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sarafince · 5 years ago

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Bibliography

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Atkin, Emily. « The Power and Peril of “Climate Disaster Porn” ». The New Republic, 10 juillet 2017. https://newrepublic.com/article/143788/power-peril-climate-disaster-porn.

Bendell, Jem, Neil Sutherland, et Richard Little. « Beyond unsustainable leadership: critical social theory for sustainable leadership ». Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal 8, no 4 (1 janvier 2017): 418‑44. https://doi.org/10.1108/SAMPJ-08-2016-0048.

Brand, Fridolin, et Kurt Jax. « Focusing the Meaning(s) of Resilience: Resilience as a Descriptive Concept and a Boundary Object ». Ecology and Society 12, no 1 (5 juin 2007). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-02029-120123.

Clement, Megan. « I Followed the Advice for Paris’s Hottest Day – It Didn’t Help | Megan Clement ». The Guardian, 31 juillet 2019, sect. Cities. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/31/i-followed-the-advice-for-paris-hottest-day-it-didnt-help.

Clouse, Carey. Farming Cuba: urban farming from the ground up. First edition. New York, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2014.

Figueres, Christiana, et Tom Rivett-Carnac. « ‘Air Is Cleaner than before the Industrial Revolution’: A Best Case Scenario for the Climate in 2050 ». The Observer, 15 février 2020, sect. Environment. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/15/best-case-scenario-2050-climate-crisis-future-we-choose-christiana-figueres-tom-rivett-carnac.

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Ghosh, Amitav. « Amitav Ghosh: Where Is the Fiction about Climate Change? » The Guardian, 28 octobre 2016, sect. Books. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/amitav-ghosh-where-is-the-fiction-about-climate-change-.

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Kormann, Carolyn. « Rem Koolhaas’s Journey to the Countryside ». The New Yorker. Consulté le 12 mars 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/rem-koolhaass-journey-to-the-countryside.

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Servigne, Pablo, Raphaël Stevens, et Yves Cochet. Comment tout peut s’effondrer: petit manuel de collapsologie à l’usage des générations présentes. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015.

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———. « ‘The Models Are Too Conservative’: A Paleontologist on Climate Change Today ». Intelligencer, 10 juillet 2017. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/what-mass-extinctions-teach-us-about-climate-change-today.html.

———. « When Will the Planet Be Too Hot for Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine. » Intelligencer, 9 juillet 2017. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html.

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sarafince · 5 years ago

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Manifesto. Story. Manual. Diary. Journal

Le T-ecosystem

13/03/2020

The State of Things

Somehow we all manage to live on credit. Ever since last century we have been living on promises – ours and theirs, our parents’ and our dogs. From the moment we created the concept of future growth we stopped worrying and went on a careless pursuit of happiness.

Our world is crumbling down and there seems to be little to be done to make it carry itself a little longer. People quit their jobs and run into the woods to raise goats and write novels that nobody will read because there will be nobody left, people live in cities, minimalists, 0 waste, contemporary hippies. The rest just sits around waiting for the next wave of nitrogen oxide to enter their naively open windows. There are apps that tell you when the air pollution is low enough so you can take a walk – not to atrophy your muscles by staying inside and working on your laptop like a good little ant that you are; you and your 0 waste compost can, while England is buying carbon-credit.

Of course, England is where all this mess started in the first place, so they continue burning coal and with the money that comes from it they buy green energy somewhere else on the planet, like this is all a big farm that we can balance through dividing the planet in half, one exhales, the other inhales, like junkies passing on the last smoke of ganja.

Others see the immensity of this infrastructure as too unsustainable. As much as we dream of grandeur, we are not giants, we are not gods and we are not as important as we want to be. Thus there are who say that the goal is to absorb your own shit in your own country. That’s more reasonable, that’s scaled, fitted, better.

The What

But what if… we could find a way to be neutral at an atomic level? What if we could invent a system to be applied whenever we needed to build? What if it is not building that is the enemy but the how? If one can conceive of neutrality at a country level, one can surely scale it down to the city and then the lot.

In a corrupt, power-hungry, money-driven, under-developed country, this might be the only available path to salvation from implosion. What if on the lot to be built one could use all technology available (and mostly subsidized by the state or the European Union) to become harmless – or even…helpful?

