Example one
The third edition of Arte / Cidade,(1) a project of urban interventions, brought together artists and architects from
all over the world in São Paulo under the curatorship of
Nelson Brissac Peixoto in 2002.
This edition was dedicated to Zona Leste, a huge
urban area with high rates of poverty and crime located
on the east bank of the Tamanduateí River. Twenty-five
works investigated the memory, the present and the
future of this area of the city proactively, exploring strategies that could offer a better understanding of the metropolitan tensions that beset it.
The architects who participated included classic
names of the urban conflict theme (Muntadas, Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Vito Acconci and Dias & Riedweg) and many
others. Some of the most active groups of architects of
the time were invited, including Schie 2.0 and Urban
Fabric, Atelier Van Lieshout and the Casa Blindada
group. However, the proposal that achieved the greatest
public impact was that of Rem Koolhaas for the São Vito
building, a skyscraper over 100 metres high with 624
apartments that was built in 1959 by Aron Kogan.
Popularly called Treme-Treme (tremble-tremble),
São Vito began a slow process of degradation in the late 1980s. Almost twenty years later, the building was no
longer being maintained and many of the dwellings were
used for drug dealing and prostitution.
After analysing the living conditions of its tenants
and the morphological characteristics of the building,
Koolhaas proposed a project that attempted to foster
community ties and promote the reinsertion of São Vito
in its immediate urban environment. To do this, Koolhaas proposed to build a new, modern lift that would energize the skyscraper from the private to the public space,
from the bottom to the top and from the inside out.(2)
However, the inhabitants paralysed Koolhaas’s intervention, wielding their right to remain invisible and
isolated, undoubtedly as a means to conserve the relative invulnerability that they would have lost. Finally, in
2004, the São Paulo city council decided to expropriate
this “vertical favela” and, despite strong public opposition, São Vito was demolished in 2011.
What conclusions can we draw from this case
study? In his book Culturas híbridas,(3) Néstor García
Canclini points out an important issue to remember
here: all hybridizations involve a complex process full
of shocks that eludes the homogeneous and can in no
way be understood as definitive. Furthermore, hybrids
are fragile and hybridization does not record the places
where a culture, a language or a series of community
expressions intermingle, but the places where that culture, language or community expression resists the attempt at hybridization and blocks all contact with the
outside world.
In some way, this gaze into the inner workings of
hybridization—that is, into its conflicts rather than its
successes, into the interrupted processes rather than
their solutions—allows us to better understand the example of Rem Koolhaas in São Vito, where he effectively
proposed an interface that favoured mixing, drawing hypothetical transfers between the personal and the collective. However, faced with this invitation to hybridize,
the residents of the skyscraper responded with a belligerent refusal. This should not be understood only as a
rejection of Koolhaas’s proposal, but as a radical proof
of Canclini’s theses, according to which the history of
hybridization is, above all, the memory of that which
struggles to remain within its own autarchy.
Koolhaas’s scheme for Arte / Cidade 2002 does not
seem so eloquent because it shows that reality exceeds
any attempt to manage it. On the contrary, it is conceivable that the lift project for São Vito brings out a greater
issue, which could be formulated as the following question: How do you work with the unexpected hostility,
with the intransigence of a field of study that refuses any
attempt to be analysed?
Perhaps the main difficulty we find when entering
this problematic situation is not so much that of understanding its scope or finding an angle from which
to approach it, but of how we interfere within that
situation, how we smooth out the rough outsides and
insides of the antagonism. Indeed, there are not two
separate political spheres: one of analysis and one of
friction. Hence, any tension that leads to the expression of hostility is the same argument, the theme and
landscape of every critical project, rather than a concluding episode.
Resignifying the disagreement, resituating the disagreement and, finally, redirecting what fails to achieve
consensus is a fairly common temptation in the face
of dissent. If there is something that unites the above
mechanisms, it is their preference to deal with static images of the conflict, postcards that favour not only cultural exoticism but also a certain vaguely humanistic,
hygienic idea of what any intervention within collective
frictions involves.
