Yurt Empire

Claiming a RttC has not merely been a “way to respond to neoliberal urbanism” (Purcell 2002: 99) but a way to escape an apparent inability to influence agendas on the national or international scale; think, here, of the largely reactionary climate in the US under Reagan and UK under Thatcher in the 1980s. Claiming the RttC was to claim asylum away from neoliberal national agendas of the time; an exodus that came as a necessity. Or even think of the later claim of RttC as pacification: “a ‘new urbanism’ movement that touts the sale of community and boutique lifestyles to fulfil urban dreams” (Harvey 2009: 323).

By now there is a fact: (neo)Nazis and the ultra-conservative, authoritarian and neoliberal governments following the dictate of the EU, IMF and ECB in Greece have both chosen a scale of intervention that was, until recently, almost monopolised by voices of the social antagonist movement and critical Left: the urban scale.

A second option — essentially, the only one viable—  would be for us to use this unprecedented attack as an opportunity, an opportunity to define solidly what in this particular scale of intervention (the urban) is politically alluring and fertile for the broader movement of social and human emancipation.

'Site-writing' examines how writing art criticism can be understood as a form of situated practice where the writing responds to those site suggested by the artwork: those that are there as well as here, those that exist in the memories and imaginations of the artist and critic as well as in the tangible present, those connected to the sites of the work's production as well as reception.This workshop asks you to remake one site in relation to another, specifically to explore the potential of writing as a way of making relations between sites. Writing here includes not only as script but also as text, which might include visual images, and/or words as images, and also words as they are spoken and performed.