ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Posts tagged “war

model memorial

Posted on October 24, 2011

Here is Pradeep Jeganathan’s proposal for a giant model, dedicated to remembering all who died in Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Imagine what it would be have a model like this made for your own city. It is an amazing idea: 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,’…

lesson learned

Posted on February 16, 2011

This is 26 Ramses Street, Cairo, location of Telecom Egypt. The state-run communications company houses the main internet portals that connect Egyptians with the outside world. On Jan 28, 2011 Telecom Egypt shut down those portals in an attempt to derail to sustained anti-government protests. For five days, internet access was severely restricted, making basic communications extremely difficult, and costing the country billions of dollars. Mikhail from New York (who appears to be a competent network engineer) has some great technical advice if you’re planning a revolution: Lesson learned: if you’re planning a revolution, consider preparing a home-grown line-of-sight WiFi mesh that can be deployed quickly – perhaps using community-based volunteers to host individual nodes. Be sure to operate your own routing infrastructure independently, and…

beirut, before

Posted on January 30, 2011

Beirut Outtakes (2007), by Peggy Ahwesh This beautiful film is cut from pieces of film found in an abandoned movie theater in Beirut. The film clips appear to show segments of newsreels, advertisements and trailers for films that one might have seen a Beirut theater in the 1950s, 60′s and 70′s. What is eerie about Ahwesh’s video is not only the glimpse we get at life in Beirut before years of constant war, but also the strange combination of violence (American westerns), Orientalist sexuality (gyrating belly dancers), and feminine domesticity (women shopping for home appliances). This cocktail of violence, sexuality and domesticity seems so painfully modern, so appropriate for a forward-looking city, ‘the Paris of the Middle East.’ Ahwesh’s film is a cloudy mirror,…

tel aviv in wartime

Posted on January 21, 2011

It is July 2006, and Israel is at war again with Lebanon. Terrible waves of shelling sweep over densely populated south Beirut and the Israeli army enters southern Lebanon. Small mines, shaped and colored like toys rain from Israeli planes into farmer’s fields, making a deadly harvest. Each day, missiles assail the northern Israeli towns closest to the border. There is little protection for Arab Israelis. Their communities are hit hard. An overwhelming silence about Lebanese casualties engulfs the country—a wall of support-our-troops-bomb-them-into-the-next-century rises up into the air. On Israeli television a few heartfelt cries to please stop the bombing come from Arab Israelis standing in the ruins of their neighborhood, places forgotten long before the war. I am in Tel Aviv, “Israel’s urban…

bright blue sky

Posted on January 9, 2011

All popular images of the event are fascinated with that bright blue sky:  The innocuousness of the clear late-summer day, the passenger plane familiar over a city skyline, the rectangular skyscrapers. The event described in these images has its own story, its own trajectory.  Like a video game it suggests a user control, it can be paused, re-played, re-figured as if the outcome might be different next time, maybe the person with the controls will turn the plane just before—  

catastrophic stories

Posted on December 27, 2010

Brualitat in Stein [Brutality in Stone] (1961), a collaboration between Alexander Kluge (writer, filmmaker) and Peter Schamoni (filmmaker) ________________________________ W.G. Sebald, in his essay “Between History and Natural History: On the literary description of total destruction,” considers the work of West German writer, Alexander Kluge. Kluge’s book, New Stories. Nos 1-18 (1977) takes on the prodigious task of examining the aftermath of the destruction of German cities during World War II. Although it makes use of personal recollections of air attack, interviews with military officials and primary source documents, the book is neither a history in the traditional sense, nor is it a traditional novel. Sebald pays attention to Kluge’s method of presenting this diverse material, arguing that confronting catastrophic experience in writing requires…

screen memory

Posted on December 20, 2010

Escaping her disgust with herself, she walks out into the night to haunt a familiar tea room—to meet a familiar stranger. An encounter with the stranger, her lover, who asks her to stay here in Hiroshima is the beginning of a slow walk through the empty streets of the night city. He’s going to kiss me. He’s going to kiss me and I’ll be lost. She walks on, passing two strolling guitarists, lovers embracing in back seat of a parked car, another car slowing, almost stopping as it passes her, a lone lady in the night. The flickering of Japanese neon is cut with day-lit memories of the sober street signs marking the corner walls of her small French village. Her thoughts drift between…

end times

Posted on December 20, 2010

Terror! In filmic imagination, the end of the world is really associated with the end of the city. World War II saw the full destruction of great cities by radiation and fire. The massive loss of life in the powerful haze of giant mushroom clouds and the slower deaths, memorialized in films like Gojira (1954) and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) became a real threat for urban dwellers caught in the Cold War. Walking through city streets after seeing this film, how could we not imagine the hot nuclear breath of Godzilla?  

dangerous archives?

Posted on December 8, 2010

Watch the development of the case against Julian Assange very carefully. It’s pretty bizzare: sexual assault? espionage? Some are coming to his defense. As my friend Barbara says, one likely result of this drama will be greater restrictions on the way we are able to access, use and create various media archives. CBS News predicts a future of never-ending cyberwar. Never forget: sorting through these sorts of archives or databases is the political practice of our time, made even more so by sheer ubiquity. And the creation of digital archives themselves? What sort of politics is that? One New Republic editorial questions Julian Assange’s/Wikileaks’ status as beacons of serious journalism, governmental transparency and democracy due to their commitment to collect data, without organization and…

how do you take care of your dead?

Posted on June 20, 2010

I hope I can correct a false picture about me. I am not a Jewish James Bond, and I am not a Don Quixote, and I am not [in] between. I am only a survivor who pays with a dedicated work for the privilege to remain alive. –Simon Wiesenthal (1908 – 2005), architect, survivor of death camps across Europe, documenter of Nazi war crimes, and intrepid and dedicated hunter of war criminals.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 62 other followers