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W5379
19.10.2012
The naturalness of the artificial - Ana Pissarra
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  • The naturalness of the artificial, Ana Pissarra This work explores associations between House and Domestic fantasy, always within a logic of ‘integration’. Thought games of association, the word House may bring about in us resonances that take the ...

    The naturalness of the artificial, Ana Pissarra

    This work explores associations between House and Domestic fantasy, always within a logic of ‘integration’. Thought games of association, the word House may bring about in us resonances that take the shape of images. The image is the product of a memory process that can create strong emotional reactions. How does one set up the experience of the taste in our memory? An installation made up of a real scale chocolate house in Africa (The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe). notes: In the city today, whatever has no use has no place. Utopian social models, still the dominant order for city planning, will not tolerate any waste. In the face of the adverse forces of nature, the House has perhaps been the response that lies furthest from man’s understanding. In times of war, natural catastrophe, or global economic collapse, the possibility of the house as an essencial asset, at times the last redoubt of those who have nothing else, is systematically called into questions. The House, in the various forms that it adopts, has always reflected geographical, culture, and anthropologigal peculiarities which remain even in the age of globalization and the instantaneous flow of information on a planetary scale. José Mateus, chairman of the Lisbon architecture triennale, 2010. In October 2007, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury called the bursting housing bubble "the most significant risk to our economy. The immediate cause or trigger of the crisis for the European sovereign-­‐debt crisis. The responses put forward by modern architecture, considered through the transition from the artisanal method to industrialisation and the prophecy of a new way of living, are currently much in debate. José Berardo, honorary president of the fundação Coleção Berardo. In 2007 Biennale di Venezia, Ângela Ferreira shows Maison Tropicale. Ângela Ferreiras Maison Tropicale reflects on colonial history and its contemporary, post-­‐ and neo-­‐colonial resonances. Amidst the territorial reorganisation undertaken by the colonial powers in Africa after World War II and following a public tender process, the French Overseas Ministry, through collaboration with the French designer Jean Prouvé, saw the possibility to further develop modernist ideas of conceiving a series of aesthetically sophisticated homes, that could be mass-­‐produced and that would give people greater access to well-­‐designed, high quality architecture based on prefabricated aluminium modules. Prouvés ideas never took hold in Europe, but the possibility to install a large number of his houses in the African colonies led to the development of his Tropical House. Of the thousands of units originally envisaged, only three prototypes ultimately left Prouvés workshop. In 1949, the first Tropical House was transported by plane to Niger and installed in the capital, Niamey. Two other houses were transported to the Congo and installed in Brazzaville in 1951. With the rediscovery of Prouvés work in the 1990s, the houses also incited new interest and became part of a process of fetishisation of Prouvés productions by the design world. 1. 2. The three Tropical Houses were dismantled and transported back to France where they were restored and subsequently presented there and in the United States, in a new context. This is what we know about Prouvés Tropical House, and it is at this point that the story of Ângela Ferreiras Maison Tropicale begins. The installation at the Portuguese Pavilion in Venice presents us with the displacement of these houses, not located in France, the United States, Niger or the Congo, transforming them into containers of history, in transit between the worlds of the colonisers and the colonised, the de-­‐colonised and post-­‐ modern worlds with their realities of post-­‐ and/or neo-­‐colonialism. Ângela Ferreira recreates the places where Prouvés houses were originally installed, highlighting their absence and the traces left behind, evoking the structures themselves through the sculptural objects produced by the artists modular form of architecture resulting from the accumulation of objects in a claustrophobic space and remaining permanently adrift. Between 1974 and 1976, Portugal lived trough a particularly turbulent stage in its recent history. In the period following the April Revolution