En la platica navideña
Conversando sobre los musicos de Tijuana mi madre menciona ” Tu Tio Beto era muy buen pianista pero murio joven (36) – cada vez que venia el Cubano Bola de Nieve a Tijuana pedia que lo acompañara tu tio en el piano”.
Author: Rperalta
Avatar n. 6
Dislocazioni tra antropologia e comunicazione, n. 6, dicembre 2006
IN QUESTO NUMERO:
Fulvio Carmagnola: Design. Uno sguardo da fuori; Denis Santachiara: Nuovi destini del design; Kram e Weisshaar: Breeding Tables; Richard Coyne: Inflecting Space; Sérgio Bairon: Sound Textures and hypermediatic interactive environments; Aniko Meszaros: The Plant Anima Project: Biotechnology, Psychotechnology, and Aesthetics; Rene Peralta: Drag and Drop Urbanism: thoughts on the strategies of the generic; Coco Fusco: At your service: Latin Women in the Global Information Network; Fiamma Montezemolo: Eco fronteriza a Tijuana; Lorenzo Imbesi: Il design del s-oggetto; Flavio De Giovanni: Playing design 1.0; Daniela Ranieri: La plastica dell’esperienza; Francesco Warbear M. Palmieri: Indysign; Massimo Canevacci: Opus-design.
Drag and Drop Urbanism: Thoughts on the Strategies of the Generic.
Plug and Play
Currently the discussion concerning the legitimization of critical practice is a paramount issue in architecture today. Two paths demarcate the contemporary constraints of practice; one concerning a process of architecture for architecture’s sake, the other a redefinition of architecture toward a more glo-cal condition.
The 90’s brought about a cusp in critical practices in architecture that indulged in French theory by way of the diagram as a mechanism for the process of design. Many practices developed into a structuralist approach to the discipline without modernist social ideals, as well as separating themselves from Deconstruction and Pomo’s critique of modernism. Critical practices have a space of development, most often in a capitalistic environment enabling them to “research” techniques into novel modes of production. Technological advances in computer modeling and prototyping are a major influence within these types of practices and tend to be sometimes the primary concern, as described in their rhetoric. The instruments available for achieving critically are in some cases related to socio-economic systems that allow them to function as research laboratories separated from being prescriptive or socially applied ideas.
The instruments in some contexts are not readily available for the making of a critical practice, or in most cases, they are extremely different. Within this difference exists the necessity of reconfiguring practice to an “alternative” form, which enables technique and application to engender projects within a local system as well as reevaluating global conditions within that system. A “looping” practice that operates in and out of the realities of context and the perceptions of reality within academia. Take the history of American jazz for example with an origin situated between African drumbeats and European musical structures, two distinct and local manifestations. Later in the beep bop era becoming a highly articulate and experimental where a theoretical base began to emerge as musicians expanded the harmonic limits of past jazz styles. Players had to have a greater and immediate sense of chord recognition, as well as their extensions and possible substitutions (1). Its contemporary condition can be performed with highly specific addendums of interpretation, arranging variations according to local genres, hence soul jazz, Afro-Latin jazz, Brazilian jazz etc. A new generic structure yet with diverse grafting possibilities, a practice as a plug and play device.
The relationship of the concept of city and practice becomes again correlative. Alternative practices are in constant mutation becoming multidisciplinary, a kind of hypertext device referencing back and fourth into anthropological, artistic and other social conditions inherent within the political space of the city. Practice in this form becomes as much a project in itself, being responsive to the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of hybrid cultures. Therefore, practice takes another role in the interpretation of place – it measures associations. Changing the fundamental emphasis to flows, rather than to the spaces and structures (2)
Drag and Drop
In urban settings, a swap meet operates in and out specific urban conditions as a type of virtual device in which systems of exchange enable a series of informal ephemeral acts of assemblage, public space in a pure sense. Up or plugged into city infrastructure early mornings, to be later used, consumed and played with all day. This ephemeral spatial conglomerate is a type of plug in city, a meshwork of exchanges without architecture; it just needs four poles and a tent, a generic formal condition that enables a layering of spatial frames in a cinematic mode. As the despatializing of the local reinterprets the concept of the city, the notion of urban space is being restructured by global circumstances. As in many other urban conditions, the contemporary city is complex and unfathomable. Therefore, this network of exchanges predominates in some cases as a primordial diagram for a linear, radial, or organic city – or generically – swap meet urbanism.
