From Archinect: some thoughts and theory for your Tuesday.
| There's a lot of talk about freedom of speech, but much less about the right to be heard. Sometimes it seems like no matter how loud you scream, pound your fists and stomp your feet, protest efforts seem futile and institutional walls impenetrable. This is what drew me to the book, Did Someone Say Participate?, edited by Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar, which describes the resourceful strategies by which spatial practitioners navigate and radically engage the system. [The book was recently selected for The Independent's list of the 10 best architecture books of all time.] Miessen's research is further explored through The Violence of Participation at the 2007 Lyon Biennale, which asked participants to draw their spatial perception of Europe, as a phD candidate in Goldsmith's Research Architecture program, and as director of the Architectural Association's first Winter School in Dubai. Heather Ring Usually when you hear about radical forms of engagement, they tend to be about not participating. You go off the grid, grow your own food and harness your own energy, you reject the privatized economy of the real-estate market and squat an abandoned building, you negate profit-driven business models and turn down work you don't agree with. Or at least - it's sort-of like participating in non-participation. How have you defined participation in your work? Is your definition inclusive of these negations? Markus Miessen What I refer to does not necessarily relate to forms of opposition but alternative regimes of entry. How does one manage to gain access into fields of knowledge and practices that one is usually not invited to take part in. I don't think that negating will get you anywhere. It's like opposition: very often it is a way for cynics illustrating their impotence. Constructive criticism through offering alternatives is always more fruitful than simply being reactive. Heather Could you describe some examples of how spatial practitioners have found alternate modes of entry into these fields? Markus There are think tanks and other collectives and groups that have of course been working on outsiders' expertise for a long time -- strategic consulting and so forth. One thing that I find quite problematic about conventional consulting though is that it takes almost for granted that things HAVE to change, i.e. if you look like McKinsey, Roland Berger etc, these guys come into a company, city, or even country (like in the case of Bahrain) and tell them how to change things. There is this unspoken rule that if they don't change this, they are not worth the money. I like to think of it more as someone, who in the British parliamentary system would be called a cross-bench politician, someone with no ties to the political parties at play. AMO of course have tried that for a while now, sometimes with huge success, like in the Europe project, sometimes with less success, not because they haven't done good work, but because it still takes sometime for others to understand the value of the architect's strategic expertise as an outsider that can challenge and critically add to existing institutional, economic, social or governmental frameworks. Heather Maybe you could explain AMO's Europe Project? Markus In 2001 Romano Prodi invited AMO to join a brainstorm session in which the future of Brussels as EU capital was discussed. As a result of this session, AMO started working on a series of projects including Europe's representation at large and subsequently developed a visual language that was associated with Europe, including what is now known as the "barcode flag". Archinect has been invited to contribute to the Violence of Participation project. Check out the discussion and participate in spatializing Europe.
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Heather They have turned rather straightforward design expertise and propositional physical practice into agency and consultancy. Markus A friend of mine, an architect in Austria, now runs workshops for McKinsey Germany, to teach them how to think 'outside the box': how can economists and politicians learn from architects. I am most interested in the political work of spatial practitioners. Projects, where authorships start to blur. We are now working on a project with the Slovenian Government, a project, which is in many ways a sequel to the Lyon project. It wouldn't have happened without it. The Consul General of Slovenia in New York realized that this outsider's perspective is somewhat interesting. I am doing this project together with 
Heather You utilize the roundtable in your Violence of Participation installation - which is also the focal point of the 
Heather What makes the participation "violent"? Markus Obviously, there is no direct violence involved in this project. It can maybe be understood like strength of emotion, passion, or conviction: a violence of a feeling. We need forceful recipes for the idea of Europe not to be domesticated, ideas and visions that prevent any state of inactivity or equilibrium. This includes the breaking away from those representations that are most commonly associated with the "image" of Europe. The idea of a violent democracy in this case is based on the act of introducing people to the table who have previously not been invited to participate; but not in a romantic way, not in the sense of a participatory democracy that postulates an idea of inclusion and invitation of the entire social body. This is not an inclusive model of democracy, but one, which is very opportunistic and seizes the chance for a moment of rupture within a given system. It attempted to include the idea of the political into the space at the Biennial, to confront head-on the most basic question of the European Union: what do we have in mind when we think of Europe? What do we associate with Europe as a space? Heather How can space -- and the spatial perception of Europe -- be then used as an instrument in political discourse? Markus If I had a coherent, operational answer to this question right now, I would be a lucky man. One thing that seems to be evident from almost of the drawings is that politicians should pay attention to those voices as they very often indicate rather pressing issues. What was amazing to see also was that many of the "hacked" or "corrupted" drawings that were sent back to me to London suggested that there is a substantial divide between what the French -- who made up the majority of on-site audience at the Lyon Biennial -- and the rest of Europe and the world -- who made up the majority of the 100 commissioned drawings -- think. If I was an EU politician right now, one of the issues I would try to spend time and resources on would be how to explain more coherently the space that Europe is. I am looking forward to the first travel-guide to the European Union. If you asked me right now to draw a map of the political union, I would not be able to do this. I think this is alarming news. Heather Was there anything that surprised you about the way people in the Violence of Participation started to describe Europe? Did you notice any meaningful differences coming from different regions? Markus I think it is impossible to generalize it. Most of the contributions from the audience of the Biennial were from French nationals, so one of the re-occurring themes was the way that France in particular is dealing with immigration, especially from the Balkans and North Africa. If there is one aspect that seemed to be quite evident throughout the project is that many participants seem to feel uncomfortable about the overbearing presence of central/western European countries in the global perception of the EU. 
Heather Now that you've invited the 
Heather In 
Heather You're in sort of a unique position because you've actually gained an audience with political and institutional bodies. It seems like most disengaged or disenfranchised people, however, find the system to be bureaucratic and inaccessible. Are you situating yourself as a middleman between the voices of the people and the institutions? How do people, outside of consultancies, find effective ways to participate and drive change? Markus I am not sure if I am the right person to be asking this question. I certainly do not have a universal answer. I agree that I am by now in a privileged position to be working on those projects. If you would have asked me three years ago whether I could imagine that I would be working on a project with the Slovenian government and the EU, I would have probably said no. Everyone can get engaged on the most basic levels. But I also think that one should not be naive. If we really want to generate serious change, we almost inevitably have to institutionalize. Whether in order to change policy for the government or to open a massive company that can change work environments and conditions for thousands of people. At the end of the day it's a question of scale. 
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