Alberto Duman | Middlesex University (original) (raw)
Papers by Alberto Duman
Music for Masterplanning (2016-2017) was a research-led, participatory, socially situated art pra... more Music for Masterplanning (2016-2017) was a research-led, participatory, socially situated art practice project in Newham, London that examined how visual languages of affect are central to the production of the contemporary global city as shaped by incoming investments.
Music for Masterplanning has two main components.
1. Music for Masterplanning soundtrack compilation (2018) This is a collection of originally composed music as soundtracks for the movie ‘London’s Regeneration Supernova’: https://musicformasterplanning.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-masterplanning
2. Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Opportunity and Loss from East London (2018) is an anthology of texts published by Repeater Books: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/regeneration-songs-sound-of-investment-and-loss-from-east-london/
ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice ... more ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice art and include valuable lesson plans offering examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both the college and high school levels. With contributions written by leading social practice artists, teachers and thinkers it's content will be arranged thematically to around such themes as labor rights, environmental justice, urban policy, the rights of women and girls, inequality, migrant's rights, Black Lives Matter, the rights of prisoner's and the global nexus of art/labor/capital among other areas of topical concern. Some lesson plans will be written by the students, alumni and faculty members of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum. The book will consist of two main parts. A set of introductory materials focused on the concept of teaching socially engaged art (with some of these essays having an associate...
City, 2012
Chatsworth Road in Hackney, has recently been branded in an article in The Guardian newspaper as ... more Chatsworth Road in Hackney, has recently been branded in an article in The Guardian newspaper as ‘the frontline of gentrification’ in East London. As one of the ‘faces’ of the article, and through my position as local street market trader, I want to open up these claims to scrutiny, beyond both scholarly discourses on gentrification and the tough language of militant resistance. Through a blossoming of local action groups, the planning mirage of the Localism Bill, the proximity to the Olympic Park and the activities of local estate agents, the Clapton area is certainly at the centre of intense transformations in both demographics and property values. How are such urban shifts are created and the resulting values distributed in this area and for whose benefit? Where is the place for truly transformative social justice in the scope and tools of the Localism Bill? At the crossroads between declared missions of ‘managing gentrification’ for the love of the local, and the ways in which the employment of images of area distinction and notions of cultural ‘authenticity’ inevitably bolster the fragmentation of the local as the locals know it, the probing of Chatsworth Road and Clapton at this point in time offers a valuable vantage point to observe East London beyond the Olympic rhetoric.
Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2014
In this article I aim to unfold the main argument in Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art into con... more In this article I aim to unfold the main argument in Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art into contiguous territories, located within the contemporary reality of urban development and the post-Olympic cultural landscape in London. Faced with the emergence and increasing production of artistic activities known as ‘creative placemaking’, and the enmeshed relationships between the continuing evacuation of social housing estates and the presence of artists as temporary occupants/practitioners in these interim spaces, a stark but necessary question is suggested: what is art doing in London at this moment in time? In asking this question, I am mindful of the precious distinction recently drawn by Angela Dimitrakaki, who suggests that we should differentiate between ‘the artwork’ as the output of artistic production, and the outcome of ‘art’ as a way of production. The production relations as ‘outcomes’ that we examine in this article are those of the forces engaged in the production of physical and social urban space in London today in which ‘art as outcome’ is a central component. I identify this as the ‘aesthetic dividend’, understood as the added value to privileged narratives of urban development inscribed both into planning authorities' scenarios and private developers' marketing strategies, and served by an array of specific artistic activities and their perception as ‘creative placemaking’. Dimitrakaki's propositions will also be important in the central section of the article, when they will be drawn as important resources into the analysis of Mike Nelson's/Artangel's unrealized artwork for the decanted Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle, South London.
ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice ... more ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice art and include valuable lesson plans offering examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both the college and high school levels. With contributions written by leading social practice artists, teachers and thinkers it's content will be arranged thematically to around such themes as labor rights, environmental justice, urban policy, the rights of women and girls, inequality, migrant's rights, Black Lives Matter, the rights of prisoner's and the global nexus of art/labor/capital among other areas of topical concern. Some lesson plans will be written by the students, alumni and faculty members of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum. The book will consist of two main parts. A set of introductory materials focused on the concept of teaching socially engaged art (with some of these essays having an associate...
