Domestic Landscapes [Bert Teunissen]

Bert Teunissen

Tripoli [International Fair]

Satellites [Jonas Bendiksen]

Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union

"Satellites" is the culmination of Jonas Bendiksen’s fascinating seven-year photographic journey through unrecognized countries, enclaves, and isolated communities on the periphery of the former Soviet Union. From Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Siberia, he takes us into little known places where the stark legacy of the Soviet collapse continues to evolve: Transdniester, Abkhazia and Nagorno Karabakh, the Ferghana Valley, the Jewish Autonomous Region, and the spaceship crash zones on the Kazakh steppes. In these outposts, the transition to the post-communist world order brought mixed results - some lost everything to bloody civil wars, while others find themselves in tiny pariah states that remain all but closed to the outside world. Some evolved peculiar self-styled brands of capitalism, others simply packed their bags and left.

15 years after the fall of the USSR, Bendiksen's haunting photographs and text explore these restless territories' search for historical, religious and ideological identity, and forms a timely look into unfinished chapters of Soviet history.

kabul and California

Beautiful Bagdad

Real War and Real Architecture

Beirut, Lebanon, July 2006

Lebbeus Woods

Lebbeus Woods is an American Artist who envisions experimental environments rather than designing practical buildings, comparing his work to the visionary power of cinema. He was quoted saying "the interplay of metrical systems establishing boundaries of materials and energetic forms is the foundation of a universal science (universcience) whose workers include all individuals...."

The majority of his explorations deal with the design of systems in crisis: the order of the existing being confronted by the order of the new. His designs are politically charged and provocative visions of a possible reality, provisional, local and charged with the investment of their creators. He is best known for his proposals for San Francisco, Havana and Sarajevo included in the publication of Radical Reconstruction in 1997. Sarajevo after its civil war, Havana in the grips of the ongoing trade embargo, and San Francisco after the Loma Prieta Eartnquake. Woods studied architecture at the University of Illinois and engineering at Purdue University and first worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen, but in 1976 turned exclusively to theory and experimental projects.

He is currently a professor of architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City. In 1998 Woods co-founded RIEA, the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, a non-profit institution devoted to the advancement of experimental architectural thought and practice while promoting the concept and perception of architecture itself.

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no "sacred and primordial site." I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then "melt into air." I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhoutte against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.