Grupo de Arte Callejero

Situating Rights / e-misférica, vol. 3, issue 1, June 2006 / Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Poltics

The Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) has engaged in acts of urban intervention since the late 80s, dealing with issues of human rights. Together with H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad contra el Olvido y el Silencio, an organization formed by the children of the disappeared), GAC actively participates in the “escraches” (acts of public shaming) that expose the specific places where dictatorship has carried out its injustice and impunity—e.g., current homes of ex-torturers, buildings that were used as detention and torture centers, etc. During recent years, GAC has expanded its activism to single out other modes of injustice under democracy, such as the criminalization of social protests, the impunity of police officers in the state of security, the news media’s monopoly and the housing market. Their actions, which are local and anonymous, use different levels (performatic, graphic and textual) to interfere and subvert the discourses that authorize, legitimize and legalize injustice.



Escraches

The Grupo de Arte Callejero (Group of Street Art) came into existence with its work with H.I.J.O.S. (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence) at the end of the 1990s, actively participating on the escraches1 against former members of the dictatorship who were responsible for kidnapping, torturing, and disappearing dissident citizens. It was a time when the democratic polity was dominated by a pact of silence, sealed with presidential pardons to perpetrators and a neo-liberal economic policy. GAC's interventions on traffic signs re-signified the topography of the city by marking the direction and distance to the homes of former torturers.

Escrachar is slang for 'to put into evidence, disclose to the public, or reveal what is hidden.'



Plan Nacional de Desalojo

Without abandoning the escraches, GAC's actions have expanded and diversified. Two different stages of human rights struggle coexist today. On the one hand, the commitment for justice against perpetrators of genocide persists; on the other, a stage in which multiple rights emerge under the legitimizing umbrella of human rights: the right to dignified housing against real estate speculation, the right of original peoples to the possession of their land, the right to protection against police brutality and the criminalization of everyday life, the right to public communication against mass media monopoly, the right to work and to take occupy businesses that have been deserted by their owners. GAC's interventions are not limited to highlighting these rights, but they are engaged in creating social practices that put these rights to work.

The municipal government of Buenos Aires implemented an eviction program in several areas of the city, most notably in the neighborhood of San Telmo, the historical center. Dozens of families were violently evicted from various buildings in this area. Real estate and financial businesses with ties to the tourist industry were the major forces behind the evictions.

A week after these initial episodes, we put up a stand in one of the busiest intersections, from which the “official” employees of the “Ministry of Control” interviewed residents and tourists. A questionnaire was used, and participants were asked how they would like to be evicted, how they would like to surrender their right to housing, and how they would like to be cast out of society. The same action has been performed on many occasions in this neighborhood, as well as in other places around the city (e.g., at a shopping center).



Anti-monumento a Roca

The action that we present here denounces the celebration of the so-called 'Campaign to the Desert' (1879). That campaign, under the direction of the general Julio Argentino Roca, was a war of extermination launched against the native inhabitants of Patagonia in an epoch of national consolidation. GAC's action consists of a public ceremony of desecration of the monument to the patriotic 'hero,' which is situated in the historical core of downtown Buenos Aires.

The intervention underscores historical continuities between past and present: from the process of territorial colonization of the nation-state opened by the newly created army (representing its first internal job by which it 'modernizes' its potential with the acquisition of Remington rifles to be used against the indians), to the subsequent oligarchic state rule (represented by the Rural Society), to the alliance with transnational capital of the last dictatorship and its continuity in the neo-liberal democracy of the 1990s (represented by the Spanish corporation Repsol which has exploited Patagonian oil wells since that decade of privatization of national companies, and by Benetton).

Exceptional Bodies: Performance and Law / By Jill Lane

"... For Gustavo Buntinx, reflecting on the Colectivo Sociedad Civil in Lima, Perú, and for the artists of Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the struggle for a public sphere is staked in questions of the legitimacy of the nation itself. Buntinx focuses on what he calls "zonas ultraperiféricas," where histories of colonial and neocolonial violence and exploitation have produced "el nacionalismo sin nación de repúblicas sin ciudadanos." Both arts collectives aim at creating and rehearsing viable forms of civil society and citizenship against the radical negligence of the state—whether the aggressive dismantling of the democratic state in Fujimori's de facto dictatorship or the impassive erasures in public memory of genocide and colonial violence in contemporary Argentina. For both groups, art is the site of a new form of civic engagement: both use performance to make claims against the sovereign state, to illustrate its corruption, and to stake new forms of political agency...."



