London 2012: espacio de excepción

Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, which, he argues, has become a technique of government rather than a provisional and exceptional measure, may help to understand the legal and spatial configuration of the Olympic Games. This text analyses the key documents in the legal architecture of the Olympics, and their impact in the regulation and surveillance of the economic and political space of the city. After summarising the key components of the governance of the Games, the text focuses in the configuration of exceptionality. Legitimated on the basis of necessity and threat, the regulations linked to the Games passed by the British Government effectively materialise an state of exception: a capitalist paradise in which economic activity is subject to exclusive contracts, political activity is criminalised, and where these privileges are protected by the police and military-grade security. Hence, the idea of London 2012 as a “space of exception”

More than a mountain: the contentious multiplicity of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands)

The mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands) has been surrounded by controversy since the mid-1990s. It is, at once, a listed indigenous site, a protected natural environment, a mining resource, and the designated location of a monumental intervention by artist Eduardo Chillida, consisting in digging a grand cubic cave in its interior. This article conceptualizes Tindaya as a contentious multiplicity and analyses the mountain’s competing enactments. The state’s Tindaya is a ‘partitioned’ mountain, an entity split into different dimensions (cultural and natural; interior and exterior) that can be both legally protected and excavated. In contrast, activists have enacted a ‘holistic’ mountain, characterized by the inseparability of its multiple ‘values’ (archaeological, geological, environmental) and the need to protect it as a single whole. These two enactments constitute ‘worlding’ practices connected to opposing understandings of the relationship between heritage, nature, and the future. For the state, the mountain is an asset to be exploited, an opportunity to bring about prosperous futures fashioned after the spectacular projects of the metropolis. For the activists, Tindaya represents a unique opportunity to rethink the island’s development model and to put indigenous heritage and environmental concerns at its centre. Tindaya’s unresolved multiplicity is therefore political in the broadest sense: it is a reminder that reality can be otherwise

Monumental suspension: Art, Infrastructure and Eduardo Chillida’s unbuilt Monument to Tolerance

More than twenty-five years after it was unveiled, Eduardo Chillida’s Monument to Tolerance has neither been built nor abandoned – it is, rather, suspended. The project consists in digging a vast cubic cave inside the mountain of Tindaya (Fuerteventura, Canary Islands). From the outset, it faced the opposition of environmental activists, who argued that it was incompatible with the mountain’s status as a protected site. Drawing from anthropological approaches to infrastructure and art, this article unpacks the Monument’s actual existence as an unrealized project, partly actualized through anticipatory practices such as exhibitions or economic aspirations. The article contributes to the theorization of suspension by combining a focus on the temporal multiplicity of anticipation with an attention to the materiality of unbuilt entities

Photography against the Olympic spectacle

This article sets the official images of the transformation of East London for the 2012 Olympics against two independent documentary photography projects, Alessandra Chilá's Olympian Visions and Chris Dorley-Brown's Decisive Moments. The first section analyses the Olympic Delivery Authority's computer-generated images as acts of political imagination and in terms of the production of consensus. The work of Chilá and Dorley-Brown is then presented as a counter-representation of the changes in the area, and at the same time a critical reflection on the constructed nature of the documentary image. Through the use of post-production techniques and text–image combinations, these photographers have abandoned the idea of a transparent access to reality, while remaining committed to a broader notion of realism

Luces y sombras. El compromiso en la etnografía

¿How can we defend today that ethnography’s main task is to get closer to reality? ¿How can a postructuralist conscience be combined with an attempt to describe and explain a world “out there”? ¿What is the significance of an anthropology that does not aspire to transform reality? These are some of the questions addressed in this article, drawing on the naturalism-realism debate proposed by manuel delgado (2003) in this journal. A return to a “primitive naturalism” is countered with a “realist” ethnography: flatter (which recognizes each object’s singularity and is interested in its relations) and more opaque (which does not aspire to transparency and recognizes texts as mediation).    ¿Cómo defender Hoy que la tarea primordial de la etnografía es acercarse más a la realidad? ¿Cómo combinar una conciencia posestructuralista con el intento de describir y explicar un mundo “ahí fuera”? ¿Qué sentido tiene una etnografía que no aspire a la transformación de la realidad? Estas son algunas de las cuestiones que este artículo aborda, retomando el debate entre naturalismo y realismo planteado por Manuel Delgado (2003) en esta misma Revista. A la idea de un retorno al “naturalismo primitivo” se contrapone una etnografía “realista”: más plana (que reconoce la singularidad de cada objeto y se interesa por sus relaciones) y más oscura (que no aspira a la transparencia y que reconoce el texto como mediación). &nbsp

Together apart: Hackney Wick, the Olympic site and relational art

As soon as the bid to host the 2012 Olympics was won by London in 2005, and the plans to build the Olympic site in the Lower Lea Valley were announced, an inconspicuous yet steady stream of artistic projects started to interrogate the impact that the transformation of the area would have on its inhabitants, landscape and social life. This undercurrent of criticality, largely invisible to the mainstream, offered an alternative to the official account of the process – one that spoke of displacement, surveillance and the effacement of local history. Through a myriad of art works, images, events and discussions, an important space of dissent was produced in the lead up to the Games. The relational, collective and public dimension of these artistic practices is explored in the first part of this article, via an analysis of Jim Woodall's Olympic State project in Hackney Wick

Actor-Network Theory, Gabriel Tarde and the Study of an Urban Social Movement: The Case of Can Ricart, Barcelona

This article explores the possibilities that a deeper engagement with the work of Gabriel Tarde opens for Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It argues that the combination of ANT’s methodological and analytical orientation and Tarde’s neo-monadology offers a useful framework for the study of new forms of political activism. Findings from an ethnographic project on the conflict surrounding the eviction and demolition of the Can Ricart factory in Barcelona are used to discuss: a) how ANT transforms the objects of inquiry into performative, relational entanglements (or monads); and b) how Tarde’s neo-monadology helps to re-imagine the political in ANT, moving away from the design of new parliamentary forms and towards a politics of invention. Three key moments of invention in the conflict of Can Ricart are examined: the assemblage of a new activist collective, the fabrication of the very factory the movement was trying to save, and the generation of a bifurcation in the conditions of possibility in which the conflict was taking place

Descentrar el sujeto: Erving Goffman y la teorización del sujeto

This article synthesises the contributions of Erving Goffman and situational-interactionist sociology to rethinking the subject. In particular, it analyses the impact that this perspective has for the modern concept of subject and its contribution to a relational theory of the latter. The interactive nature of the subject, its constitutive multiplicity and the importance of superficial relations in its social configuration are three of the main ideas developed by this perspective and discussed in this paper. the article concludes by setting out the possibility of taking these claims as the starting point of a theory of the subject, and some of the difficulties this would entail

Creating Better Visualisations With STS

A workshop with guest lecture by Laura Watts, Interdisciplinary Senior Lecturer in Energy & Society, University of Edinburgh. Workshop held at Goldsmiths, University of London, and organised by Michael Guggenheim, Isaac-Marrero Guillamon and Alex Wilkie of the Centre for Innovation and Social Process

Objetos textuales y dispositivos colaborativos: de la etnografía como plataforma pública

This article traces the unexpected becoming-collaborative of an ethnographic project in Hackney Wick (London) which looked at the role of art in the critique to the urban transformations brought about by the 2012 Olympics. The derailment of what should have been a conventional fieldwork exercise led to a reformulation of the ethnographic practice as a collaborative device aimed at the production of textual objects which in turn acted as public forums or platforms. This process is here discussed as a recursive (or parasitic) gesture which appropriates native ways of doing.<br><br>Este artículo traza el inesperado devenir colaborativo acontecido en el transcurso de una investigación etnográfica en Hackney Wick (Londres) en torno al rol del arte en la crítica a la transformación urbana asociada a los Juegos Olímpicos de Londres 2012. El descarrilamiento de lo que debía haber sido un ejercicio clásico de trabajo de campo condujo a una reformulación del ejercicio etnográfico como dispositivo colaborativo orientado a la producción de objetos textuales que a su vez actuaban como foro o plataforma pública. Este proceso se discute aquí como un gesto recursivo (o parasítico) que se apropia, y versiona, prácticas y modos de hacer propios del campo