLD conference, which brings together international leaders, disruptors, scientists, designers and artist. DLD also hosts global events in dynamic cities such as Palo Alto, Beijing, London, Tel Aviv, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and this year for the first time in Moscow!

Log 20, the tri-annual journal published by the Anyone Corporation, takes a special look at the expanding ideas of curating architecture at a moment when its traditions and trajectories can no longer go unexamined. The proliferation of museum architecture departments and architecture biennials since the 1980s and the broadened use of the term curating to encompass artistic, architectural, and academic practices have today influenced the very idea of cultural production: Everyone is a curator and everything is curated. What does this mean for the architecture curator and for architecture?

Published concurrently with the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, Log 20 assembles twenty-four of the leading and emerging curatorial voices to reconsider the definition of architectural work, to reexamine the problems of representation and display, and to project new directions for curating within architecture itself.

Edited by Cynthia Davidson with consulting editor and curator Tina Di Carlo, the issue includes articles by Barry Bergdoll, Sylvia Lavin, Henry Urbach, Mirko Zardini, Andrea Philips and Eyal Weizman among others, and about curatorial practices at OMA in Rotterdam and SANAA in Tokyo. Log 20 also considers the politics of the Serpentine pavilions, the idea of the exhibition as atmosphere, the influences of the Venice Architecture Biennale, and novel “displays” from Hong Kong to Moscow. In sum, the 168-page issue is arguably the first compendium of contemporary practices on curating architecture to propose future directions in this emerging discourse.

Contents
Barry Bergdoll, In the Wake of Rising Currents: The Activist Exhibition
Eve Blau, Curating Architecture with Architecture
Jean-Louis Cohen, Mirror of Dreams
Cynthia Davidson, Drawn In
Marco De Michelis, Architecture Meets in Venice
Tina Di Carlo, Exhibitionism
Manfredo di Robilant, Pippo Ciorra Takes A Job at MAXXI
Ole W. Fischer, In the Shadow of Monumentality
Kurt W. Forster, Show Me: Arguments for an Architecture of Display
Jeffrey Kipnis, Dear Paula
Sylvia Lavin, Showing Work
Paula Lee, Still Life, After Death
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Biennial Manifesto
Kayoko Ota, Curating as Architectural Practice
Andrea Phillips, Pavilion Politics
Alex Schweder, Exhibit Architecture
Felicity D. Scott, Operating Platforms
Robert A.M. Stern, From the Past: Strada Novissima
Léa-Catherine Szacka, A Conversation with Vittorio Gregotti
Henry Urbach, Exhibition as Atmosphere
Philip Ursprung, The Indispensable Catalogue
Eyal Weizman & Tina Di Carlo, Dying to Speak: Forensic Spatiality
Mirko Zardini, Exhibiting and Collecting Ideas: A Montreal Perspective

PLUS: New Canaan … Moscow … Hong Kong

Exhibitionism as a method and open project proposes a mode of praxis involved in the creation of the sensible. It proposes architecture and the architecture curator as a spatial practitioner within a broader spatial aesthetic discourse; that as architecture, the exhibition should not represent architecture within the space of the gallery but should presence or produce architecture within the space that is architectural; and that architecture is often best presenced through its alterity or other. It considers where and how the political enters as a common stage to hear the low man speak, in Ranciere’s terms, be it to elevate the value of architecture through reconceiving the thing akin to that of painting and sculpture, or to consider the exhibition and curator as somehow instrument and agent, beyond branding or even knowledge production. To look at architecture in this way is to posit architecture as part of a broader spatial-social-political-aesthetic discourse, at once inside and outside itself. It is also a reflexive position that argues the display of architecture should be congruent with the most recent practices. To say as much means that the exhibition is no longer contained in space, but is constitutive of, and constituted by, space. Exhibition as architecture, architecture as exhibition. A reflexive mirror that proposes what Foucault calls a heterotopic space. (Excerpted)

Tina Di Carlo: In your forthcoming book Dying to Speak you theorize forensic spatiality, which stems from your long-standing interest in international law. Can forensic evidence as an object, say a destroyed building, a document, or a dead body – and here I am playing on the double entendre of the dead body and the dead object typically ascribed to the curatorial practice of collecting – actually speak? Or is mediation necessary?

