On Sunday, May 6, 2012, as part of the city-wide Delai Sam (DIY) Urban Festival, 10-15 participants will engage in a “Sociological Party-Marathon” in the Palevsky Zhilmassiv, Saint Petersburg’s oldest cooperative community. The idea is for people to open up their homes to strangers, and to enjoy food and drinks, while they discuss important aspects of life in their community.

This event is a challenge to people who want to  to get out of the routine of everyday atomization—who really want to “move” in a different, and unpredictable direction.

Successful movements to change cities by the residents, depend upon a strong sense of community: people recognize that they are connected, sharing histories and come together on that basis, not just because of a threat from outside. In other words, people know their neighbors and recognize that they are together, attached to each other in this particular time and place.

This performance was commissioned by the Centre for Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg, and I am so happy to put it together. If any of you are in Saint Petersburg this Sunday, join us!

Here I am in Moscow’s Bar Strelka, being interviewed about my impressions of my first 3 months in Moscow.

I like Moscow, if by like I really mean I’m scared of Moscow. Moscow is really scary to me, but that’s also exciting. It reminds me of New York in a really odd way, like when New York was a little bit scarier. When it was harder to tell what’s around the corner. Everything in Moscow is inaccessible to me, because I don’t speak Russian and I’m foreign. I feel there are these layers of the city that I can’t reach, it’s like a mystery. But around this hard crusty outside of Moscow, I really feel that there’s a soft creamy center. And I’m going to find it.

In many ways, we strangers experience today’s Tokyo as the dream city of metabolism: networked and cosmopolitan, efficient and polite, caring and tolerant. This dream experience has a history.

According to Koh Kityama, professor of architecture and leading authority on Tokyo’s metabolism, Tokyo is a city shaped by catastrophe from above and below, within and without: earthquakes, firebombs, economic “miracles,” and tsunami.[1] In reaction to such devastation, the 1960s saw the development of Metabolism as a crossdisciplinary design principle: anticipate inevitable destruction by humbling the city—each structure avoids direct conflict with fate by digesting itself every 26 years, before the next tsunami does.  Arm by disarming, by opening the inside to the outside. Do not build walls to last, but design relationships that will endure.

Kitayama presents a plan for regenerating urban centers in the wake of disaster using the idea of a “Community Core,” which provides social infrastructure that endures, even as the surrounding housing continuously transforms itself. Kitayama’s version of metabolism represents a strange paradox: small, free-standing buildings that can organically transform the entire megacity in tiny gestures of self-effacement or erasure, while retaining a shared core, sustained through simple practices of interpersonal relationships. Despite metabolism’s Japanese endogeny, the imagination of the city in its entirety, along with the concept of modern urban planning is fairly new to Japan.[2] Urban living in Japan happens at the scale of the machi, or neighborhood. In fact, Japanese urban planning has deliberately attempted to balance large-scale infrastructural projects against the organic transformations of everyday life in the machi.[3] In this respect, Kitayama’s metabolistic tendencies are no exception, but follow in a strong tradition of Japanese urban planning. The tendency is to use large-scale megastructure or mega-plans to protect against catastrophe and provide space for unfolding the intimate relationships that make the fabric of each neighborhood.[4]

It is this polite metabolism, always new and yet so tied to its history and the specificity of its place, that I experience as I move through the lubricated tunnels and passageways of this city, where inner and outer continuously and almost imperceptibly meet. In the wake of recent world events—wars, natural disasters, vast economic fluctuations and advances in the networking of mobile technologies—cities are again targets, and the relationships between people are increasingly fragile. I recognize the vitality of Japanese metabolism, as an urgent response to these pressing problems. However, as a stranger who can never learn the complex Japanese manners for navigating the spaces between people, how can I truly understand metabolist principles? What can be translated from Tokyo’s response to catastrophe into other contexts?

