This book is the second volume of texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011. The editorial line of this second series of twenty-six essays is dedicated to philosophical and political questions about bodies. This choice is informed by Léopold Lambert’s own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Corporeal politics do not exist in a void of objects, buildings and cities; on the contrary, they operate through the continuous material encounters between living and non-living bodies. Several texts proposed in this volume examine various forms of corporeal violence (racism, gender-based violence, etc.). This examination, however, can only exist in the integration of the designed environment’s conditioning of this violence. As Mimi Thi Nguyen argues in the conclusion of this book’s first chapter, “the process of attending to the body — unhooded, unveiled, unclothed — cannot be the solution to racism, because that body is always already an abstraction, an effect of law and its violence.” Although the readers won’t find indications about the disciplinary background of the contributors — the “witty” self-descriptions at the end of the book being preferred to academic resumés — the content of the texts will certainly attest to the broad imaginaries at work throughout this volume. Dialogues between dancers and geographers, between artists and biohackers, between architects and philosophers, and so forth, provide the richness of this volume through difference rather than similarity.
The Funambulist Papers are published by the CTM Documents Initiative imprint, Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School. CTM is 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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS //
Introduction: Corporeal Politics, by Léopold Lambert
Profiling Surfaces, by Mimi Thi Nguyen
Caught in the Cloud: The Biopolitics of Teargas Warefare, by Philippe Theophanidis
Bodies on the Line: Somatic Risk and Psychogeographies in Urban Exploration and Palestinian ‘Infiltration,’ by Hanna Baumann
Palestine Made Flesh, by Sophia Azeb
Corpographies: Making Sense of Modern War, by Derek Gregory
Chamayou’s Manhunts: From Territory to Space? by Stuart Elden
Nazi Architecture as Affective Weapon, by Gastón Gordillo
Bodies at Scene: Architecture as Friction, by Pedro Hernández Martínez
Racialized Geography and the Fear of Ships, by Tings Chak
Urban Space and the Production of Gender in Modern Iran, by Alex Shams
Norm, Measure of All Things, by Sofia Lemos
Patterns of Life: A Very Short History of Schematic Bodies, by Grégoire Chamayou
Bee Workers and the Expanding Edges of Capitalism, by Renisa Mawani
What is the Problem? by Nick Axel
Of Associated Milieus, by Sarah Choukah
~~FJORD~~ AND //DESERT// BODIES~~LEAKING~~ AND //CONTAINED// BODIES by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Dress Becomes Body: Fashioning the Force of Form, by Erin Manning
A Sensing Body, A Networked Mind, by Adrienne Hart
Dream of Flying / Flying Bodies, by Elena Loizidou
The Act of Waiting, by Joanne Pouzenc
Bodies in Sympathy for Just One Night, by Chrysanthi Nigianni
Framing the Weird Body in Contemporary European Cinema, by Ina Karkani
Building Body: Two Brief Treatments on Landing Site Theory, by Alan Prohm
A.V. (Anthropocosmogonic Vastupurushamanism), by Dan Mellamphy
Ghost in the Shell-Game: On the Metic Mode of Existence, Inception and Innocence, by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy
Portfolio: Body Weight, by Seher Shah
The Funambulist Pamphlets and Papers 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.
About the Editor
Léopold Lambert (born in 1985) is a French architect who has successively lived in Paris, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, and currently resides in Paris. 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.
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.
One thought on “The Funambulist Papers, Volume 2”