Generic food, generic drugs and generic cities, what then constitute a generic space? There have been several definitions of the urban generic from a non-place envision by Marc Augé to the multi cultural mix described by Rem Koolhaas. Yet the generic city is as evasive as its name proclaims it to be. It is everything to everyone. The generic is a social form; social space that endures change from within and not just becomes an effect of global conditions. The generic functions in the threshold of stability and volatility; it is a “liminal” condition where the local coincides with the global (3). The generic can be highly specific and multiple and at the same moment able to be applied beyond its intimate location. Within this generic fabric, exists threads that interweave and coalesce into heterogeneous social forms.
Within these nodes, the possibility of other operational structure gives way to events, flows and structure. A good example would be to look at the city of Tijuana as a generic city. Since its conception, it has been operating within the threshold of global and local conditions. Its geographic location creates situations that translate into flows throughout the city. Instances of illegality have been a major drive forming its dystopian condition, a diagram of design. An illegality in form of land invasion, civil disobedience, and other forms of resistance. It is said that more than 50% of Tijuana’s development began as invasions of property (4). This illicit behavior has woven itself into multiple spaces, each with its distinct form of identity, that as of today has produced the most heterogeneous places within the city. Yet the conflict arises when these informal and rhizomatic systems of development are confronted with “designed” spaces promoting a solution to the impetus diagram of illegality. Serialized housing for hundreds of thousands of people, using methods of mass manufacturing that again produce mono-logical containers, a homogenous archipelago, where the pursuit of diversity is again an illicit endeavor. These communities where part of a drag and drop urbanism that after ten years have struggled to break away from totalitarian claws of urban planning and design rules. The spatial differences between both spaces vary in that one is capable of absorbing and constructing out individual perceptions of what constitutes a city, hence multiple images with plural interpretations. While “design” has brought about a condition of entropy within serialized communities and individual needs and wants have to be a form of resistance against conformity. Size, boundaries and the concept of ownership are part of the discrepancies found within both models. A typical serialized development is made up numerous enclaves, for example, the oldest developments of this kind are approximately composed of eight sections. Their limits are defined, yet the concept of ownership is redefined to systems of credit – you don’t own your land or your house. While in the informal communities, the city bureaucracy has not been able to “legalize” them because of their constant flux. In this case boundaries are negotiated between each member of the community, I take this much land but we share this much to have access to our homes. Ownership is achieved through a system of channels of communication. Therefore, the boundaries within informal developments change due to the constant reorganization of the area.
Tijuana is a generic playground because it does not have a past, a history, it is a true modern city without utopia, there is no image and there has never been one. It is this reason that image is a four letter word. If there is something critical of Tijuana is a crisis of identity in relationship to the urban, due to global phenomena. This specific condition which could be described or compared in universal terms with the predicament of generalizing certain conditions within context if we take a synthesis approach to urban issues. What is need is a quantum theory approach to urbanism. Practices in Tijuana are invalidated to become critical because the instruments for their endurance do not exist. An alternative must be negotiated, either through multidisciplinary approach, as others have been doing in South America, or through “looser” practices that shy away from a structuralist concerns and reintroduce mechanisms to make practice once again a cultural activity. Alternative practices must then renegotiate their relationship to the current critical discourse and the despatialization of place, and other conditions that disassociate objects with society
Save and Exit
While waiting in line to cross the border from Tijuana to San Diego I was gazing at the silly plaster figurines and all the other copyright infringed products sold at the “swap-meetesque” stands. I then immediately thought of the how the city, apart from being constructed of illegal acts of urbanism, is also made of copy/paste constructions.
La mona, la bola, las torres, colloquial names given to a series of pseudo monuments found in the urban landscape of Tijuana. Generic names for highly iconic objects that within other contexts have specific meaning, yet in Tijuana they have become blank canvass of assorted interpretation. As you drive by them you distinguish their freakish resemblance to other familiar icons sited somewhere in a modern metropolis, from NY to Sao Paulo. They belong to a family of imposter icons, such as the Bart Simpson, Incredible Hulk and Mickey Mouse, plaster statuettes sold to tourist waiting in line to cross the border. They represent artificiality at a grand scale, a need to embody a replicated communal narrative. Their generic description is a negation of their figurative representation making way to a sort of diagrammatic reading that enables a looping of diverse correlations.
In a series of paired black and white photographs, titled Mal-Hitos a well-known Tijuana artist juxtaposes the authentic against the forgery, in a mug shot format that exposes their culpability of stolen identity. Even though they impersonate monuments that through decades have acquired a deep-seated symbolism in their distinct cultural environment, they have become affirmations of the longing Tijuana has for a past and desire for urban artifacts. Their only crime, in their short and dislocated existence, is forming part of a simulated collective memory.
