Envisaging Spatial Crisis: On Capital and Territory and the Diagnosis of the Present

Author(s): Mari Paz Balibrea

Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 30 (Summer 2012), pp. 38-47
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art and
Design, University of the Arts London

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667244 .

Accessed: 11/11/2014 11:12
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts
London are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Afterall: A Journal of Art,
Context, and Enquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

38 | Afterall

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Javier Andrada,
Huertos urbanos
(Urban Allotments),
2009, colour
photograph, detail,
from a series of
photographs made
during the project
On Capital and
Territory, UNIA,
Seville. Courtesy
the artist

Envisaging Spatial Crisis:

On Capital and Territory
and the Diagnosis of the Present
Mari Paz Balibrea

One of the most urgent questions for artistic and cultural production in the Spanish context
today concerns the conditions of possibility and dissemination of critical thinking. Where
can one nd sustained reection on the present era and the place of Spain within it, on the
pressing issues dening our historical moment or on the role of art and culture within this
historical moment? Where are audiences being given access to artistic and cultural forms
that interpellate them as discriminating thinkers and social agents? Where are the hard
questions pointing to the consequences of living under conditions of the radical and
inescapable commodication of art and culture? Where are art and culture being thought
politically? Where is utopian thinking being made possible? Where are young practitioners
and students aspiring to a career in the creative industries or to an education in the humanities being trained to think critically, to defy disciplinary boundaries, to question their own
practice and the structures and institutions that make it possible?

The obvious place, the university, provides such functions only at its margins, leaving
much to be learnt beyond them. Still a recognisable child of the Franco dictatorship in
its structures as well as in its mechanisms of reproduction (that is, in its members and
the knowledge taught), the Spanish university has failed to reinvent itself as a democratic
institution after more than 35 years of democracy. In particular the arts, the humanities
and the social sciences have proven unable to turn the university into a space where
education is understood as the debating of ideas, of rigorous and innovative thinking and
of openness to relevant conversations taking place beyond national frontiers.

It is probably because the Spanish university has failed to occupy such a space that
more marginal and decentralised platforms have moved to ll in this void of critical
thinking. In the case of art and culture, one source has been provided by artistic institutions
and museums, and by those working in them. A number of artistic directors and
curators have, over the past two and half decades, reected on the role of art and the
increasing centrality of cultural policies for the sociopolitical, economic and ideological
understanding of First World, post-industrial societies such as Spains. Through their
educational, curatorial and organisational
tasks, wider in reach than what is possible
Mari Paz Balibrea returns to the project
for universities, 1 they have disseminated
On Capital and Territory to explore
the practice of critical thinking and
reected upon the place that art and culture
its Lefebvrian underpinnings, and,
occupy in our society, at arts institutions
in particular, its treatment of Andalusia,
such as Arteleku in San Sebastian and
a region marked both by branded
Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Vitoria,
in the Basque Country; Fundaci Antoni
stereotype and an inflated real estate
Tpies, Museu dArt Contemporani
market.
(MACBA) and Espai en Blanc in Barcelona;
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa (MNCARS) and Eskalera Karakola in Madrid;
and Casa Invisible in Malaga. To the extent that production and access to this activity is
provided in dialogue with local practices and collectives and from a conscious effort to
situate knowledge, one can say that these institutions and their artistic teams are explicitly
attempting to incorporate political and cultural activism into the critical thinking of culture
and art.
1

To be fair, museum programmes are at times delivered via agreements with and financial help from
universities, with the participation of university lecturers and professors and the awarding of credits
to attending students. Although this is an interesting example of collaboration, we are still far from
a situation where universities can be said to lead or fully participate in the promotion of the kind of
critical thinking that I am discussing here.

Events, Works, Exhibitions: On Capital and Territory | 39

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions


This introduction provides a framework to locate the kind of intervention that, in the
landscape of knowledge and culture production in Spain, a project such as Sobre capital y
territorio (On Capital and Territory, 200709), the case study of this article, occupies.
One in a series of projects, On Capital and Territory was conceptualised, nanced
and facilitated by UNIA arteypensamiento (the International University of Andalusias
artandthinking research programme, which is also a partner in this journal). It was
directed by Mar Villaespesa, produced by the agency BNV and included a variety of
formats: seminars, poetry readings, documentary lms, workshops and screenings.
The project collected a great number of participants in different capacities under its
umbrella; rather than closely analysing its different components, this text will consider
the political relevance of the project as a whole, in its original context (the southern Spanish
region of Andalusia) and elsewhere.

