Estéticas del desplazamiento
Critical flows: The aesthetics of journey
Conferences cycle on contemporary architecture
from January 2007 onward
Cordoba, Spain

Conference
LAb[au]: From Architecture to MetaDesign
April 2007

presenting:
Touch, interactive urban installation
PixFlow #1, permanent generative installation

Invitation by: Óscar Fernández

Venue: Delegación de Cultura de la Junta de Andalucía en Córdoba, Spain
Beginning: Thursdays, January 2007 at 18:00
Organizer: C4 Córdoba Center for Contemporary Creation, Junta de Andalucía

Conference Program

Topic 1: infinite flows, towards the no-city
- Marc Augé: No-place. Actualizations
- Saskia Sassen: Countergeographies
- Enrique Vila-Matas: The case of Badía de Besós

Topic 2: The aesthetics of flowing
- Francesco Careri: Walking as an aesthetic practice
- Santos Zunzunegui: Kiarostami, Cinema on the way
- Mar Villaespesa: Art in the city-frontier

Topic 3: Fluid architectures
- Fredy Massad / Alicia Guerrero Yeste (btbW/architecture): global flow
- LAb[au] (Belgium): MetaDesign
- Josep M. Montaner: Archigram/Constant: nomadisms

''The need to construct and organize the circulation of non-static, fluid architectural environments was not hardly studied before the upcoming of modern architecture. It seems that it is not until the birth of the high-density city, followed by of the metropolis and mechanical means of transport , that distances between different points in the city started to escape the human scale. This is the time when a new need to understand the city as a space in which to circulate, rather than a place to be static, was also born.

Apparently it is also during the breakthrough of the liberal capitalist paradigm that the ideology of high performance gains hold and that exceeding production affects lifestyles and the time invested in moving about. It seems, thus, we are facing a concept of modernity.

However, the condition of flowing as "essence" of being in the contemporary city has been used as political and aesthetical practice of opposition to institutionalised models of urbanism only in certain revolutionary moments, lacking in diachronic continuity and lasting social effect, i.e., only in some exceptional moments in history. From the first dada "visits" to irrelevant places in Paris in 1921 to the Situationism in the 50's, to the new movement practices of the 90's, there is a certain -subaltern, I insist- tradition of movement as force that is antagonist to the paradigm of flowing through hegemonic power.

The aim of this series of conferences is to continue the line created by illuminating works such as Walkscapes by Francesco Careri and undertake a genealogy of the above-mentioned concept of flowing in the sense of a defining, poetical and political act.

By examining examples from various areas in cultural production -architecture, visual arts, urbanism, aesthetics- these conferences will try and draw a new map of the situation and the application boundaries of critical flows, which has become in of the most common, and subsequently most erodes concepts in current cultural theory.''

Óscar Fernández, coordinator of the conferences