Periferia - grupo de arte callejero

Manifiesto I (de la urgencia)
Manifiesto II (de la construcción)
Manifiesto III (de la comunicación)



La Biennale di Venezia / 50th International Art Exhibition / 2003
The Structure of Survival / Curated by Carlos Basualdo

Cartografía del control / Cartography of control / Video projection and collage

Marked on a piece of a map of Buenos Aires (an area along the heavily polluted river Riachuelo): centers of economic power, acts of military repression, places of warlike conflicts, militarized zones, US military bases. A video projection plays on the side of the wall.

The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade / The use-value of art / apexart

By and large, when artworlders talk about what might be broadly described as art's 'use value,' they're bluffing. Anyone who believes that art, in any conventional sense of the term, by 'questioning,' 'investigating,' or otherwise 'depicting' some socio-political issue, actually empowers anyone to do anything about it, is actively engaged in self-delusion. Yet art continues to make such promises — using its institutions to lend them not only a largely unchallenged semblance of truth, but all the trustworthiness of convention — only to immediately break them. Why? Is it because art is unable to do away with its romantic underpinnings, except by abandoning itself to all-out cynicism?

More likely, it is because art remains caught in an essentially representational paradigm, protected from the real, which allows the symbolic transgressions of the artworld to be confused with the real-life political activism that occurs in the judicial, penal and civil spheres of society. In and of themselves, of course, such 'picture politics' are not void of use-value: for the artworld élite that likes that sort of thing, the concentrated, composed and self-reflective works one finds in museums have a contemplative value that is far from negligible, in terms of refining perceptive awareness or stimulating sense-based cognition. But all that falls far short of what art implicitly leads us to expect — which is what makes our relationship to art one of constantly renewed, constantly dashed hopes.

Grupo Etcetera @ [iDC]

Precarity, Social Movements and Political Communication: Forms of auto-organization and communication strategies in the era of globalization / By Martín Bergel and Julia Risler / Translated Brian Whitener

Misc.



H.I.J.O.S.

Somos H.I.J.O.S, Hijas e Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio. Somos hijas e hijos de desaparecidos, presos políticos, fusilados, exiliados, asi como jóvenes que sin haber sufrido en su propia familia la represión directa, comprendemos que somos hijos de una historia de represión como de luchas.

Somos una organización política que, desde los derechos humanos, lucha por un mundo más justo y denuncia las violaciones de ayer y hoy. Como organización iniciamos nuestro trabajo en 1995 pero nuestras raíces tienen más de treinta años. Somos hijos del horror, del genocidio y la represión pero también somos hijos de mujeres y hombres que soñaban con un mundo distinto y luchaban para construirlo.

Argentina 30 Years after the Coup / By Marie Trigona / IRC / March 29, 2006

This March 24, Argentines commemorated the 30 year anniversary of the nation’s 1976 military coup and the brutal nightmare of state terror that followed. Throughout the week, human rights groups remembered the 30,000 people who were disappeared with a series of rallies and cultural events.

Without a doubt, anniversary commemorations were much larger this year than in the past. Massive crowds could barely squeeze into the Plaza de Mayo and tens of thousands spilled over into the connecting avenues during the demonstration on March 24. Along with the masses that returned to the streets for the first time in decades, polemic debate among human rights groups accompanied this year's commemorations.

You Are Here: The DNA of Performance / By Diana Taylor
TDR: The Drama Review - Volume 46, Number 1, Spring 2002

Among the mothers and the children of the "disappeared" in Argentina, performance of various kinds is a way of marking, accusing, and remembering. How can performance transmit traumatic memory? How do those of us who have not suffered the violence come to understand it? And how do we participate, in our own ways, in further transmitting it?

El espectáculo de la memoria: trauma, performance y política / By Diana Taylor

Adrian Blackwell

Adrian Blackwell is an artist and urban and architectural designer, whose work focuses on the spaces and forces of uneven development produced through processes of Postfordist urbanization.

Since 1996 his art projects have altered existing spaces to encourage common uses. Public Water Closet (1998) and How to Open a Car Like a Book (1999) open private enclosures to the city. Recent works such as Light Net (2004), Car Pool (2005) and Model for a Public Space (2000, 2006) produce new locations for collective action and public discourse.