As I crossed into San Diego to teach my course on swap meet urbanism, teaching is part of my alternative practice as well as my alternative income, I realized I was crossing into a distinct generic condition, a hyper-designed generic of sameness due to an absence of myth and imagination. San Diego is the counter part of Tijuana – its anti-thesis, yet it is the reason why Tijuana exists. Its image has always included a symbiotic relationship with nature –a rural image. Its communities are isolated places of simulation. In the 1970’, Kevin Lynch made a study that addressed the both cities as a region in a report appropriately named Temporary Paradise, another simulation of homogenization. San Diego has become an earthly paradise yet with perimeter wall and militarized border.
As I left the checkpoint in San Ysidro, I become conscious I had to save my thoughts on the specificities of Tijuana as I exited into the vast and sublime space of the California interstate freeway.
1 William P. Gottlieb, “The Golden Age of Jazz: Text and Photographs”
Pomegranate Communications; California, 1st ed. edition, 1995
2. Arjun Appadurai, “The Right to Particpate in the Work of the Imagination”, in Transurbanism, Edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder, Laura Martz. V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2002.
3. According to Victor Turner the liminal or liminality is a condition of being in between states. “Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” Liminality is a form of anti-structure a catalyst for social change, liberation of the imagination from normative constraints
See, Turner, V. (1969). “The ritual process: structure and anti-structure”. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.
4. Tito Alegría y Gerardo Ordóñez. “Legalizando la Ciudad: Asentamientos Informales y Procesos de Regularización en Tijuana”.
Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana, B.C. México,2005.
5. Mal-Hitos, 11x 17, black and white photographic prints. Artist: Melisa Arreola.
Exhibited during Foto-Septiembre at the Tijuana Cultural Center, September 2003.
.
Black Dog Publishing, London
Authors: Fiamma Montezemolo, Rene Peralta and Heriberto Yepez
“Like a ying yang symbol, the border has become less straight, less a knife edge and more a twirling, blurring line of transgressions(…) an evolving cultural mix of blood, money, economies, cuisines and territories.”
Neil Denari
Tijuana is a border-town in all respects. It hovers between Mexico and the United States, not just physically, but psychologically. On the one hand it maintains its reputation as a sleezy centre for booze, sex and crime, and on the other it aspires to, and is slowly achieving, the sophistication and affluence of California–just a few miles and another world away.
Divided into three sections, Here is Tijuana! deals with the socio-cultural issues, the morality and the urban development of the city. Beautiful photographic essays accompany the text and bring the city to life. The book will be published in two editions–Spanish and English. Through words and images, Here is Tijuana! captures the spirit of a fractured city with a split identity.
ORDER NOW
Paperback
192pp
394 colour and b/w ills
25 x 21 cm
1 904772 45 5
UK £19.95
February 2006
Unas calaveritas jazzeras
A todos los músicos que hicieron de esta Tijuana un “happening” del jazz de 1920- 1960
A Jelly Roll Morton (pianista) trabajo en el bar Kansas City en TJ y compuso el Kansas City Stomp y Perl dedicada a un mesera llamada Perla.
Al- bárbaro del ritmo -el gran Beny More que trabajo en TJ en el Ciros en 1945-46.
A Charlie “Bird” Parker (saxofonista) que se caso en Tijuana con Doris June Sydnor en 1948
A Charles Mingus (bajista) y su Tijuana Moods, disco que lo considero como unos de su mejores.
Al gran compositor y cantante Jose Antonio Méndez que paso por estos rumbos.
A Gary Mcfarland que grabo con Clark Terry Tijuana Jazz en 1965
Al pianista Bill Evans que tocaría en Tijuana en los 70’s.
A mi padre Rodolfo Peralta “el plato” pianista de los Travelers
A mi tío Humberto Peralta (Tío Beto) considerado por algunos jazzistas de la cuidad como el mejor pianista que ha tenido Tijuana.
A mi Abuelo Pedro Peralta Músico de la orquestra del Agua Caliente.
Y muchos mas…
Para aquellos que decían que en Tijuana no había cultura, había y de la buena! Mas allá de los proyectos culturosos de la miseria y estéticas de la pobreza tan fáciles de promover hoy.