of 1974, in an attempt to respond to the changes which the urban network had been suffering since the 1960s (as consequence of the Colonial War, migration towards the cities, and the progressive transformation of the productive sector due to the industrialization of a rural country), which had given rise to the first wave of shanty towns on the out-­‐skirts of Lisbon and Oporto, a governmental decree created the Local Mobile Support Service (SAAL). In this respect, José Bandeirinha’s essay, which emphasizes the question of distancing (taken from Brecht) and its importance in providing a contrast to the Lacanian notion appropriated by Homi Bahba’s Mimicry, opens the field to the necessary discussion between the social values of architecture, its value as architecture, and the need to reposition the ethical question of architecture polices.This question seems to be particularly significant if it is approached from the point of view of a country that, in many aspects, has passed from a pre-­‐modern to a postmodern condition, or which has found its ruralism replaced by emigration and, very quickly, by the immigration that is an inevitable consequence of a world in transition. Delfim Sardo in Lisbon arquitecture Triennale 2010. Cadbury has a history of struggling between ethics and hard-­‐nosed business practice, and parallels can be drawn between why they are finally making a shift now towards Fairtrade, and their original move to sourcing cocoa from Ghana in the early 20th century. The truth is, the company has shown a tendency to drag its heels when making difficult ethical decisions, only jumping when it makes sound financial sense to do so. Back in the early 20th century the issue was slavery. Despite financing anti-­‐slavery propaganda and denouncing ongoing issues such as the slave labour practices in the gold and diamond mining in Rhodesia and South Africa in their family owned newspapers, the Cadbury family hypocritically turned a blind eye to the fact that the majority of their cocoa supply came from the Portuguese colonies of São Tomé and Príncipe and was farmed using slave labour imported primarily from Angola. It took them almost a decade to accept that this was indeed the case, insisting that reports were false or grossly exaggerated, and burying their own commissioned report which was actually more damning than anything previously written on the subject. A high profile defamation action brought by the Cadbury family revealed that the shift could have taken place earlier, although according to one of their main buyers, it would have been “difficult” and “awkward” and would necessitate in a payment of premium, something the Cadburys were not prepared to countenance. Instead, they waited until they were able to establish that Ghana would be a viable source of cocoa immediately and going forward. When this was confirmed – which was incidentally at a time when they were being constantly being attacked in the press for their hypocrisy – they made the break from their Portuguese suppliers and finally boycotted slave labour cocoa. 17th August 2009, Trading visions, ‘Fairtrade Cadbury: Altruism or self-­interest?’ São Tomé and Príncipe, is a Portuguese-­‐speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe were uninhabited before the arrival of the Portuguese sometime around 1470. Portuguese navigators explored the islands and decided that they would be good locations for bases to trade with the mainland. Attracting settlers proved difficult, however, and most of the 3. earliest inhabitants were "undesirables" sent from Portugal, mostly jews. In time these settlers found the volcanic soil of the region suitable for agriculture, especially the growing of sugar. The cultivation of sugar was a labour-­‐intensive process and the Portuguese began to import large numbers of slaves from the mainland. Sugar cultivation thus declined over the next 100 years, and by the mid-­‐17th century, the economy of São Tomé had changed. In the early 19th century, two new cash crops, coffee and cocoa, were introduced. The rich volcanic soils proved well suited to the new cash crop industry, and soon extensive plantations (known as "roças"), owned by Portuguese companies or absentee landlords, occupied almost all of the good farmland. By 1908, São Tomé had become the world's largest producer of cocoa, which remains the country's most important crop. As early as the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, African peoples were persuaded to inhabit ‘typical’ dwellings on the exposition site. They agreed because they were promised a better life after the world’s fair finished. Often tehy died from the cold and from diseases whose names they did not know. Survivors were placed in the zoo, permanently on display. Judith Barry, negociations in the contact zone.