Artist Masato Nakamura begins with a question: What kind of society can we create in relation to this destruction by tsunami?[5] Unlike Kitayama, whose work aims to protect a community core, Nakamura presents a more radical notion: “since everything is gone, there is nothing to fear.” Instead of protecting against the ravages of nature, Nakamura identifies in his interactions with survivors of the recent tsunami, an instinct towards facing nature directly, searching for the opportunity to reconstruct another society, from scratch.

 In this state of deprivation we taste bitterness, we taste suffering but we have nothing to fear.

As we go into the mountains to collect wood, we have the opportunity to imagine another life. We are not defeated by anyone or anything. We are not defeated by the city. We are not defeated by the world.

These statements of tsunami survivors, collected as part of Nakamura’s “WA WA Project,”[6] clear the path towards an individual creativity that has the potential to re-build a new society. These statements form the basis of machizukuri, the art of making the small town or neighborhood through sustained community efforts. Machizukuri, according to Nakamura is the daily creative process of making a happy family, of cultivating good relations with others.

As a term, machizukuri is contemporaneous with the rise of the metabolist design movement, coming into wide usage in the 1960s, to describe the machi-based grass-roots activism that arose in Japanese cities in opposition to nuclear ambitions and large-scale infrastructural planning efforts.[7] Unlike governmental responses to disaster, which mobilize and deploy resources rapidly and at large scales, efforts undertaken through machizukuri necessarily take longer, as they are determined by the speed of cultivation of relationships.[8]

Walking in the side streets that weave through Tokyo neighborhoods, one can feel the efforts of constant machizukuri. There are old women sweeping the pavement outside their homes, carefully tending flowers. This spirit is infectious. Accidentally dropping a chewing gum wrapper, I rush to pick it up, almost falling in my desperation to avoid making a mess in a space that seems as cared for as a family’s living room.

Nakamura’s notion of machizukuri aims not simply to oppose toshi keikaku, or large-scale, top-down urban planning, but to find ways of establishing a line of creative development that can link different levels of society, producing inclusive flows of communication and decision-making. For Nakamura, the job of imagining and enacting such flows is necessarily an artistic task. He asks: “How do we as artists contribute to the making of our cities and our communities?” “Art” in this formulation is not limited to the white cube of the gallery or museum, but must extend into the street. By the same token, “artistry” is not the province of the trained professional, but is developed in face-to-face interactions between people in the neighborhood.

Facing six cold months in Moscow as a foreigner, I recognize how much both Nakamura’s and Kitayama’s methodologies depend upon the connection of the artist and the architect to his place and his history. In order to negotiate these tiny spaces between people and their environments, one must feel a certain sense of “home.” As an artist interested in making the city, how am I to approach a city that is not my own? Nakamura’s response to my question is slow and considered. He has not faced this one before. His answer is surprisingly simple: “Look for need, meet the need” he says in halting English. “Talk to people. Say ‘hello.’ Come to the same level. Don’t be a ‘professor.’”

Over 10 days in Tokyo, Alexander, Silvia, Carlos and I got into the city, its history, its tastes, its metabolism. It was a joy to work with two architects and a curator. Here is what we learned.

Alexander Novikov
Carlos Medellin
Silvia Franceschini
Adeola Enigbokan

Special Thanks to Juan Pablo Gomez for your patience and expertise in editing!

My address is not a house, and not a street, my address is… (2011)
Adeola Enigbokan, Carlos Medellin, Aleksandra Smagina

A few weeks ago, we visited microrayons, giant ex-public housing projects that weave through Moscow, in which many Muscovites live. The buildings are remnants of the Soviet era, cheaply built, each a micro-city all its own, made to house 10-16,0000 people at once. The buildings are large and, to outsiders, seem impersonal and impenetrable. Common areas appear barely used, quiet even on temperate afternoons. The hallways tend to be poorly maintained, often smelling of garbage or urine. Oddly, the apartments are quite expensive (one couple we met paid almost $400,000 for their very small two-bedroom apartment). The interiors are well-appointed though small, lovingly decorated by residents, reflecting the individuality of each family.