In parallel to these propositions Blackwell has engaged in critical descriptive work. Evicted May 1, 2000 (9 Hanna Avenue) uses pinhole photographs to illustrate the transformative potential of artist’s studio spaces. Detroit’s Underdevelopment: Separation, Divesture, Erasure, Encampment (2005) uses three maps to excavate the social and political forces that underdeveloped Detroit in the second half of the 20th Century. Factory = Territory (2005) uses drawings, maps and pinhole panoramas to document the dormitory factory territory along the eastern edge of China’s Pearl River Delta.

These projects have been exhibited across Canada at artist run centers and public institutions including Mercer Union, The New Gallery, The Hamilton Art Gallery, The Power Plant and the Mackenzie Art Gallery, at the University of Michigan and at the 2005 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture.

In 2005 Blackwell co-edited Unboxed: Engagements in Social Space, with Jen Budney and is co-curating the exhibition and publication Detours: Oblique Approaches to Urbanization in China with Pei Zhao. Since 1997 he has taught architecture and urban design at the University of Toronto, initiating the school’s China Global Architecture program in 2004. In 2003 he was a visiting professor at Chongqing University and was the 2004-05 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning.



Unboxed: Engagements in Social Space / Edited by Jen Budney and Adrian Blackwell

DETOURS // TACTICAL APPROACHES TO URBANIZATION IN CHINA
Curated by Adrian Blackwell & Pei Zhao
Eric Arthur Gallery (University of Toronto) & The Power Plant
October 23, 2006 - March 10, 2007
Detours Symposium: November 4, 2006

Detours: tactical approaches to urbanization in China, focuses on projects by Chinese architects that critically engage urban development in China today. Each approaches this shifting context from a tactical perspective that begins from a close reading of the given social and material situation, setting it apart from strategic initiatives that respond directly to the abstract demands of foreign and local capital or state ideology.

Since the early 1980’s China has been transformed in unprecedented ways: incredible economic growth has created a new middle class, cities have been physically reconstructed, culture has been opened to capitalist markets and industrial workers have been demoted from privileged citizens to precarious migrants. This urban revolution has brought with it many contradictions. Cities and towns have been quickly produced for immediate effect, projecting the image of a quickly modernizing society, while deep divisions between urban and rural spaces and citizens remain unchanged.

This exhibition presents ten tactical propositions for the production of urban space in the context of this transformation. Each project resists tendencies toward contextual erasure and stylistic appropriation commonplace within Chinese architectural design. Faced with these reductive strategies, these projects follow a set of detours in order to negotiate China’s complex histories, spaces, cultures, and social realities.

While these practices have been developed in response to specific circumstances within Chinese society, they also offer strong experiments and models for architects working elsewhere in the world within the traditions of the urban project, rural studio, ecological urbanism and urban acupuncture. To highlight these new possibilities, the exhibition will be accompanied by a book of projects and texts by each participant to be published by Timezone 8 in Beijing, and a symposium on alternative approaches to urbanization in China, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.

2006–2007
James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City Competition

Special recognition: Adrian Blackwell, Department of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto, for Territorializing Flexible Landscapes of Production, which compares post-Fordist industrial urbanism in declining Detroit with the booming industrial cities of the Pearl River Delta in China;

The gentrification of gentrification and other strategies of Toronto’s creative class (PDF) / By Adrian Blackwell

"...Finally, The Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry is an autonomous working group, organizing public forums and exhibitions. It has focused on the precarity of work in contemporary flexible economies, food security, the privatization of the university, contemporary transformative tactics and mapping globalization. This organization, working from both an academic and aesthetic perspective, often in collaboration with the Toronto Free Gallery in the east end, works to politicize aesthetics through an experiment in public discourse, at a moment when the city as a whole is privatizing public and counter-public spheres through processes of gentrification."

"Through creative city rhetoric artists are being empowered to consider their effects on the transformation of the city. In order to fight the class-defined displacement and polarization that is the result of gentrification, artists have to find models of solidarity with urban communities outside their own solipsistic enclaves. In that choice they define the character of their practice and participate in forming the city around them. This means not arguing for the rights of artists alone, or for a creative city as an end in itself, but rather understanding that it is precisely the city’s complexity in terms of class, race and culture that provides the foundation for those possibilities of substantive artistic experimentation and creativity that do exist."

