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Sans Terre

A Temporary Institution for the Investigation of Urbanism

Note:

Over the duration of the Interventionist exhibition, Sans Terre will be open as a functioning research institution. You are invited to use the available resources, including the collections, maps, diagrams, books, and digital equipment to collaborate in the ongoing investigation in urbanism.

Research Goals:

It is our contention that the world now consists of a radically urban geography.  Currently, half of the world's population lives in an urban context. We propose to experimentally define this urban condition as a mode of distributed agency in the world, where the world is full, active and participatory (across all levels of organization, forms of agency, systems of incorporation and hierarchies). Many of the ways in which we currently frame questions regarding issues of urban dwelling- city vs. country, region vs. globe, nature vs. culture, urban vs. suburban, subject vs. object, etc., all seem to have little purchase given this new urban context. In this regard our primary research objectives are centered around exploration of three main questions.

1. Can the separation between the natural and artifice be reconceptualized under the rubric of urbanism (Is there a way outside the phenomena-neumena divide)?

2. Can urbanism as a concept allow a vectoral method of understanding place?

3. What happens when the world becomes fully urban?

Methodology:

The material currently in the archive is a product of three distinct, but linked methodologies:

(1) Immanent collection walks (2) Open collaborations, and (3) Archival processing.

Immanent Collection Walks:

Collection walks are a set of movements through places using a score to navigate. The scores are a set of instructions, which take information from the environment to direct our movement. Understanding a walk in the broadest sense, the movement uses all forms of available modes of transportation. The scores also inform the locations, manner and duration for making collections. Objects, images, and recorded interviews comprise the principal collection categories displayed in the archive.

The current installation is testing the question of urbanism, using Mexico City and North Adams as the principal locations of research. A continuous collection walk (drive) has been made in and between these places. Collection walks using related sets of scores from other sites have been added to this archive.

The movement through Mexico City was mapped and is represented by the red line on the floor. This route was overlain to scale on the region of North Adams and is the basis of the walks here. This walk is not complete and will continue over the course of the installation time period.

Open Collaborations:

The archive is open to contributions from both individuals and separate collaborations.  These contributions are an integral part of the larger question of urbanism, bringing into the archive a related set of methodologies and processes.

Archival Processing:

The archive is also open to further contributions that can be researched in this space. Using the available resources, including the diagrams, maps, objects, media, microscope and other supplies, members of spurse and the public are invited to assemble, process, revise, annotate and record their findings in the archive. Specifically, we invite you to take and use the Sans Terre poster as a working diagram of the question of urbanism.

Archive Layout:

The general organization of the archive reflects the geographic distribution of the research to date. The collections from Mexico City begin in the shelving area located around the corner from the placard holder. This begins the continuous line of collections from Mexico City to North Adams, which is located in the left hand corner near the entrance to Corpus. Throughout this line of collection are separate walks that have occurred in distinct places.

The audio portion of the piece are recorded interviews from Mexico City and North Adams made during the collection walks.

The tables are provided as work space for processing information and to use the available tools, including the digital equipment and media resources.

Notes on the ARCHIVE

The archive is often seen to be tied to the documentation of a past event – an event that has receded far into the past so as to be only accessible through documentation housed in the archive. The archive becomes thus situated as a space for the complex and contested production of histories. In Foucault’s alternative sense the archive is the site of the spacing out of a history so as to turn history upon itself and uncover the discursive and non-discursive regimes of what is sayable or visible at a given moment. The Foucaultian archive becomes a site of ontological – or perhaps heterological – investigation/production and experimentation. Critical to this form of the archive is that there is a nascent cartographic function to the archive – where it begins to trace out weaknesses, aporias, new paradoxes, and new modes of becoming latent in the mass of housed materials (always in relation to questions of the present). This is what Foucault saw as the shift into genealogical modes of inquiry (and what Deleuze termed the cartographic). Perhaps then it is not all that much of a morphogenetic shift to see the archive as an open experiment in the production of what is in common – where this conceptualization of the “commons” is being posed as a zone of problematization.

Here in the development of a temporary parallel space or event of inquiry one finds interesting resonances following the archaic root of the word archive --  “Archeia” -- the town hall, a public gathering, the space of civic engagement. “Archive” then as a space for the production of a public. The archive becomes a strategic zone of stopping mid stream to allow the unformedness of ideas, things, events, places, identities, individuations of any scale and forces to fold in upon each other as an experimental problematization of the given – a pause – a slowing down of acting to allow the givenness of a new situation to reshape one’s mode of acting and doing.

Given the global context of action and vastly distributed nature of agency there is a need for this form of situated condensation and slowing down of agents, forces, spaces, and events. A strategic temporary parallel institution -- the archive is at once a collection, a system of collecting, a series of relations (to peoples, groups, regions, terrains, events, things and other beings, etc.) and an unfolding collective space in which to experiment with these (now collective). The archive becomes a way of investigating and experimenting with the present through the collective development of a system of problematization.

A system is needed to move from the space of problematization towards the production of an archive. Here one needs to develop a methodology of tracing out immanent forces at the point of emergence. A score that directly engages outside of the structural subjectivities of scientific, aesthetic and other agendas produces an archive that can move outside of itself, making possible that the archive becomes an active force in its own reshaping. The generation of archival objects through the scores creates an open set, in which any object, image, sound, smell or agent can become an element of the set if collected from the environment using the specified methodology -- thus permitting the discovery of unanticipated elements and associations. The archive demands an engaged participation that over time must respond to the changing problematic that the archive itself calls forward. The spatio-temporal contingency of the archive and archival process is fundamental and thereby as a process sustains a dynamic continuity, remaining open to intervention, aberration and inflection.  So, the etymology of the word archive as an interaction of forces maps onto the praxis of the archive as a collection. It is a repository of motion and speeds; a collection of open agencies, sensible and prone -- the production of a people(s) and a space/spaces still to come.

Partial List of Collaborators:

JARED HUKE, DANIEL TING, BANG DANG, DAVID MUNOZ, CHRISTIAN GARCIA, FERNANDA COVELO, TANIA RODRIGUEZ, JOHN KRAMER, KATARINA WESLIEN, ARMIN LINKE, CHRIS THOMPSON, NICOLE CATHCART, KATIE ATKINS, NATHANIEL EDMUNDS, ROGER COSSEBOOM, JIM KINGSLY, GEORGE SMITH, J. MORGAN PUETT, MIKI DESAI, BORIS RICHTER, CESARE PETRIOUSCHI, CATHERINE D’IGNAZIO, BRIAN DEROSIA, KARL UNNASCH, SOCIETY FOR THE REPRESENTATION OF SOCIETY, GREG STEWART, GREG LENDECK, AND OTHERS.