Going back to the example of São Vito, it should be
remembered that perhaps one of the main “misunderstandings” that affected the proposal was that it disregarded the fictional nature of any interference in the vital
space of the city. Koolhaas certainly overcame the ethnographic problem of excessive identification, but he
undoubtedly made a “technological” error of verisimilitude, offering a hostile and alienating machinery that
was too productive for those who had to use it.
For this reason, let’s say that the fiction of the project was out of tempo with the residents of São Vito, and
the interests of the two parties were out of balance. This
is what is called a continuity error in the cinema, and
we could well argue that many of the “rescue” actions
carried out in the public sphere and in the collective
symbolic heritage suffer from this same error, that is,
they become failures of urban continuity.
Example two
The Ponte City residential skyscraper located in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg is a 173-metrehigh, 54-story cylindrical tower built by Mannie Feldman, Manfred Hermer and Rodney Grosskopf in 1975.
After its construction, it underwent a process of degradation similar to that of São Vito, culminating after the
end of apartheid in the mid-1990s, when a large number
of gangs moved in, making it an icon of urban deterioration and crime.
In 2007 David Selvan and Nour Addine Ayyoub,
developers of the Ayyoub Company, bought the building and promoted a lavish media investment campaign
for what they called “New Ponte”. Their goal was to
target a new rising middle class—young black professionals and business people from across the African
continent who were fascinated by the typical Manhattan lifestyle. Selvan and Ayyoub were very popular brokers in Johannesburg. They even intervened in the new
architectural scheme, thematically redesigning some
floors on the basis of fatuous concepts such as “Future
Slick”, “Old Money” and “Glam Rock”.
In 2008, with the fall of Lehmann Brothers and the
ensuing global economic crisis, the Ayyoub Company
went bankrupt. It therefore abandoned the rehabilitation proposal, leaving behind a new layer of ruins. The
signs advertising “New Ponte” that are still visible offer a
perfect metaphor for the ambitions and disasters of the
contemporary financial system.
It should be noted, however, that unlike the São
Vito building, Ponte City has kept its undeniable photogenic qualities more or less intact. A gigantic circular advertisement surrounds the top floors, which are
owned by the mobile telephone company Vodacom, a
leader in South Africa. Proof of the building’s attraction
is that in 2007 the well-known film-maker Danny Boyle
announced that he would direct a thriller inside it. Also,
the final sequences of the science fiction film District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter
Jackson, which premiered a year before the 2010 FIFA
World Cup, is set in the impressive hollow interior of
Ponte City. No digital retouching was needed to give it
the look of a gothic futuristic ruin.
Finally, the South African photographer Michael
Subotzky, helped by the British artist Patrick Waterhouse, won the Discovery Award of the photography
festival Rencontres d’Arles 2011 with a project entitled
Ponte City. In this work, an installation of light boxes included countless images of the building and its inhabitants, shown as an object mosaic.(4)
The photographs by Subotzky are reminiscent of the
great panoptic images of Andreas Gursky, only here the
individuals are portrayed in isolation, next to collections
of windows, doors, bars or televisions. They look like the
result of an endless channel-hopping session.
All the images have a sophisticated technical drama that makes them almost unreal. In the text that
accompanies the project, the photographer focuses on
the dreams of the inhabitants of Ponte City, a kind of
romantic melancholy that has taken over the building. However, Subotzky’s words also suggest a feigned
consternation, a vaguely paternalistic compassion that
Susan Sontag defined as attraction to the pain of others.
However, we do not need to judge the moral intentions of this text on ruin, misery and the effects of economic capitalism, because the simple montage on which
it is based is even more paradoxical.
Here we can consider (again, of course) Walter Benjamin’s idea that a photograph is fundamentally what happens outside the frame and that, therefore, in order
to tell the story of images, we must access the optical unconsciousness, which cannot be achieved through a story
or chronicle, but rather through an interpretive montage.
In the same vein, referring to the famous four negatives of Auschwitz, Georges Didi-Huberman said that
they are images despite all,(5) that is, photographs whose
particular technical conditions or formalistic difficulties
cannot be eliminated without manipulating them towards some unexpected ideological horizon.
