Lake Ontario, Rochester NY

Sartre's preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth

- “ ‘you are making us into monstrosities; your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart’”

- “in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two form part of the whole”

- “you warned them that if they shed to much blood you would disown them, or say you did, in something of the same way as any state maintains abroad a mob of agitators, agents provocateurs, and spies who it disowns when caught. You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name”

- “yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the fear that they experienced when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression but also that which their own fury produces in them. They are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of their humanity”

Stuart Hall on identities

“Identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, prcatices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation”.

On Foucault and the “aesthetics of existence”: “a deliberate stylization of daily life; and its technologies are most effectively demonstrated in the practices of self-production, in specific modes of conduct, in what we have come from later work to recognize as a kind of performativity”. 

- Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?”, 17, 26. 

Richard Weller

On Monday, I attended a lecture by Richard Weller on his Landscape Works. Some key words, phrases and concepts I'd noted down include the following:

- proposals for no man's land
- framing voids
- infrastructures as sociopolitical arenas as opposed to aesthetic
- how to reconstruct communities after disasters
- resilience and sustainability
- biodiversity hotspots
- integration of industry with public transport
- urban development where city expansion is not sustainable
- new cities - how to represent the future in a way compelling but not fraudulent or alienating
- urbanism as attuned to topography
- global biodiversity and its pressures (on the planet)
- conservation communities - neocolonial?
- protected land must be representative and connected - must be applied to all 867 eco-regions of the planet
- biological hotspots
- conflict maps
- Peri-urbanism (edges of cities)
- ecological landscape restoration
- Global South and education
- global responsibility
- national ecological network
- species and linguistic complexities
- planetary garden, constant involvement


This is the link to Weller's project Atlas for the End of the World: http://atlas-for-the-end-of-the-world.com/index_0.html

Weller's website: http://richardweller.net/design-research/

Cities in hotspots

Ecoregions 

http://atlas-for-the-end-of-the-world.com/world_maps_main.html