30/11/2015

Τίτλος: MEMORIALIZATION APPARATUS.

Πως αποφεύγεται η σύνδεση ενός μνημείου με μια επακριβή σημασία, η οποία εγκλωβίζεται σε ένα επαναλαμβανόμενο ρεφρέν; Θεωρώντας το διαδίκτυο ως τόπο αντίστοιχης εμβέλειας με το έργο του Le Corbusier, η πρότασηαυτήαναζητά έναδιαφορετικό τρόπο μνημόνευσης, ένα θεμελιωμένο πρότυπο που επιδέχεται τελειοποίηση για να παραφράσω τοναποθανών. Βασιζόμενος στο απροσδόκητο γεγονός ότι δεν υπάρχει επίσημο Google Doodle για τον Le Corbusier, η πρόταση μου είναι ένα μνημείο-Doodle, που στοχεύει στην διαδικασία αναζήτησης, η οποία πυροδοτείται από τους χρήστες εξαιτίας των πληροφοριών που τους παραθέτονται. Όπως επισημαίνει και ο Proust, η ερμηνεία δεν αφορά την ανακάλυψη ενός πράγματος που προϋπάρχει, ούτε την δημιουργία εκ μηδενός, αλλά την παραγωγή μιας εντύπωσης, ενός αποτελέσματος. Επομένως η πρόταση αυτή αποσκοπεί σ' έναν τύπο μνημείου που δεν έχει συγκεκριμένη σημασία, ένα μνημείο που πλέον δεν είναι ερμηνεύσιμο, αλλά που λειτουργεί ως μηχανισμός, μια μηχανή ικανή να παράγει νόημα.

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MEMORIALIZATION APPARATUS

_Monuments, as a subset of memorials, refer to the materials used to memorialize an event or person. They are mnemic symbols that represent the past and their goal is public remembrance. According to Deleuze&Guattari there are two different social libidinal investments: Schizoid(open) investments of desire that are polyvocal, liberating, and productive versus Fascistic(paranoid) investments of desire that are univocal, oppressive and are organized around a despotic signifier. In the context of memorial culture, as Adrian Parr argues, a schizoid investment of desire is to extract the polyvocal movement of social energies and affects at play in the process of public remembrance. A fascistic investment is when the energies and affects, that the labour of memory produces, are coded and given a fixed meaning. This becomes crucial for a monument because meaning- that is signification and regulated representation- gets stuck on a refrain that returns us to the same story again and again. But how do we avoid connecting the monument to the one meaning or idée fixe? How do we experiment with desire instead? Such a case of experimentation (though inadvertent) is Dürer's solution for a monument commemorating a victory of the 1525 German peasant’s war. The monument, like a totem pole conveying the everyday life of peasants, consists of the life-sustaining goods and fruits of their labor, animals, and their work tools. At the peak of the composition, an 'afflicted peasant' sits atop a chicken cage, with a sword stuck in his back. As Amir Djalali argues, Dürer’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants has always been an interpretative enigma. Some have seen it as an act of mockery, a grotesque representation, an attempt to discredit the misery of peasant life. Others interpret its forms as a passionate endorsement of the peasants’ cause. According to S. Greenblatt, the seated peasant, stabbed from behind, evokes the iconographic type known as "Christ in Distress", a supreme figure of betrayal, for the peasants were betrayed by Luther when he decided to side with the princes. At the same time, if the design was conceived in the spirit of Luther's remarks[1] the peasants themselves can be seen as traitors, and the monument would thus celebrate their just punishment. While the monument retains its commemorative, unitary form, its consumption is not univocal. These contradictions enable the monument to escape the oppressive representation trap, and produce something new. Dürer’s monument represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works.

__Considering Le Corbusier's worldwide influential body of work and theoretical concepts, this proposal seeks a specific site that would have an equivalent impact, thus the Internet. But in this virtual place, with its almost worldwide impact, a different way of commemorating already exists, an established standard that allows for perfection to paraphrase the deceased, that is called Google Doodles.

Following the ambiguity of the raw material of Dürer’s design and the surprising fact that Le Corbusier has not got an official Google Doodle, this proposal is a Doodle memorial design, that keeps the established standards (google word), including information about the commemorated person, not with fixed hyperlinks but by laying them bare. This is because, as Proust insists, to interpret is neither to discover something that is already there, nor to create something ex nihilo, rather, it is to produce an effect on other people, to make something happen.

This proposal aims at a type of monument that no longer has meaning, a monument that is no longer to be interpreted, but works as an apparatus, a machine capable of producing meaning -that is certain truths. Specifically, these truths are created from the searching procedure via Google search engine, that will be triggered due to the specific content of the memorial's information and due to the lack of hyperlinks. This establishes a new link between remembering and creating and establishes it in a process of production as a work of art. In this regard, the modern work of art has no problem of meaning, it has solely a problem of use.

[1] Panofsky claims that Dürer never wavered for a moment in his loyalty to Luther. The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton, 1955

Bibliography:

Adrian Parr, Deleuze and Memorial Culture Edinburgh University Press,2008

Amir Djalali, The Measure of Turmoil: Dürer’s Monument to the Vanquished Peasants, San Rocco 4,2012

Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis,1983

Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? ,New York,1994

Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, Minneapolis,2004

Stephen Greenblatt, Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion, Representations 1,1983

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ORGANISATION:

Archstudies.gr and DeCorbuziers team organised the International, Public, Anonymous, Single Stage, Conceptual Architectural Idea Design Competition under the auspice of the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens.

Websites: www.archstudies.gr

Event: http://lecorbusier.arch.ntua.gr

e-mail: arch_studies@yahoo.gr, submissions@archstudies.gr

tumblr: decorbuziers-memorial.tumblr.com