Flamboyant markers : gay style in urban spaces

textThis thesis explores gay style within urban spaces in downtown Austin, Texas. Employing style as a rhetorical and communicative approach and method, I investigate and analyze how gay style markers are read off the built material environment of urban spaces. Through an application and analysis of a rhetoric of style, I demonstrate how particular downtown Austin districts and neighborhoods can be read as de facto gay districts through a reading of the gay style marker flamboyance. The focus of the thesis is an analysis of the systematic and rhetorical signification of gay style markers, which function to define and constitute particular urban spaces as “gay” districts or neighborhoods. Through of an examination of flamboyance in downtown Austin’s Warehouse District and surrounding districts, I demonstrate gay style is indeed present in a “non-gay” urban space. Ultimately, I argue that gay sexual style markers are capable of being read off the built environment of urban spaces; furthermore, it is these same gay style markers that come to define and constitute gay urban spaces, districts, and neighborhoods.Communication Studie

[Åpent Forum 2010.09.06]

1 h, 10 minForelesning av Valerie Tevere og Angel Nevare

Salon of revolution

The title of the exhibition for the 2008 Zagreb Youth Salon – Salon of the Revolution, contains a deliberate paradox and ambiguity that defines it both as 'revolutionizing a Salon' and 'salonizing a revolution'. By creating a space of uncertainty about its meaning, it presents itself primarily as a question, reflecting on the possibilities, responsibilities, and positions which contemporary art and intellectual practice can occupy today. The year 1968 (the year of the global revolts but also the year when the Youth Salon was first established in Zagreb) is just an allusive starting point for the multifaceted project which links strategies of resistance in the past with those of today and, in a more general sense, questions the ways in which looking into the past, even with nostalgia, can foster not only a passive attitude which Walter Benjamin reproachfully dubbed 'left melancholy', but the driving force of a new reflection on art and the present moment. The relation towards the past which the Salon of the Revolution wishes to activate is closest to Badiou's concept of the 'fidelity to the event' and, besides 1968, the project maps a series of other 'events' from the past which together form a repertory of empowering references, or at least moments whose heritage is today worth questioning and whose 'anniversaries' we can, without cynicism, congratulate. The show further reflects on the history of the exhibition venue, the House of Artists, designed by Ivan Mestrovic and build in 1938, which, since then, had gone through several transformations, all of which have been linked to highest instances of state politics and the changing ideologies

An Open Interview and Lunch : Fuse Magazine - 16 Beaver Group

This unbound document contains the results of an unconventional conference in which at least 87 identified artists/writers participated from different locations. A series of questions and answers pertaining to collaborative work, artist’s organisations, possible models for the future, and the relationship between art/politics are presented