The City – Terrain of Resistance
The terrain of resistance is a land of nomadic structures capable of forging new connections which metamorphose constantly to respond to changing needs
Guy Lafranchi
Taiwan, Chi Chi Earthquake memorial architect Guy Lafranchi collaborative architect Dietmar Panzenböck graphics Büro Destruct (Bern)
The discrepancy of thinking in the hierarchical order of the mechanical age although we are deeply settled in the electronic age opens a new terrain of exchange which deals with the in-between, the edge, where the order of network pattern allows hidden momentums of Overlaps, Uncertainty, Unpredictability, Self Organisation and Experimentation, creating the Terrain of Resistance.
The Terrain of Resistance deals with smooth space defined dynamically: in terms of transformation instead of essence. Thus, one’s momentary location is less important than one’s continuing movement or line of flight. This space is by definition a structure for what does not yet exist, smooth social structures include ad hoc or populist political movements, communes, some small businesses, subcultures and undergrounds.
The Terrain of Resistance consists of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ), sites of resistance designed for an era in which the state is omnipresent and all-powerful, yet raddled with cracks and vacancies; it is focused on Nomadism, that does not involve physical displacements of buildings: the Rhizome is the path that the Nomad follows, ceaselessly establishing connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.
Taiwan, Chi Chi Earthquake memorial architect Guy Lafranchi collaborative architect Dietmar Panzenböck graphics Büro Destruct (Bern)
The Terrain of Resistance is built by structures out of the nomadic order which provide new links and lead to new fields of confrontation, constantly modified to meet the latest needs, celebrating the transition from linear connections into the world of creative configurations, where the hybrid principle serves as a technique of creative discovery. The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born.
The Terrain of Resistance represents a map, not a tracing. The map differs from the tracing as it is entirely oriented toward an experiment in contact with the “real”: maps, like hypertexts, relate directly to performance, to interaction. Any given order is respected not neglected. It is simply confronted with a field for its own transformation. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions: it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification; can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation.
So-called contextualism and typological historicism are no more than suitable disguises applied to oven-ready formulae.
The Terrain of Resistance activates momentums where society discovers new territories or develops new knowledge; it is attracted by the discontinuous, fractured, and non-linear relationships between science and the rest of culture. These “Temporary Autonomous Zones” liberate an area (of land, time, imagination), then dissolve elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it. With no fixed cities or territories the action on the Terrain can never be located. Consequently, it can never be put on the defensive and conquered. The autonomy is maintained through movement.
The Terrain of Resistance takes into account that in the realm of electronic image production the boundaries between art, science and entertainment get blurred.
A computer program is like to a script, complete with stage directions; plays and computer programs are both “closed universes”; teams of designers and programmers have similar creative roles to personnel in theatre companies; software and circuit boards operate like the “backstage” activity in a theater to support representations and create “magic”.
Theatrical metaphors pervade software applications since both are mimetic, multisensory experiences, and their prime objective of representing action with multiple agents fundamentally overlap.
Transformation of an abandoned Tank system architect Guy Lafranchi graphics Büro Destruct, Bern
Within the Territory of Resistance the polarisation of critical thought in relation to new technologies and cybernetics has been inevitable, faced with a medium that is at once art and science, rational (mathematical, computational) and irrational (mystical, performative and cognitively dissonant). The network creates new relationships between being fictive and being real(ized).
Being fictive becomes an integral part of being real.
The Terrain of Resistance is the cultural matrix that individuals create for themselves in a world where access to “distant” cultural resources has expanded enormously. At the same time, however, it embodies traditional or “close” cultural resources too. The essence of the Terrain resides in the dynamic interfaces that link and mediate available cultural spheres. It is a fusion of the near with the far, the traditional with the new, the relatively unmediated with the multi-mediated in order to create discursive worlds that transform life experience and radically reconfigure the meaning of cultural space.
The Terrain of Resistance underscores the ability of human beings to transform the mundane cultural worlds they inherit through birth and physical presence in particular locales of time and space in order to explore the unknown, and to overcome limits, creating new modes of personal stability and belonging. The interplay between levels of cultural “reality” becomes the core of cultural activity.
Traditional power agents like church and state suffer an unprecedented challenge to their authority as modern technologies decentralize sources of cultural information, and the symbolic forms which circulate today can easily be reproduced, edited and retransmitted in ways that provoke a range of possible interpretations and ideological conversions. Since social consequences of cultural globalization extend beyond political borders and social classes, the overall effect of the technological explosion is the creation of a much greater range of cultural options. The astounding material and symbolic productivity stimulated by the international economies and cultural market is fundamental to the emergence of the Terrain of Resistance as a dominant cultural modality.
Entering the Terrain of Resistance is like performing a spirited, unscripted, perpetual dance that oscillates between routine manoeuvres reflecting familiar deep structures of inherited “internal cultural patterns”, and trickier solo steps of cultural risk and innovation, forever synthesizing and creating, never resting.
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The Terrain of Resistance
The Terrain of Resistance is an abstract machine, a set of conceptual tools that works as a specific device, inhabiting the real and activating its potential for transformation. The Turin workshop – ToGame05 – organised by RIEA with Dipartimento Casa-Città del Politecnico di Torino and Cluster, will activate a Terrain of Resistance in relation to the Olympics Sites: the action will focus on the surrounding urban fabric, dealing with the in-between condition between new symbolic buildings and the everyday spaces of the city. Participants will develop design strategies – based on the idea of performance and the free use of urban space made by Parkour freerunners – that will become the architectural moves of the spirited, perpetual dance that makes the Terrain of Resistance real.
Corrado Curti