    The naturalness of the artificial, Ana Pissarra This work explores associations between House and Domestic fantasy, always within a logic of ‘integration’. Thought games of association, the word House may bring about in us resonances that take the ...

    The naturalness of the artificial, Ana Pissarra

    This work explores associations between House and Domestic fantasy, always within a logic of ‘integration’. Thought games of association, the word House may bring about in us resonances that take the shape of images. The image is the product of a memory process that can create strong emotional reactions. How does one set up the experience of the taste in our memory? An installation made up of a real scale chocolate house in Africa (The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe). notes: In the city today, whatever has no use has no place. Utopian social models, still the dominant order for city planning, will not tolerate any waste. In the face of the adverse forces of nature, the House has perhaps been the response that lies furthest from man’s understanding. In times of war, natural catastrophe, or global economic collapse, the possibility of the house as an essencial asset, at times the last redoubt of those who have nothing else, is systematically called into questions. The House, in the various forms that it adopts, has always reflected geographical, culture, and anthropologigal peculiarities which remain even in the age of globalization and the instantaneous flow of information on a planetary scale. José Mateus, chairman of the Lisbon architecture triennale, 2010. In October 2007, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury called the bursting housing bubble "the most significant risk to our economy. The immediate cause or trigger of the crisis for the European sovereign-­‐debt crisis. The responses put forward by modern architecture, considered through the transition from the artisanal method to industrialisation and the prophecy of a new way of living, are currently much in debate. José Berardo, honorary president of the fundação Coleção Berardo. In 2007 Biennale di Venezia, Ângela Ferreira shows Maison Tropicale. Ângela Ferreiras Maison Tropicale reflects on colonial history and its contemporary, post-­‐ and neo-­‐colonial resonances. Amidst the territorial reorganisation undertaken by the colonial powers in Africa after World War II and following a public tender process, the French Overseas Ministry, through collaboration with the French designer Jean Prouvé, saw the possibility to further develop modernist ideas of conceiving a series of aesthetically sophisticated homes, that could be mass-­‐produced and that would give people greater access to well-­‐designed, high quality architecture based on prefabricated aluminium modules. Prouvés ideas never took hold in Europe, but the possibility to install a large number of his houses in the African colonies led to the development of his Tropical House. Of the thousands of units originally envisaged, only three prototypes ultimately left Prouvés workshop. In 1949, the first Tropical House was transported by plane to Niger and installed in the capital, Niamey. Two other houses were transported to the Congo and installed in Brazzaville in 1951. With the rediscovery of Prouvés work in the 1990s, the houses also incited new interest and became part of a process of fetishisation of Prouvés productions by the design world. 1. 2. The three Tropical Houses were dismantled and transported back to France where they were restored and subsequently presented there and in the United States, in a new context. This is what we know about Prouvés Tropical House, and it is at this point that the story of Ângela Ferreiras Maison Tropicale begins. The installation at the Portuguese Pavilion in Venice presents us with the displacement of these houses, not located in France, the United States, Niger or the Congo, transforming them into containers of history, in transit between the worlds of the colonisers and the colonised, the de-­‐colonised and post-­‐ modern worlds with their realities of post-­‐ and/or neo-­‐colonialism. Ângela Ferreira recreates the places where Prouvés houses were originally installed, highlighting their absence and the traces left behind, evoking the structures themselves through the sculptural objects produced by the artists modular form of architecture resulting from the accumulation of objects in a claustrophobic space and remaining permanently adrift. Between 1974 and 1976, Portugal lived trough a particularly turbulent stage in its recent history. In the period following the April Revolution of 1974, in an attempt to respond to the changes which the urban network had been suffering since the 1960s (as consequence of the Colonial War, migration towards the cities, and the progressive transformation of the productive sector due to the industrialization of a rural country), which had given rise to the first wave of shanty towns on the out-­‐skirts of Lisbon and Oporto, a governmental decree created the Local Mobile Support Service (SAAL). In this respect, José Bandeirinha’s essay, which emphasizes the question of distancing (taken from Brecht) and its importance in providing a contrast to the Lacanian notion appropriated by Homi Bahba’s Mimicry, opens the field to the necessary discussion between the social values of architecture, its value as architecture, and the need to reposition the ethical question of architecture polices.This question seems to be particularly significant if it is approached from the point of view of a country that, in many aspects, has passed from a pre-­‐modern to a postmodern condition, or which has found its ruralism replaced by emigration and, very quickly, by the immigration that is an inevitable consequence of a world in transition. Delfim Sardo in Lisbon arquitecture Triennale 2010. Cadbury has a history of struggling between ethics and hard-­‐nosed business practice, and parallels can be drawn between why they are finally making a shift now towards Fairtrade, and their original move to sourcing cocoa from Ghana in the early 20th century. The truth is, the company has shown a tendency to drag its heels when making difficult ethical decisions, only jumping when it makes sound financial sense to do so. Back in the early 20th century the issue was slavery. Despite financing anti-­‐slavery propaganda and denouncing ongoing issues such as the slave labour practices in the gold and diamond mining in Rhodesia and South Africa in their family owned newspapers, the Cadbury family hypocritically turned a blind eye to the fact that the majority of their cocoa supply came from the Portuguese colonies of São Tomé and Príncipe and was farmed using slave labour imported primarily from Angola. It took them almost a decade to accept that this was indeed the case, insisting that reports were false or grossly exaggerated, and burying their own commissioned report which was actually more damning than anything previously written on the subject. A high profile defamation action brought by the Cadbury family revealed that the shift could have taken place earlier, although according to one of their main buyers, it would have been “difficult” and “awkward” and would necessitate in a payment of premium, something the Cadburys were not prepared to countenance. Instead, they waited until they were able to establish that Ghana would be a viable source of cocoa immediately and going forward. When this was confirmed – which was incidentally at a time when they were being constantly being attacked in the press for their hypocrisy – they made the break from their Portuguese suppliers and finally boycotted slave labour cocoa. 17th August 2009, Trading visions, ‘Fairtrade Cadbury: Altruism or self-­interest?’ São Tomé and Príncipe, is a Portuguese-­‐speaking island nation in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western equatorial coast of Central Africa. The islands of São Tomé and Príncipe were uninhabited before the arrival of the Portuguese sometime around 1470. Portuguese navigators explored the islands and decided that they would be good locations for bases to trade with the mainland. Attracting settlers proved difficult, however, and most of the 3. earliest inhabitants were "undesirables" sent from Portugal, mostly jews. In time these settlers found the volcanic soil of the region suitable for agriculture, especially the growing of sugar. The cultivation of sugar was a labour-­‐intensive process and the Portuguese began to import large numbers of slaves from the mainland. Sugar cultivation thus declined over the next 100 years, and by the mid-­‐17th century, the economy of São Tomé had changed. In the early 19th century, two new cash crops, coffee and cocoa, were introduced. The rich volcanic soils proved well suited to the new cash crop industry, and soon extensive plantations (known as "roças"), owned by Portuguese companies or absentee landlords, occupied almost all of the good farmland. By 1908, São Tomé had become the world's largest producer of cocoa, which remains the country's most important crop. As early as the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, African peoples were persuaded to inhabit ‘typical’ dwellings on the exposition site. They agreed because they were promised a better life after the world’s fair finished. Often tehy died from the cold and from diseases whose names they did not know. Survivors were placed in the zoo, permanently on display. Judith Barry, negociations in the contact zone.