PHPM06: " A Picnic with the Natives " ThePublicAnnouncement

The Think Tank that has yet to be named hosts the 6th Publicly held Private Meeting, “A Picnic with the Natives.”




Initiated and directed by DIUM-
The Director of the Department for the Investigation of the Unmentionable
along with the sub-directorships:
DI-ACB for the Investigation of All-around Community Benefit,
DILG for the Investigation of Landing Grabbing,
DISP for the Investigation of Slowing down Progress.

The catalyst for the meeting’s discussion is the proposed plan of New Kensington- CDC to build a theatre at the established green-space on the NW corner of E. Susquehanna and Frankford Ave.

Some of the topics and questions that will be introduced by the committee of managing directors are:

• Places in Transition-a space for conversation about the future.
• Common Use of Private Land:

Now that time has passed, whom does it belong to anyway?

• The appropriation of the Native for the Growth of a Nation.
• Theatre and the Culture of the Spectacle
• Tree Phobia meets Tree Mania in the global world of warming.

PHPM06 Who benefits? What community?

My interest and goals in directing a meeting on the green-space, at the proposed NKCDC site for a future theatre and offices, is multifaceted. Initial questions that have arisen are:
How does this project benefit the community?
Is one person or one organization’s understanding of benefit enough to make the claim that it is beneficial?
Does there need to be a shared understanding of what benefiting the community means?

Perhaps benefit should be accessed by a list of criteria in order to claim the title beneficial. (Similar perhaps to any standard, such as “certified organic.”) There could be a committee who creates these standards, the committee would include a diverse representation from the community. Yet what is this community that we are talking about?
Who does it include and who does it not include?
Should one of the standards of what it means to benefit be that it includes a broad sector of the community?
Is it an imagined community a future community, one that currently exists or a little of all three?

I will also be looking as possible implications, both socially and psychologically, of establishing a green-space with the future intention of then removing it. I will be looking at historical precedent both in recent contemporary history and dating further back to include governmental land policy and other forms of past development, both public and private that institute temporary “public publicity sites” (my term) in order to pave the way for private agenda’s.

It is my hope that by facilitating a meeting a dialogue between community members, whose views of this project are diverse will open up a more nuanced understanding of the issues at hand and perhaps lead to possible collaborations on the oversight of development in our neighborhood and beyond. What is the purpose of bringing differing voices together, it can be argued that less will get done this way, yet this would of course achieve the goals of (DISP) Department for the Investigation of slowing-down progress.

The following posts will address the above issues along with the research that is collected and contributes to the conversation.

PHPM06 Topic and Notes

The following notes were compiled to open up a dialogue at the PHPM06:

Places in Transition, A space for conversations about the future.
“A place between is spatial, it is a mapping of the topographies between here, there and elsewhere. A place between is temporal, it pays attention to time, to the ways in which we locate the then from the now, the now from the yet-to come, for in our writings of history, our placing of the past in the present, we are already positioning possibilities for the future. A place between is social, it is an articulation of the place of dialogue, ongoing discussion, between one an another.”…” the spatial relationship between what is inside and outside the gallery,…” A PLACE BETWEEN, Art, Architecture and Critical Theory Jane Rendell

The Privatization of the Commons: The 21 century “Indian Givers”
"Public green space is an important factor in urban life- it is a respite from the concrete and asphalt environment of the city, and functions as a place to gather, relax, play, and experience a bit of nature…
Public Green poses questions about ownership of land, and suggests the transfer of property from private to public use. Viewers are asked to rethink their local landscape, and to physically transform their environment."
Lize Mogel, Public Green

The "public green", or town commons, was originally a shared piece of land used for grazing livestock. In 17th and 18th century New England, this type of public space was usually the center of community activity. The public green is thus a referent to both a communal patch of grass and the color of money, demonstrating how economics and politics shape urban terrain.
Lize Mogel, LaForum-Public Green