Poverty of Planning: Tent City, City Hall and Toronto’s New Official Plan / By Adrian Blackwell and Kanishka Goonewardena

"... Toronto doesn’t need a plan driven by corporate interests, developers and taxpayers. It does need a set of planning strategies produced by diverse communities already struggling against economic, cultural and ecological injustice that will open up spaces for people to imagine, transform and enjoy their city. This struggle for justice in the city is also one to reclaim the promise of planning for the very people whose fundamental right to the city is violated in the new official plan."



Entangled Territories

The gentrification of Toronto's downtown has displaced low-income residents. New immigrants, often precariously employed, are warehoused in high-density structures within low-density suburbs. City land is rezoned for optimum profit extraction rather than for livability. The costs of using public transit are rising as new programs of surveillance carefully monitor the smog-saturated city.

This neoliberal agenda remains contested by urban social movements committed to the building of a new commons: street protests, squats, community gardens, housing co-ops, public-space interventions, regularization campaigns.

Toronto's territory is entangled in divergent forces of neoliberal enclosure and public commons. Animating this play of forces is a triad of actors: capitalists, governments, and multitudes. At stake in their balance of power is access to affordable places to live, sources of healthy food, a secure income, mobility, pleasurable forms of life.

* How is capital capturing urban territories? Which spaces are currently under threat of enclosure?

* What possibilities exist for the state to protect existing public spaces or initiate new ones, when its role has increasingly become the policing of space?

* What capacities do we have for escaping existing enclosures, in the name of constructing new urban commons?

Entangled Territories Readings



Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry

TSCI designs education events inquiring into the new enclosures: enclosures on time, space, creativity, thought, ecology, love... We seek to understand how these enclosures work. But combating against cynicism, we also inquire into creative pathways within, against, and beyond the enclosures: pathways of thinking, collaboration, organization, experimentation...

Manifestations of Soft Revolution

Here be Dragons: Cartography of Globalization



Public Acts 1-29

Public Acts 1-29 is a pragmatic field, a network of lines of flight for the experiences and experiments of 29 artists, activists and researchers situated along the Trans-Canada Highway. Together, we are engaging in an assemblage of acts that carry the potential to proliferate, to resonate, to emerge; practices, tactics, and situations such as public discussion forums, tactical media, counter-cartographies, public interventions, free dance lessons, haircuts, how-to-guides and propositions, deliveries, endurance performances, creative disturbances, space invasions, sonic liberations, carpools, wanderings, meals, reading groups, swims, parking lot parties, love affairs, letter exchanges, virtual roundtables, telephone calls, roadtrips, blog conversations...



Planning Action

We are a group of urban planners, architects and activists who work with diverse communities of Toronto struggling against economic, cultural, and ecological injustice to open spaces for people to imagine, transform, and enjoy the city.

We strive...

* To collaboratively promote social and environmental justice by planning for affordable housing, food, public transportation, public space and accessible education and recreation for all residents and workers of the city.

* To democratize planning practice to foster greater participation and control over the creation and maintenance of the city.

* To build an organization that is committed to radically democratic and socially just practices within its own operation, in its partnerships and collaborations, and in the city.

The war must go on

Three projects for the 2006 season of artists’ billboards produced by Clockshop. The participating artists are Trevor Paglen & John Emerson, Ignasi Aballi, and Nadiah Bamadhaj. Funded by the Lef Foundation and CBS Outdoor.



Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer based in Berkeley, California. His project ‘CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006’ is composed from flight data provided by the Federal Aviation Administration and Eurocontrol. The map is a visualization of the movements of aircraft owned or operated by known CIA front companies. The project illustrates some of the more obscure relationships that have been forged between the United States and other countries over the course of the war on terror. John Emerson is an activist, graphic designer, writer, and programmer based in New York City. He has designed maps for Human Rights Watch, UNDP, Amnesty International, and United for Peace and Justice. John is currently a Partner at Apperceptive, LLC.



