The Zone and Zones - Radical Spatiality in our Times

Jedan je čovjek rekao: „Najljepše godine moga života su ondje, u prašini eksplozije.“Zaspali su u kukuruzu. Ništa ne čuju, ništa ne vide. Mladi su. Kukuruz ih štiti.Operaciju su najavili u tisku. Televizija, radio ponavljaju informaciju, riječi naviru, uporne, i ako se rečenica izgubi od jedne do druge sobe, rekonstituirat će se između kuhinje i balkona. Čuje se: „rušenje… problemi… zone… stambeni park… prenaseljenost… predgrađe… dotrajalost… rušenje… eksploziv… stambena četvrt… deset nebodera…“ Shvaćamo da će već mjesecima zazidani neboderi biti srušeni. Barem je to jednostavno. Iz jednog se nebodera preselila u drugi. Kad je suprug došao po nju u selo, odmah je pristala. Sve te godine u kući koja nikad neće biti njezina. Od prvog je dana znala da je majka njenog supruga neće voljeti. Nije ju zlostavljala, ignorirala ju je, kao da ona nije bila majka djece njenog najstarijeg sina. Svekrva ju je intrigama pokušala odvojiti od dječaka kako bi ih poslala da žive s ocem jer ona nije bila ...

Pjesništvo Susanne Jorn intimno je s mnogo kratkih pjesama koje često izražavaju osjećaje, atmosferu i dojmove. Tu su osobna viđenja prirode i ljudi, doživljena, mogli bismo reći, na slikarski način. Boje su gotovo redoviti sastavni dio tih doživljaja i kao na slikama, stvaraju dramatičnu ili smirenu atmosferu. One su izraz prirode koja okružuje pjesnikinju, ali su i izraz osjećaja i duševnih stanja. To se jasno pokazuje u zbirci Ne sada već sad, čiji je okvir paleta plavih boja. Druga scena njezine poezije sličice su iz japanskog života i japanske umjetnosti i pjesništva, koje mnogo puta prenosi u svoju dansku okolinu. U zbirci Ne sada već sad mnoge su pjesme prizori iz Danske ili Tokija, ali i drugih krajeva svijeta gdje je boravila. Ipak, njezino je pjesništvo prije svega vezano uz nordijsko nebo, zemlju i kulturu te sjećanja na oca (poznatog danskog likovnog umjetnika Asgera Jorna, koji je u svojim djelima spajao različite vrste umjetnosti. Asger Jorn bio je član poznate transnacio...

It is time to radically rethink the question of the political – is how contemporary theorist Enrique Dussel explained the motive to write his Twenty (20) Theses on Politics [20 Tesis de política], almost six years ago. In one of his theses he stated that the radical transmutation of the political system is actually a “response to new interventions by the oppressed and excluded” (Dussel 112), or in other words, that it relies on other spaces and impulses of the political, namely on those which are dedicated to engaging in critical, that is, liberating actions. A year ago, in a joint public conversation between two leading feminist theorists – Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – organized by the Centre for Postcolonial Theory in Frankfurt in May 2011 and devoted to critique today, the main meaning of critique was expressed neither as a method nor as a theoretical position, rather as its potency to explore “how it may be possible to think”; namely, the way “in which we pose the...

Featuring as one of the privileged metaphors in humanities and social sciences, theatre provides primarily an image of a circumscribed space whose spatial syntax and modes of human engagement take place within and with respect to the larger space of the city, the world, and, as in Calderon’s Gran teatro del mundo, the universe. It is precisely as a special organization of spatiality that theatre reached the status of Foucault’s radical hetero-topos, flexible as it proved to be as a model for not only counter-representing all the human dealings in the external space, but also of conceptualizing, as in Freud’s psychoanalysis, man’s inner world, his psychic topography. But theatre is above all a concrete place, a built form with its own spatial history, its changing social and ideological functions, and its ways of bestowing to the bodies that enter into it actual or phantasm identities, thoughts, sensations, feelings and memories.My intervention will deal with one of the ruling borders/d...

The cartographer’s dream is that of a perfect map: a map that perfectly represents a territory, a dream of Divine knowledge; a map that has haunted the ideology of representation throughout history; a map so detailed that it coincides with real space. In a short parable, ‘Museum, on Exactitude in Science’, Borges describes the mysterious gild of cartographers which charts such a map. Although Borges’ narrative finishes with a nostalgic conclusion about a superfluous and forgotten discipline, the cartographer’s dream of a perfect map has never ceased: it has merely varied throughout history. For medieval cartographers the perfect map included the physical cosmos and the spiritual one. In Dante’s time the European ‘mappa mundi’ depicted one single landmass, the Northern Hemisphere, with Jerusalem in the middle and the world is variously shown as dominated or held by God. In the Psalter mappa mundi, which is surmounted by an illustration of the Last Judgement, God holds a little dark red ...

On the basis of ever-mounting evidence, amongst which is the “zone” problematic of the Zadar conference that occassioned these notes, it can be concluded that the spatial turn has insinuated itself as an all-pervading heuristic tool throughout the humanities and the social sciences. The extent to which space and spatiality have usurped the central stage in the various branches of reasearch can be gauged by admonishments that what we are witnessing is a new fundamentalism that has simply inverted the terms of the dualism of time and space (May and Thrift 2001: “Introduction”). According to Michael Dear the sway of space is manifested in multifold ways: in the ubiquity of spatial analysis in social theories and practices; in the explosion of publications devoted to the exploration of the interface of the social and the spatial; in the reintegration of human geography into various domains of knowledge; in the focus given to difference and the consequent diversification of theoretical and ...