Creating a better world for nothing?

"What if we create a better world for nothing?" Cartoon by Joel Pett

"Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal" by Peter Gleick.

Goli Otok- an abandoned prison island in the Adriatic

Between the Croatian tourist islands of Rab and Krk , in the Adriatic sea lies a barren island, two by two kilometers in size, with strange ruins of prisons, bunkers and industrial sites.

Until the fall of communism Goli Otok, "the naked island" was a taboo in former Yugoslavia.

Today the island´s history is still an uncomfortable topic for many.

Austrian journalist Reinhard Grabner and camera man Franz Schwaighofer have now produced the first film about the island: "Strahota- Die Geschichte der Gefängnisinsel Goli Otok".

In 1949, the entire island was officially made into a high-security, top secret prison and labor camp run by the authorities of SFR Yugoslavia.

Goli Otok "was the private concentration camp of the Communist Party, more specifically: of Marshall Tito" says a former inmate, one of the contemporary witnesses interviewed for the film. Starting in 1948 critics not conforming to the system and political prisoners were confined to the island and subjected to forced heavy labor and tortorous abuse.

From the mid-60ies when also convicted criminals were imprisoned on the island "the prison situation normalised".

Over the course of four decades, apart from cell tracts and living quarters for the guards, the forced labour of the prisoners built a whole industrial zone, a number of factories for the production of furniture and tiles, even a pig farm that supplied the surrounding tourist islands. Former prisoners interviewed in the film tell about torture and abuse, and compare the conditions and the treatment with Guantánamo.

The island was eventually evacuated in 1988, leaving the facilities to decay.

"Strahota - Die Geschichte der Gefängnisinsel Goli Otok" premiered on May 5 2009.

A Croatian version is in the making. Alfred Pal, a former prisoner of Goli Otok plans to open an exhibition in Zagreb in July 2009.

Sources for further historic background and original photodocumentary material:

article in the Austrian newspaper derstandard.at (in German)

website about the film "Strahota- Die Geschichte der Gefängnisinsel Goli Otok

goliotok.com photodocumentation about the island

"Golit Otok- hell in tourist´s paradise" , photodocumentation about the island Goli Otok

"Die nackte Insel" a visit of Goli Otok- article in "Neue Zürcher Zeitung"

historical-political background (pdf, in German) from www.fraumuennich.de

"Goli Otok- hell in the Adriatic" book review

Communities, ecomuseums and sustainability

Ecomuseum in Rennes, France by Nantes-based architects Guinee Potin. article at designboom.
image: Stéphane Chalmeau. 


My review of a lecture at University College London by Peter Davis, author of Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place.
Link to article on UCL´s events blog.

Who decides what should be regarded as heritage? Dorina Dobnig, an MSc Sustainable Heritage student, discusses a guest lecture given by Peter Davis (Professor of Museology at the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at the University of Newcastle) on the concept of the ecomuseum.

Professor Peter Davis presented his lecture ‘Communities, Ecomuseums and Sustainability’ to a mixed audience of students, academics and members of the museum and heritage professions at the UCL Institute of Archaeology on 20 January.

The concept of the ecomuseum or ‘ecomusée’ was developed in France by George Henri Rivière and Hugues de Varine as a reaction to traditional museum concepts.

Ecomuseums are community-based heritage projects that support sustainable development – a counterbalance to ‘top-down’ institutional approaches to communities that democratises the operative structures of cultural heritage interpretation and challenges the spatially bound traditional museum models.

In his lecture, Davis elaborated on ecomuseums as both mechanism and process, and the significance of their characteristics specifically in relation to the empowerment of local communities, who can make their own decisions about what constitutes their heritage and the creation of different forms of capital, cultural and otherwise.

As such, no single authoritative model for ecomuseums exists. Rather, the ecomuseum is what Davis calls a “toolkit of heritage practices” that may be adapted to the heritage of specific territories not necessarily defined by conventional boundaries, but instead, for example, by a common landscape, dialect, industry or musical tradition.

Local communities are at the heart of the ecomuseum philosophy and Professor Davis demonstrated its application in a deliberately broad scope of case studies, openly discussing the varied results and impacts on the respective communities, their identity and the challenges in sustaining community-supported ecomuseum practices in the longer term.

Among the wide range of eco-museums discussed were the Ecomuseo de Canapa, Carmagnola in Piemonte, Italy; Kalyna Country, the “world´s largest ecomuseum” for Ukrainian culture in Canada; the Japanese ecomuseums of Asahi-machi, Yamagata and Hirano-cho, Osaka as well as a group of Chinese ecomuseums initiated by a Sino-Norwegian cooperation project.

In his analysis of differing approaches to balancing visitor and community interests, cultural tourism, fragmentation of sites and content, community involvement, and the degree to which ‘heritage professionals’ and financing authorities influence the process in the specific countries, Davis assessed the wide-ranging applicability of the ecomuseum model as a highly flexible framework based on a holistic understanding of the history of a place.

Professor Davis’s book Ecomuseums: A Sense of Place will be published in a revised second edition in March 2011.

brick rustling

image source

Brick by Chance and Fortune is a documentary by director Bill Streeter, premiering at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase about the rich heritage of brick architecture in the town of St. Louis and the accompanying severe problem of brick theft, resulting in the demolishing and ruination of whole buildings in order to salvage valuable brick material.
link to film
link to New York Times article on brick theft in St. Louis
link to extensive article on treehugger on the "harvesting" of building materials and metals from the built environment.
link to article "Where stolen bricks go"
A brick valued at 3,000 UKP was stolen from an art gallery and replaced by an ordinary substitute.

Nuts and Bolts

Another example of valuation and valorisation out of context- a bolt of Yuri Gagarin´s Vostok space craft is available for auction. The current bidding price is 2,800 dollars, and expected to rise over the next days. I´d love to own that- but maybe not at this price. But what would it be worth to you?
Link to the auction

Time travel is verboten!

Expanding on my current China theme:
This article (via BoingBoing) gives background on an impending official ban by China´s General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television on the production of a genre that has increased in popularity recently: time-travel . 
In these fictions the main characters find themselves transported from the contemporary to an era of China´s historical grandeur. 
A nostalgia for such imagined pasts is perceived as reactionary and disrespective of history by the authorities.

Culture Shock between the contemporary and the historic.
Image: still from the television series Shen Hua (Myth)

museum boom in China

China National Film Museum founded 2005, the world´s largest professional museum (not counting ecomuseum-regions)- with an architectural space of 38,000 sqm
image source: wikimedia commons Carla Antonini

China´s cultural infrastructures are under vigorous development- but what concepts of heritage and culture does the Chinese state want to establish and support?

"China´s New Age of Enlightenment" - from an article in the Art Newspaper:

"As of 2009 there were 3,020 museums in China, including 328 private museums (the American Association of Museums estimates 17,500 in the US). One hundred new museums are being added each year. In March the government made entry to museums of modern and contemporary art free. The torrid pace of museum development is part of a national drive to build cultural infrastructure and, as Cai Wu, the minister of culture, put it earlier this year in a published comment, “to establish a batch of world-famous cultural brands.”

“The next ten years should be a golden period for the development of every aspect of cultural industries in China,” said Ye Lang. “The country isn’t just satisfied with the economic achievements it had made,” the Xinhua news agency announced in January. “What it now needs is all-round cultural influence on an international scale.” The government backs these ambitions with a cultural outlay of $4.45bn in 2009, excluding construction costs."

link to article

Hypothetical adaptive re-use

Artist collective the Hypothetical Development Organisation, "dedicated to the recognition and extension of a new form of urban storytelling", has developed alternative perspectives towards the re-use of abandoned structures. Ten abandoned buildings in New Orleans were given hypothetical futures, "not bound by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics". In accordance to their motto, "You won´t believe our plans!",  among the suggested developments have been a Loitering Centre, a Rubble Depot and an Authenticity Monument of a building in disrepair, to be conserved "as found".

