IMPROMPTU

Christina Mitrentse said:

I would like to introduce a few new important terms in the conversation of IMPROMPTU that I think are vital elements in the project and derived from the notions of community and social structure. The living space and the home have the importance significance in contemporary life as a term associated with collection of human personal traces.
The notion of living SPACE but reversed from the one that Heidegger had spoken about. The contemporary notion of Living space according to Walter Benjamin. The culture of living has been derived from Heidegger in a crucial moment around the Second World War in a moment where the notion has been re examined and repositioned. Now days though we look at that notion in its reversed sequence so we see first the building of a space then we think of its environment and last we live in it.
But very important it has always been a collective practice. This has to do with a structural element of living space, which is the notion of collection as a mechanism of life and of existence. We collect vital things, which are important in order to live. Today everything is a collective process. Think about the Internet, The blogs the consumerism, the texts books the city and the living space is a collection. We are coming from a term with political connotations the multycollectivity, which if we look at it from an artistic point of view it reduces the critical ability is the opposite of critical ability. I collect everything without knowing why. If we look around us at now days life style model this logic of collective ability is dominate. This collectivity and the living have to do with the revitalizing of existence. There is a big gap in the concept of ‘collect’ the collective practice which is obvious in European countries during the industrial revolution in 19th cent. Where there is a middle space, a distinction between the internal and the external, which is the city. What the citizen is not able to get or find from the city he tries to collect it in the internal part, which is the home. This created a distinction between the working space and the living space. In reality what we all do as citizens is to collect traces in our living spaces. A huge pile of traces, memories and experiences or life experiences. In a way the notion of living contains the characteristics of piling information, which derives from this ‘relational’ community spaces. Like Freud ‘s surgery in Vienna was a memorial, includes everything that had bothered him and had dealt with. This gives us another reading/layer is that if we want to read a space we need to use the tools of an archeologist. To find out about the person the indiosigratic elements of the citizen etc. In some ways we in this project need to introduce the viewers to this living personal human traces as a group. So I think we need to consider and incorporate this idea/ problematic in terms of how we approach the gallery space. The museum space, the exhibition space becomes /reflects the city, becomes a living space.
I think the biggest project of erasing the traces of living space is Postmodernism. This notion of living space in society has become an non personal space visualized and highly represented in Mess Vaun De Roe architecture in the minimal cold ,glass, white cube houses the clinical archetype of a distant white cube hyper-space where no one lives but everyone. The notion of collection-.

So what do we have in common/community or what separate us /individuality?
We live /share time together through discussions towards the end product of this project but we should consider highly important that in this ‘ living space’ the living is the important – The actual collective exchange is the work itself. So we make sure we all live our personal traces and experiences both literally and metaphorically.

Christina Mitrentse



According to Felix Guattari:
In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become "dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical
Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.
The crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control?