'The integration of urban culture and global capital is at a high point, packaged in the idea... more 'The integration of urban culture and global capital is at a high point, packaged in the idea of ‘attractiveness’ central to the ‘world-class’ city concept. As a result of these synergies of place marketing, we can observe the production of typologies of urban space where cultural consumption (an essentially aesthetic dividend) is central to its financial value. The intangible currencies of ‘uniqueness’ and ‘authenticity’ multiply the overall brand value of places in the mind of those engineering them.'
A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2014. I was the wo... more A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2014. I was the workshop leader for the London section of the initiative run to leverage the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies. This text is an account and critical reading of the workshop and its explorations of East London in September 2014.
A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2015. I was the wo... more A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2015. I was the workshop leader for the London section of the initiative run to leverage the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies. This text is an account and critical reading of the workshop and its explorations of East London in September 2015.
Regeneration Songs: Sounds of investment and loss examines the role of the artist in regeneration... more Regeneration Songs: Sounds of investment and loss examines the role of the artist in regeneration. The book is an output of a Leverhulme Artist in Residence grant I secured for artist Alberto Duman to collaborate with the MRes programme I lead at the University of East London. Alberto worked on a socially engaged project with musicians from East London to record tracks to go with a promotional film, entitled ‘Regeneration Supernova’ that Newham Council produced to show to investors at the Shanghai Expo. He had originally obtained a copy of the film under a Freedom of Information request, which was silent, sparking the idea that local artists and musicians should have the chance to record their own interpretations and responses to the changes taking place around them. Alongside the album, we edited a book commissioning a variety of artists, academics, journalists and activists. A number of the contributions examined the role of artists in the regeneration process and my own chapter, ...
A text as part of the Summerlab Reader 2013. This is an initiative of DPU (Development Planning U... more A text as part of the Summerlab Reader 2013. This is an initiative of DPU (Development Planning Unit) of the Bartlett School of Architecture, intending to leveraging the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies. I have run the London section of the Summerlab in September 2013 and this text is an account of the 2-weeks workshop and its journey through East London.
Leveraging the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies
This is the movie that brings together all soundtracks for the London Regeneration Supernova movi... more This is the movie that brings together all soundtracks for the London Regeneration Supernova movie, repeated seventeen times, each time with a different soundtrack. It is freely available to watch/listen on Vimeo
A text produced for the exhibition 'Person to Person' by Lloyd Corporation at Carlos Ishikawa. , 2019
They were scattered,-these residues of a deterritorialized socius-, like scraps of a conviviality... more They were scattered,-these residues of a deterritorialized socius-, like scraps of a conviviality that once believed its own existence. They first appeared on a beach,-or not quite, since what one makes of a jetty that does not connect anymore to the land behind it? Becoming detached, it forgot it was ever a beach to begin with. In the end it morphed into a cut off spit made of littoral debris, terraformed into an island, a cult onto itself. A dissident landmass. A reluctant patch. A remiss gyre of the alienated kind.
This was a text written for the exhibition 'Local to Global' by Lloyd Corporation at Carlos Ishik... more This was a text written for the exhibition 'Local to Global' by Lloyd Corporation at Carlos Ishikawa Gallery, London, 9 May – 23 June 2018.
The Lloyd Corporation is a collaboration between artists Ali Eisa and Sebastian Lloyd Rees. Their work explores a political, social and economic framework, outlined by the relationship between their own individual practices. Often conceptualizing and executing site-specific installations, the Lloyd Corporation processes and re-contextualizes contemporary culture into new forms. Through the examination of the urban environment, the artists transform rubble, flooring samples, aluminum screening, as well as traditional art materials into sculptures and mixed media works.
