(1) Elena Bajo ‘No Power for Nobody’ Film-Sculpture, 16mm film projector enclosed inside a found old glass vitrine placed in a hallway. Installation View, 16mm color film, loop 2min 32secs, film depicting a Berlin bear walking in circles and backwards, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2008
(2) Elena Bajo ‘No Power for Nobody’ Film-Sculpture, 16mm film projector enclosed inside a found old glass vitrine placed in a hallway. Installation Detail, 16mm color film, loop 2min 32secs, film depicting a Berlin bear walking in circles and backwards, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2008
Keine Macht für
Niemand
(No Power
for Nobody), Berlin,
2008
It was her walking what I heard, and I heard it like a silent Moan, It was her eyes beating, that made me stop, To look, to see more, her circular movement, transformed into a clock Day after day I came back Step after a step run eternal circles without weariness or fainting Time became a cage
The ordinary
practitioners of the
city live ‘down
below’, below
thresholds at which
visibility begins.
They walk – an
elementary form of
this experience of
the city: they are
walkers,
Wandersmanner,
whose bodies follow
the thicks and thins
of an urban ‘text’
they write without
being able to read it.
These practitioners
make use of spaces
that cannot be seen:
their knowledge of
them is as blind as
that of lovers in
each other’s arms.
The paths that
correspod in this
intertwining,
unrecognized poems
in which each body
is an element signed
by many others,
elude legibility. It is
as though the
practices organizing
a city were
characterized by
their blindness. The
networks of this
moving, intersecting
writings compose a
manifold story that
has neither author
nor spectator,
shaped out of
fragments of
trajectories and
alterations of
spaces in relation to
representations, it
remains daily and
indefinitely other
-Michel de Certeau’s
The Practice of
Everyday’ Life
VITRUVIUS- THE PRODUCTION OF PLACE, SPACE MARX; THE PRODUCTION OF CAPITAL
In the stock market, a bear market is a period of declining prices. Pessimistic forecasting or negative activity is said to be bearish (due to the stereotypical posture of bears looking downwards)
NOMADOLOGY,
NOMADIC
RESISTANCE AS
production of space
Social space is a
social product - the
space produced in a
certain manner
serves as a tool of
thought and action.
It is not only a
means of production
but also a means of
control, and hence
of domination /
power.
-Henri
Lefebvre The
Production of
Space
Backwards Walk Last sunday two bears who live in the Bear Pit (Bärenzwinger) in the Koellnische Park started to walk in circles and backwards. After what it seemed an isolated event, similar situations have been reported happening in other cities of the world. Sociologists, scientists and Architects are trying to decipher this mysterious behaviour.
Are bears performing a secret ritual? without any purpose?
A bear pit was historically used to display bears, typically for entertainment and especially bearbaiting. The pit area was normally surrounded by a high fence, above which the spectators would look down on the bears. The most traditional form of maintaining bears in captivity is keeping them in pits, although many zoos replaced these by more elaborate and spacious enclosures that attempt to replicate their natural habitats, for the benefit of the animals and the visitors.
Pour une refondation des pratiques socials, in Le Monde Diplomatique, October 1992.
The individual
and the group
cannot avoid a
certain existential
plunge into chaos.
This is already what
we do every night
when we abandon
ourselves to the
world of dreams.
The main question is
what we gain from
this plunge: a sense
of disaster, or the
revelation of new
outlines of the
possible?
It’s been since 1835 that anyone in Germany saw a wild living bear. That is, until Bruno the bear, who was unfortunately brutally murdered last year, probably for political reasons.
Interview with
Paolo Virno By
Héctor Pavón 12-
24-04
http://libcom.org/library/creating-anew-public-sphere-without-the-statepaolo-virno
Héctor Pavón: We
live in a new epoch
that, as such, needs
new values, new
concepts. But, who
thinks them, who
constructs them?
When an animal is moved from its own environment into captivity, it must reconstruct a whole new world and this is an enormous task.
The primary effect is the restriction of movement and the secondary effects include lack of diversion and occupation, no food choice, impossibility of avoiding its own species at will, possible unsuitable differentiation of space, anti-social behaviour. (...) so the solution is to reduce the flight distance and so neutralise the animal’s desire to escape. This is possible by taming.
Zoos now often receive animals bred in captivity, whose flight distances are greatly reduced from their wild ancestors.
Notes on some
topics in Applied
Animal Behaviour
http://www.animalbehaviour.net/JudithKBlackshaw/JKBlackshawCh10.pdf
Elena Bajo is a Spanish visual artist currently living and working between New York, Berlin, LA and Madrid. Her conceptually-generated practice is concerned with the social and political dimensions of everyday actions and common places. She works across installation, performance, participatory events, video and writing. Bajo holds a Masters from Central Saint Martins, London, and a Masters in Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona. In 2006, she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She has recently exhibited in Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin and Fondazione Ratti, Milan. Future solo exhibit include P.S.1/MoMA, New York.