On Capital and Territory was made in two parts. Part I was subtitled De la naturaleza
del espacio... y del arte (On the nature of space and of art), and its meetings took
place in April and June 2007 in Tarifa, Cdiz and Seville respectively; Part II was De la
naturaleza de la economa y de la cultura (On the nature of the economy and of
culture), and consisted of three different series of meetings in Seville between November
of 2008 and October of 2009. The originating concern for the whole project was clearly
political:

to analyse how the production of space is a central aspect of the capitalist economy,
and to approach it both from a transdisciplinary reection anthropology,
human geography, psychoanalysis, philosophy, ecological economy are the elds
of expertise of the participating theoreticians and from the exchange of artistic
and activist experiences. This convergence has allowed for complex responses
to different questions: how does economic logic affect the conguration of the urban
environment? What role has urban development played in the dynamics of the
accumulation of capital? [] How should we represent the chief paradoxes of
neoliberal urban development? What visions are contributed by artistic narrative
to the discussion of the hegemonic territorial model? 2

But the projects political ambition was not limited to making economic processes visible
that is, to showing that they have a determining impact in spatial congurations, many
times in abusive forms nor did it aim simply to put forward a theoretical discourse to
counter neoliberal hegemonic ideologies. Its political ambition stemmed also from a desire
to upset well-established and compartmentalised forms of knowledge, and to go beyond
the traditional safety of the conference format: to increase the interaction amongst social
movements and to conceptualise territorial problems from the local to the global; to create
and consolidate decentred yet strong networks of solidarity; and to highlight and facilitate
the commitment of art to these networks. Such aims challenged researchers to contribute
to a collective narrative, social activists to establish networks of resistance and artists to
practise in politically inscribed territory. Research, activism and art were each seen as
having independent potentialities: research in the case of academia, in the denunciation
of situated knowledge in the case of social movements and in creative transgression as
far as art is concerned. It is worth mentioning that in abandoning the conference format,
On Capital and Territory employed methodology that embraced forms of radical
pedagogy. 3 Working groups were organised to consider key questions 4 in a process of
learning within a context that aimed to:
2

3


4

See UNIAs web page for the event: http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com-content&task=view&id=486

(last accessed on 25 February 2012).
Mar Villaespesa, La orqudea y la avispa, in Ur_Versitat 2010: Prcticas espaciales: Investigaciones
culturales sobre el territorio y el espacio social, Valencia: Universidad Politcnica de Valencia, pp.117,
125, 126. All translations are the authors.
Each of the three groups, co-ordinated by the architect Claudia Zavaleta, the economist Daniel Coq
and the artist Isaas Griolo, worked with a set of questions. Group 1: How do urban dynamics impose
themselves in territories that were rural until recently? How are public spaces constructed or
destructed, and how are spaces of exclusion generated? Group 2: How does financial capital use the
city-territory? What agents are implicated in the landing of financial capital in specific cities such
as Seville? What implication does this landing have on the city planning? Group 3: In what way do
modern myths and their symbols as generators of identity have an impact on the configuration
of the metropolitan space and the city? What role do marketing agents play in this process? See
http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=69 (last accessed on 25 February
2012).

40 | Afterall

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Carme Nogueira,
Plano-contraplano
(Shot-countershot),
2007, light box
and video projection
with sound,
200 16cm.
Installation view,
Centro Gallego de
Arte Contemporneo
(CGAC), Santiago
de Compostela.
Photograph:
Mark Ritchie.
Courtesy the artist

reassign the distribution that each one of the three practices with which we
have worked, and the institution that organised it, had been given: as artists,
as social movements, as thinkers and researchers, as a university. We believe
that it is only to the extent that we have succeeded in undermining this natural
order and practised a certain form of dissent, that we can call our project a
political one. 5

The questions addressed were recognised as concerning world-wide phenomena, and the
project made explicit and developed the local-global connection in drawing upon critical
voices and artistic work from different locations: Juliet Flower, David Harvey, Arantxa
Rodrguez, Dean MacCannell, Jos Manuel Naredo, Manuel Delgado, Jorge Riechmann
and Lucy Lippard, amongst the theorists; and Harun Farocki, Alexander Kluge, Dennis
ORourke, Sitesize, Carme Nogueira and Ibon Aranberri, amongst the artists. Their
insights and contributions cross-fertilised the central role performed by representatives
of Andalusia, such as the research group AREA, amongst the academics; Asociacin Casa
Pumarejo, Arquitectura y Compromiso Social and Plataforma Aljarafe Habitable, amongst
the social movements; and Isaas Griolo, Daniel Alonso Malln, Celia Macas and Manuel
Len, amongst the artists.
5

See Joaqun Vzquez (BNV Producciones), Sobre Capital y Territorio, un proyecto de UNIA
arteypensamiento, in Ur_versitat 2010, op. cit., p.143.