'To draw cartographies of time into the future of a place is a way to affect the present with pot... more 'To draw cartographies of time into the future of a place is a way to affect the present with potentialities in the making, staking claims on the ownership of possible futures and if the cartographer is also a landowner or developer, selling its plots to prospective clients, whilst activating them with interim uses that prime their transition towards the future. In conditions of uneven social justice, to be able to develop visions becomes even more a luxury, a commodity in itself, an exercise of privilege: to envision means to take space in a place and set forth in time its present inequalities.'
This introduction to Journal of Visual Art Practice, guest edited by Alana Jelinek, includes a su... more This introduction to Journal of Visual Art Practice, guest edited by Alana Jelinek, includes a summary of This is Not Art, summaries of the articles responding to the ideas and challenges presented by This is Not Art and a reply to those responses. The rationale for inviting a philosopher, a curator, an artist, a marxist art historian and a scholar working between art and anthropology to respond is also included. The edition of Journal of Visual of Art Practice is available online and it is available here as a single download which includes the Introduction and articles by Derek Matravers, Jen Clarke, Larne Abse Gogarty, Alberto Duman and Sally de Kunst.
Critical jump-cuts such as these kept emerging as we travelled across the Arc of Opportunity in i... more Critical jump-cuts such as these kept emerging as we travelled across the Arc of Opportunity in its spatial and temporal narrative, ultimately defining the purpose of our passage as akin to a cinematic montage.
For this reason, the 'Meanwhile...in Newham...' cue offered here,
deliberately recalls the language of synchronous sub-plots in a film noir script and its overlapped multiplicity of events as seen from the 'celestial eye' of the narrator, as well as the specific terminology used to describe temporary projects assigned 'interim uses' in sites awaiting scheduled future developments.
Music for Masterplanning (2016-2017) was a research-led, participatory, socially situated art pra... more Music for Masterplanning (2016-2017) was a research-led, participatory, socially situated art practice project in Newham, London that examined how visual languages of affect are central to the production of the contemporary global city as shaped by incoming investments.
Music for Masterplanning has two main components.
1. Music for Masterplanning soundtrack compilation (2018) This is a collection of originally composed music as soundtracks for the movie ‘London’s Regeneration Supernova’: https://musicformasterplanning.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-masterplanning
2. Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Opportunity and Loss from East London (2018) is an anthology of texts published by Repeater Books: https://repeaterbooks.com/product/regeneration-songs-sound-of-investment-and-loss-from-east-london/
ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice ... more ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice art and include valuable lesson plans offering examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both the college and high school levels. With contributions written by leading social practice artists, teachers and thinkers it's content will be arranged thematically to around such themes as labor rights, environmental justice, urban policy, the rights of women and girls, inequality, migrant's rights, Black Lives Matter, the rights of prisoner's and the global nexus of art/labor/capital among other areas of topical concern. Some lesson plans will be written by the students, alumni and faculty members of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum. The book will consist of two main parts. A set of introductory materials focused on the concept of teaching socially engaged art (with some of these essays having an associate...
City, 2012
Chatsworth Road in Hackney, has recently been branded in an article in The Guardian newspaper as ... more Chatsworth Road in Hackney, has recently been branded in an article in The Guardian newspaper as ‘the frontline of gentrification’ in East London. As one of the ‘faces’ of the article, and through my position as local street market trader, I want to open up these claims to scrutiny, beyond both scholarly discourses on gentrification and the tough language of militant resistance. Through a blossoming of local action groups, the planning mirage of the Localism Bill, the proximity to the Olympic Park and the activities of local estate agents, the Clapton area is certainly at the centre of intense transformations in both demographics and property values. How are such urban shifts are created and the resulting values distributed in this area and for whose benefit? Where is the place for truly transformative social justice in the scope and tools of the Localism Bill? At the crossroads between declared missions of ‘managing gentrification’ for the love of the local, and the ways in which the employment of images of area distinction and notions of cultural ‘authenticity’ inevitably bolster the fragmentation of the local as the locals know it, the probing of Chatsworth Road and Clapton at this point in time offers a valuable vantage point to observe East London beyond the Olympic rhetoric.
Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2014
In this article I aim to unfold the main argument in Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art into con... more In this article I aim to unfold the main argument in Alana Jelinek's This Is Not Art into contiguous territories, located within the contemporary reality of urban development and the post-Olympic cultural landscape in London. Faced with the emergence and increasing production of artistic activities known as ‘creative placemaking’, and the enmeshed relationships between the continuing evacuation of social housing estates and the presence of artists as temporary occupants/practitioners in these interim spaces, a stark but necessary question is suggested: what is art doing in London at this moment in time? In asking this question, I am mindful of the precious distinction recently drawn by Angela Dimitrakaki, who suggests that we should differentiate between ‘the artwork’ as the output of artistic production, and the outcome of ‘art’ as a way of production. The production relations as ‘outcomes’ that we examine in this article are those of the forces engaged in the production of physical and social urban space in London today in which ‘art as outcome’ is a central component. I identify this as the ‘aesthetic dividend’, understood as the added value to privileged narratives of urban development inscribed both into planning authorities' scenarios and private developers' marketing strategies, and served by an array of specific artistic activities and their perception as ‘creative placemaking’. Dimitrakaki's propositions will also be important in the central section of the article, when they will be drawn as important resources into the analysis of Mike Nelson's/Artangel's unrealized artwork for the decanted Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle, South London.
ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice ... more ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice art and include valuable lesson plans offering examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both the college and high school levels. With contributions written by leading social practice artists, teachers and thinkers it's content will be arranged thematically to around such themes as labor rights, environmental justice, urban policy, the rights of women and girls, inequality, migrant's rights, Black Lives Matter, the rights of prisoner's and the global nexus of art/labor/capital among other areas of topical concern. Some lesson plans will be written by the students, alumni and faculty members of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum. The book will consist of two main parts. A set of introductory materials focused on the concept of teaching socially engaged art (with some of these essays having an associate...
'The integration of urban culture and global capital is at a high point, packaged in the idea... more 'The integration of urban culture and global capital is at a high point, packaged in the idea of ‘attractiveness’ central to the ‘world-class’ city concept. As a result of these synergies of place marketing, we can observe the production of typologies of urban space where cultural consumption (an essentially aesthetic dividend) is central to its financial value. The intangible currencies of ‘uniqueness’ and ‘authenticity’ multiply the overall brand value of places in the mind of those engineering them.'
A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2014. I was the wo... more A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2014. I was the workshop leader for the London section of the initiative run to leverage the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies. This text is an account and critical reading of the workshop and its explorations of East London in September 2014.
A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2015. I was the wo... more A short text as part of the DPU (Development Planning Unit) Summerlab Pamphlet 2015. I was the workshop leader for the London section of the initiative run to leverage the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies. This text is an account and critical reading of the workshop and its explorations of East London in September 2015.
Regeneration Songs: Sounds of investment and loss examines the role of the artist in regeneration... more Regeneration Songs: Sounds of investment and loss examines the role of the artist in regeneration. The book is an output of a Leverhulme Artist in Residence grant I secured for artist Alberto Duman to collaborate with the MRes programme I lead at the University of East London. Alberto worked on a socially engaged project with musicians from East London to record tracks to go with a promotional film, entitled ‘Regeneration Supernova’ that Newham Council produced to show to investors at the Shanghai Expo. He had originally obtained a copy of the film under a Freedom of Information request, which was silent, sparking the idea that local artists and musicians should have the chance to record their own interpretations and responses to the changes taking place around them. Alongside the album, we edited a book commissioning a variety of artists, academics, journalists and activists. A number of the contributions examined the role of artists in the regeneration process and my own chapter, ...
A text as part of the Summerlab Reader 2013. This is an initiative of DPU (Development Planning U... more A text as part of the Summerlab Reader 2013. This is an initiative of DPU (Development Planning Unit) of the Bartlett School of Architecture, intending to leveraging the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies. I have run the London section of the Summerlab in September 2013 and this text is an account of the 2-weeks workshop and its journey through East London.