Eyal Weizman: I am interested in forensics because it embodies a shift from the speech of humans to the communicative capacity and “agency” of things. Several legal and cultural scholars have labelled the third part of the 20th century, with its attention to testimonies, truth commissions, and interviews, as “the era of the witness.” It seems to me that in the field of international law, but also in general political culture, we might have entered a stage when we have become more attuned to the communicative capacity of things, of things speaking, if you like, between themselves and to us. This material approach is simultaneously evident in a number of areas and disciplines. Today’s legal and political decisions are based upon the capacity to read and present DNA samples, 3D scans, nanotechnology, and the “enhanced vision” of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance, which extends from the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed or bombed out buildings. This is not just science, but its associated rhetoric. Just as the “era of the witness” had its aesthetics – testimony still occupies a central place in contemporary culture and art galleries – and its ethics of compassion, the forensic shift might bring about its own associated ethics and aesthetics. If popular entertainment is at all an indicator of cultural shifts, then it is interesting to note how today the forensic-detective has gradually replaced the physiologist-detective in TV dramas. Today’s narratives are told through things. In relation to this idea of speech, the origins of the term forensics might be revealing. The word derives from the Latin forensis, which means “forum” and refers to the practice of making an argument by using objects before a gathering such as a professional, political, or legal forum. Forensics was part of rhetoric. Rhetoric, of course, is about speech, but forensics does not refer to the speech of humans but to that of objects or things. In forensic rhetoric, objects address the forum. Things need, however, a “translator” to interpret and mediate their speech. Because the thing speaks through, or is “ventriloquized” by, its translator, the object and its translator make a necessary and interdependent duo. To refute a legal/rhetorical statement, it is enough to refute one of the two: to either show that the object is inauthentic or that its interpreter is biased.

TDC: Have you been literally experimenting with the inscription of the visible in the process of writing Dying to Speak?

EW: Yes. As Oscar Wilde once said, “The true mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible.” In relation to my book on forensics I have been experimenting with genres of writing beyond the spatial-documentary form of my earlier work and its hard sense of gathering/ organizing/analyzing. The genre of this book is closer to critical biography. But it’s the critical biography of structures and objects. It is similar to the method of my favorite forensic anthropologist, Clyde Snow, who pioneered the forensic presentation of mass graves and also investigated the skulls of people, from Tutankhamun to Josef Mengele to JFK. Snow liked to refer to his work as “osteo-biography.” He said, “There is a brief but very useful and informative biography of an individual contained within the skeleton, if you know how to read it.” He used one of the most important principals of forensic presentation, which the Romans called prosopropea. In classic rhetoric prosopropea referred to speech on behalf of things. This principal is employed, as Thomas Keenan showed, when bones are presented as “witnesses” in court.

TDC: In the way you theorize forensics, the forum begins to be an operative space. Would an analogous idea of the forum in art discourses be one way to reinstate the public, as opposed to the audience?

EW: Maybe, yes. The principle of forensics assumes two interrelated sets of spatial relations and both are relations between publics and things. The first is a relation between an event and the object in which it is registered. The second is a relation between the object and the construction or the assembly of the forum to which it is addressed, or within which it resonates. The forums to which contemporary forensics are addressed are not only the actual spaces of the court or parliaments; they are also diffused and networked, created through and by the media, and operate across a multiplicity of international institutions. Forensics is thus as concerned with the materialization of the event as with the construction of a forum and the performance of the object within it. So forensics is not only the writing of history; its other part is the constant construction of its forums – and here lies its propositional potential. (Excerpted)

You are working on a project with fashion photographer Nick Knight about the smells of violence and the smells of fear. What is the smell of fear or of violence? I was invited to do a small project in Manhattan—this was in the period of Bush and the paranoia around terrorism—so I said, “Okay, what actually happens when people are afraid?” Through my global network—psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists, all working with paranoia and phobia—I got in touch with twenty men who suffered from severe phobias. I developed a small device that these guys carried around with them as if it was a talisman. This device extracted the sweat at the moment they had an attack. The sweat was sent to me overnight, and we reproduced it immediately with chemicals. The research was just astonishing. By smelling their sweat, I could build a kind of conceptual image about who they were, what kind of surroundings they were living in, and why they were afraid. The reasons for their phobias were always other bodies and constellations of bodies—humanity, human beings.

Was there something unique that you could identify in all these smells of anxiety or phobia? Listen, this research started as a conceptual thing. It’s not as if I can say, “This is the smell of fear.” There are as many smells of fear as there are human beings on this planet.

So this was about bodily communication that goes beyond what is seen and heard, to something indiscernible yet more immediately telling than anything else? Absolutely. Nick Knight was interested in this kind of thinking from the very beginning of his career. He started off as a skinhead. One topic of his is the notion of violence in men. We both want to find out what happens with humans in the moment of aggression, in terms of fighting and the hormones.

TDC I have heard you say more than once “Avoid democracy at all costs.” Obviously as someone who is German and who is an advocate of participation this position becomes polemic and controversial. Is this the point?