Asked about how we might “improve” the crumbling infrastructure of the microrayons around Moscow, Carlos, Aleksandra and I (all of us strangers to Moscow) worked together to create this postcard.

Project Statement:

Today the microrayon is turned in upon itself, presenting a cold and colorless facade. On the other hand, the insides of the homes are often warm, tended with care and reflect the individuality of each resident, and the ties that bind each family to its place.

Our project suggests a future in which this warm, colorful inside can become visible and sensible from the outside. The postcard represents the facade of the microrayon, with windows which can be opened by the viewer using colorful strings, to reveal events, relationships, patterns and colors. The facade is transformed not through demolition, or technical re-construction, but through the small act of opening– an act combining curiosity and trust.

Adeola Enigbokan
Carlos Medellin
Aleksandra Smagina

I arrived in Tokyo five days ago, on Sunday. Landing in Narita International, on an Aeroflot flight out of Moscow, and hearing the soft polite sounds of Japanese ground control take over, I felt a great sense of relief. As a New Yorker, there is something of home for me in Tokyo. Anna, my Moscow friend, commented how much Narita recalled her experiences of US airports like Washington D.C’s Dulles: clear and efficient, lots of signs in English, brisk politeness and smiles–customer service.

Entering the city in a dream state after a long flight into a future 9 hours ahead of Moscow, and 14 hours ahead of New York, I experienced an immediate calm: the quietness of the voices, the deliberate design of every amenity, the sense that this city “cares” for strangers. I mean, the seats in public toilets (they have free public toilets in Tokyo! Are you listening, New York?) are perfectly warm, and massage your nether regions with accurately aimed sprays of water. Tokyo convinced me to actually sit on a public toilet for the first time in my life: a revelation.

With my hair piled high, and my bright leggings and large sunglasses, I appeared strange, even among the colorful fruits of Harajuku, with their asymmetrical spike haircuts and wild costume clothing. I felt only brief looks on the subway and in the streets, a fleeting sense that I was out of place. Almost in unison the citizens of Tokyo cast their gaze away from me, as part of the perennial politeness, or a sense of cosmopolitan pride, or some combination of the two. They fitted me with a welcome indifference towards strangeness, so familiar to me as a New Yorker, but almost impossible to find in Moscow. This meditative withdrawal of attention fills me with relief, whether or not it indicates a true tolerance of difference or is simply a rote performance of politeness.

Travelling through the underground tunnels and pedestrian bridges connecting multiple train and metro lines, I sense both the crowdedness of the city and the deftness with which people manage the small spaces between each other.

Every art is material—and can be only material. The possibility of using concepts, projects, ideas and political messages in art was opened by the philosophers of the “linguistic turn” precisely because they asserted the material character of thinking itself. Thinking was understood by these philosophers as the operation and manipulation of language. And language was understood by them as thoroughly material—a combination of sounds and visual signs. Now the real, epoch-making achievement of conceptual art becomes clear: it demonstrated the equivalence, or at least a parallelism, between language and image, between the order of words and the order of things, the grammar of language and the grammar of visual space.

–Boris Groys, “Introduction–Global Conceptualism Revisited,” e-flux journal #29: special issue on Moscow Conceptualism.

In recent weeks, I have found myself involved in extended conversations about my Moscow life with friends from around the world. It now occurs to me that these conversations are in fact an extension of my “Shop Talk” series (cross-disciplinary conversations about method), and so I have decided to post some excerpts of chats and emails here, as “field notes.”

(Of course, these excepts appear in edited form, in order to preserve the integrity of the conversation, and the privacy of my interlocutors, as per their requests).

12:03pm
how is going for you in moscow, still boring?

