Eclectic Electric Collective: The El Martillo Project (2012)

“In 2009 an inconspicuous looking suitcase was sent from Berlin to Mexico City containing a 39-foot tall inflatable silver hammer. Thus began El Martillo’s odyssey to protest the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancún. El Martillo’s short, but glorious life, climaxed when protesters from Marea Creciente (Rising Tide) stormed the conference complex fences, gigantic hammer above their heads. In full view of the press Mexican police tore the inflatable to pieces. Within an hour global the media corporations declared El Martillo a symbol of the climate changes protests as it’s image traveled across the world.

The El Martillo Project documents the whole process from its conception and construction to the media flurry it sparked off. Included are numerous full color images and documentation of the project; texts and analysis by David Graeber, Alex Dunst, and Cristian Guerrero; an interview with John Jordan from the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination; and a fold out technical manual and plan for creating giant inflatable hammers.

Initially inspired by the quote “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it,” The El Martillo Project aims to inspire creative action and joyful disobedience.”

Publisher Minor Compositions, an imprint of Autonomedia, 2012
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781570272509
64 pages

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PDF, PDF (updated on 2021-8-13)

Jean Baudrillard: Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (2007/2009)

“Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination,” writes French theorist Jean Baudrillard in Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? In this, one of the last texts written before his death in 2007, Baudrillard meditates poignantly on the question of disappearance. Throughout, he weaves an intricate set of variations on his theme, ranging from the potential disappearance of humanity as a result of the fulfillment of its goal of world mastery to the vanishing of reality due to the continual transmutation of the real into the virtual. Along the way, he takes in the more conventional question of the philosophical “subject,” whose disappearance has, in his view, been caused by a “pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality.”

Interspersed throughout the text are photographs by Alain Willaume that help illustrate Baudrillard’s argument. Baudrillard insists that with disappearance, strange things happen—some things that were eliminated or repressed may return in destructive viral forms— yet at the same time, he reminds us that disappearance has a positive aspect, as a “vital dimension” of the existence of things.

Originally published under the title Pourquoi tout n’a-t-il pas déjà disparu ?, Editions de L’Herne, 2007
Translated by Chris Turner
With images by Alain Willaume
Publisher Seagull, 2009
The French List series
ISBN 1906497400, 9781906497408
72 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-29)

Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (2009)

The Bauhaus—founded inWeimar in 1919, located in Dessau beginning in 1925, and closed in Berlin in 1933—continues to be the most effective and successful export article of twentieth-century German culture. Even more than seventy years after it was closed, this interdisciplinary school for art, architecture, design, and theater has not lost any of its currentness.

On the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, this profusely illustrated, comprehensive publication with over three hundred color illustrations reexamines and reevaluates the art school’s history and influence. In this collaborative project by the three leading institutes at the former sites of the Bauhaus’s activities—the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and the Bauhaus-Museum der Klassik Stiftung Weimar—the historic Bauhaus and the trail of its reception are closely examined and analyzed based on sixty-eight selected highlights, including the hitherto neglected aspects of the Bauhaus during the period of National Socialism as well as its international propagation and commercialization.

Texts by Barry Bergdoll, Klaus von Beyme, Regina Bittner, Gerda Breuer, Magdalena Droste, Peter Hahn, Christine Hopfengart, Christoph Ingenhoven, Michael Siebenbrodt, Klaus Weber.

Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / Museum für Gestaltung, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau
With an introduction by Annemarie Jaeggi
Publisher Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2009
ISBN 978-3-7757-2414-2
376 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-18)