Double-lecture: Of Superbugs and Secret Zones by Keller Easterling and Xenia Vytuleva
7 PM
In the context of the S AM exhibition 'Under the Radar'.
SUPERBUGS
Architects and urbanists have joined journalists, social scientists, lawyers, economists, artists, and others in exploring rampant forms of global development. Formulaic, repeatable spaces – from networks of free zone world cities to distended urban peripheries – introduce some of most radical changes to this now hotter, wetter globalising world. These spaces and the powers that preside over them have often become political superbugs, surviving against all odds to generate unchecked concentrations of power, extremes of inequality, and climate cataclysms. Spatial practitioners, as perplexed as any who explore these conditions, may nevertheless offer to the allied disciplines some forms with which to design – to actually manipulate that physical world.
KELLER EASTERLING
is an architect, writer and professor at Yale. Her most recent book, 'Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space' (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. A recently published e-book essay titled 'Medium Design' (Strelka Press, 2018) previews a forthcoming book of the same title. Medium Design inverts an emphasis on object and figure to prompt innovative thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems.
SECRET ZONES
Architecture and Secrecy has a long standing tradition of power negotiations. From Secret Cities of the Cold War to Secular Monasteries and Google Empires, paradoxes of secrecy and architectural thought operate across political, economical and geographical domains. What is the logic and the urban matrix of a secret zone? Is there a shared language and a spatial formula of visible/invisible? What is the aesthetical canon and the rhetoric of urban concealments? Are secret zones just the side effects of new economies, military research and zones of strategic knowledge production? Or secrecy is at a backbone of scientific cosmology and larger – of the the utopian. And finally, why questions of secrecy and secret spaces are so obsessively relevant today?
XENIA VYTULEVA-HERZ
is an art historian and curator. Her scholarship is focused on new modes of preservation, intersection of architecture, art and politics. Dr. Vytuleva-Herz was a fellow at the ZGW gta ETH Zurich and the Department of Philosophy ETH Zurich. She was teaching at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York and Parsons New School in New York. A recipient of various grants and awards, including the Graham Foundation for the project 'Secret Cities of the Cold War', she is currently working on a manuscript 'Secret Zones and Shimmering' and a research project 'North Trans-National'.
Discussion moderated by Andreas Ruby, Director S AM
Language: English
Location: Ackermannshof, St. Johanns-Vorstadt 21, Basel
Admission: CHF 12.– (red. CHF 8.–)
Supported by: Hans und Renée Müller-Meylan Stiftung
photo: Extrastatecraft – The Power of Infrastructure Space, Keller Easterling