Didi-Huberman thus seems to vindicate just the
opposite of the Ponte City photographs: a restitution of
the testimonial value of photography based on its involuntary formal rhetoric. On the other hand, Subotzky’s
colourful montages use that same technological intentionality not only to cause sensation but, in some way, to
enter the existence of the residents as if through a protected tunnel, avoiding the problems that they seem to
be embody, just like that cylindrical void inside Ponte
City. And yet (despite all), they fail to concretize this existence, to offer a full representation of it.
The tendency to essentialize social conflicts, transforming them into conciliatory slogans, has generated
a good number of iconographies and ecstatic discourses
that observe antagonism with veneration or iconoclasm.
Indeed, some artists such as Subotzky appear to us as
captive, unemancipated spectators, as pious visitors to
their own teachings.
As Jacques Rancière points out, it could be argued
that despite the obvious differences, the São Vito and
Ponte City projects reproduce an unfortunate common
misunderstanding in many interventions with a political dimension: that art and architecture can leave their
disciplinary perimeters, visit and mingle with conflict
and then return to the ghetto where they normally live
to observe the effects of their interaction.
As the popular 1968 slogan proclaimed, “Tout est
politique”: you cannot dip in and out of politics; you have
to live within it.
Example three
Precisely this position is narrated by the Polish poet
Wisława Szymborska in one of her most exceptional
works, Children of the Age: “We are children of our age, /
it’s a political age. All day long, all through the night, /
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs— / are political affairs.”.
Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría mention this
poem in an interview about their project David’s Tower,
which is our third example.(6)
This proposal includes texts, exhibitions, drawings,
sculptures, workshops and lines of research. This broad
activity shows the extent to which David’s Tower is the
antithesis of postmodern interventions such as those of
São Vito and Ponte City, despite dealing with similar urban problems and even buildings with similar connotations and features.
From the outset, we could say that the work by
Bonadies and Olavarría does not reject what Viktor
Shklovsky called “estrangement”, that is, an inclination
to deactivate the ideological and representative automatisms that invariably lead to stereotypes. Hence, according to Bonadies and Olavarría, Venezuelan artists
operate within “a story that violates the limits between
fiction and reality and between such basic meanings
as protection-helplessness, security-insecurity, curtain
wall, window-emptiness”. This means working inside a
territory with fluctuating perimeters, which refuses to be
approached from any assumed exemplariness.
David ’s Tower thus testifies that there is a middle way between paternalistic intervention and the exoticism with which collective problems are sometimes
viewed, between the heroic rescue of an authenticity
that is about to be lost and the various frivolously anthropological safaris.
The approach of Bonadies and Olavarría to the living
conditions of the Tower, to the power structures and the
vertical morphology of the building, should in no way be
seen as the search for a strategic site from which to visually exploit the skyscraper. Rather, it should be seen as
an exercise in compilation of all the political densities, all
the heavy elements that come together in it. This is precisely what we were referring to when we mentioned estrangement, that Brechtian distancing that David’s Tower seems to revisit as if it were a working methodology,
a reflective rather than precautionary way of collecting
evidence, information, testimonies and disagreements in
order to overcome the most simplistic contingencies and
get to the root of the present situation.
The architects say that “is an icon that represents
the last 30 years of Venezuela: from the modernizing
promise from capital to the revolutionary promise from
the State”. By pointing out the building’s resistance to
being only the heritage of some people or others, in the propensity to claim it as success or failure, Bonadies and
Olavarría avoid a set of fissures, a collection of interludes
that are an invitation to translate the current difficulties
of the building through the devices of art. The unfinished
building promoted by David Brillenbourg, occupied until 2014 by the cooperative Caciques de Venezuela, also
reminds us how antagonistic community practices can
bring out points of friction, propositional horizons that
also lead to the most insurmountable paradoxes.
