Mapping The Commons, Athens, por Hackitectura
Este miércoles 23 a las 19.30 en La Casa Invisible, Pablo de Soto de Hackitectura, nos presentó la experiencia y resultado de este proyecto en el que tambien participa José Perez de Lama aka Osfa y colabora Jaime Díez Honrado.
Escucha y descarga la conferencia desde Archive.org
The main text of reference that we are using is Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri [2009].
To some extent the idea would be to try to map on Athens the rather theoretical concepts / hypothesis presented by Hardt and Negri in the book… The issue however is in many ways new; it is still in the process of being conceptually defined… So the project is rather experimental… As Negri and Hardt write, the commons are rather invisible, because we are used to look at the world with “modern” eyes, that tend to classify it the categories of public and private. However, realities such as the Internet / WWW, or free software make the commons, at least in certain fields, quite clear and distinct… And in general, there are many spaces material and immaterial in the city and contemporary life that escape the dualistic private/public classification…
Indeed, ours seems to me like a quite intense research project. Many people are talking about commons, and some put examples of course, but as far as I know there isn’t yet a cartography project about them, especially trying to geolocalize them and relate them to urban space… Nor are there very conclusive texts… But rather multiple discussions, comments, interpretations…
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, From 1 to 8 december
A workshop by Pablo de Soto and Jose Perez de Lama, hackitectura.net
with the collaboration of Jaime Díez Honrado and suppoort by cartografiaciudadana.net
Curator: Daphne Dragona
If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants. Isaac Newton, 1676
This famous line by one of the founders of modern science calls our attention on the collective cooperative dimension in the production of knowledge and culture, indeed, one of the key elements of our contemporary network society.
[commons]
The recurrent concept of the commons ellaborates on the same idea, that is, that in nowadays world the production of wealth and social life are heavily dependent on communication, cooperation, affects and collective creativity. The commons would be, then, those milieux of shared resources, that are generated by the participation of the many and multiple, which constitute, some would say, the essential productive fabric of the 21st Century metropolis. And then, if we make this connection between commons and production, we have to think of political economy; power, rents and conflict.
[mapping]
However, due to our tradition of the private and the public, of property and individualism, the commons are still hard to see for our late 20th Century eyes. We propose, therefore, a search for the commons; a search that will take the form of a mapping process. We understand mapping, of course, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and as artists and social astivists have been using it during the last decade, as a performance that can become a reflection, a work of art, a social action.
[a new Athens?]
Athens, a global posfordist metropolis, in the middle of the economic crisis, periodically struck by social rebellions, will be the object of the mapping project. We propose the hypothesis that a new [view of the] city will come out of the process, one where the many and multiple, often struggling against the state and capital, are continously, and exuberantly, supporting and producing the commonwealth of its social life.
[tools]
The workshop will develop collaborative mapping strategies, using free software participatory wiki-mapping tools. The final production will feature as its central piece an interactive online video-cartography, complemented by secondary data bases and analogue-paper productions.
Links
http://www.emst.gr/mappingthecommons/index.html
http://cartografiaciudadana.net/athenscommons
http://mappingthecommons.wordpress.com/
http://meipi.org/mappingthecommons
