Future Anterior最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Heritage Conservation in Postcolonial India: Approaches and Challenges ed. by Manish Chalana and Ashima Krishna
• Ateya Khorakiwala (bio)

Ground-level plan of a shala (left); first-level plan (above right). The image (below right) shows a typical shala structure in a thatara tola construction in Chamba, with a badi and tulsi vedika in the front courtyard. The four concrete columns in the front veranda, and a small outdoor bathing area on the right of the entrance steps are more recent additions. Sketch generated in September 2014 as part of a studio project at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Source: Sakriti Vishwakarma.

Manish Chalana’s and Ashima Krishna’s volume brings a chorus of divergent and complementary voices together to represent the major debates and directions in heritage conservation in India. The critical framing of the book is centered on the changing institutional and theoretical norms in the field of conservation, particularly in contrast to the approaches laid out by the colonial and governmental behemoth, the Archeological Society of India (ASI). Heritage conservation’s institutional landscape exceeds the ASI; it is also shaped by the different histories and organizational structures of the non-governmental Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and the global mandates and directions of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The book aims to complicate this institutional landscape by introducing the myriad institutional scaffolds that make conservation possible. It presents emerging definitions and trends of heritage in postcolonial India by bringing together essays from practitioners in the field that complicate both what heritage is and what its conservation should and does constitute. Positioned against the ASI’s monument-centric model of conservation, the book produces conservation as a textual production: lists, publications, status designations, vision plans, and even public interest litigations (PILs).

In the post-independence period, Chalana and Krishna argue, the ASI narrowly and uniformly enforced the prescriptions of a 1923 document, the conservation manual thus shaping postcolonial heritage as an archeological and bureaucratic endeavor. These two aspects—the uniformity of application and the power of a manual—have had an outsize impact on the field. The strength of the ASI is that it has produced a comprehensive record of monuments and artifacts; however, this r

Abstract:

This article chronicles the urban transformation of Skanderbeg Square— the center of Tirana, Albania’s capital city— over the last one hundred years. It traces a series of urban erasures in and around the square, which detached, estranged, and stole the square from the city. While there were many reasons behind these erasures, political and economic ones notwithstanding, there were also discursive choices that biased and sustained them, as there were others that could have been made against such erasures. The transformation of Skanderbeg Square was anticipated from the very beginning, in the projects of the so-called Time of Italy, between the two wars. The larger methodological stake of the article is precisely this anticipation, namely, the telling of a story through the critical and speculative lens of the future anterior: how and why does an event retroactively selects the reasons of its occurrence, and what other, potential transformations would have occurred at other junctures, if other choices were made. This is not mere fantasy or wishful thinking; it is only by showing that the past has always- already been many, and that it could have been different, that it is possible to imagine change in the present, and thus have agency toward the future.

Abstract:

This article conceptualizes everyday processes of carbon embodiment and transplantation in informal settlements across Karachi, Pakistan. The authors explore these grounded carbon trajectories against the state’s carbon discourses and policies, highlighting the lacunae in the national (de)carbonization discourse particularly in the housing construction sector.

In contrast, they look at grounded, unintended, and ad hoc practices of carbon embodiment and transplantation through the lens of the informal housing construction sector in urban Pakistan, drawing on several representative cases from extended fieldwork in Karachi during 2018–22. They examine how carbon is embodied and “transplanted” across spatial regions, intergenerational life courses, and the localized imaginaries of urban housing, through the everyday practices of residents (de/re)constructing and living in informal, patchworked houses. Against the backdrop of Karachi’s housing precarity, Abudallah and Macktoom observe peculiar temporal-material patterns that frame everyday carbon management for a large proportion of urban dwellers. They conceptually weave these cases together to speculate on patchwork housing processes, material redistributive practices, and carbon (dis)embodiment for populations lying beyond the state’s formal attempts at de-carbonization. They posit that understanding, accounting for, and upscaling the existing practices of patching, unpatching, and repatching carbon constitutes a critical lens to understand the smaller-scale yet more proximate and intense relations of carbon in under-documented cities like Karachi.

Abstract:

This article explores ruins perceived as disappointing and computer-generated imagery (CGI) in the context of film induced tourism. Specifically, we take a closer look at how CGI for the popular Game of Thrones television series has influenced travelers’ expectations and local guides’ repertoires on selected locations in Croatia. The authors ask: what kind of contemporary artefact is a CGI-still; how does it relate to other “standard” material artefacts used or (re)constructed within heritage tourism? Building on episodic observations from fieldwork on the coast of Dalmatia since 2016, and through a small detour to the earliest backlots and filmset facades of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Frederiksen and Ulfstjerne argue that CGI-stills are a layer unto locations that has practical, material, economic and social consequences. Contributing to larger debates over authenticity and commodification in tourism-and heritage studies, we argue that these added “fictive” layers become part of local history, and potentially also to local heritage.