Here is when we present the concept of Concave Ecocentric Architecture. Concave stands for multiuse, multicultural; Ecocentric is a play on egocentric, our god until now – it means that we look to re-establish the balance in nature and that humans take on a role that helps, and leave behind the one that destroys. We choose “architecture” for the immensity of its possible meanings, we appeal to its creative power, to its ability for action, to its quality of sense generator in a system (without limiting its meaning to the manipulation of tectonics by one person).

The offspring of Concave Ecocentric Architecture is the T-Ecosystem. A human-made ecosystem that functions on the principles of natural ecosystems might blur the lines between urban and rural just enough for people not to have to choose between the advantages and the disadvantages of both. What we mean when saying that this has to work as an ecosystem is that the ultimate goal is for it to produce its own energy, consume it, and then have some left to help the less fortunate. It would be an ethical machine of sharing and exchange with one part supplying the other. Money coming through one door, as that door is open to capitalism, goes through the hands of the community and it filters all the way to the extremities of the socially and environmentally oriented chunks of the T-Ecosystem. Energy flows in the other sense, as the environmentally focused part of the T-Ecosystem produces more than it consumes, it allows it to flow towards the hungrier parts of it, like the communicating vessels.

This shall turn into the emblem and landmark of new economic, ecological, societal, anthropological, biological, natural model. A place that can function on its own, almost a perpetuum-mobile of human growth together with landscape.

The Why

It is impossible and unsustainable to live on the side we have been living on. The pursuit of happiness through consumerism, short shots of skag that last for one to ten minutes until we have to shoot up again proved itself to be reason enough for a trip to rehab.

The issue is that there seems to be no alternative to consumerism-loaded syringes.

Population is growing but the drug is getting thinner.

Everything that has been used up until now has been swept under the rug, but the rug cannot cover it anymore, its corners are in the air and we can see underneath.

Our suggestion is to start using methadone to ease withdrawal, to make do with this addiction to create something different, we believe in the “I’ve been clean for n days”, we believe in rehabilitation.

It is a question of will, like all desirable change, it is intentional and directed and as one wise online video once said, one minute of movement a day is more than nothing and it is more likely to lead to an hour, more likely to generate other lifestyle changes. Like a lifestyle coach, we come to tell you that we throw in our minute, the one we believe is capable of changing the world, little by little, by the power of example, ‘cause exercise kind of makes you feel guilty in the face of too much sugar.

There you have our why, one try at offering real and palpable experience, real and impactful change because compulsive ice-cream eating and plastic-wrap throwing is completely expired and passé.

Lenora Ditzler, who was introduced by Rem Koolhaas in his exhibition Countryside as an eco-feminist farmer says that planting various crops next to each other increases the probability that they survive hostile changes (they help build nutrients in the soil and they develop a system to protect each other in from pest and diseases). Like the Mayan agricultural techniques, we use all we have within our reach to create an ecosystem of our own.

The Where

Bucharest is the urban tissue that developed into one out of profoundly rural land, out of orchards and hay fields, a place where Carol the Ist of Romania first came off his carriage in mud, where people would carry themselves in western attire and would sit cross-legged on each other’s carpets with tea in their hands and silk hats on their heads.

Because we want to make it clear that we do not mean that the invention is to function only on tabula-rasa, we choose to place ours in Bucharest, on a communist ruin, a mastodon of waste and meaninglessness from where Ceausescu watched the last parade given in his honour, a building known under the name of “Casa Radio”.

We take advantage of this occasion to introduce a little history. Casa Radio is by no means the only ruin of Romanian Totalitarianism; it is only the biggest one that is completely unused.

Almost all totalitarian architectural efforts have been caught unfinished by the revolution. Immediately after, the city found itself with huge concrete structures built with people’s money and at the expense of their feeding and health. Because at that point architecture was the last thing on people’s minds, they have been left to perish in the weather. Not surprisingly, they became shelters for the homeless and became known as “centres of hunger”. This state lasted for around 15 years and then capitalism penetrated the market. At this stage, the structures were bought usually by foreign investors and turned into malls.

This is how Romania came to be known today as the country of malls.