Source of Found Image: Malaysian National Archives. Wars in other countries bring communities into sharp political focus. However all the net searching will not bring you closer to finding if the people you met are safe from one bombardment to the next. In the great void of your search is the cyclical rhetoric of politicians, acting as a firewall to events in specific times and places. In this work I use, manipulate, and reinterpret a found image from the 1960s, to highlight an irony that is as applicable now as it was then -- that when a community is brought into political focus, its individuals begin to disappear. Nadiah Bamadhaj was born in West Malaysia in 1968. Since 2000 she has produced drawing, video, and digital images.



Ignasi Aballi is an artist who lives in Barcelona, Spain. Since 1998 he has been assembling lists based on daily cuttings from the newspaper. From these cuttings he organizes different groups creating an extensive series of lists on different themes: persons, dead persons, wounded persons, disappeared, immigrants, money, time, drugs and ideologies. His Project, “Listos(Inmigrantes)” is based on selected cuttings from Spanish newspapers from 2001-2006.



The Clockshop billboard series is located at 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90036.

September 11 – October 8, 2006
CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006, Trevor Paglen & John Emerson

October 9 – November 8, 2006
The Inquiry, Nadiah Bamadhaj

December 9, 2006 – January 8, 2007
Listados(Inmigrantes) 1998-2006, Ignasi Aballi



Test Site / 2005

Test Site, the 2005 season of artist billboard projects, invited 4 artists to respond to a series of photographs titled Destruction of house #1 by atom blast, taken in 1953 in Yucca Flats, Nevada. Funding is provided by Viacom Outdoor, the Puffin Foundation and City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. Participating artists: Michael Blum, Allan deSouza, Mary Lum, and Lisa Young.



Public Speaking / 2004

Public Speaking appeared in June, August, October, and December 2004. Four projects were selected to spark curiosity, conversation, and debate about the images and words that were and were not circulating around the 2004 Presidential election. Participating artists: Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Susan Silton, David Thorne, and Mario Ybarra, Jr.



Clockshop is a non-profit media + art organization based in Los Angeles. Clockshop supports and produces projects by artists, theorists, and activists which are realized in a variety of formats including: media arts, public art, documentary, and text-based publications. Clockshop was founded in 2003 by Julia Meltzer.

An Architektur

The magazine An Architektur tackles the raisons d'étre and effects of buildings.

Each topical issue features particular political and social aspects of architecture and the city under current capitalist conditions. An Architektur considers the built environment to be determined by fundamental concepts inherent in society which frame and affect our lives.

An Architektur advocates a progressive, critical notion of architecture.

Architectural practice should include a concern with discourse on space and its use beyond planning and construction, as this is where social conceptions are being negotiated. An Architektur engages in the critical analysis of spatial relations as a form of political activism to reveal any underlying political order.

The approach of An Architektur is interventionist.

By analysing specific architectural situations and unveiling previously disonnected topical aspects, each issue of An Architektur attempts to re-examine the terms of spatial arangements and find new definitions.

An Architektur is looking for new options and alternatives.

Increasing social tensions, cultural capitalization, ethnic segregation, ubiquitous surveillance, and the privatization of public space within the context of urban re-development strategies dictated by neo-liberal economic thinking demand a new critical approach in spatial practice.



Upcoming:

Camp for Oppositional Architecture 2006 (Part II)
Theorizing Architectural Resistance

Utrecht, the Netherlands, November 10 – 11, 2006
An Architektur at Casco. Office for Art, Design and Theory

The small part of the built environment that is subject to planning at all is almost completely controlled by the claims of capitalist utilization: globalized markets and cultures ask for commodified spaces, nation states and corporations require spectacular architectures for representative purposes, the multitude of consumer subjects demands room for individualized privacy. What’s left to do?

Continuing the “Camp for Oppositional Architecture” this second congress again looks for possible ways of resistance within the field of architecture and planning. Having brought together practitioners and researchers in Berlin 2004 who exchanged approaches and developed a common basis of discourse on the open idea of oppositional architecture, we now want to further explore the theoretical grounds on which such projects could spread. As part of a series of future Camps each dealing with a specific issue, we this time would like to elaborate the concept of opposition within the field of architecture and planning. The Camp will focus on analytical approaches that invent, explore and reflect on possibilities of architectural resistance that withstand the demands of a capitalist production of space and try to develop a non-affirmative attitude within this powerful contiguity.

