[-empyre-] Thank you Menoitti and Welcome to Ana Valdes

[Renate Ferro]

iI realize that I am a couple of days late but a belated thank you to
Gabriel Menotti for shepherding the discussion on in/compatible
methods during the month of February.  It is great to have you as part
of our moderating team once again and we look forward to your
moderating many discussions in the future.

And to Ana Valdes a warm welcome once again to you.  Ana moderated a
discussion in 2006 and has agreed to host this month's discussion on
Urban Resilience.  Tim and I  attended  a Cornell conference today and
yesterday in honor on a curated show by my colleague Iftikhar Dadi
called "Lines of Control" at the Johnson Art Museum.
http://museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions/lines-of-control.html

This remarkable exhibition and conference focuses on both the
resilience and resistance of many peoples whose lands are marked by
lines of division and the new energy that springpp forth.  While Ana's
discussion this month will focus on the issues of urbanism, I think
that the broader notions of partitioning between countries like India
and Pakistan, Mexico and the US, North and South Korea, the Medicine
Line between Canada and the US and so many others pose interesting
questions within our discussion on Urban Resiliences.  Dadi and fellow
curators Hammad Nasar and Ellen Avril, with Nada Raza assisting insist
that the notion of partitions within these nations allow for
resilience in the form of create generative relationships, languages,
and identities.

We were so happy to see fellow empyrians Jolene Rickard who spoke
about "Indigenous Borders Visualized in the Americas" and Naeem
Mohaiemen who gave an artist's talk screening two  videos that he is
working on that erase the historical archive.

We look forward to this month's discussion and while sitting in on the
discussion's taking place on Cornell University's campus I kept
thinking about the resonances of the occupy movement.  A temporary
partitioned space  so to say that opens up a space where the
disenfranchised come together within an urban city situated within the
inner borders of a nation. Ana your description of where you live
between Stockholm and Montevideo interestingly describes my
observations of the Wall Street Occupy area.  Though you insist not,
this occupy is also  full of people cooking, cleaning, and sustaining
their environments.  Twitter is not so present but the human
microphones that repeat announcements or issues that its participants
might be so inclined to share with those gathered. Jolene Rickard
encouraged me to think about such partitioned spaces as the Occupy
Movement because it is ironic that these spaces of apportionment are
on land where indigenous peoples livedo.

Thanks you Ana for leading our discussion and we truly look forward to it.

Renate Ferro

On Fri, Mar 2, 2012 at 7:24 PM, Ana Valdés <agora158 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ana Valdés
> 1:01 AM (20 minutes ago)
>
> to soft_skinned_s.
> Hello fellow -empyrians! It's a honor an a pleasure to be again the
> moderator of a discussion on -empyre. I did it in December 2006, it was
> about the Crusades and the Middle East. Now, six years later, my interests
> and approach are focused on the cities, on urbanism 2.0, a kind of merging
> the work of two of my housegods, the writers Henri Pirenne and Johanes
> Huizinga mixed to Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin and Oscar Niemeyer.
>
> The description of the topic is the following:
>
> ""Urban resilience" , to try to understand the new ways and methods of
> activism and resilience performed in the urban environment. We live in a
> world where the populations tend  to desert the rural areas and gather in
> megacities. The urban tissue is made of gests, rituals, memes going viral
> and reproducing itselves.
> We are going to gather in this discussion Spanish architects and urbanists
> working in Fukushima and mapping the resistance against the nuclear,
> Uruguayan writers and philosophers working at museums and universities,
> thinking about time and space in a time of change of paradigms.
> Where is the axis where urbanists, architects, activists, writers and
> philosophers converge and interact? Since Guy Debord wrote about the city
> and the situationists saw in the city the canvas of actions and art have
> we
> been fascinated with the movements and actions generated by the city in
> itself.
>
> In the next mail I am going to introduce my guests.
>
> All the best and I hope this topic is going to rise interesting
> discussions and exciting exchanges!
>
> Ana Valdés
>
> --
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>
> mobil/cell +4670-3213370
>
>
> "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with
> your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will
> always
> long to return.
> — Leonardo da Vinci




--

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor of Art
Cornell University
Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office #420
Ithaca, NY  14853
Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
URL:  http://www.renateferro.net
      http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net

Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre

Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/