that’s the artist who gave the workshop in Geneva last month:

http://www.softhook.com/

His name is Christian Nold and he has been working mainly on public space and particularily how “masses” use and move into space. As he says, nowadays, there are so many events happening already in the public space (for example, protests, etc.) that there is no need to organize events or performances. there is enough to observe already. what he has been mainly doing in recent years, is to produce subjective cartographies of areas, cities, etc. He made kind of emotional maps, for example, renaming all the subway stations, or he asked people to draw their neighborhood…in another project, he asked people to walk around with a kind of machine that measures stress (like a lie detector) and a gps, and afterward they discussed together to understand what were that main reasons for stress. actually his maps look like the one I posted last summer on our blog…

I think the whole point of his work is to give community a voice to express its own space, and to personalize maps instead of having objective, pseudo-neutral maps. somehow, I felt that his work is trying to put together the two dimensions of mapping and tracing…I gave him Petrescu’s paper, he was interested! His work goes sometimes a step further, in the sense that it is used by urban planners or local politics, who need to have a better understanding of the environment.

The work we did in Geneva was quite different though, and although i found it interesting, it was somehow too similar to what I’m used to do in social sciences. we chose an area we wanted to explore, describe and map, and we ended up working on the UN/international organizations area, which is a very special area in Geneva as it is very cold, unfriendly and unlively area. almost like the bad chinese new constructions you see everywhere.

http://www.geneva.publicbiopsy.net/?page_id=105

well, so as we could feel it in the built environment, we tried to explore the connections/disconnections between this area, the people working in those IO and Geneva. Basically a lot of those people are expats, so they have a particular relation with the city, as expats have everywhere else in the world. but what at least for me is interesting, is that all those IO, NGOs, etc. are kind of acting for the world, that is, in a scale we all belong to. But as I showed on the pictures (the world upside down that I posted a few weeks ago) there is something very weird about the world they represent: something that is far, stranger, cold, that nobody seems to be able to appropriate, and this is strongly felt in the built environment. So during the workshop we got kind of stuck with this very huge topic of international organizations…and tried to map them, or at least tried to map their presence into the city, but we didn’t really have enough time to finish…so the result wasn’t that interesting. it was funny though to interrogate people about those IOs; we asked them to draw the people working there and get a bit into their imaginary of what those guys are (doing). I think it could have been funny to try to imagine the city actually without its international part and see what would be left…but I think these drawing and mapping techniques are definitely very interesting and could be something to explore in Beijing projects as well…

and here is my question, the post about electric palm tree is very interesting, how do you imagine we could get further on the co-existence discourse? do you already have some ideas in mind?