#dpr-blog

[ethel-baraona]

First guideline: look for a sad memory If you don’t have one, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.

Second guideline: read a sad poem. If you don’t feel a lump in the throat, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.

Third guideline: imagine the day of your dead. If you feel immortal, leave, you’ll not be able to cry.

Fourth guideline (only when the other three has failed) Cry because you have abandoned all hope of crying.

—'Guidelines for Crying,' The Circus of Suffering [from the archive at DPR-barcelona BLOG]

[ethel-baraona]

In 2010 we designed this speculative fiction about using the enormous tunnel-boring machines as spaces of retreat in Gaza. Sadly at that moment we weren't able to imagine that fictions are not so fictional in the terrible world we're living.

/// The complete proposal can be read here: Tunneling Gaza

That idea from 2012 of using the tunnel-boring machines for underground retreat somehow is becoming a sad reality —without such speculative technology, of course—, as a response for a real and current need: the need of Palestinian people to retreat and feel safe. We can read:

"We blocked our ears and dug deeper, farther. We didn’t want to hear anything, we wanted to get away. We dug so deep that we reached the Styx, the river of the dead. The old boatman gave us a helpless look and then he turned away. What good will his little boat do against the tide of blood, the masses of people, against the people of Gaza? We swam across the cold river until we reached the cold rocky bank, and then we kept digging – beyond life, and far beyond time."

The complete story at The underground ghetto city of Gaza

[ethel-baraona]

If the city no longer represents the system but becomes the system itself, as Archizoom proposed more than fifty years ago, how can we avoid to get lost in representation and start understanding the systemic fails we’re living to react in a proper way?

From Housing the Remnants of Capitalism

[ethel-baraona]

“We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us —because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand— the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests —the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature— only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value—leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand.” ― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

More info: Ponte Tower. Fiction becoming real or the machine for making emptiness at dpr-barcelona BLOG

[ethel-baraona]

Architectura Simplex | a book by Beniamino Servino

[ethel-baraona]

When talking about information, the idea of creating an underground space it’s quite understandable: it represent a safer space, with the right temperature and designed to protect our most important data to bepreserved for the future. The project Underground information chambers [mining 01100100 01100001 01110100 01100001] by Eva Papamargariti and Maro Tsagka takes place in the mountain of Penteli, famous for its flawless white marble, which was used to build the Acropolis and other ancient monuments.

From Underground Information Chambers —a protoecology to preserve our most valuable data

[ethel-baraona]

Tourniquet | Decolonizing Mind Process [dpr-barcelona proposal for Arquine's Competition "Shelter for the Displaced"]

Following the challenge posed by Arquine we imagined an artifact that could be used to avoid just using band aids. A sort of denouncing apparatus not to be physical constructed but to generate a legend to inoculate in the minds of Central American people, a sort of contemporary “llorona” that they can find in their route to the United States. This “llorona” won’t bring them to the hell, it will bring them back to real home. It will capture them and decolonize their minds from the distorted idea of material progress which is nothing more that the modern tale of capitalism.

More info: Tourniquet

[ethel-baraona]

“If there is a limit to all things and a measure And a last time and nothing more and forgetfulness, Who will tell us to whom in this house We without knowing it have said farewell?”

Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “Limits”

More at dpr-barcelona BLOG