Events, Works, Exhibitions: On Capital and Territory | 41

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions


For the researcher who examines the projects output, not having participated in
it, the results are a coherent, rich totality. And this can, perhaps, be the problem with a
project like this: the fact that it clearly presents itself as working towards the production
of sameness, compatibility and coherence, rather than difference with no dissenting
perspectives, despite the political aim to dissent that the producer initially states. Diversity
appears in the project in using different disciplinary and knowledge-producing approaches
with no one kind of knowledge being privileged over any other to illuminate the
same hidden-yet-determining realities. To put it differently, On Capital and Territory
had structure in mind as the ultimate focus of critique; it was a product of neo-Marxist
inspiration. More specically, it was a Lefebvrian attempt at paying equal attention to a
critique of capital and its spatialised manifestations and to the celebration and stimulation
of local, grass-roots agents of critical thinking, response and transformation. 6 Fundamental
Lefebvrian dictums sustained the conceptual and political logic of On Capital and
Territory: that capital reproduces itself by appropriating space; that space is produced
and subject to strict regulation, which has a determining impact on the particular circumstances of the everyday life of those who inhabit it; consequently, that all politics is spatial;
and that it is inhabitants and social movements that must change and reframe power
relations with respect to the production of space.

This being a project conceived and nanced by the artistic and cultural eld that UNIA
arteypensamiento represents, it is worth looking a bit longer from a Lefebvrian-Marxist
lens at the overall role that art played within On Capital and Territory. Various projects
representatives were at pains to present themselves not as privileged contributors or
interpreters but as equal partners on a level eld of political intervention, and one in which
all those with equal objectives and shared positions are strategically allied to make action
6


7

See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith), Oxford: Blackwell,
2004; and H. Lefebvre, The Right to the City, Writings on Cities (ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and
Elizabeth Lebas), Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, pp.63184.
Villaespesa, quoting Valentn Roma, defines thus the communitarian turn: With the advent of the
communitarian, a different field of work has opened up for art, a field of social action as well
as a market, an audience the exploration of which forces us to find different methodologies of
negotiation, to accept other tensions and other dynamics, to build different forms of representation,
also to tackle new incognitas. M. Villaespesa, Ur_versitat 2010, op. cit., p.127

42 | Afterall

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Sitesize, Cartell
Aprenentatge_
Acci_Creaci_
Transmissi
(Poster Learning_
Action_Creation_
Transmission),
2009, action in
collaboration with
Ateneu Enciclopdic
Popular during
the centenary
celebration of
Barcelonas Tragic
Week. Courtesy
the artists

Isaas Griolo,
La construccin
de un sueo: Chillida
(The Construction
of a Dream: Chillida),
2007, digital
photograph,
30 45cm. Courtesy
the artist

creatively possible and meaningful. Villaespesa explained this attitude as stemming from
a kind of communitarian turn identiable in artistic practices of the last twenty years,
providing a differentiated eld of work for artistic practices. 7

Be this as it may, I see the conceptualisation of On Capital and Territory as belonging
to a different tradition, that of committed art, via the recuperation or recycling of avantgarde premises regarding the political/revolutionary potential of the aesthetic. Or, to put
the question in Lefebvrian terms, 8 art can contribute to the perception and experience of
space, and, more specically, to changing such perceptions and experiences in discursive
and symbolic practices by intervening in the production of meaning and symbols of/
in space. If spaces are produced, they
are subject to modication through time
The business of producing
and use. Art can arguably be an agent of
cities as brands is conditioned
progressive change by proposing alternaby the maintaining and
tive, non-hegemonic readings of everyday
updating of a historically
spaces. Such an ambition lies behind
artistic contributions to On Capital and
built, deeply ingrained and
Territory, such as Sitesizes series of
widely disseminated spatial
alternative critical explorations of social
imaginary.
space through artistic collaborative
practices with local communities in Catalonia, Narraciones metropolitanas. Formas de
aprendizaje en la geografa de lo comn (Metropolitan Narratives: Forms of Learning
in the Common Geography, 2009) or Carme Nogueiras presentation and installation
(lvarez, la travesa y otros lugares (lvarez, the Journey and Other Places, 2009).
In a more explicitly denunciatory, testimonial mode that does not compromise its relative
autonomy nor exclude the imagination of alternative practices, art can also be an agent
of progressive change by making strange, fallacious, undesirable or, at the very least,
questionable that which is familiar in the dominant perception of space. It is along these
8