“ the best outcome of NTI lies in the expansion of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's (PHS) Philadelphia Green program, the nation's leading community gardening institution. It has successfully cleaned, greened and fenced thousands of vacant lots throughout the city. Yet Cubas charged that PHS shifted its primary rationale for greening as it gained substantial NTI contracts. In the organization's publicity of its work, what was once presented first and foremost as an effort to organize neighbors and “build community” became cast more often as an “interim strategy” for stabilizing sites in preparation for development and market rebirth.”
Progressive Planning: Twenty-First Century Urban Renewal in Philadelphia, by Domenic Vitiello W07

The Appropriation of the Native for the Growth of a Nation.
“Sewatis has been at the Six Nations blockade since it began on February 28 (2006)… . I was peaceful and just explained the situation. [I said] 'I cannot follow your orders because I'm not Canadian. I'm Haudenosaunee.'"…
“Since 1924, the Canadian government has done its negotiating with the Band Council, a system that is a part of and paid for by the federal government. "The Band Council," says Horn, "does not represent the Six Nations peoples according to international law."
In an open letter to local newspapers, Hill compares the government's agreements with Band Council to finding a few people in Caledonia to agree to sell their town to the people of Six Nations. "Would that be legal?" she asks.”…
“It is not only First Nations people that stand to benefit from a just outcome to the Six Nations standoff, says Horn. Native and non-native people alike are suffering from a system that is destroying the environment. Horn believes that under Indigenous title, the land would be treated with far more respect. "According to our constitution, we have to take care of the land, in other words we're environmentalists," explains Horn. "That's why it's important [for non-native people] to help us assert our jurisdiction."
Home On Native Land, The people of Six Nations are repossessing their land by Hillary Bain Lindsay, The Dominion

Theatre and the Culture of the Spectacle: Who benefits? What community?
“It is NKCDC’s hope that the arts center will become an asset to the community by presenting diverse and acclaimed performer and exhibits which reflect the rich cultural diversity of the neighborhood, as well as providing a forum for artists both locally and city-wide.”
“Inside New Kensington”, summer 2007 nkcdc newsletter.

“When I had my first cold in New Zealand, I was advised by neighbors to take lots of “manuka”. This is honey produced from the flower of the native manuka plant, a key pollen plant for honeybees (and green geckos!, not to mention kiwis). Honeybees, however, are not native to New Zealand. And the native bee that, takes the pollen of the manuka does not make honey. So if people want to eat honey, they must take it from non-native bees, getting it from a native plant. It gets complicated.”
Pennsylvannia Native Plant Society: Vol. 9 no 4 Oct-Dec 2006

Tree Phobia meets Tree Mania in the global world of warming.
“Little dispute remains over the issue of excessive greenhouse gases emissions. Science has finally overwhelmed politics; statistics have trumped speculation…this is by no mean a death knell, but a call to action.” …local calls to action such as Philadelphia’s “Next Great City” initiative that encourages the future mayors to become involved in neighborhood transformation. Just as we can change the political landscape with our vote, we can improve the environmental landscape with our actions.”
The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, The Quill, Sp07 by Dennis Burton

What is indigenous?

I wonder if indigenous exists? It seems to me that the word is full of contradictions. It very well might me a condition that has been made up by our western experience of believing that we are lost? Are we lost? It certainly appears that way when I look around at the condition of this city and the quality of our lives in it. Yet the solutions are not beyond or far reaching, rather exist in the ramble and debris of our own back yards. Indigenous has been a topic of discussion between us Think Tank directors. (we have only nibbled.) I have come to the conclusion (for the moment of course) that there is nothing about my condition that makes me indigenous and I see no need to change that. I think we strive for this pre-ordianed status in order to some how feel that we legitimately belong. It is also tied up with the belief in the virtues of the authentic and the original. I laugh at this notion-the original and the new! Innovation is interesting, but newness for newness sake-oh so modern, such illusion. Is the modern reaching for the original really a regressing to the lost paradise? Interesting to think about the connections between the word original and origins. Perhaps we moderns are not so modern at all.

Is there such a thing as reality?