One of the main tasks of art is to promote new patterns for the thinkable, new forms of political imagination that destroy totalitarian agreements, that allow the
complexities of life and reality to be given an expressive
and developmental space. But what tools can artists use
to prevent these tensions from remaining in the vague
territory of critical representation?
Maurice Blanchot wrote that a community can
only survive and believe in itself when it administers
the languages that name it, when it becomes unavowable.(7) On the other hand, Jean-Luc Nancy said that it
is in the absence of heritage, in disavowal, that communities are strengthened, because they have nothing to venerate or protect beyond their own ties, their
own being-in-common. However, perhaps both philosophers were only trying to give a suitable name to
everything that comes out when we are together within
the same violence, when we are in a situation of stress.
David’s Tower is a project that invites us to think
how far art should listen to the fictions that narrate the
world in conflict to us uncontrollably and chaotically. It introduces the idea that artistic practices perhaps need
to lose their preventive or elegant distance, take a step
forward to “respond” to the demands of these stories in
which we are confronted with distorted images, contradictory words. Without this will to respond, the antagonism leads to a kind of surfing through the quagmire
of others, a quick way to isolate them in the numerous
suburbs of morality, in order to watch how they develop
there, accepting that they will never continue their rebellion and, above all, that they will never come to ask
us for answers, accountability.
However, as Bonadies and Olavarría have persistently stated, the main danger of this false agency regarding the dispute is a distorting homage and
its consequent populism. This is what the geographer
Francesc Muñoz called “urbanization”, a term that refers to how the heroic and dramatic representations of
some artists result in the city becoming an uncritical
and pompous stage setting with the props preferred by
unscrupulous politicians and urban planners.
Finally, with regard to David’s Tower, we must recall
the film by Agnès Varda entitled Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, which traces an intimate ideological story of the
savage capitalist economy of abundance and precariousness, delving into the lives of a series of individuals who
glean the food that others throw away.
The film ends very poetically when employees in
the Paul-Dini municipal museum in Villefranche-surSâone discover a painting by Edmond Hédouin called
Glaneuses à Chambaudoin (1857) and take it out into the
museum’s courtyard. This canvas portrays a very strange
scene of a group of gleaners running with their bundles
of wheat on their heads before a storm. By chance, when the painting is shown to the camera, gusts of wind hit
its surface as if they had come from the depths of the
canvas to goad the three women gathered there. Unlike
Jean-François Millet’s famous canvas on the same subject, in which the gleaners work conscientiously on the
harvest, Hédouin’s young women seem to emancipate
themselves from their task, helping each other and even
laughing as they are sprayed. by the first drops of rain.
Thus, against the moralistic representation of individual
effort and alienating work, we see the sudden solidarity
aroused in the community, a feeling of abandoning the
distribution of assigned roles and social hierarchies.
The always problematic and never homogeneous
journey from a bucolic scene to that of a group of women organizing themselves differently, from a reassuring
postcard to a document that records a process of disorder, is the place that seems to be occupied by David’s
Tower. Bonadies and Olavarría also glean the contradictions and fissures of a situation full of opacity, a proposal
that prefers to look at where the storm is coming from
and how strongly it will hit those who are in the open,
instead of recording how they will pose before the delicate hand of the artist, before the sometimes cynical eye
of the camera.
Valentín Roma
1 See http://www.pucsp.br/artecidade/indexp.htm Arte / Cidade held three events
based on the following themes: “Cidade sem janelas” and “A cidade e seus fluxos”
(1994); “A cidade e suas histórias” (1997); and “Zona Leste” (2002).).
2 http://www.pucsp.br/artecidade/novo/koolhaas.htm
3 Néstor García Canclini: Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la
modernidad, Paidós, Barcelona 2001
4
See http://www.subotzkystudio.com/ponte-city-dwt/
5
George Didi-Huberman: Images malgré tout, Minuit, París 2003 [Imágenes
pese a todo, Paidós, Barcelona 2004]
6 See http://latorrededavid.blogspot.com.es/
7 Maurice Blanchot: La communauté inavouable, Minuit, París 1984 [La comunidad inconfesable, Arena, Madrid 2002]
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