Taking the place of a hippodrome (bourgeois function), Casa Radio was meant to become a cultural centre, the one and only museum of communism where all citizens would come to learn about the great deeds of the regime and their father and mother, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Unfinished, it was inaugurated in ’89 so that the ruler could watch the parade on the 23rd of August. But the revolution came in December that same year and nobody wanted to deal with that mega-structure anymore, it was too big and people scattered around, the first generation to be freed remembering it as the place where they were forced into labour. 31 years have passed and it’s still a ruin, rotting away under the increasingly violent sun, making the city a little bit hotter with its concrete mass, untended to and naked.

It’s a big lot, 437x235m, almost 103.000sqm of land, near the Dâmbovița River, surrounded by wide urban highways, like the Egg in Beirut. Casa Radio is found in the midst of influent urban functions such as the University Hospital, the Opera House, University of Sport (ANEFS), University of Medicine, Student Campus, National Agency for Roma, Faculty of Law, Business Centre (Opera Centre) etc.

In short this is the perfect place to work with the meaning of ruin, this one being both a ruin of a totalitarian regime and one of capitalism for people could not agree on a price for its exploitation, to work with the concepts of urban and rural, given the immense space that it has to offer; it is the perfect place to interrogate the relationship cities have with their rivers, their main circulation arteries, their identity, their citizens.

And this is the perfect time to ask questions about the direction architecture can move towards, especially when people like Rem Koolhaas tell us that architecture becomes obsolete. Maybe this is the time to redefine what architecture can do.

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sarafince · 5 years ago

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Shakespeare

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sarafince · 5 years ago

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A Possible Future. Manuscript.

It’s January. 2100.

At the tropics, people are cooking from the inside.

Calves are born medium rare.

It’s the month when all dates in your diary are wrong. You are learning to change the year when you date things, don’t be hard on yourself, we’re all in this. In this and in other shit.

I am in my old apartment in Paris. It’s a studio in a student residence where nobody really ever checked if you were a student. I haven’t been back here since I graduated, 80 years ago, but I can’t say I missed it much. I have a park nearby, about five minutes walking, that helps a lot with the breathing when I feel that my new lungs clogged up too much – I can go there and breath for a little while, always with my gun in hand, my back muscles turned on and the hair on the back of my neck up. You wouldn’t say, but if you manage to do that, you can feel movement from yards away. It’s useful especially now, that some had cat legs installed, and you can’t hear them even if they’re breathing on your neck.

I used to be afraid of writing – that I wasn’t good enough, that there are too many trying it already. I’m past that now. I know that if I can, I have to somehow send this to the next intelligent beings that will develop on Earth… that means that I have to engrave it somehow in something not likely to be destructed in millions of years. Then I will have to make it so that after they find it, they understand it.

I will write it in all the languages that I know and more – and then I’ll try to make it indestructible… maybe Stonehenge was such a warning to us – maybe we just didn’t know how to read it, too preoccupied to understand how it was put together… maybe what mattered was how the rays of sun passed through, maybe they point to something, to the place where a million year old bastard wrote on a small piece of stone, a mountain… a grain of sand. Maybe they were trying to tell us that when we discover the steam engine, we have to bury it in the ground and never think about it again. There is no limit to greed, power and the desire to conquer, to have, as if having would ever make life bearable.

What if we never found extra-terrestrial life simply because to arrive at the point where a civilisation is able to make contact, they have to arrive at the point of burning themselves up, and given that the star-galaxies are millions of years apart, it is simply impossible to receive a message from the other part of the universe before blowing ourselves up. What if what is happening to us will perpetually happen forever, or as long as the universe is alive. What if, when looked at from afar, the universe looks just like fireworks, with one planet burning up after the other?

We haven’t had fish in the seas for a very long time. I can’t remember the last time I tasted the sea. It’s so freakin’ acid right now that even dipping a finger in it would make for a nasty wound.

Shit, we were naïve back then… making phone calls for nothing at all, looking everything up on the internet, turning on lights for reading, dancing, to make day out of night; we used to take the plane just because it was cheaper than the train and turn music on just because we were lonely when we could have gone out and talked to people in the streets.

I imagine there is no human being within five kilometres now, and if I would meet one, I’d kill it before it kills me. It helps if I don’t think of them as being human. I was not much of a fighter before… I was slow and had no physical resistance, but fighting makes you strong. The rush of adrenaline increases muscle power by 30% - I read that somewhere. The hardest part is that with everything down, I only have my head for entertainment – I am stuck with everything I know and limited by everything I don’t. I should have learned to play an instrument.

