This is a book I picked up last week that looks at Israel’s Architecture of Occupation – a primarily spatial investigation of the transformation of the occupied territories of Palestine via geographical, urban, territorial and architectural conceptions. I mention it here because I think the theme has a lot in common with the artists’ work currently on display in This land is Your Land at the CCA. In descriptions of settlement processes undertaken by pioneering Zionist zealots, among other players, throughout the territory Eyal Weizman paints a picture of a chaotic and hostile borderland that echoes Ursula Biemann’s Sahara Chronicle in its depiction of the impossible complexities that accompany the very concept of national border creation and the ruthless process of partition that it entails. In Biemann’s work abstract mapping technologies of a highly military nature are contrasted with, both, the realities of barren and inhospitable landscape – shifting continuously out of reach of the technologies and people charged with policing it – and human stories of survival that have taken them necessarily beyond questions of national identity. Next door Mark Boulos’ work is also one of aggressive contrast that challenges the comfortable neutrality of the viewer by placing them between accusations of a materially dispossessed Nigerian tribe fighting against the theft of petroleum resources and the abstracted numerical world of the American financial trade floor that reaps the benefits of this extraction. Bouchra Khalli’s work is also a deceptively straight forward exploration of displacement and migration that juxtaposes the simplicity of drawing a red line on a map with the difficulties undergone within the narratives that accompany the video footage.

As much as politics and conscience would like to see the marking out and use of land as a simple two sided issue with separation and abstraction as the main tools of engagement what these artists create in the installation space and the author on the pages of Hollow Land is a multidimensional picture that requires a more careful engagement and ultimately seems to question the sanity of drawing lines at all in an ever shifting ground.

The exhibition is on until the end of the week and the book can be found on the shelves of Aye Aye books in the CCA’s foyer space.

Post by: Caroline

In an earlier post, Orlando Santos commented on Pina Bausch’s love of Yohji Yamamoto clothes. This prompted me to trawl internet for more on the choreographer’s connections to Yamamoto. On the Coming Soon blog I found this in another tribute to Bausch:

‘She collaborated with Yohji Yamamoto in 1998, for the 25th anniversary of the Pina Bausch dance company in Wuppertal; to accompany her choreography, all the dancers wore Yohji Yamamoto clothing. For this performance, Yohji Yamamoto joined the dancers on stage performing karate. Yohji considered Pina as an inspiration, a muse: to him, she represented the perfect silhouette and movement reduced to the very essence of body and clothes. A whole Yohji Yamamoto collection was dedicated to her in 1990. They shared a very strong opinion and desire for “what cannot be seen”…

Wim Wenders, who worked closely with Yohji Yamamoto on the film “Notebook on Cities and Clothes”, was currently working on a dance film project with her. All of them, also including Bartabas, composed a kind of an artistic family, which has definitely lost one of its closest members.’

The Coming Soon project is Yohji Yamamoto’s lower priced line aimed at a younger market. It avoids the predictable and tired logo chic of most designers and takes an innovative approach to marketing. In the light of his links with Bausch, it’s interesting to see that the first four videos produced for the line centre mostly on contemporary dance. All are directed by fashion photographer and film maker, Max Vadukul, and each is set in a different European city. The first, for Fall-Winter 2008 is set in London and has been choreographed by Rachel Lopez de la Nieta and Ben Ash. 

The second, ‘Traffic in Italy’ features the choreographers Simone Sandroni & Lenka Flory, while a third, ‘The Man With The Suitcase’ is made with Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits and Director of Photography Rain Li.

For number four, ‘Le Chef Chic’, Vadukul works with Parisian choreographer Hervé Koubi.

More on International Times (and a little on its first editor, Tom McGrath) in a Guardian article today marking the launch of ITs’ full issue archive. It’s the covers on the later issues and the illustrations that have lasted best and evoke the period. The one above is from a 1969 issue and signals the fast approaching demise of the hippy, even before the end of the sixties, and the rise of the skinhead.

By 1970 Richard Allen was publishing Skinhead, the start of a successful run through other titles such as Suedehead and, of course, Knuckle Girls.

Somehow, IT saw it coming and though its roots may have been in psychedelia, it recognised that the strange hybridity of British popular culture was its’ true subject. A later editor of IT, Mick Farren, went on to write for the NME and penned a landmark article entitled ‘The Titanic Sails at Dawn’ which laid waste the turgid and pompous rock stars of the 70s and cleared the ground for punk. The article seems locked in an online subscriber-only archive and, anyway, it’s probably more appropriate to direct to Farren’s current blog.

To drive this tangent to its conclusion only needs the revelation that Richard Allen was a pseudonym for James Moffat, a Canadian born writer who worked under a series of aliases. Stewart Home, who has paid homage to the Allen books, analyses them in an online article, ‘Gender, Sexuality and Control’ where he conludes the readers of these texts were ‘searching for an authority they could believe in, rather than attempting to overthrow all forms of hierarchy.’ For more on all of this, there’s a 1996 documentary on YouTube here.

Members of the constabulary come across some gardeners…and seem to think it’s looking good.

Meanwhile, the young turn up to show the (slightly) older ones how it’s done. Brought their own tools too.

Eventually work gets done.

Here at CCA we’d all like to thank our intern Elizabeth Wewiora for all her work co-ordinating the guerilla gardening initiative and the work in Schools in Drumchapel.

Grow Sheffield have produced The Abundance Handbook which can be downloaded as a pdf from this site.

The book’s producers say:

Finally after eighteen months of labour and sweating over computers, pencils, pens and apples we proudly present to you the Abundance Handbook – a guide to harvesting fruit in the city. As the book says this is experience and knowledge gleaned from our very specific experience of Sheffield and what is has to offer and share..hopefully there will be some seeds of knowledge and nuggets of wisdom here for everyone.