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- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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City State Dubai, a text-image essay : Society of the And
- 2012
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Society of The And : Text-image photo researchWith the traveloque of images in the photobook the Society of the And the viewer is challenged to carry out a montage. A dialogue full of ambiguities, contradictions and positions should set itself into presence. While the viewer is invited to look to the facts, I hope s/he start to see beyond the stereotypical, beyond the world of stupifying banality, routine and mechanical reproduction. The format of the images is chosen not only that you decode, that you decipher what you "read" (as in the television news), no, you are also invited to see the free play, the unfinished pieces, the juxtapositions, gaps and openings within the Society of the And. The challenge is to extract a genuine image from the Society of the And, free the visual from any prior program, or fixed gaze (theatricality), to release ourselves from the suffocation of the cliché.A new spectre is haunting the world – the spectre of And. It is the spectre of urbanity, the one of the multitude that haunts society. All the cultural, technological, economical and intellectual powers in the world – both on the left and the right – have embraced this spectre. Formerly the dominant forces were separation and specialisation, the struggle for clarity and the reduction of the world to calculable proportions; now we talk about One World based on simultaneity, mobility, migration, fluidity, multiplicity, reflexivity, individualism, risk, urban warfare, uncertainty, chaos theory, hybridization, diaspora, the state of exception, schizophrenia, privitization, heterotopia, immersion, the space of flows, the culture of sprawl, cyborgs and so on. The Either-Or world in which we lived and acted became increasingly an illusion. Our modernity no longer develops mainly in instrumental, rational and linear terms; instead it takes its direction from the rules of side-effects. In a certain sense Modernity might be considered more ideological while the Society of the And (2nd Modernity) is more pragmaticThe above mentioned fieldwork of text-images on Dubai, photographing the current conditions of globalization, is undertaking parallel to an inroductionary article on The Society of the And, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas, Architecture in Effect.
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| 2. |
- Ozmin, Janek, 1975-, et al.
(författare)
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The Extraordinary Life of Elements Review Exhibition, UMA School of Architecture, October November 2014 : UMA Research Group Review of the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture: Elements of Architecture.
- 2014
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The Extraordinary Life of Elements Review Exhibition Editor Professor Roemer van Toorn, Professor Jüri Soolep, Sepideh Karami, Katja Hogenboom, Hannes Frykholm and Janek Ozmin, UMA School of Architecture, October 2014 consists of six separate reviews collated into a single exhibition. The content was captured on site at the Biennale including record conversations by the review group, interviews with Biennale exhibition contributors, collected media, photographs, sound recordings and videos by the authors. The collated work formed a pluralist, dialogical platform from which the Biennale Exhibition can be viewed. Alongside the printed review panels and video installations, a round table format was used to present various printed media, Biennale exhibition catalogues, and media from participating country pavilions and maps. This table then formed the basis for a debate on the Venice Biennale Exhibition by participating researchers. The Exhibition was mounted in Umeå School of Architecture and formed part of the Arts Campus Open House Research Days November 2014.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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The Cruel Architecture of Apartheid, Israel. Text-Images essay : Society of the And
- 2013
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Society of the And: Text-Image researchIn the Society of the And life can be characterised by a complexity that tends to become ever more chaotic. In one way or another conflicts and liberating experiments emerge that cut a path beyond all Either-Or polarities. The near and the far intertweave; the local and global blend and impact each other. Everything is infused with, and dependent on everything else; what counts isn’t two or three or however many, it is the conjunction And. The global, diffuse and formless character of the And rocks not only all relations, it rocks all kinds of earlier identities based on the verb “to be”. The And is not simply a collection of elements but a sytem of complex relations in space ochestrated by different time rhythems. The relationships between the various elements may consist of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, cultural differences, philosophical, moral and economic propositions, and so on. With time of communication imploding and shrinking to the no-size of the instant, space and spatial markers cease to matter, at least for those whose actions can move with the speed of the electronic message. We live apparently in a fragmented world of collages of images, signs, imaginations, functions, and activities with myriad ways of connections and intensities that coexist with each other. While we complain about the loss of dominant form and the abundance of junkspace, we enjoy the advantages of being more and more mobile. Efficient and comfortable spaces of interconnection interweave paradoxically with the worlds of exclusions and disconnection within the same fabric. If there is coherence and integration within the Society of the And, it comes from the circulation of power within the technological infrastructure, of interlocking, interdependent agencies, practices and knowledge on a global scale. One thing is for sure the binaries oppositions that defined Modern conflict have been blurred. The dialectic logic, which helped Modernism to navigate in the world; of objectivity versus subjectivity, of the near versus the far, of fact versus value, of the city versus the countryside ensured that we could not understand reality as being both real And virtual, human And non-human, utopian And dystopian, local And global, heterogenious