• Polymerized Heritage
• Fyerool Darma (bio)

Close up of P ♥ rtraire Family (featuring rawanXberdenyut, Aleezon, Tuan Siami, A.I.den and Lé Luhur from the exhibit “Radio Malaya: Abridged Conversation About Art,” National University of Singapore Museum, South and Southeast Asia Collection and Autaspace. Photography by Jonathan Tan.

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[ Fri • 9 Jun 2023 • 01:15 PM • Telok Blangah • Singapore ]

2023, Singapore—The city-state played host to a series of conferences bringing together blockchain technology and art; yet digital exclusions persisted within and beyond its geographical landmass. Is it not ironic when art becomes a stream that hosts the ambitions of the Green Plan against this Smart Nation? What did I take from the advice, “màn màn lái~”¹? How can these intricate circuitry hint to the collaborators or are they traces of colluding crests?

There is an energy shield that dissolves into a fibrous hue of chrome. It brought me to my heritage—the polymeric surface—“Am I minimizing my ecological footprint with this material? Why should I bear the burden of responsibility when it is the negligence carried forward by my parents, their post-Merdeka generation, and the ones before? What happens when artists employ these fossilized detritus? Lao Ban Niang,² your grandchild of the Plastic Age, explored these cues that were once utilized as military equipment—I am repurposing it as a razzle dazzle camouflage against a heritage. What can you decode of these surfaces? Could its verso hint at formations or are they compressions of oversampled marks from the saturation of our heritage that you love? Whose heritage? What heritage?”

Polyvinyl decals are a heritage of the present. They are cues to a sonar measuring the intricacy and intimacy of metrics for the materiality of the digital born and physical labor. They are slippages of overlooked heritage in the digital depth that underlies industrial legacies to systems that continue into our digital age. It is a portal where the digital wades. They are traces to energies of the bodies that mined precious minerals—processed, grinded to powder, suspended onto emulsions of CMYK and tattooed onto surfaces. Vinyls carry evidence of manual, intellectual, and creative labor. They are cues to the co-production between society and automotion. As soon as it is applied to a surface, the energy of the labor evaporates from the cache. Can polyvinyl decals resemble self-fashioned textiles? Do they carry the incantations of tattooed weavers and loom makers? What material possibilities arise amidst this obfuscation? These thoughts explore data wast

Abstract:

Industry is dirty, and land, soils, and sites remain toxic even after operations have diminished or closed. Dominant heritage frameworks, aligned with narratives that serve national interests, and environmental plans, have not yet imagined the heritage futures of industrial landscapes— nor the narratives that link the industrial pasts of workers to the present and the future. Significant labor histories are frequently diminished, marginalized, or omitted altogether. Major nation-building industries in Australia, America, Canada and northern Europe were dependent on immigrant labor drawn from Asia, Europe, and South America, and their stories are embedded in the large tracts of industrial sites that have become wastelands of defunct and demolished structures. “Dirty” extends onto a linguistic terrain of “dirty histories” and the silencing of particular histories parallel the masking of environmental toxicity. Focusing on the Port Kembla steelworks in Australia, this article examines immigrant industrial labor history and develops a perspective from which to rethink heritage practice and the theoretical development of critical carbon. If critical carbon is conceptualized as a matter that concerns both the exploitation of land and of peoples, this article argues that heritage practice needs to develop projects around immigrant heritage sites such as the steelworks.

• The Necessary Interlinking of Culture and Climate Change
• Hector Abrahams (bio)

Dixon Street drawing—Elevational collage highlighting Kwong War Chong’s cultural significance. By Maddie Gallagher and John Suh.

Contrary to public perception, Sydney’s population is composed mainly of immigrants: more than 35 percent of current Sydneysiders were born outside Australia. This diverse migrant majority has been increasing for at least five decades. Previously, Sydney was dominated by European migrants and, before that, British migrants for fifteen decades. Prior to the invasion, Sydney remained the place of indigenous culture for the last 47,000 years. The climate of Sydney is benignly coastal temperate. Since both climate and culture are changing, in what ways are they relevant to each other? Is it better to try to respond to climate by also responding to culture, rather than as a standalone imperative? This commentary attempts to address this through a close reading of student projects that generated responses to climate change in places of accepted cultural significance.

In 2022, Jennifer Ferng devised a Master of Architecture studio brief called Critical Carbon, focusing on carbon and energy with the premise that an effective response to climate change is interlinked with culture. This approach is not normal in Australia, where response to climate is a practical problem of environmental engineering, which has not led to the uptake of solutions that are to hand. As an architect specializing in the cultural approach to the environment, I led the students through two of my completed projects at the start of the semester and returned for final reviews to offer commentary on their design propositions and thinking.