Museum of the Self.
Image: screenshot Hypothetical Development Organization

To quote Architizer: "a brilliant way for architects to use those $100K rendering skills to actually do something with some impact on a community, besides warning people about the fresh hell their neighborhood is about to go through with the construction of that new 57-story tower."
Read more on their New Orleans development projects- link

Be my Valentine

Copper penny coin smoothed and engraved with initials image source

An article on the use of crooked, smoothed and engraved coins as tokens of affection that have been resurfacing in the mudbanks of the river Thames at Spitalfields Life.

more virtual caves

Go spelunking in Nottingham! Virtually, that is, as the Nottingham Caves Survey is documenting the over 450 sandstone caves in the county.

encroachment of the taste of other´s

by flickr-user  RUAMPS source

Le Corbusier´s Villa Besnus as it appears in 2010, adjusted to the means of aesthetic taste and practicability.
The originally austere modernist structure from 1922 has been accessorized with a hip roof and new windows that might just not follow the Modulor.

After Klaus Kinski, Werner Herzog takes on the Paleolithic

Click to see images from the production  on tiff.net

After Grizzly Man, the 30,000 year old cave art paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France are next to undergo the Werner Herzog treatment. The German director and his team have gained exclusive access to the cave and the oldest cave paintings ever to have been found- the site is not accessible to the general public for conservation issues. "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" will be Herzog´s first documentary filmed in 3D and is to be released in April 2011.

In the meantime, we can enjoy a virtual tour of the caves at Chauvet and Lascaux.

The Bridge of Sighs, NYC

"The Bridge of Sighs", New York City, ca.1905 source

A covered bridge connecting Tombs prison and the Manhattan Criminal Courts building. 

Our musical heritage- Beatles & Burzum

The Beatles: Abbey Road 1969 LP cover

The iconic LP cover photo of The Beatles crossing Abbey Road is more than 40 years old. The original zebra crossing has been moved several feet 30 years ago and may be reconstructed.

The street crossing, popularly used by fans re-enacting the shoot is to be grade II listed along Abbey Road studios for its cultural and historical importance, following recommendations by English Heritage in an effort to recognize more popular and recent sites as heritage material. 

Save Britain´s Heritage criticizes EH for this ostentatiously middle-brow decision while neglecting Ringo Starr´s birth place, Madryn Street, which is often referred to in his music and part of an area scheduled for demolition under the Pathfinder scheme.

Burzum: Aske 1992 EP cover

Meanwhile the listing of the site of another iconic LP cover image in recognition of its importance in music history seems more unlikely.

Restoration of the material fabric of the now reconstructed Fantoft stave church to the period of its greatest cultural influence would infer its reconstruction as a ruin of smouldering cinders.

The burning of Fantoft stave church on June 6, 1992 was the beginning of a series of arsonist attacks on more than 50 church buildings by persons associated to the Black Metal scene in Norway. 

Many of the targeted structures were historical churches constructed in tarred timber. To great public outrage these heritage buildings were singled for arson attacks out as symbols of the subjugation through christianization of a pagan Viking Norway. In the same way as the remains of ship burials discovered in Viking grave mounds, stave churches were instrumentalized during the nation building process after the secession from Sweden and reinforced as physical symbols of a shared Norwegian cultural heritage.  

Varg Vikernes of the band Burzum, marked out as "the most notorious metal musician of all time" was a suspect in the burning and is rumored to have taken the photograph of the burnt out ruins for the LP cover himself. Heeding his self-created image, he went on to murder fellow musician Øystein Aarseth and embrace a cornucopia of fascist ideologies during his imprisonment. (cf Goodricke-Clarke, N. 2003. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity)

material market forces

Changing market forces influence the conservation and deterioration of heritage objects in a multitude of ways. The official market is shadowed by its underground double- historic materials are subject to organised theft by gangs. Harnessing their material and contextual value, heritage assemblies are deconstructed and their parts sold to the highest bidder. The components are then either up-cycled or re-cycled: amalgated into new creations that cash in on reminiscing the past or harvested for their material value and maybe reused as building material in oversea countries experiencing a shortage of raw material supply. 

