Uncomfort: On Tomás Maldonado’s call for rebellion through comfort (original) (raw)
Walls, enclaves and the (counter) politics of design
This paper focuses on the political role of urban design in the transformation of urban and rural, central and peripheral, formal and informal landscapes in Israel. Based on design anthropology methodology, the political role of urban design in the production of aesthetic objects and landscapes that signify the control over individuals and communities will be explored. As this paper suggests, such a new form of political influence is hidden beneath an aesthetic and user-oriented façade, making it even more dangerous than previous more direct actions, such as gated communities separated from public space by stone walls. The paper’s interdisciplinary approach that is rooted in anthropology, design, architecture and politics will also point out some similarities between specific sites that are often considered different, namely Tel Aviv’s global and privatized gated communities on the one hand and the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the peripheral Negev region on the other. It will be argued that these similarities are the product of the politics of militarization, privatization and social fragmentation that are translated into urban design practices from ‘above’ via state and municipal planning policy as well as formal design, and from ‘below’ through informal and often unauthorized construction initiated by marginalized communities.
Y-UTOPIA , Block journal (special issue)
2006
This volume questions the contribution of the numerous architectural-political, architectural-social, and architectural-cultural events in Israel, asking whether there has been a radical shift in the thought and methodology of the discipline. The study asks, is this a fashionable embrace of a political discourse or a real debate about the values of our society? This question is especially significant within the Israeli-Palestinian context, where societies of immigrants and refugees are embroiled in a bloody conflict over a disputed environment. This context gives rise to extreme situations that, in turn, present the current architectural praxis hyper-realistically, in all its helplessness. As this volume argues, this condition is not, however, exclusive to Israel. Thus, it is instructive to understand it within the broader context of the contemporary architectural culture by asking three primary questions: (1) What is radical practice? (2) What is radical practice in an age of late capitalism? (3) Does radical practice exist in Israel? These questions are, in a sense, implicit in the papers collected in this volume, which address the role of architectural "visioning" through the lens of utopian drawings (generators), utopian intentions (interventions) and utopian debate (discourse).
Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible
Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2021
This essay explores how contemporary Palestinian cultural producers—across literature, art, and film—simultaneously expose and disrupt the chronopolitics of settler occupation. It pairs Adania Shibli's 2002 novella Masās (Touch) with the 2013 short film Condom Lead directed by Tarzan and Arab in order to theorize a poetics of the everyday. Their works generate an ontology of the present eschatologically bound to an emptied future time–space. The essay then turns to Khalil Rabah's conceptual multisite project the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003) and Larissa Sansour's science fiction trilogy: A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2012), and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015). Their projects engage in speculative modes of world-building that bridge past and future temporalities in order to render legible the unviability of the present. I situate these works, on the one hand, in relation to scholarship on affect and ṣumūd (steadfastness) in post-Oslo popular Palestinian cultural production. On the other, I put them into conversation with theorizations of counter-futurism and Afrofuturism as historical recovery projects. Read paratactically, this body of Palestinian art illustrates the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.
The tent: The uncanny architecture of agonism for Israel- Palestine, 1910-2011
Mass social protest erupted in Israel in 2011 around the banner of housing, with citizens pitching hundreds of tents in urban public spaces all over the country. The tent, as a symbol of and the architecture for political action, aligned communities deeply alienated from each other -the middle class and very poor, renters and homeowners, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, Jews and Arabs-Palestinians -in a shared demand for housing.
Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism, abstract
Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism: From Functionalism to Fiber Art, 2022
The historiography of Israeli visual culture has often emphasized the ongoing tension between artists' search for local roots, visa -vis their perception of modernism as representing universal values, as well as their desire to maintain a dialogue with the cultural centers of Europe and the United States. 1 Recent scholarship continues to ask which sources shaped Israeli modernism, and what political implications followed the incorporation of Middle Eastern traditions, European Jewish heritage, or international avantgarde movements into an Israeli national style. 2 However, so far these scholarly debates have focused on the "fine art" fields of painting, sculpture, new media or architecture, and ignored other fields of aesthetic production. 3 Thus study will contribute to such debates by investigating a medium that has received little scholarly attention-textiles. Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism: From Functionalism to Fiber Art examines textile art and design produced in Israel between the 1940s-1990s, as a hotbed for a range of issues at the interstices of aesthetics, national identity, and gender. Grounded primarily in art and design history, but also in cultural history and material culture studies, this study uses unmined archival material, interviews, and objects' analysis in order to provide a fresh perspective on some of the principal questions
2015 Book Review: New Narratives and Legacies of Israeli Modernisms
Images, Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 2015
Critical review on the exhibition Friedrich Adler: Ways and Byways curated by Batsheva Goldman-Ida (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 26 Oct 2012 - 2 March 2013),in comparison to two other exhibitions the same year: Forging Ahead: Wolpert and Gumbel, Israeli Silversmiths for the Modern Age (Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 23 November 2012–6 April 2013), curated by Sharon Weiser-Ferguson; and Common Roots. Design Map of Central Europe (Design Museum Holon, 15 November –23 February 2013), curated by Agnieszka Jacobson and Galit Gaon.
Introduction to Diseña 22: Design, Oppression, and Liberation (2nd issue)
Revista Diseña
This special edition introduces eight papers at the intersection of design, oppression, and liberation. These papers refer to social structure as a common leverage point to criticize and transform different oppression relations, namely racism, gender, marginalization, epistemic injustice, and colonization. The contributions follow recent moves in social movements and social sciences that recognize that tackling different oppression relations enables seeing oppressive structures more clearly. Nurturing solidarity bonds across different oppression struggles becomes an urgent task in this new field of research we call Oppression Studies of Design. Building upon anti-colonial views on oppression, this field connects design research with the history of changing social structures through liberation struggles.
This paper examines at close quarters the role of fictions in design, in order to push forward the scope and influence of critical discourses in design. It aims to raise a cross-disciplinary debate around the redefinition of the design profession and also around the practices of curating and reflecting on design. Main theoretical reference has been " The practice of Everyday Life " by French sociologist Michel de Certeau. Certeau's work has influenced the thinking of three authors that were relevant to further elaborate this study: the combination between material culture, design history and gender studies by Judy Attfield; the theory on relational aesthetics developed by Nicholas Bourriaud and the thinking of Jacques Rancière, specially his notion of dissent as form of political subjectivity that can create new modes of sensing. In order to test its arguments the paper establishes two scenarios, where negotiations between reality and fiction take place: the home and the museum. On the one hand, representative examples of critical design are examined and put in dialogue with the theoretical positions. On the other hand, the paper examines the transformations that happen in the museum's space, when displaying critical design becomes a kind of rehearsal for alternative ways of living. Two exhibitions were analysed: Wouldn't it be nice... Wishful Thinking in Art and Design (Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, 2008) and Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft (V&A, London, 2008). The final part of the paper discusses how such positions in design play a critical role in society, by setting up micro-situations of dissent (disagreement), and in doing so they generate new forms of sensing and making sense in contemporary living. Conclusions will point at the potential of these design fictions (understood as projections) and frictions (considered as irritations) in order to re-fabulate the commonplace.
The ‘‘Designed’’ Israeli Interior, 1960–1977: Shaping Identity
Journal of Interior Design 38(3), 21–36, 2013
The concept of a ‘‘home’’ had played an important role during the early decades of Israel’s establishment as a home for all the Jewish people. This study examines the ‘‘designed’’ home and its material culture during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on aesthetic choices, approaches, and practices, which came to highlight the home’s role as a theater for staging, creating, and mirroring identities, or a laboratory for national boundaries. It seeks to identify the conceptualization of the domestic space during fundamental decades in the history of Israel.