It is also worth remembering that Lefebvre was himself inspired by the avant-garde. For a full
discussion of Lefebvres aesthetic ideas, see Marc James Lger, Henri Lefebvre and the Moment of
the Aesthetic, in Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris
to the New Left, London: Pluto Press, 2006, pp.14360.

Events, Works, Exhibitions: On Capital and Territory | 43

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

lines of work that I understand the exploration of Alicia Herreros Situationist-inspired

project Flows! Magazine in Situ number 7 (2009); Isaas Griolos coordination of a
series of poetry readings, Paisaje de escombros (Landscape of Debris, 2008); and, from
a more historical perspective, Ibon Aranberris discussion of his work with Nuria Enguita
Mayo in Desplazamientos en el paisaje. Monumento versus informacin (Landscape
Displacements: Monument versus Information, 2009).

Having located the ideological framework of On Capital and Territory, I want to now
consider what such an approach accomplishes. There are three interrelated manifestations
of the relation of capital to territory that the project critically explored: the promotion
of a speculative economic model whose conditions of possibility as well as benets were
fuelled by the real estate market; the basing of cities economic viability on their branding
as tourist destinations; and the impact of years of unsustainable capitalist development on
the environment and public health, which not only went unchallenged but was promoted
by local and state institutions. The unmasking of these manifestations in the multiple local
projects that comprised the triple collaboration of research-activism-art in On Capital
and Territory produced a kind of a synecdochical kaleidoscope of the economic and geopolitical development of democratic Spain since 1976. They were also painful reminders
of all that has gone wrong with the Spanish democratic process: the betrayal of democratic
principles and their use by the representatives of local institutions for the pursuit of
personal prot rather than public welfare; 9 the lack of long-term vision for the economic
and ecological sustainability of regions; 10 the persistence within the state and its institutions, particularly local and regional ones, of relations of production and reproduction
with capital coming from the dictatorial period. In short, the narratives of On Capital
9


10

This was made clear in the audio-visual contributions by Daniel Alonso Malln concerning the new
urbanism in Seville: Torre Pelli I y Torre Pelli II (Pelli Tower I and Pelli Tower II ); Ditero, montaje de
dos montajes (Ditero, Montage of Two Montages, both 1416 October 2009).
The research group from the Sevilla Universidad Hispalense AREA (Regional Analysis: Andalusian
Economy/Anlisis Regional: Economa Andaluza) brought this home unequivocally in their work on
the construction of the Pelli Tower, owned by the banking institution Cajasol, which incorporated
a debate amongst citizens on how the economic comes to control political discourses in its quest
to control even more urban space. Another case in point is the grass-roots association Mesa de la Ra
Platforms unveiling of the devastating effects of polluting chemical industries in the Andalusian
province of Huelva.

44 | Afterall

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Ibon Aranberri,
Poltica Hidrulica
(Hydraulic Policy),
20042010, 98
framed photographs,
dimensions variable.
Installation
view,Fundaci
Antoni Tpies,
Barcelona, 2011.
Photograph:Llus
Bover.Courtesy the
artist andFundaci
Antoni Tpies

and Territory spoke of the chronic shortcomings of democracy, and of its progressive
reduction to spectacle. Moreover, at the moment in 2008 when the real estate bubble was
beginning to burst, the narratives pointed precisely to those local practices that revealed
how dependent economies, infrastructures and sociabilities were on the hypertrophied
housing market. They made apparent that a set of hegemonic practices, instigated by
the institutional-capitalist structure precipitated Andalusias, and Spains, descent into
its current systemic crisis. 11