MM On the one hand, it is certainly intended to stir a debate about current practices. On the other, it refers to a sometimes problematic politics of non-critical inclusion. Since the mid-90s participation has become increasingly overused. We are led to believe that everyone can take part, everyone can participate in the decision-making process, when in fact, in many political systems, participation is merely an excuse for elected politicians to withdraw from their assigned responsibility. This situation could be described as Harmonistan – an illusory state in which the public is denuded into believing that one can always be involved in the transformation of reality. The situation is, in fact, the reverse: while everyone has been turned into a participant, the uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term – hijacked and supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness – has become the default mode of politicians to withdraw from accountability. This can be traced back through several Labour governments, most prominently New Labour in the UK, and the notion of the consensual Polder Model in the Netherlands. When I claim that, sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs, what I really mean is that we have to rethink the prevailing notion of participation. I am arguing for an inversion of the term: towards a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, I propose a reflection on the limits and traps of its real motivations. Instead of breading the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, I am arguing for conflict as an enabling, a productive rather than disabling, force. It presents a format and practice of “conflictual participation”, which is no longer understood as a process by which others are invited into something, but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking.

TDC: This thinking is evidently informed by your work with Eyal Weizman, who founded an entire body of work based on the notion of spatial tactics, and who also introduces your new book. And while this notion of conflictual participation sounds in theory, all well and good, can you give us an example where it has been invoked as an instrumental or effective agent of change in practice?

MM Eyal is my PhD mentor and, yes, he has certainly been an inspiration in terms of my practice. But there are many others, which I would also consider as influential from other fields, such as Christoph Schlingensief or Josef Bierbichler in theatre, or Cedric Price in architecture. My theory of praxis is not so much about conflict per se, but to reverse the notion of participation into a pro-active engagement of the individual, self-initiated practitioner. This is, by default, very different from the role of an agent, who necessarily represents the cause of others and, hence, acts and practices with a clear mandate. I am promoting a practice without mandate, and a project in which I am currently really trying to push this agenda forward is the Winter School Middle East, a self-initiated small-scale nomadic educational framework, which I set up in Dubai in 2008. This year, it will move on to Kuwait, to be followed by Tehran in 2011. The Winter School is dealing locally with issues of critical spatial practice. In Dubai we investigated the Labour Camps, in Kuwait this year we will run a research project on Bedouin housing agglomerations, in collaboration with UN Habitat. Regarding your question of conflictual participation, a good example is a consulting project I am working on together with Andrea Phillips, where we, as outsiders, enter the institutional interior of the Dutch organization SKOR, in order to critically question, advise, and redesign their institutional framework and policy.

TDC You mentioned recently that your new book The Nightmare of Participation completes the participation trilogy to which my comment was, “Then you will be known as the participation go-to man.” Part of the premise here is that since 2004 participation has become a catchword in art and architecture, in many ways perpetuated by your first publication Did Someone Say Participate? And yet within architecture one could argue participation is a long-standing tradition, going back to the 1950s and 60s with groups like CIAM and such and even just alluding to the basic architectural process. How is your use and invocation of the term different?

MM Instead of advocating, I revoke. Participation-addicted romantics that still believe in a united struggle, may despise me for this, but I believe that the only way out of the crisis is to become a pro-active individual, to no longer rely on conventional participatory frameworks. One has to take action in one’s own hands. Of course, in architecture, there were groups such as CIAM, and their efforts and tasks are highly commendable. However, their premise is based on the belief that inclusion will produce a surplus. I am no longer sure whether this is always the case. What I attempt to introduce in my recent work is the notion of ‘Crossbench Praxis’. This approach is modeled onto the independent politicians in the House of Lords in the UK. Although the House of Lords is a highly problematic and deeply conservative construct of representation, the abstract position of it, and especially the crossbenchers, is interesting to hijack. They do not belong to a specific party (i.e. Conservatives or Labour), but generate their decisions based on their individual judgment, outside the consensual realities of an existing party. My term “Crossbench Praxis” encourages an “uninterested outsider” and uncalled participator, who is not limited by existing protocols, but enters the discursive arena with nothing but critical intellect and the will to generate change.

TDC Would you say you are indicative of a new series of spatial practitioners, in which the form of architecture becomes as much about how you think and mediation as what you build? Could one even go so far as to say that this sort of disciplinarity, which comprises spatial advising and mediation that works across discourses – between politicians, policy makers, economists, cultural advocates, artists, developers – is the new form of architecture? Would you agree?

MM I don’t know if I am indicative for a new type of practitioner, but what I agree on is that thinking through and the production of non-physical realities and identities co-produces a physical reality that cannot be negated. Architecture is about relationships, politics and identity. This can also be produced through a piece of writing – an essay in a newspaper or magazine can change the entire perception of an urban area – and, as a result, force and propel a development of migration. In contrast to many architects, the physical dimension is not the application, but rather the testing of a hypothesis. The range of projects definitely plays an important role in the production of a reality, which is far from building, but allows for a production of opinions that alter reality. Our current projects are ranging from small-scale domestic interiors, to galleries, to institutional buildings, to strategic frameworks for urban areas and the production of future identities of regions, for example in Austria. The way in which we approach an architectural project is based on the same logic that we approach a strategic framework design. We are not interested in primarily formal characteristics, but the development of content-driven realizations of practice in three-dimensional space. One could of course argue that this has always been part of architecture and spatial practice. (Excerpted)