Artist Spaces in Berlin: Defining and Redefining a City through Contemporary Archaeology

Author(s):  
Carolyn L. White ◽  
Steven Steven

The contemporary city of Berlin is known for its art and for its community of practising artists, along with its ‘weirdness, perpetual incompleteness, and outlandishness . . . and the liveliness inherent in these qualities’ (Schneider 2014: 7). One of Berlin’s primary energy currents comes from the role of artists and the creative verve that abounds in the city. Artists use and reuse the physical environment of the post-Berlin Wall city and the surrounding environs (the Wall was officially taken down in 1989, although parts of it still remain) in temporary and permanent project spaces. The buildings and project spaces artists occupy are entwined with the history of the city— a history manifest in the city’s form, aesthetics, and economics. A similar dialectic exists inside artist spaces; artists actively define and redefine studio spaces through their practices as their manners and methods are simultaneously defined, confined, and reflective of the restrictions and allowances that interiors provide. This chapter is a contemporary archaeological analysis of the physical elements of four artists’ studios and buildings, the placement of artist communities within the city, and an exploration of the meanings of space and community in broader context. We highlight the reuse of historically significant buildings and the materiality and physicality of artists’ spaces within a broader context of the political economy of creativity. The use of Berlin for creative practice reflects many of the problems associated with the ‘Creative City’ and so-called creative economy. The art practices inside studios are reflective of the political economy of the world of art. The placement, availability, and tenuousness of the buildings themselves attest to problems associated with the adoption of creative capital by neoliberal capitalist agendas. The archaeological project can be used to document the micro and the macro—the interior and the exterior—of the economically circumscribed worlds of the artist, documenting an important moment in the development of a global cultural hotspot. The chapter considers project spaces as both physical places and conceptual spaces among Berlin artists focusing on the geographic, ephemeral, and enduring spaces of artist studios. What do project spaces in Berlin look like? How do individual artists create their spaces? How does the physical space reflect artistic practices?

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 494-499
Author(s):  
Destin Jenkins

This essay revisits Making the Second Ghetto to consider what Arnold Hirsch argued about the relationship between race, money, and the ghetto. It explores how Hirsch’s analysis of this relationship was at once consistent with those penned by other urban historians and distinct from those interested in the political economy of the ghetto. Although moneymaking was hardly the main focus, Hirsch’s engagement with “Vampire” rental agencies and panic peddlers laid the groundwork for an analysis that treats the post–World War II metropolis as a crucial node in the history of racial capitalism. Finally, this essay offers a way to connect local forms of violence to the kinds of constraints imposed by financiers far removed from the city itself.


2019 ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Viktor A. Popov

Deep comprehension of the advanced economic theory, the talent of lecturer enforced by the outstanding working ability forwarded Vladimir Geleznoff scarcely at the end of his thirties to prepare the publication of “The essays of the political economy” (1898). The subsequent publishing success (8 editions in Russia, the 1918­-year edition in Germany) sufficiently demonstrates that Geleznoff well succeded in meeting the intellectual inquiry of the cross­road epoch of the Russian history and by that taking the worthful place in the history of economic thought in Russia. Being an acknowledged historian of science V. Geleznoff was the first and up to now one of the few to demonstrate the worldwide community of economists the theoretically saturated view of Russian economic thought in its most fruitful period (end of XIX — first quarter of XX century).


Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842110612
Author(s):  
Daniel S Lacerda

The spatial imaginations of organisations can be particularly insightful for examining power relations. However, only recently they have gone beyond the limits of the workplace, demonstrating the role of the territory for organised action, particularly in mobilising solidarity for resistance. In this article, I investigate power relations revealed by the political economy of the territory to explain contradictory actions undertaken by organisations. Specifically, I adopt the theoretical framework of the noted Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, who recognises spatial multiplicity and fragmentation while maintaining an appreciation of the structural conditions of the political economy. This perspective is particularly useful for the analysis of civil society organisations (CSOs) in a Brazilian favela (slum), given the context of high inequality perpetuated by the selective flows of urban development. First, I show that the history of favelas and their role in the territorial division of labour explain the profiles of existing organisations. Then, I examine how the political engagement of CSOs with distinct solidarities results in a dialectical tension that leads to both resistance based on local shared interests and the active reproduction of central spaces even if the ends are not shared. The article contributes to the literature of space and organisations by explaining how territorial dynamics mediate power relations within and across organisations, not only as resistance but also as the active reproduction of economic and political regimes.