Seven schemes are discussed in three sections, each representing diverse cultural response strategies. They offer creative solutions for heritage places located close to the most dense and populous part of this landscape dominated city environment. The studio brief directed postgraduate students to choose their own sites from any of the buildings listed on the New South Wales (NSW) State Heritage Register—these structures ranged anywhere from local neighborhood landmarks in areas like Chinatown, industrial sites, maritime dockyards, and cultural artifacts such as dams and fortresses that exceed the scale of a single building. All of these sites are under special protection, preventing demolition on the basis of the cultural importance attributed to them. The 1979 Planning Legislation terms them “Items of Environmental Heritage.”¹ At the same time as this planning protection, a specific language and set of [End Page 93] principles for guiding change (known as the

• Final Comments
• Gayatri Spivak (bio)

Thank you. Our task is to think about the possible role of the humanities and qualitative social sciences in the context of the climate disaster.

I teach the humanities. My entire intellectual efforts are focused on the distinction that I have learned, that even the qualitative social sciences must make some kind of truth claim, that is to say produce verifiable knowledge; whereas the humanities—non-analytic (qualitative) philosophy and literature—are about the practice of learning. The repeated practice of learning is what we see in the cultures that are based on mnemic languages, that is to say—languages that are written on the memory rather than on material things like paper. We generally call them oral languages, and today we call the people who use only mnemic languages illiterate, but in fact one might say that the digital has finally caught up with them, writing on “memory.”

Speaking speculatively, one might say that these mnemic languages can possibly produce social formations and cultural formations that are contaminated by no more than the practice of learning, because with a mnemic language you can’t leave material evidence. This is not Plato’s position against writing that Jacques Derrida undid. I am speaking about an epistemological practice where the humanities may be said to have a methodological affinity with the mnemic languages.

I ask my students not to take notes because I want to see how much I have been able to teach so that they retain something the next day, so that something gets written on memory. The practice of learning.

This simply emphasizes that the worst victims of climate disasters are quite often dependent upon mnemic languages and training in the humanities’ epistemological practice might help us to approach them.

This invites us to rethink the academy’s role in making lasting change. Not just material policy changes to undo the Anthropocene while sustaining smart capitalism, but sustaining climate reversal epistemologically as well.

When my students come into my class these days, they’re reading mangas. Graphic material is fantastic, of course. But to pick up language signals so that you identify with what you’re reading, gives you practice to “read” the mnemic subaltern. It is only thus that the humanities classroom gives you a practice of learning where you surrender rather than control, summarize, relate to historical examples, codify, recommend, defend, apply.

We have to rethink the academy. If we start from where we are—with the humanities trivialized—we will not be able to read deep history, geological history rather than our own, in any way but as an object of knowledge. [End Page 115]

This is the way in which today’s major world ch

• Background BuildingA Net Zero Energy and Super-Low Carbon Adaptive Reuse at the National University of Singapore
• Jennifer Ferng (bio) and Erik L’Heureux (bio)

Adaptive reuse, super-low embodied carbon, and net-zero energy retrofit of SDE1. West elevation features a deep veil of horizontal light shelves and gradient filigree panels to allow for daylighting, glare mitigation, and ventilation. Photo: Ong Chan Hao.

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On the National University of Singapore campus, the super-low carbon, net-zero adaptive reuse of two institutional, four-story buildings housing the Department of Architecture are known as SDE 1 and SDE 3. Their reinvention reconfigures the legacy of the 1970s S. J. van Embden master plan by creating a scaffold and pedagogical tool for design learning, teaching, and research for the twenty-first century. The architecture is founded on design excellence and sustainability, calibrated to the specifics of the urban equator while repurposing the embodied carbon from generations earlier.

The design, led by Erik L’Heureux FAIA from 2015 to 2023, creates a new identity, interfaces with the equatorial context and climate of two conjoined blocks, and enwraps them with a performative, deep-veil envelope. A series of light shelves drive daylight deep into the floor plate, while an ascending succession of screens folds to filter solar radiation while providing views and natural ventilation. Within, careful removals allow the introduction of productive social spaces and a verdant jungle that centers the architecture on the equator.

The south block renovation involves internal reorganization of faculty office spaces while two temperate-looking lawns from the original building are replaced with a jungle courtyard and brise soleil golden crown. The north block inserts a new circulatory promenade, strategic openings, and renovated theater spaces to improve the facilities for design education. Together the architecture serves as background buildings on the campus, creating a subtle but dignified identity for the university. Within, the interiors are retrofitted with careful subtractions and removals to improve the spatial quality of the buildings. Smart building sensors monitor and modulate the high quality, high comfort indoor air environment. Fans and cutting-edge hybrid cooling systems calibrate the air to life in the tropics. The high-efficiency buildings have integrated photovoltaics and a solar roof to meet the operational energy demands. Holistically, the renovation showcases sustainable design that infuses the campus with architectural quality and environmental stewardship, repurposing the embodied carbon of the original structures w