And homogenious. The new paradigm of power in the Society of the And rules through differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivies. The heterogeneous nature of the And, and its effects are not necessarily predictable, that means that a wide range of both positive and negative outcomes can be generated through development without attributing these to a metanarrative, or requiring that we solely see imposition at play. At the same time, though, such ensembles operate to achieve overall effects thereby serving a dominant strategic function within our corporate global world. The paradigm of difference, fluidity and hybridity within The Society of the And – so much celebrated by contemporary advocates of emancipation –, is today very much part of the colonization strategies of corporate globalism too. Although the urban, capitalist, and modern everyday is pushing towards increased homogeneity in daily life, the irreconcilable disjunctions born in the And full of anachronistic interstices still make it impossible to think of modernization as only negative. Nothing is never fully coherent in the Society of the And: its cultures are always already partial and full of hybrid formations. Michel de Certeau’s work confirmed the impossibility of a full colonization of everyday life by late capitalism and stressed that potential alternatives are always available, since individuals and institutions arrange resources and choose methods through particular creative arrangements. Instead of searching for a position outside the Society of the And it is better to enter the terrain of the And and confront its homegenizing and heterogenizing flows in all its global complexity.The above mentioned fieldwork of text-images in israel, photographing the current conditions of globalization, is undertaking parallel to an introductionary article on The Society of the And, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas, Architecture in Effect.
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| 5. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Zabbaleen Community, Monqattam Village, Cairo, Egypt. text-Image essay : Society of the And
- 2012
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Annan publikation (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- The Arabic Multitude - A spectre is roaming the Middle Eastt. The spectre of the multitude.The beauty of the historical moment - th epeople in Egypt and elsewhere revolutionzing against the status quo - is that it has no leadership. It might also prove its fatal weakness, but that does not contradict its beauty and importance. It was the people rising up against the tyranny and the authoritarian governments. Of course youngsters and schooled people – doctors, engineers, etc. took the lead, but from the beginning in Tunisia it was the multitude at work. It is a revolution that stands for a series of social demands about work and life, not only to end dependency and poverty but to give power and autonomy to an intelligent, highly capable population, and not religion; as neo-conservatism want us to believe.In this phase of late-capitalism the whole metropolis becomes the arena of production and resistance. It is a system that is bio-political, with the whole of life as politics. New practices have to be developed in this bio-political context of what I call the Society of the And.Our task is to investigate the organizational framework of antagonistic subjectivities that arise from below, based on the indignation expressed by subjects in the face of unfreedoms, exploitation and expropriation. And there exists a communality of work characterized by the immateriality, cognitive contents, networking and communication implicit in all areas of work under capitalism. This requires a radical shift in how we conceive the organization of social change (as already indicated in the opening quotes above). It is – as already stated - a horizontal network that has no single leader. The multitude is able to organize itself without a centre.The swarm intelligence, of this Arabic Revolution consists of at least two interrelated logics of the informal: one being the virtual reality our global media allows to occur through Twitter, Facebook, Skype, YouTube and other digital media. Another logic of the informal is at stake too, namely the real spatial one of the informal city: the routes, places and street where they collectively demonstrate through temporal actions and constructions, and the network of informal (and hidden of view) places where they work and live (including their global connections). These two interrelated networks of the virtual and the real make up for this new collective arising at the horizon through what we call the multitude.In the workshop and fieldresearch done in Zabbaleen we are not going to map how the multitude – through its virtual reality (both being virtual and real) of oppression and resistance – generated the Arabic revolution. That would have been a very intriguing studio, but time did not permit us to do so, but we didn't leave the multitude behind. We documented how the multitude - as rhizome, self-routing and auto-developing system operates and works on an everyday bases (every moment of the day, at home, at work, in the city, in the teahouse, the street, at its darkest -, and even at its beautiful moments, in and through its different spatial formation of domesticity, work and infrastructure. In short the question has been: What kind of human and spatial logic of the multitude makes this world of the Zabaleen society a success? What can we learn from them, and how can we help to improve their situation by creating and mobilizing new public infrastructures (parks, schools, social and spatial networks, etc.) through the studio with the students?We did not primarily document its failure. What did interest us (at most) is how the multitude at Zabaleen – through its hybrid logic of contradictions, gaps, holes, voids, limits, shadows, dirt, garbage, margins, openings, routes full of movement and interstitial spaces (including the interaction between digital (virtual) and real life) could give the architect a beginning to generate (parasitical) emancipatory interventions within the self-organizing rhizomatic fabric of Zabaleen society itself.The above mentioned fieldwork of text-images in Egypt (the city of "garbage", Zabbaleen, Cairo), photographing the current conditions of globalization, is undertaking parallel to an introductionary article on The Society of the And, funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas, Architecture in Effect.