Leveraging the city as a laboratory for developing socially responsive design strategies
This is the movie that brings together all soundtracks for the London Regeneration Supernova movi... more This is the movie that brings together all soundtracks for the London Regeneration Supernova movie, repeated seventeen times, each time with a different soundtrack. It is freely available to watch/listen on Vimeo
A text produced for the exhibition 'Person to Person' by Lloyd Corporation at Carlos Ishikawa. , 2019
They were scattered,-these residues of a deterritorialized socius-, like scraps of a conviviality... more They were scattered,-these residues of a deterritorialized socius-, like scraps of a conviviality that once believed its own existence. They first appeared on a beach,-or not quite, since what one makes of a jetty that does not connect anymore to the land behind it? Becoming detached, it forgot it was ever a beach to begin with. In the end it morphed into a cut off spit made of littoral debris, terraformed into an island, a cult onto itself. A dissident landmass. A reluctant patch. A remiss gyre of the alienated kind.
This was a text written for the exhibition 'Local to Global' by Lloyd Corporation at Carlos Ishik... more This was a text written for the exhibition 'Local to Global' by Lloyd Corporation at Carlos Ishikawa Gallery, London, 9 May – 23 June 2018.
The Lloyd Corporation is a collaboration between artists Ali Eisa and Sebastian Lloyd Rees. Their work explores a political, social and economic framework, outlined by the relationship between their own individual practices. Often conceptualizing and executing site-specific installations, the Lloyd Corporation processes and re-contextualizes contemporary culture into new forms. Through the examination of the urban environment, the artists transform rubble, flooring samples, aluminum screening, as well as traditional art materials into sculptures and mixed media works.
'To draw cartographies of time into the future of a place is a way to affect the present with pot... more 'To draw cartographies of time into the future of a place is a way to affect the present with potentialities in the making, staking claims on the ownership of possible futures and if the cartographer is also a landowner or developer, selling its plots to prospective clients, whilst activating them with interim uses that prime their transition towards the future. In conditions of uneven social justice, to be able to develop visions becomes even more a luxury, a commodity in itself, an exercise of privilege: to envision means to take space in a place and set forth in time its present inequalities.'
This introduction to Journal of Visual Art Practice, guest edited by Alana Jelinek, includes a su... more This introduction to Journal of Visual Art Practice, guest edited by Alana Jelinek, includes a summary of This is Not Art, summaries of the articles responding to the ideas and challenges presented by This is Not Art and a reply to those responses. The rationale for inviting a philosopher, a curator, an artist, a marxist art historian and a scholar working between art and anthropology to respond is also included. The edition of Journal of Visual of Art Practice is available online and it is available here as a single download which includes the Introduction and articles by Derek Matravers, Jen Clarke, Larne Abse Gogarty, Alberto Duman and Sally de Kunst.
Critical jump-cuts such as these kept emerging as we travelled across the Arc of Opportunity in i... more Critical jump-cuts such as these kept emerging as we travelled across the Arc of Opportunity in its spatial and temporal narrative, ultimately defining the purpose of our passage as akin to a cinematic montage.
For this reason, the 'Meanwhile...in Newham...' cue offered here,
deliberately recalls the language of synchronous sub-plots in a film noir script and its overlapped multiplicity of events as seen from the 'celestial eye' of the narrator, as well as the specific terminology used to describe temporary projects assigned 'interim uses' in sites awaiting scheduled future developments.
Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss from East London Edited by Alberto Duman, Dan Hancox, Anna Minton, Malcolm James, 2018
This chapter addresses some specific aesthetic, spatial and affective dimensions of contemporary ... more This chapter addresses some specific aesthetic, spatial and affective dimensions of contemporary place-making strategies. The 'affective atmosphere' of the Arc of Opportunity, understood through London Borough of Newham’s livery colour (magenta) is explored here through the 'tabula rasa' model of exploitative capitalism, affectively understood through the idea of an all-pervasive 'haze' at work in areas of intense place-making activities.