Lead- £1,500 per tonne
The steep increase in prices paid for lead makes the roofs of listed churches a target. Metal thiefs are said to conventiently locate lucrative targets with the help of Google Earth. Eleanor Clark, director of the Ragged School Museum is quoted "Any building that looks old is being targeted."- the equation being old=valuable. article and article

York stone pavement £110 per sqm
Meanwhile a posse of  fake council workmen keep themselves and the police in and around Camden borough hard at work by neatly cordoning off areas with official barriers, then ripping up pavement and spiriting their stony spoils away in a white van.  The stone paving, often used in conservation areas is later resold. The local council is appealing for locals to be on the look-out for the gang. article

Love´s Merry-go-round

Listed Urinal in Stensparken, Oslo/Norway.

Photo: Arne B. Langleite

2009 was the Norwegian Year of Cultural Heritage, as designated by the Norwegian government in its white paper “Living with Our Cultural Heritage”.

Its main theme, “Cultural Heritage in Everyday Life” encouraged the democratisation and popularisation of a recurrently elitist pursuit.

The Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Norway (Riskantikvaren) marked the year by listing twelve objects that would specifically represent communal values and experiences. Among the usual suspects relating to small town and rural culture such as kiosks and milk collection points, there is the more uncommon object of a public urinal.

The urinal in Stensparken, designed as a piece of street furniture by one of Oslo´s municipal architects, has aesthetic and historic value as a representative example of 1930s Scandinavian functionalism and urban sanitation.

Its distinctive appearance gained it a number of monikers such as “The Mushroom”, “The Umbrella”.

However, of greater interest and major influence to the decision of Riksantikvaren to list this particular structure are the nontangible values reflected in the colloquial name of the locale as “Love´s Merry-go-round”: the urinal was a popular and well frequented meeting place for Oslo´s gay community during a time when homosexuality was afflicted with serious social stigma.

lecture review Ruan Yisan

image: Xitang watertown source: Dorina Dobnig

A review of Professor Ruan Yisan´s guest lecture on conservation challenges in China using the case study of the award winning restauration of six water towns in the southern area of the Yangtze river, held at UCL on Oct 21, 2010. link

heritage and real estate

source: screenshot of advertisement on derstandard.at 7.10.2010

"In an old building, you are always queen or king."

(a wordplay referring to the classic checker board pattern of floor tiles)

An example for the commodification of heritage as a real estate asset.

In this internet ad campaign of an Austrian property development company owning an apartment in an old building is conflated with luxury and elegance.

You are not just buying an apartment, you are buying into being associated with a certain social class and past grandeur.

embassy as modern fortress

image: Kieran Timberlake illustration in Wired

Kieran Timberlake´s winning design for the new US embassy in London features a number of security measures of 11th century fortresses.

Wired magazine interviews an expert in medieval military history that analyzes the parallels of the modern design´s defenses to 1- keep, 2- motte, 3- bailey and 4- moat.

link to article

Kabelbrand

Max Brand (1886-1980) was an Austrian composer and pioneer of synthesizer and electronic music. The moogtonium or Max Brand synthesizer is an early synthesizer prototype built by Bob Moog between 1967-60 for the exiled composer in New York. The rare synthesizer prototype was Moog´s interpretation of a trautonium.

Article on the origin and rediscovery of the moogtonium on the moog-foundation website.

The moogtonium was one of the main exhibits in the 2008 show Zauberhafte Klangmaschinen / Magical Sound Machines on the histories of sound generator, sound recorders and sound transmitters at the Kulturfabrik Hainburg (a repurposed tobacco factory), curated by IMA, the Institute of Media Archeology.

The instrument is part of the Max Brand archive.

Watch it being played live at the Ars Electronica (festival for arts, technology and society held in Linz, Austria) by Clemens Hausch and Gerald Krist. To listen to more compositions on this fascinating instrument, as well as Brand´s own, check out the CD "Kabelbrand- sounds from the Max Brand synthesizer" released on the label Moozak.