GANGAR: Simonetta Ferfoglia, Heinrich Pichler

Vienna

The Yellow Pages

A view on commodity and service exchange at Rustaveli Avenue, which is characterized by transfers on many layers, offers insight into social, economic, political conditions of the place. The material and visual culture in which these transfer-layers represent themselves, or are represented, include forms of performativity, visual communication, design and the production of space. Exceeding the aspect of concrete trading practices - from informal economies to flagshop stores of western brands -, a commercialization of the space itself appears to be evident, in which real estate speculation and a privatization of public space tend to produce increasing governmental regulation of the public sphere: a transformation of the city in the interest of private profit and state control. But what planning and political issues are at stake?
...a problem is that planning theory and practice have often been based on conceptions of space and time which are particularly unsuited for dealing with contemporary urban change... Planners still widely assume (usually implicitly) that space and time act as little more than objective, external containers within which human life is played out. (Graham/Healy. Relational concepts of space and place, in: European Planning Studies, 7(5), 623-646.)
On a methodological level, the normative practice of an extensive use of construction and design software has shaped procedure as well as reception of planning so deeply, that architectonic renderings do not in first instant represent an expected physical result of a building or a city area, but rather that those fulfill the software determined appearance of their electronic anticipation. The wireframe model of an architectonic element, applicated onto the historical façade of the Cinema House, relates to a field research on material culture expression alongside the Rustaveli Avenue, and articulates the development of urban design on the background of social, economic and, not at least, political considerations.

gangart

16 10 2007 / 19:00
in front of Cinema House / Rustaveli Square (Metro Rustaveli), Tbilisi

supported by:
Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture
Austrian Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs