Graz.Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber plough their way through the increasingly informalising urban development on the global scale. Their visual research on architectural modernity in the south are in particularly good hands in this magazine. With their latest exhibition in Graz, however, these two Austrians – Sabine Bitter is based in Vancouver – palpably shift the accent away from style towards political and social lines of conflict. Their stay of several months in the Venezuelan mega-metropolis Caracas has radicalised their project of examining urban modernity from a socio-political angle. Together with Raul Zelik, the holder of a scholarship, who is regularly in South America as an author and political essayist, they were driven into the turmoil of the contradictory Bolivarian Revolution, which will bring about much more radical change than the Argentine reform project.
Their urban images are still chic and formally attractive. In the project »Super Citizens« (2003-2005), however, architecture is reduced to basic contours, while social and political street activities of the residents are specially emphasised using Photoshop. The latest series, »Bronzeville«, recalls the black neighbourhood that was removed in the early forties to make room for Miës van der Rohes’ much-lauded IIT campus. With solarised photos of this classic of architecture and a passage of poetry by the author Gwendolyn Brooks, who was among those removed, the series commemorates this purported »slum clearance.«
BitterWeber contrast this illustration of »modernisation from above« with the Caracas project »23 de Enero« as an example of a practice of appropriation from below. The Paris-trained architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva designed this eighty-part complex with 9,000 apartments in the mid-fifties. The large housing complex is now permeated by informal structures, too hastily depreciated as slums. The rebellion against the dictatorship of General Pérez Jimenez on 23 January 1958 was accompanied by the mass occupation of the almost completed super-block and gave the project its present name.
The business capital Caracas, built in the style of US-European modernism, has now been massively influenced by the rural exodus. The neglect of the agricultural sector at the same time as oil-boom globalisation was taking place caused the city’s population to swell to five million inhabitants. The buildings and open spaces are now being appropriated in a manner counter to the former instructions for their usage. In this deeply divided city, over half of the inhabitants live in the barrios, from which the wealthy vehemently isolate themselves. But »LIVE LIKE THIS!« does not tell of really existent wealth.
While »the architectural structures represent a still functioning living and housing environment today«, as BitterWeber write about the once prize-winning residential town »Pedregulho« in Rio, the only pictures of it in circulation are »pictures of the ruins of modernity«. In the Brazilian city, they say, it was not the architecture that failed, but the building maintenance or the socio-cultural structure. BitterWeber counter the pessimistic ghetto discourse that is again flaring up because of the revolting banlieus with »today’s use as social functioning«.
The building-industry modernity of the super-block »23 de Enero« and practices of appropriation by the barrios do not cancel each other out, but interlock. For example, a self-built carpet of housing developments has established itself on the former open spaces, while the star-shaped arrangement of building rows was re-occupied and participatively developed as »vertical barrios«. Almost 400,000 people are said to live here. Jeff Derksen and Neil Smith describe this in their catalogue article as a »continuation of modernisation as part of neoliberal globalisation«. Live like this? Scepticism about such emergency practices on the part of the welfare state is justified. But in the project »23 de Enero« was the flowering of the idea of the Bolivarian Revolution as a Latin-Americanisation from below. In 1825, the Creole Simón Bolivar won the liberation of South America from the European colonial regime and slavery.
The call for participation in Caracas covers almost the entire social field. The erratic redistribution strategy of Aló Presidente Hugo Chávez – he now even wants the poor people of the USA to have a share in the wealth of the Venezuelan oil industry – has a broad counterpart here. For example, the rebellious super-barrio block is situated near the seat of government. The masses now also occupy the political arena, while Chávez puts forward his telegenic rock politics. Here – or so it is hoped – mass occupations, citizens’ initiatives, district groups and union work are connected with popular government action. The connecting link is the Bolivarian constitution, »The Consitution as Megastructure«, written in the vernacular, discussed across the country, passed in 1999 and widely distributed. BitterWeber aptly fuse text and super-block to create a large poster with ASCII-graphics.
Forms of representation like newspapers, posters, panels, digital prints, exhibitions, videos, digital slide shows, lectures, book collaborations, catalogues and photographic art run through the cultural practice of BitterWeber. In Graz, the diversification of presentations is carried to extremes in the exhibition, curated by Reinhard Braun, grounded by the video interviews with protagonists from Caracas, which are a pleasure to follow. They spell out the alphabet of contemporary urban developments using the examples of further projects in Almere, Bronzeville and Caracas, as well as Los Angeles, Gdansk, Rio, Paris and Vancouver. The informal practical modernity is condensed in the remarkable collage »Learning from La Vega«, in which Moshe Safdi’s experimental modern housing development »Habitat« is connected with the barrio La Vega in Caracas.
BitterWeber examine an international, informal style that engraves itself more powerfully upon the cities than Philip Johnson’s »International Style«. Ali Gonzalez, an artist and resident of »23 de Enero«, calls the buildings of the illiterates »illiterate architecture«. Correspondingly, a former company headquarters was now converted into a university-like institute of learning. Picture after picture, it becomes apparent that the »shrink« hype represents a pretty trivial bubble from a global point of view; elsewhere, one would be happy to have such problems.
Publications:
BitterWeber: LIVE LIKE THIS! Ed. by Reinhard Braun. Graz 2005.
Bitter/Weber: Caracas, Hecho en Venezuela. Frankfurt am Main 2005.
Bitter/Weber/Zelik: Made in Venezuela. Notizen zur »Bolivarianischen Revolution«. Berlin/Hamburg 2004.
Translated by Timothy Jones