This post is an over view of Bruno Latour's introduction to Pandora's Hope. I wrote this as a way to prepare for a reading group meeting with member's of C-Cred, BaseKamp and our very own Think Tank:

Feb 10th 2007

Bruno Latour began working on Pandora's Hope when confronted with the question put forward to him by a colleague. He was asked by his friend, a psychologist, if he believed in reality. This question let Latour to argue that to ask such a question means that you have had to become so distant from it that the fear of losing it is quite plausible. Backing up this argument is the content of his book. He begins: How is it that this question could even be asked? And in asking how, Latour gives a brief summary of the history of the philosophy of modernism. Beginning with Descartes up to the present practices of the fields of science.

Descartes argued that our minds are distant and separate from the world. (Latour names this "the mind in a vat" syndrome.) The only plausible way to experience the world (out there) was an intervention from God through the tenuous connection of the gaze. The empiricists abandon the need for divine intervention, yet whole heartedly embraced the "mind in a vat" gazing out onto the world: receiving an endless amount of stimuli. Kant attempted to explain how we are able to decode and make meaning from this visible empirical world by claiming a universal system (that exist solely in our mind) which interprets the world (out there) (my comment: C. Greenberg, was heavily influenced by Kant. His definition of "taste" in relation to aesthetics is a direct reference to Kant's "universal a priori") The predetermined code, which we all shared was soon replaced by a constructionists definition, that claimed that our gaze was socially constructed. Latour argues that constructivism rather than freeing us from the "mind in the vat" syndrome, simply expanded the prison of the in/out from the individual cell to a large dormitory. (my words: replacing madness for organized socialized pathological behavior-read foucalt?.) Phenomenology in this century, tries to give the mind back to the body, where the mind/body, experiences the world directly "a lived-world, however, Latour argues that theirs is only a partial mending that leaves science practice of mind in-to world out, intact.

Strangely and dangerously this modern history intersects with an older one going back to Socrates. Where the singular mind of reason, he argues, was superior to "10,000 fools" hence an outside world needing to be dominated and saved from their inhumanity. (my words: Here is our western history of conquest at its beginnings) The separation of the "humane", the "pure" from the "inhumane" and the "beastly" created a deep anxiety of the pending mutiny by the unruly, named the "fear of the mob" syndrome. (again greenberg's "avant-garde and kitch" argues that the avant-garde could save culture from the base work of kitch)

The "mind in the vat" with its FoM syndrome (down there) gazing out at the spectacular (read spectacle) world out there, created a descending whirling dervish away from any contact with reality, away from all that makes us who we are and have become-all those "non-humans".

Latour replaces the word objects with the word non-humans in order not to only free objects from their cold and calculated objectivity but also to free us humans from our subjectivity, which leaves us separated from the world of objects. Humans and Non-Human's implies "a social history of things" and a "thingy history of humans". When humans and non-humans fold into each other they form constant changing collectives. Hence, an alternative to the modernist trilogy-mindin-worldout-foolsdown is the notion of a factish, which "cancels out the twin affects of belief and knowledge." (I can't help but think of 911 here, maybe there is something to that????)

Scientific research is the zone where humans and non-humans are thrown into an extraordinary collect experiment, (with sites, experiments and groups of colleagues) whose outcome is always unknown and undetermined. This Latour claims is a practice of the non-modern differentiated from the post-modern. The post-modern practice debunks and negates and is derived from the modernist settlement. (Like an adolescent who has woken up to the revelation that her parents are not "God") the Post-modern reveals the failures, inconsistencies and falsehoods because of tenacious over-identification with their modernist inheritance. The non-modern takes a step back to a forgotten pathway, not to regress, but rather to move forward, a pathway that is not interested in domination, a practice which claims that there is no outside world. Yet not to negate its existance but rather to refuse to grant it a cold alienated experience. The non-modern replaces science with research deeply engaging in a practice of deployment, affirmation and construction.

The hope in Pandora's Hope is for us to embrace this practice where "facts and artifacts with their beautiful roots, delicate articulations, their many tendrils and fagile networks, remain for the most part to be investigated and described." (Latour, Harvard University Press, 1999)