Vertical

Água é um estado de ausência de verticalidade

Água is the lack of verticality


estas são anotações do pessoal que vai receber a Mrs Tarcha::

What’s Eating Amsterdam?

For long situationists have been mapping the contemporary city in two ways. First, one can follow its fragments, the different social, cultural, architectonical frames, the various ecosystems it houses. Debord thus mapped striatedness, different forms of urban organization, performing an ethics of disruption (culture versus nature, man versus animal). One could also follow Constant’s New Babylon trying to traverse the various parts, restoring the unity it has always already been. This time, an ethics of micropolitical resistance is performed, smoothening the city, showing in what way any point can and must be connected to any other.

Of course we take the second path when we search a radical new politics of consumption. Our fascination with food or consumption already shows the way we intend to merge instead of divide. Our bodies, and consequently our minds (the ideas of our bodies), need to perform how a pluralism is a monism, how the barriers that structure/identify/suffocate the city can be broken/eaten. Thus, while reading and discussing the texts, we experiment with several new diagrams proposing a new ecological geography of the city (as Cache could say it).

In terms of concrete molecular action, we set up a two day event in which we find and feed off the (in)visible, concrete garden of plant-life in Amsterdam, flourishing in dispersed yet intense ecological life-worlds; the wild shoots and anomalous plant communities that thrive ‘out of control’ in the interstices of regulated urban space. The process of finding varieties of edible plant species from the city environs and urban ghostgrounds (arable zones, like the swamp area around Schiphol) along the canalbelt banks or transport routes such as railway lines or bicycle paths involves the indeterminate growing of the society of molecular stalkers. For example, urban phytosociologists who study the relations between different urban-occurring species will be contacted to help suss-out the edibility and preparation of plant species. The experiments allow us to be ‘in the city’ much more radically than how Michel de Certeau envisioned it.
Next to placing our lives between the various consumptive strata/ ecosystems of urban life, we intend to open ourselves up to other minor ecosystems that traverse the city of Amsterdam. We are interested in mapping some of the systems that are in someway repressed by the way human life has created urban foodscapes (which would include the anomalous plant communities), but we are also keen on finding out what followed from this (the life or rats, ants, fungi) and other consumptive schemata’s that are broken, shattered and sometimes surprisingly vital machineries of urban life.

The ‘relational soup’ could be a decoction made from the plant life that is gathered by the molecule. This way we share with our guests, our fundamental entrance to city life. Following that the social, geographic and survival facts and anecdotes amassed in the collection also become part of the soup or bigger meal and are themselves vital ingredients that are shared when eating and drinking together.

In short, we could form a molecule that looks for and ingests the pickings of the city’s pervasive yet concrete gardens. In doing so we positively disturb the regulation and over-organisation of city life in Amsterdam.

Core aprticipants:

Rick Dolphijn
Sher Doruff
Wietske Maas
Matteo Pasquinelli
six more soon to be disclosed!!