12:04pm
well moscow is getting a bit better

12:04pm
ah thats! great!! actually better
glad moscow is getting u

12:05pm
some of my russian colleagues are slowly realizing how difficult their country is for foreigners, and reaching out a helping hand. i have been invited to several homes of colleagues, to some parties, and today, to some kind of hipster artist collective in an old factory somewhere.

as i said a BIT better. the people are still very strange to me. i have had enough conversations with the young people here to know that they are very tense and depressed about the country’s situation

12:07pm
well, its good to feel happy, even if just a little! so enjoy the BIT more!

12:07pm
many just try to escape into little worlds of hipster intelligentsia

12:08pm
like the kinds Yurchak described in his book? (Alexei Yurchak, Everything was forever, until it was no more)

12:13pm
not exactly. this is a different time. those people were poor and did not have (or want) money and jobs. these ones that i have met are elite in many ways: iPads, iPhone, ieverything. They work in the same little circles of media-art-architecture-design; they have middle class to very rich parents (lots of brands: prada & american apparel feature prominently). They have gone to the best schools in the country, usually due to family connections. However they feel their country “uncivilized” they want to be more connected with Europe and north america. they do not appreciate the mannerisms and attitudes of the older Putin generation, and the coarseness of their country men. so they retreat a bit, but not too much, because they are the young winners of society

i just went to an exhibit of necrorealist art and then after an exhibit of the latest young moscow artists (sponsored by martini and rossi, of course). let me tell you, yurchak’s people had a very different mentality.

12:16pm
gotcha
is a different kind of western influence
a recent aggressive capitalist western influence, different from the processes of westernization taking place during the 80 and 90s under the soviets and right after the end of USSR

12:22pm
maybe. i don’t know if the influence is western, or simply part of a global trend. they look to europe and north america, but at the same time are very insulated within the particularities of their own history–maybe too insulated in fact. this is the cause of the tense depressiveness: they want to be more european, but they are afraid of great distance culturally and historically between their country and the “west.” so it is hard to say western influence. it is very strange. they talk about visiting london, berlin, new york, but never “britain, germany, usa.” so i am not sure if it is that they are influenced by the west, or that they long for some lifestyle that is replicating itself around the world right now: this nondescript international floating life, linked by certain brands and hip places.

for example, it is not as if they long for democracy. non of these people are democratic activists, or would ever do anything like “occupy wall street.”

12:28pm
i hear you–its important to question the idea of “the west”, since it does not say much, and it does not describe processes that as u say, are more “international”–but still london, i agree, is not the UK, I agree, so its more a longing for mega-city lifestyles, but is London and not for example Kuala Lumpur. In this sense, it is not West in general, but still a part of the so larger unspecified western culture

12:30pm
well they also talk about shanghai and hong kong and sao paulo. the studio program is taking us to tokyo.

12:30pm
and some of those Russian, perhaps, might have a lot in common with OWS , in terms of views on social programs, though their lifestyles are a contradiction to the OWS’ claims

12:30pm
i just gave an example of those 3 cities
could be true, i have not asked…

12:31pm
yes, but is your program not all the russians u described above, i mean the parents of those mates of urs

12:33pm
maybe. i thought we were talking about the young people? those comparable to the necrorealists of yurchak’s day. anyway, it is hard to tell, as i have not been here very long, and my impressions are formed from a very strange distance from the people

12:34pm
i meant Russians in general, but yes, generations are different and its important to distinguish

12:41pm
well then i must say i do not know russians in general, and doubt that i will. i am moving in a very specific circle. the city of moscow is organized in rings, quite literally. the city is divided by giant rings of avenues, and people tend to socialize within their “rings.” I was warned when i arrived here never to leave the first two rings, as my life could be threatened by the (poor or working class) barbarians living beyond. So the rings are social and physical and increasing everyday. My work place is on an island across from the kremlin, which is right in the center of the center ring. this island is its own world of media-design-bars-restaurants-cafes-cool-expensive-face-control. not a place for just anyone to come anytime. Given this, it is not clear that i will get far off this island, except to go to other islands as led by my new friends and colleagues. So when I speak about young russians, i am speaking about these islands within moscow/russia.

