Zalzala - Andrew de Freitas

On September 24, 2013 a new island
appeared off the coast of Gwadar, Pakistan.
It proceeded an earthquake of 7.7magnitude which killed at least 300
people and left many more injured
and homeless. The new island is
called Zalzala Jazeera, or in English E A R T H Q U A K E I S L A N D . It’s
caused by a sort of under-water-seabed-mud-volcano, which simply put is a
shallow pocket of pressurized gas under
the sea-bed, getting jostled around by the
quaking earth and as it releases it rises to
the surface and rapidly brings with it the
sea bed itself. So what is now an island
was only weeks ago the bottom of the sea
- mud, rock, methane gas leaks, choral,
mud pots of boiling water, dried up sea
creatures. Since then, talk about its emergence has
waned, but at a time the island news was spread
through satellite images from NASA and much
more entertaining youtube videos by curious locals
who wander the terrain smoking their cigs and
lighting methane gas leaks with their lighters.
This information was translated to me by a
friend from a French newspaper she bought at the
train station. The article was supplemented with
a centerfold image of a eerily circular grey lump
in some sea off some coast with circular ripples
extending to the edges of the frame. We sat, in
awe of it, on a packed train blocking a broken
exit on our way to Kassel, Germany, one Sunday
afternoon.
So, there is a new island. The earth moved and
gas released and pushed ground up from one place
to another and created a new piece of land in the
Arabian Sea off the coast of Pakistan. There’s no
new material being added to make this island, it’s
the plain process of the relocation of earth, caused
by trauma and the eventual release of some thing
which creates a new some where.
B R I N G O N T H E Q U A K E which
jostles what we’ve allowed to lay dormant for
so long, with the hopes of erupting into a new
somewhere.
lina
bo
bardi
“*Cultural*, said Lina, ‘is
too weighty, and can make
people think they should
perform cultural activities
by decree. And that can lead
to inhibition or traumatized
dullness.’ She said the word
‘culture’ should be put in
quarantine, given some rest,
left to recover its original
meaning and depth.
There’s something really
essential in this
reconsideration of culture
vs. leisure. It starts with
thinking through what exactly
you want to do, what you
enjoy doing. Maybe culture
can include forms of work,
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A man and a woman that love each
other meet every evening on their
couch and tell each other about their
day.
They both had an exceptionally great
day today. They are laughing, and
happy, and decide to open a bottle
of wine.
The day after on the couch, the
woman tells her man about some
problems she is having at work.
She is upset. The man is feeling
very well and has a hard time
understanding his wife´s feelings.
The day after after, they are both
sitting quite depressed on the
couch. Unable to comfort each other,
they decide to open a bottle of wine.
Eventually, they are talking about
getting a new couch.
for a future II:
portrait of an
immortal androgyny
she is your sister.
her name is agatha or valkyrie ice. she speaks her ideas
to her others in color, music, gesture and specially
made concoctions of the liquids still unknown. this
idyllic forgetfulness of old-fashioned method of
communication through speech allows her to always
start thinking from scratch. errors of history are not
to be inscribed.
her body is an extension to and elaboration of that
of andrej pejic. it is a landscape articulated in a
variety of protrusions and crevices. it has textures
and a scent, it produces liquids of different viscosity.
her body is estimated to have over 8,000 sensory
nerve endings per cm2. it is flexible in its ways. it
swells, erects and contracts. a synthetic composite of
bionic cocks, neo-clitoris implants, and cybernetic
prostheses. she is one- and multi-gendered, a
multiplicity and universality in one. her love does not
but it doesn’t depend on
differentiate between species, races, ages or sexes. her
them in any way. Culture
children are to be given as gifts, addressed from one
is something that exists
i n d e p e n d e n t l y f r o m s t r u c t u r e s love to another love. she is hermanphroditos, the son
of aphrodite and hermes.
of work. The fact that
culture can also be leisure
may seem obvious, but it’s
worth considering the kind of
relationship that they have,
and why it is that the upper
echelons of contemporary
artmaking are so often
disparaging of projects that
are designed for people to
enjoy.
Lina was making buildings
that addressed public
concerns - buildings that
people enjoy.
*Bela Criança*
[Beautiful Child]
By Lina Bo Bardi
First published in Habitat 2
(January–March 1951)
Notes from the ,,Svett’’ Elliðaárdalur Rekyjavik 20/08/2013
We are publishing this photograph
of the Education Ministry in Rio
de Janeiro as a call to arms to
continue the fight against the
formulaic and routine. Make no
mistake: formulaic does not just
apply to historicism, it also extends
(even more dangerously) to the
so-called ‘modern’ – modernism
as a ‘habit’, as in ‘the old way
doesn’t work any more, so let’s
move ahead with the times, young
men, or we’ll lose out’. We have to
fight against this kind of dangerous
generalisation, against this
devaluation of the spirit of modern
architecture, which is unwavering,
and shaped by a love of humanity,
and has nothing whatsoever to do
with exterior forms and formalist
acrobatics.
You believe in something. If you’re a scientist and
you want to prove something, then you prove it
with the scientist’s way. And if you are against it,
you can prove that in the scientist way as well. This
is so stupid. It is the scientist’s placebo. But they
know everything is better than the placebo.
TOWA R D S A N E W
T H E O RY O F
PROBABILITY
The Native Americans have the possibility of the
great mystery, the black hole in the galaxy, there’s a
black hole, and it eats everything, it eats the earth,
it eats everything. But we don’t have to know about
everything, that’s the reason we have the great
mystery. And that’s why we don’t have to reach for
the scientist’s proof or whatever you call it.
Hyperchaoses
Along
Möbiusstrasse
L a n g u a g e, a n d t h e r e b y
thought itself, have become
quite unequipped for the
iterative communication
processes necessary for Life
(truly worthy of the name).
Here in the beginning
of the third millennium,
something is knocking
h e a v i l y o n t h e d o o r, b u t w e
can’t hear it over the sound
of Miley Cyrus getting gang
banged in the internet by
political leaders and oil
fracking, heavy artillery
financiers with their
wet fingers perpetually
increasing the volume (that
apparently has no limit).
S weat
“When a territory of
possibility emerges i t
changes the social
map, like a landslide,
a flood or a volcano do
in nature.”
Brian Holmes
The Affectivist Manifesto
But Nonni is more the mystic. I’m a realist, I like
realism. I’m a Mathematic... Do you know about the likelihood, the probability?
Think about motors. Or you can think about water
pumps. Motors or pumps, doesn’t matter. They
are the same. Do you know why ships have two
motors? Imagine you’re a ship… and you get close
to a cliff, then you will definitely need a motor to
get away. You have one motor, but there’s a 50-50
chance it will fail or the pump will fail and
everything collapses.
That’s the reason you need two motors. If you have
two motors, what’s the likelihood that both the
motors fail?
No. It’s 10 percent. A 10 percent probability that
both motors will fail at the same time. So you have
a 90 percent chance of avoiding the cliff, that both
water pumps fail.
This, they call the calculation of the likelihood.
So then, if you have three water pumps? Only 1 percent. 1 percent chance that the pumps
will all fail. So there is a 99 per cent safety that one
of the motors work.
Yes, that is the likelihood calculation. And this is
why every ship should have three motors.
There’s a lot of people that believe in this
likelihood calculation. But you should remember - this is all bullshit.
No two situations are ever the same. Text: Hallur Heiðar Hallsson; dm
Image: Nonni Þorgeir Ragnarsson; dm