Author(s):  
Regina Galasso

The cultural production of Spanish-speaking New York is closely linked to the Caribbean and to Latin America at large, but the city also plays a pivotal role in the work of a host of authors from the Iberian Peninsula, writing in Spanish, Catalan, and English. In many cases, their New York City texts have marked their careers and the history of their national literatures. Drawing from a variety of genres, Translating New York recovers cultural narratives occluded by single linguistic or national literary histories, and proposes that reading these texts through the lens of translation unveils new pathways of cultural circulation and influence. Looking beyond representations of the city's physical space, Translating New York suggests that travel to the city and contact with New York's multilingual setting ignited a heightened sensitivity towards both the verbal and non-verbal languages of the city, garnering literary achievement and aesthetic innovation. Analyzing the novels, poetry, and travel narratives of Felipe Alfau, José Moreno Villa, Julio Camba, and Josep Pla, this book uncovers an international perspective of Iberian literatures. Translating New York aims to rethink Iberian literatures through the transatlantic travels of influential writers.


Author(s):  
Lucia Zedner

This Afterword reflects on the scope, ambitions and achievements of this substantial volume of collected essays. It reflects on the interdisciplinary, cross-jurisdictional and temporal range of the contributing chapters. It seeks to situate them in the longer history of studies of the political economy of crime and punishment, and applauds their collective revitalisation of the field. It explores the ways in which the impressive, international group of contributors explore the complex interactions between inequality, crime and punishment. In particular, it addresses the conceptual and methodological choices made in determining how to measure comparative poverty and prosperity and how to gauge relative punitiveness. The Afterword concludes by exploring promising further areas of enquiry suggested by this remarkable collection.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 24-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Backhouse

AbstractThis paper argues that Milonakis and Fine, in their bookFrom Political Economy to Economics, offer an account of history that systematically omits discussion of how economics has been shaped by the political and social context in which it developed. This contrasts with work by intellectual historians who have argued that such factors were crucial to understanding the history of economic ideas. It is ironic given that Milonakis and Fine are criticising economists for excluding the political and the social from economics.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Isaac

The city of Joppe/Jaffa/Yafo on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, immediately south of modern Tel Aviv, has a long history of importance as an urban centre, from the Middle Bronze Age onward until the 20th century. It was one of the few sites along the Palestinian coast that had a usable anchorage. The present article focuses on the Hellenistic, Roman, and late Roman periods, giving a brief survey of the major events, the political, social, and administrative history, and the major sources of information.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-24
Author(s):  
Leonardo Capezzone

Abstract The history of Khaldunian readings in the twentieth century reveals an analytical capacity of non-Orientalists definitely greater than that demonstrated by the Orientalists. The latter, at least until the 1950s, prove to be prisoners of that syndrome denounced by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which projected on Islamic historical development a specificity and an alterity, which make it an exception in world history. Orientalist scholarship has often wanted to see in Ibn Khaldūn’s critical attitude to the philosophy of al-Fārābī and Averroes only the confirmation of the primacy of the sharīʿa over Platonic nomos. This article seeks to highlight some aspects of Ibn Khaldūn’s critique of classical political thought of Islamic philosophy. His critique focuses on the importance given to the juridical dimension of social becoming, and to the role of the political body of the jurists in the making of the City. Those aspects witness Ibn Khaldūn’s effort to interpret change and fractures as factors which make sense of history and decadence.


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