inspiration

Art and the City

“I want to consider three specific contexts for urbanity that help mediate art and the city: the idea of the public, the idea of democracy, and the idea of interdependence. These mediating ideas provide a context that helps render the abstract practical, the invisible transparent. In the words of Peter Brook, these contexts give the “holy” in art an invigorating dose of the profane." (Barker, 2013)

READ MORE

Tired City

'For me the work starts with an image, not an idea.’ Jorge Macchi   

READ MORE

More and more about less and less

'In the recent years, the urgency of reviewing the general framework of European history has grown in proportion to the fashion for highly specialized, high-magnification studies. (...) Many historians and students have been drawn into ‘more and more about less and less’ to the point where the wider perspectives are sometimes forgotten. Yet the humanities require all degrees of magnifications. History needs to see the equivalent of the planets spinning in space; to zoom in and observe people at ground level, and to dig deep beneath their skins and their feet. The historian needs to use counterparts of the telescope, the microscope, the brain-scanner and the geological probe.’ Norman Davies  

READ MORE

The Green Line

‘Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.’ Francis Alÿs.

READ MORE

Use versus Population

 “Today, city planners swear loyalty to Jane Jacob’s vision. Her goal of preserving the city’s physical fabric by maintaining the small scale and interactive social life of the streets has been translated into laws for preserving much of the built environment. But these laws go only part of the way towards creating the vibrant city Jacobs loved. They encourage mixed uses, but not a mixed population.”   Zukin S., Naked City: the death and life of authentic urban places, New York, Oxford University Press, inc., 2010, p25 

READ MORE

Urban Venus

This stencil graffiti has more similarities with the original painting: La nascita di Venere, Botticelli then just the iconographic face of Venus.

READ MORE

No Megacity without Megacitizens

 ‘… the demarcation of different city concepts in the world, such megacities, megalopolises, urban areas, urbanized areas, edge cities, metropolitan areas and the like, it is not the statistical definitions which tells us the full story, but rather question how much citizens in a certain settlement configuration share an urban way of life.’ Peter Nijkamp, 2oo6.  

READ MORE

Sense & Surrounding

‘Where in society can we still use our senses to define our surroundings, instead of just being defined by them?’ Many of Olafur Eliasson’s installations are based on this question.

READ MORE