1a. Even though this topic might be too old already, I cannot avoid
thinking of the ground zero development process as the most
emblematic case study of the powerlessness of artistic and
architectural fields in the context of socio-political and economic
realities. No matter how much architecture thinking and form seemed
to have developed at the beginning of the 21st centuryŠ It had never
seemed so irrelevant and trivial in the context of an usurped public
process, the economic power of the developer and a governance without
visionŠ and ultimately under the burden of cheap metaphorsŠ
4. The challenge at this moment is to pull things apart, to
critically understand the way certain institutions operate, only then
we can propose counter procedures that can generate new models of
possibility. Traditionally, though, the notion of the avant-garde has
proposed the opposite: that the artist keeps a 'critical distance'
from the institutions in order to critique these spheres of power
from the outside. Today, what's important is what I would call a
'critical proximity,' which in fact is the opposite: it's about us
tactically entering the institutions in order to mobilize their
resources and logics of organization. It is a very different agenda,
less this sort of fake protest or rebellion.
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