Camp for Oppositional Architecture (Part I)
Berlin-Wedding, Summer 2004

Polar Inertia: Report / Crosswalk: Report / An Architektur: 14 Camp for Oppositional Architecture

Under Fire @ UIUC
September 8 - October 7, 2006

The Under Fire exhibition at I space and series of events at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are a continuation of the international discussions and publications initiated by artist and writer Jordan Crandall. Under Fire presents a discursive engagement with global militarization and political violence, incorporating perspectives from multiple disciplines to explore the contemporary organization, representation and materialization of war.



Essays:

An Architektur: Exterritories and Camps: Juridical-Political Spaces in the "War on Terrorism"

Stuart Elden > There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political: Henri Lefèbvre and the Production of Space

Mark Gottdiener > A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and The Production of Space

Interview with Eyal Weizman / An Architektur 06

An Architektur @ Territories (Witte de With, Rotterdam)

"Kartentisch" / An Architektur @ Projekt Migration

The Privatization of War

The Privatization of War:
Colombia as Laboratory and Iraq as Large-Scale Application

A mapping project by Lize Mogel and Dario Azzellini

Gwangju Bienniale, South Korea
September 8 – November 11, 2006
The Last Chapter: Remapping Global Cities > Latin America
Curated by Chris Gilbert and Cira Pascual Marquina

Commissioned for the Gwangju Biennial, this collaboration between artist Lize Mogel and writer Dario Azzellini diagrams the relationships between the United States and private military contractors (PMCs); and their activities in Columbia and Iraq. These nations are two key sites that exemplify PMC operation in the new world order.

The privatization of military services is a worldwide business worth $200 billion a year. PMCs are an enormous part of this economy, offering "products" from logistics (such as building and managing military camps and prisons) to strategic support (radar and surveillance) to open combat and special sabotage missions. PMC corporations are based globally, and recruit heavily in the global south.



Interview with Lize Mogel / by Trevor Paglen / artwurl interview #57

Lize Mogel is an artist working with geography and cartography. Her projects, often site-specific and distributed in public space, use the map as political agent. She is interviewed by artist and geographer Trevor Paglen.

Trevor Paglen: How did you come to work on your most recent project, which is about mapping the corporate structure of this new age of global war?

Lize Mogel: "The Privatization of War: Colombia as Laboratory and Iraq as Large-Scale Application" was originally commissioned by Cira Pascual-Marquina and Chris Gilbert for the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea. It diagrams the relationships between the United States and private military contractors (PMCs); and their activities in Colombia and Iraq. This was a sort of "blind date" collaboration - where Cira/Chris emailed me and asked if I wanted to do a mapping project with writer/researcher Dario Azzellini who had done a large amount of work on the "business of war" (while I had been involved in some research on American military interests while working with the Center for Land Use Interpretation). It was a somewhat globalized project - I’m in NYC, Cira and Chris live in Venezuela, Dario is in Berlin, and the show is in South Korea - and the project itself is about global flows, centered on Iraq and Colombia.... [continue]

artwurl.org is a non-profit webzine - project of PS122 Gallery, New York - that aims to provide a space for conversation, practice and research of contemporary critical, conceptual and political art.



MAPQUEST / Exhibiton on view from September 16 – October 9, 2006 at PS122 Gallery, New York

Mapquest brings together work by artists, activists, writers and organizers, involved in experimentation with critical and dissident cartography. The exhibition examines various mapping strategies employed as response to specific social and political issues. Working not unlike investigative journalists, some participants conduct and map in-depth research of themes such as the functioning of private military contractors or recruitment centers. Others design maps as tools, featuring information that can be used to support for social action. In a similar vein they employ mapping strategies to produce alternative knowledge about networks of power and control in urban spaces.

Works by: Lize Mogel and Dario Azzellini / Daniel Blochwitz / Cartographic Perspectives: Map Art / Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) / Ewen Chardronnet / The Friends of William Blake / Elise Gardella / Ryan Griffis - Temporary Travel Office / Ashley Hunt / Lasse Lau / Nadxieli Mannello / Carlos Motta / Sarah Ross / Gregory Sholette / curator Elena Sorokina.

Misc.

"Outsourcing the war" / P.W. Singer / Salon.com

"A government in search of cover: PMCs in Iraq" / David Isenberg / British American Security Information Council

Bibliography / Private Military and Security Companies
NYU / Institute for International Law and Justice

CorpWatch : Privatization

CorpWatch : War Profiteers