12:48pm
i see–
it sounds a bit like Nairobi, in terms of urban segregation by different classes…sorry, got to go on skype now–my aunty called–parents etc..lets talk/chat later , if ur still there, keep writing about moscow and its rings, and also who told u not to explore other rings…, well this is what u do , no?

12:53pm
if i go to other rings, it is with the guidance of colleagues. this is not the kind of place to just ride the train and get off somewhere and go for a walk. at least not for me, as i clearly do no blend in most parts of the city. but yeah, let’s chat more later. –a

Let us layout a large map made of concrete or granite somewhere in the country. It must be to scale with all its mountains and valleys, rivers and reservoirs, forests and cites. Let it be, say, 500 metres in length or more. Let us mark on this map the place of every violent event that took place within its shores from the April 5, 1971 to the May 19, 2009. It cannot be comprehensive of course, but it can be representative, no ‘sides,’ but in the sense of a random statistical sample. Identify survivors of these selected events. Record what they remember, not about politics, not about violence, nor about who did what to whom, but about their loved ones died in that place. That’s all, a narrative of their love and attachment, which will also be a narrative of loss, pain and grief. Let us take these recordings made in the language the survivor chooses, and translate them also in to the other two languages of our country.
The idea is to place these recordings on the map of our country so that any one, especially, our children can listen to them. This map then will be filled with markers, of stone also, simple and yet distinct from the terrain it represents of death.

Violent death
Let us walk on this map– it is a large map, remember, and we can walk on it; respectfully of course — as we walk our country, and we can visit and revisit, in some small way, at each place someone died.
As we walk this map, then, with simple portable playback device with pre-recorded disk, yes, like a iPod, and a pair of supplied head phones, which we obtain from the administrator of the site as one does in some museums now, we should be able to listen at each place that is marked, by selecting number, like k324 on the device to a narrative of a survivor that pertains to that place.
Listen, take it in, and perhaps move on to another spot. It will take hours, of course, perhaps days, to traverse this map.

I do not offer panaceas; nor can I foretell the future. But I do think this may be a better way for us Sri Lankans to reconcile ourselves to our violent past.

After three weeks of organized field trips and official lectures, some of us Strelkans* decide to take a detour off the tourist path. On the last Sunday in October we take the green metro line into northwest Moscow, and get out at the Aeroport stop. After a half-hour walk, across an 18-lane boulevard, through a massive sports complex, across a large open field filled with friendly stray dogs, over a section of crackled tarmac, which has been converted into a makeshift amateur stunt driving course, and through a hole cut into a chain-and-barbed-wire fence, we arrive at a graveyard of Soviet aeronautical ambition.

In a field of tall grass, lie the remains of dream jets. Children play among the ruins of an empire, climbing onto wings and into cockpits with the help of their parents. Single enthusiasts roam with their cameras, taking pictures of the grounded giants. Teenagers dare each other to climb the rickety watchtower, which sways even with light breeze. Carlos and I walk together, taking pictures and video. We are dazzled by these magnifications of childhood toys. We close in on the same details: a flattened landing tire, wire innards spilling out of a plane’s ripped side panel, graffiti honoring a local football team and the defunct CCCP in the same breath, the cigarette wrappers and beer bottles tucked into the planes’ open holds, the oil-slick rainbow discolorations of the cockpit windows.

After a week of discussing public spaces in the city, this is the first truly public space we have found: this hinterland between a newly built financial center, and an endless sea of residential high-rises. Here are children and parents and grandparents, and tourists, and lone weirdos, and neighborhood residents. Here are multiple uses. Here is play. Here is evidence of another life at night, after the children go home. Most importantly, it is free, in all senses, and an absolute joy to discover.

*Strelkan (n., v.): 1. One who participates in Strelka Institute’s 9 month research program. 2. Describing an approach to urban research and design, as yet to be defined.

**all photos by Carlos Medellin