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| 6. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Critique = Propaganda : The Role of Critics in the Netherlands
- 2005
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Annan publikation (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- A lot of critics in the field of architecture speak from above and outside lived experiences. They lose sight of their conditional nature, take no risk in speculation, and circulate as members of an administrative inquisition over the world paralyzing all practitioners what should be done tomorrow. When Lucien Goldman spoke his words in Paris during the turbulent days of 1968 he referred to what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels once said in “The German ideology” that when someone speaks, one should always ask oneself “Who is speaking and from where?” Goldman targeted people such as the philosopher Jacques Derrida and others who where stepping in the footsteps of Martin Heidegger, dealing with the world from an ivory-tower; as if life can be determined far from a consciousness determined by life itself. It is remarkable says Terry Eagleton “…that intellectual life for centuries was conducted on the tacit assumption that human beings had no genitals. Intellectuals also behaved as though men and women lacked stomachs.” Heidegger’s rather abstract concept of “Dasein” is indeed – as Emmanuel Levinas once said a “Dasein that does not eat”. In the many mediations of Dutch critics many different influences are delt with: sociology, economy, anthropology, history, philosophy, technology, art, film, music, literature, design, the city, the everyday, photography, fashion, the experience of the thing, and other fields all inform their role as mediator. And it is of no coincidence that several mediators have started as an architect, because – as Antonio Gramsci once noted – architects and other practitioners are “organic intellectuals”, they feel the obligation to organize life, they cannot permit themselves the luxury to observe the world from a quasi-neutral distance as traditional intellectuals prefer to do. Architects cannot avoid to experiment with the contemporary. Through projects they commit themselves to the present. Cannot but make their hands dirty when they transform a given reality to the better (at least that is what many hope to establish). It is these practices of experiment which mediators – from several different angles propagate. But we face a problem as well
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| 7. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Dirty Details
- 2001
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Annan publikation (refereegranskat)abstract
- The civil practice of social democracy, especially the Dutch ‘polder model’, idolizes blissful, prosperous mediocrity. People preach a humanism that is neither able nor allowed to go beyond nurturing and domesticating. ‘The humanist gets hold of the person and subjects him to his taming, training, educating regime – convinced as he is of the necessary connection between reading, sitting and calming,’ Peter Sloterdijk notes in his article ‘Rules for the Human Zoo’ (1999). Mankind has instituted a system that turns people into domesticated animals. Mankind creates a park around itself, a park that testifies to absolute beauty, consensus and order. Every hazard, every form of signal noise, every trace of roughness, ugliness or incompleteness, every hint of alienation and schizophrenia, is barred. This is contrary to the idea of a radical democracy which instead sees potential in the antagonism of the beautiful and the ugly, of the wild and the domesticated, in convention and liberation, in the one and the other, in design and non-design, in good and evil, and in place and non–place.
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| 8. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Duelling in Skin : Interview with Wiel Arets
- 2009
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Roemer van Toorn The artist and filmmaker Wim T. Schippers once went over the body of a Parisian taxi with a hammer, as an art object, and then spray-painted it. He wanted to undermine the car as a status symbol and still leave it as a car. Wouldn’t your Porsche improve if you dented it all over and then painted it again?Wiel Arets I don’t like that kind of thing. For me everything has to have a reason which emerges from the making or use. I would never use a bent form because I like arched forms. The arched form I use has a reason within the logic of the use or the situation.RvT In your buildings the structure and the arrangement of the space is not only crystal clear but also emphatically present. While in the films of Lars von Trier and Jean-Luc Godard, which you admire so much, one is not made aware of the order and the structure at all. Is less more?WA The big difference between architecture and film is that in film you remain passive while you are psychologically open to all kinds of filmic experiences. When you’re moving through a building you’re like a cameraman. The viewer walks through the building and sees things by manipulating the route. That’s why the route is so important to me. The construction appears simple, but I can only do that because I take certain measures which you don’t immediately realise. The route in the building is, in principle, the route that in a film is the cameraman’s route. Thus you get a complexity which also emerges in the work of the two filmmakers you mentioned. What I find fascinating is that both of these directors often have different scenes interacting with each other in very different ways. That is something you experience constantly in architecture as a viewer. Most films don’t stand out because they tell a story which is unusual, but because they treat the age-old story of Joseph and Mary, as Jean-Luc Godard does in the film Je vous salue Marie. I think this is also true of my work. After the second, third reading it becomes more and more interesting. I don’t seek complexity of form, I seek complexity of content. I seek polyphony of content because it allows a multiple reading.RvT Almost all films take place within the commonplace. The lived experience in an everyday space is central. Is it your intention to address yourself to the commonplace in your architecture, as many artists and architects now do?WA For me architecture is not an commonplace affair. When I go to a bakery, I choose a specific bakery. I don’t think the baker I choose makes a commonplace product. When I go to the bakery where I get my bread, I can smell that the man is a Titan in his field. Just the smell of the bread. I don’t have to have anything on it. I’m not interested in every baker’s, cobbler’s or artist’s work. I make very specific choices. The problem with a word like ‘commonplace’ is that it suggests a kind of dumming down of our culture. We live in a society where you have to be commonplace, you have to do things everybody understands. If you don’t get good ratings you don’t score, you don’t get funding.I do feel we should allow that commonplace to exist. I’m a person who’s very absorbed in life, because I feel we can learn from it. The commonplace has extremes which fascinate me, inspire me. The commonplace is routine, but also has astonishing extremes. I like going to a bar in Maastricht, which has existed for as long as anyone can remember. I also go to events which attract large audiences. Of course I took my children to Disneyland. Though I have to admit I left with a migraine.