To be continued…
ARTICULO XVII-3 DIMENSIONES MINIMAS
La Dimensión mínima de pieza habitable será de 2.70 centímetros y su altura será cuando menos de dos metros treinta centímetros.
LEGISLACION DEL ESTADO DE BAJA CALIFORNIA
REGLAMENTO DE EDIFICACIONES DEL ESTADO DE BAJA CALIFORNIA
Publicada en el Periódico Oficial No. 16, de Fecha 10 de Junio de 1976, Tomo LXXXIII
Sección Ira.
2.70 x 2.70
In architecture, there exists an ontological difference in the interpretation of graphics. We can “read” them in dialectical terms as drawings or as diagrams of conceptual relationships and meanings, which constitutes them. 2.70 x 2.70* proposes to reverse this set of conditions from a spatial geometry to a space of memory. Gaston Bachelard explains that the house is experienced in its reality as well as in its virtuality, by means of memory and dreams. For each individual the house is a voyage of experiential history and desires. We amass our experiences in spaces and take them with us as we move along from place to place. The house is not only lived physically, but also in our imagination. Since childhood, our house is where we learn to daydream. Our house is our universe.
Space is social and political; it has always been embedded with an idyllic desire. Drawing has been the mechanism that drives the text and geometry constructs the allegory. Any spatial practice, geographic or ethnographic, constructs our meaning of social life .When geometry becomes the diagram of our lived experiences, we live our drawings. It is this dualism in the production of space, our house/home, drawing/diagram, that constitutes our reality as architects.
2.70 x 2.70 is more than a description or dimension of space, it asks the viewer to suspend observation and read into the quadrangle his/her individual memories of home, of the corners, cracks, odors and other objects that now inhabit his/her memory and intimacy. If what we see is in this work is a house, an exercise in spatial efficiency and economy, does it have the adequate space for imagination and memory, our simply to just daydream. If each room of our house is a space of experience, as horizontal vessel of memory or a vertical assurance of shelter a” roof over our heads”, perhaps these four walls represses and neglect our intimacy and instead of producing memory they threaten our ability to dwell into our personal universe.
R. Peralta
* 2.7×2.7 is a multimedia installation by Monica Arreola based on the minimum dimensions (by Tijuana building code) for rooms in residences built by developers. Sometimes only one room meets the size regulation performimg different functions such as kitchen, living room, dining room, etc. The installation will be presented in Monterrey in November 2005.
como me decidí escribir sobre otro tema para una revista gringa que me pidió un texto sobre Tijuana – y en Tijuana todo se recicla -este queda para el blog.
Drag and Drop Urbanism
In the last twenty years the east side of Tijuana has grown beyond its critical mass, housing conditions have moved from being self built favelas to a phenomena of overnight density – drag and drop suburbs are becoming the normative housing strategy for the working class. If a certain hybridism represented the informal self-built shacks, these mono-logical constructions include seriality, production-line planning and non-place iconography, as part of their pedigree.
Stockholm, Lisbon, Madrid, London in addition to literary masters such as Velarde, Cervantes, Dante, Sartre, Victor Hugo, title most streets of gated sectors, names that are supposed to stimulate a sense of cultural awakening. The community must then imagine that their planners, these avatars of sprawl, perceive culture as a bourgeois European vacation or a mere psychological fairy-tale voyage, becoming a non-attainable construction element that is valued engineered and with a short spreadsheet life.
A vast accumulation of housing units left behind to develop into a city by their own willpower. What is fascinating is the determination of the population to appropriate urbanism and model it through their own idiosyncrasies.
As in other previous histories of the city, illicit acts of urbanism are still the fundamental modus operandi to transgress enforced homogeneity of design guidelines, which pretend to establish a general image of a simulated townscape. It is here where the majority of Tijuana’s maestros are employed to assist the transformational process. Waiting in public spaces for drive-by employers that solicit their services according to their skills and expertise, posted in the maestro’s cars, which not only function as transportation, but also as storage, workshop, and advertising billboard. In Tijuana, the box has endured all rhetorical debates and owing to the ability of operational performance the Tijuananense achieves with this ecology, it has empowered residents of Villa Fontana to reconfigure it and multiply it, with imagination and craft.
A constant condition of the unit housing box is its transformative capacity, inside and out, from a strict residential code to an assortment of “illegal” programs. The base is not only a physical datum, but also a hardware that acts as a platform allowing programmatic architectures to operate. They are plugged in with necessary installations to re configure their use; water store, mini market, internet café, tarot reader, and countless other uses that cater to basic needs as well as to sustainability, hopes and desires. The new spaces and functions of the generic box allows primarily, to maintain a family structure allowing members to share their home (initially most of the houses built have two small bedrooms) and secondly to incorporate an alternative source of income by the way of a commercial venture.
