The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on The Funambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The eleven volumes are dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, and Cinema. See all published pamphlets HERE.
The Funambulist Pamphlets is published as part of the Documents Initiative imprint of the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design, a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings.
Volume 05_Occupy Wall Street includes: Introduction: My Body Is a Political Weapon — Photographs of Occupy Wall Street — “I Am a Citizen of Liberty Square” — Urban Insurgencies: Algiers’ Labyrinthine Casbah vs. New York’s Weaponized Grid Plan — “Mic-Check!”: Human Transmission Technology — “This is What Democracy Looks Like” Is Not Just a Slogan — Why We Should Stop Calling Occupy Wall Street a Protest — Spatial Issues at Stake in Occupy Wall Street: Considering the Privately Owned Public Spaces — The Tremendous Power of Space — The Archipelago as a Territorial Manifesto — About the Notion of Occupying — Judith Butler to the Occupy Movement: “This is a Politics of the Public Body” — Occupy the Department of Buildings — Creating the Urban Labyrinth in an Orthogonal Street Grid — National Security Drones vs. Liam Young’s Electronic Counter-Measures — Aestheticizing Violence + Capitalizing on the Revolt Imaginary — Impetus — Occupy Gezi: Why Are Politicians Afraid of Bodies — The Republic of Taksim — What Is a People? — The Political Archipelago: For a New Paradigm of Territorial Sovereignty — Official Report on the Question of the so-called New York Commune — The New York Commune [Film in Progress]
About the Editor
Léopold Lambert (born in 1985) is a French architect who successively lived in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai and currently resides in New York. His approach to architecture consists in a delicate articulation between theoretical research and a frank enthusiasm for design. Such an articulation has been explicated in his book Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), which attempts to examine the characteristics that make architecture an inherent political weapon through global research as well as an architectural project specific to the Israeli civil and military occupation of the West Bank. He is also the author of the graphic novel, Lost in the Line. He finds his architectural inspiration from films, novels, and political philosophy books, rather than in architectural theory texts. He is currently collaborating with Madeline Gins for her Reversible Destiny Foundation (created with the late Arakawa) whose philosophical and architectural work is highly influential upon the role of architecture in relation to the human body.
The blog The Funambulist: Architectural Narratives , a daily architectural platform written and edited by Léopold Lambert, finds its name in the consideration for architecture’s representative medium, the line, and its philosophical and political power when it materializes and subjectivizes bodies. If the white page represents a given milieu — a desert for example — and one comes to trace a line on it, (s)he will virtually split this same milieu into two distinct impermeable parts through its embodiment, the wall. The Funambulist, also known as a tightrope walker, is the character who, somehow, subverts this power by walking on the line.