It helps imagine being killed when I’m training, I see it as motivation, but I can’t do that too much, it makes my breath intensify and I take in more methane than I am allowed per day. I should have gotten the self-clearing lungs… but back then I had to choose between that and a place to stay and I was too afraid of the streets.

People kill to eat nowadays. Hah.. nowadays. There is no day anymore, only a red shadow cast between us and the sun – and it’s very hot. I remember reading in some book Marquez wrote that in Colombia next to a railway there was a time when the rain was so ubiquitous that everything was permanently wet, moist and mouldy. It’s like this with the heat. Everything is hot. To cool off, I have to hang myself on a rope by the torso, to use no energy, to let the air touch my body in its movement – but it isn’t moving, the bastard!

We were like the toad in boiling water – we boiled ourselves to death, like the Ferrari driver who pushed the machine so hard that it broke, like the…..I don’t remember.

We were idiots.

We should have stopped when the wind started to put down trees in Paris more than twice a month. The news people didn’t help. Because they were told not to sound “alarmist”, they always delivered the climate news smiling: “The weather in Paris is out of the charts again, it’s the eleventh day with wind so strong that people are advised to stay inside because of the danger of being picked up and smashed against a building. At least people from the west will be smashed against the Eiffel Tower, haha.” Yes, these were the jokes – and they laughed, and the audience laughed, and some people got smashed, and they continued to laugh, like it was all make-believe, like it was impossible to be true, like the images were touched up, like there was nothing to worry about. We all behaved like underage children in front of our authoritarian parents when there is a criminal on the loose – don’t worry, darling, he can’t reach us here.

I remember asking myself why we wouldn’t read more about this in fiction, why art almost completely ignored it… it must not be as important as they say… usually when something is important all media talks about it. All fiction on the matter was banished to the sci-fi shelf, like there was any science behind it, like it was something else but hypothesis about the future based on facts. What I would give right now to put my hands on a copy of Paradise Lost…

Don’t turn bleak about the climate, S, it will wrinkle your forehead and then who knows how hard it will be to finally settle down?

Those comments. The good part in running away from humans is that I don’t get these anymore.

I miss I. we used to fight all the time – for her, like for so many others global warming was just a kind of thing you speak about at cocktail parties; without too much emphasis so as not to polarize the conversation and put yourself too much out there. She thought that Greta Thurnberg is looking to build a persona for herself. Nevertheless I somehow enjoyed her presence – she was lively and made me forget that I thought we were all going to die any minute now. She was one year and a half into her PhD about modest houses when she got the plague which had emerged after a glacier melted and released it into the air. She was travelling to Russia to establish a connection between the Romanian kitsch and the Russian contemporary avant-guard architecture when she came upon a village close to Siberia where people were so nice and cooked so well that she had to stay for a while and immerse herself into the culture. For a hypochondriac, she took little precaution. She left the village after the third case of plague death, thinking that somehow her European blood would be incapable of being seized by eastern afflictions. But the Russians are Europeans too. She died after a few months barely remembering her PhD subject, in her mother’s living room.

I was in Barcelona when I heard that the Dengue fever is knocking at our doors – I had never thought of it before, but +5 degrees Celsius meant that southern Europe would behave like Africa; and that meant the diseases too. I bet now we wished we invested enough in eradicating the diseases of the poor. Whatever you leave undone, comes back to bite your ass sooner or later, as my mom used to say – or was it Churchill?

I fled, of course, with my cowered back at the disaster in the city I loved so much. I fled north in the hope that I could find some solace in the coldness left behind by the melting glaciers, but now I’m stuck here, with no real chance of getting anywhere, as I depend on the park for clearing my cheap lungs – why, why was I such a parsimonious little shit? Like with the phones, I always went for the cheap, uncomplicated version. It is true, this is the less stressful choice, as the more complicated ones break more easily – and I heard it’s excruciating to die of collapsed lungs. At least this pair will last a while if I manage to keep automatic updates at bay.

Small doomsdays have been happening everywhere, but they’re relevant only to the disappeared.

There is war, famine, and economic collapse I want to tell you about, but right now I will go hang for a little while.

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