It is here where technology performs as second infrastructure, a personal urbanism, allowing a network of activities such as communication, entertainment and job search and various functions. Cell phones, computers, satellite antennas, all gadgets, purchased in mercados sobreruedas, markets on wheels, that in themselves are ubiquitous plug and play devices within the city, who’s function is to transform some undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human desires (Banham).
Like in any other developer project, gates and metal bars are part of a collective sense of security. Bars work as a macro economy that enables distinct areas of homes to organize into enclaves, and at a micro scale in the house themselves securing windows doors and some times trees from thieves and vandals. The permeability of the bars permits light and ventilation, and allows a view or dyslexic gaze through the ornamental bars. Landscape of the community is made of serifs and other motifs that configure a baroque pattern on the design of the bars, in some cases becoming the only “organic” topology in the field of view.
Tijuana – From the free formed to the automated, the urban to the post urban.
Plug and Play
The swap meet is a plug and play device in which system of exchanges enable a series of informal ephemeral acts of assemblage, public space in a pure sense. Up or plugged into the city infrastructure early mornings, to be later used, consumed and played with all day. This ephemeral spatial conglomerate is a type of plug in city, a meshwork of exchanges without architecture; it just needs four poles and a tent, a generic formal condition that enables a layering of spatial frames in section. As the concept of the city is reinterpreted by the despatializing of the local, the notion of urban space is being restructured by global circumstances. As in many other urban conditions, the contemporary city is complex and unfathomable. Therefore, this network of exchanges predominates in some cases as a primordial diagram for a linear, radial, or organic city – or simply – swap meet urbanism.
Mal-Hitos
La mona, la bola, las torres, colloquial names given to a series of pseudo monuments found in the urban landscape of Tijuana. Generic names for highly iconic objects that within other contexts have specific meaning, yet in Tijuana they have become blank canvass of assorted interpretation. As you drive by them you distinguish their freakish resemblance to other familiar icons sited somewhere in a modern metropolis, from NY to Sao Paulo. They belong to a family of imposter icons, such as the Bart Simpson, Incredible Hulk and Mickey Mouse, plaster statuettes sold to tourist waiting in line to cross the border. They represent artificiality at a grand scale, a need to embody a replicated communal narrative. Their generic description is a negation of their figurative representation making way to a sort of diagrammatic reading that enables a looping of diverse correlations.
In a series of paired black and white photographs titled Mal-Hitos (shown above), Melisa Arreola juxtaposes the authentic against the forgery, in a mug shot format that exposes their culpability of stolen identity. Even though they impersonate monuments that through decades have acquired a deep-seated symbolism in their distinct cultural environment, they have become affirmations of the longing Tijuana has for a past and desire for urban artifacts. Their only crime, in their short and dislocated existence, is forming part of a simulated collective memory.
La mona, la bola las torres, nombres coloquiales que describen una serie de pseudo monumentos localizados en el paisaje urbano de Tijuana. Nombres genéricos para objetos tan iconográficos, que dentro de otros contextos llevan consigo significados específicos, sin embargo en Tijuana se han convertido en lienzos vacíos donde se plasman multiplicidad de interpretaciones. Al pasar cerca de ellos es posible distinguir su semejanza deformada con los iconos de las urbes modernas, desde Nueva York a Sau Paulo. Pertenecen a una familia de impostores, junto con Bart Simpson, Increible Hulk y Mickey Mouse figuras de yeso que venden a los turistas que esperan cruzar la frontera. Representativos del la artificialidad a grande escala, y de una necesidad de replicar una narrativa comunal. Dentro de su descripción generica se encuentra la negación de la figura representada – que a la vez se dirige hacia una lectura diagramática permitiendo “loops” de correlaciones diversas.
En una serie de fotografías en blanco y negro con titulo Mal-Hitos, Melissa Arreola yuxtapone el objeto original con el falsificado, en una especie de ficha fotográfica que expresa su culpabilidad de secuestro de identidad. Aun se hacen pasar por monumentos que por décadas adquirieron un profundo simbolismo en sus distintos ambientes culturales, reafirman el anhelo que tienen Tijuana por un pasado y su deseo por artefactos urbanos. Su única culpa, dentro de su corta y dislocada vida, es ser parte de una simulada memoria colectiva.