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| 9. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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Fresh Conservatism and Beyond : [Voorbij het fris conservatisme. Tweede moderniteit]
- 1997
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Annan publikation (refereegranskat)abstract
- The superpresent as commitment. As the sociologists Lash and Urry explain in Economies of Sign and Space, the identity of space and place is undergoing radical change due to the pressure of a new sort of modernity. Social structures are in decline and are being replaced by a structure of flows, i.e., a set of information and communication structures. Social inequality and social class are no longer determined by one’s position not in the mode of production but in the mode of information.We can no longer explain this new modernity in terms of the contradictions produced by industrial society between feudalism and the nineteenth century. A new modernity is now penetrating our everyday lives with the utmost discretion, by way of normality. This time however, there are no political explosions or revolutions. This supermodern world – or rather, this second modernity – of everyday material and immaterial objects is experienced and consumed by all of us, while at the same time it virtually always escapes our vigilance, no matter how determined. We need to learn to look closely in order both to escape the fresh hypnosis of this supermodernity and to be able to assess at their true value the different qualities of this second modernity that lie concealed under the skin of society. New concepts, instruments and forms need to be devised if we are to operate within this second modernity in a fashion that is active and not consumerist. In short, we long for new fantasies and experiments.This search for, and creation of, a new space for experiment is a fascinating quest, but there is also a danger lurking in it. I call this danger Fresh Conservatism. This is because the second modernity, while it enables us to find new possibilities – an immanent radical space and aesthetics2) – is also accompanied by an excess of political blindness. This illiteracy is generated by a middle class without perspectives. A striking feature is that this middle class, more than any before it, is colonizing the world. For a long time now it has been at home in our worldwide second modernity, while ordinary citizens remain confined to their national borders. But alongside the silent majorities, there are large numbers of men and women who are taking on an increasingly critical and reflexive distance with reference to the institutions of the new information society. This growing reflexivity is part and parcel of a radical enhancement in our second modernity of individualization. Today’s world is a ‘risk society’, as Ulrich Beck calls it, where humans themselves both have created global problems and are increasingly reflexive about monitoring the outcomes and developing at least partial solutions to those problems.Contemporary life is premised upon the social organization of reflexivity, but of course it is doubtful whether that reflexivity can be organized so as to regulate and minimize the scale of those risks and depency of power.
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| 10. |
- Van Toorn, Roemer, 1960-
(författare)
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In Search of Political Ecology : Response to Lars Lerup's Megacity lecture 2005, Amsterdam
- 2009
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Annan publikation (refereegranskat)abstract
- When a natural disaster like an earthquake, tsunami, or hurricane18 strikes, our society reveals its true self. Instead of using the public funds donated after a natural disaster to help the local population, “Disaster Capitalism” takes opportunistic advantage of the event to colonise the area with tourist centres, elegant villas and hotels, such as the ones springing up from the earth swept bare by the tsunami. There are very good reasons why Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot19 ask themselves what has happened to our democracy in the 21st century. Although the number of free elections and elected governments in the world is increasing, it does not diminish the fact that the public electoral debate is engineered with precision by a strictly controlled and staged spectacle. The majority of the population plays a passive, quiet, apathetic role, and can only respond based on the signals dished out to them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is actually shaped in private by the interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent the interests of the free market and big business. The real question is where the world of politics stands. Are we sliding down farther toward a post-democratic model as analysed by Lars Lerup in “Toxic ecology”? Is politics disappearing under post-democratic conditions in the air-conditioned business lobbies of the privileged elites in Houston, or is there a chance of a synergy between nature and culture that makes the idea of a democratic city not only possible but feasible?
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