To appreciate the currency and pointedness of the critiques offered by On Capital and
Territory in detail, let us look at how they deal with the discursive and material practices
sustaining the new urbanism in Seville, where UNIA arteypensamiento is based and
where several events of the project took place. Seville is the regional capital of Andalusia,
the headquarters of its political institutions and a city that is economically sustained by
a service industry and public money. For the global tourist imagination, Seville functions
as the epitome of Andalusia, and by extension of Spain: passion, sun, amenco, exacerbated Catholicism the heritage of Georges Bizets nineteenth-century Eurocentric
imaginaries. 12 It would be beside the point to complain about the banality, even datedness
of the stereotype. The stereotype is alive and well, still at the core of the capitalist qualitative
advantage the Andalusia brand offers the world, at the local, national and global levels.
The slogan Andaluca te quiere (Andalusia loves you), which since 2006 has presided
over the Andalusian governments tourist campaigns for the national and global markets,
exudes a kind of libidinal investment to draw visitors, made explicit in the subjectivisation
of Andalusia as an agent of love, of sex and relaxation, of home and unspoiled authenticity.
At the local level of appeal, another slogan, Sevilla, la construccin de un sueo (Seville,
building a dream), at the centre of the critical analysis and deconstruction in Part II of
On Capital and Territory, 13 was the institutional slogan used by the mayor of Seville in
2006 to help seduce its citizens into embracing and celebrating urban restructurings that
were to be perceived as better than real, as belonging to the territory of dreams. The mixing
here of the materiality of building with the intangibility of the unconscious (dream),
perfectly parallels (besides being, of course, a perfect example of) the work of ideological
discourses: to interpellate the subject at the level of desires, beyond what is rational, in
order to produce a consent that will translate into tangible economic, social and political
consequences.

Seville, building a dream is not far removed from the old stereotype promulgated
by Andalusia loves you. It paints a familiar picture in describing the model of urban
development and restructuring that the whole of Andalusia was undergoing at the time:

A model of development based on isolated, fragmented, emblematic interventions,

devoid of a social raison dtre, one where protability becomes the only argument,
a true ethics for action [] one characterised by a logic of accumulation and
re-investment that does not take into account the possible impact that its activities
can have on the capitalist system itself, on the environment and also on the health
of humans. 14

The goal of turning the city into a brand, a product to be sold and consumed, rather
than a space to build and inhabit, has lain behind every process of post-industrialisation
in First World urban environments since the late 1970s. 15 As once prosperous industrial
metropolitan areas nd their socioeconomic means of subsistence dismantled by
11






12




13

14
15

A case in point is that of Aljarafe, dealt with by Claudia Delorenzis Cuando el capital abandona el
territorio (When Capital Foresakes the Territory and by Celia Macas and Manuel Lens El tren fantasma
(The Ghost Train, both 1416 October 2009)). The former documents the problem of isolated suburban
neighbourhoods of the exopolis kind since the crisis hit, leaving houses and infrastructures unfinished
and families deep in debt. Macas and Len, on the other hand, focus on a train line running from
Sevilles suburbs to its city centre on the politics of mobility and territory to reflect on the dire
consequences that municipal and technical decisions have in discouraging the use of public transport.
See Jos Colmeiro for an analysis of how the Andalusian fictional character of Carmen captures
the European imagination as the epitome of Spain from the early nineteenth century and of
the ideological implications of such kinds of projections. J. Colmeiro, Exorcising Exoticism:
Carmen and the Construction of Oriental Spain, Comparative Literature, vol.54, no.2, Spring 2002,
pp.12744.
See http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=486 (last accessed on 25 February
2012).
J. Vzquez, Sobre Capital y Territorio, un proyecto de UNIA arteypensamiento, op. cit., p.137.
See ibid., p.138.

Events, Works, Exhibitions: On Capital and Territory | 45

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

irreversible global forces, reinventing themselves by promoting and prettifying' the

local becomes the norm. The paradox is not to be missed. The more local governments
and private investors desperately seek to distinguish their urban brands by singularising
them with additions to the built environment by celebrity architects (Zaha Hadid, 16
Jrgen Mayer, Csar Pelli 17 and Cruz Ortiz in the Andalusian case) and by attracting
renowned artists and curators (Harald Szeemann, Okwui Enwezor and Peter Weibel were
responsible for the rst, second and third Seville Biennials, respectively), the more they
all look the same. The business of producing any form of capitalist qualitative advantage
for cities qua brands continues to be centrally conditioned by the maintaining and
updating of a historically built, deeply ingrained and widely disseminated spatial
imaginary. In the Andalusian case, its official promoters in the public and private sectors
are lucky to count on such a powerful and attractive imaginary. Their challenge is to
keep the experience of passion, sun, amenco alive in and for a postmodern, radically
commodied and globalised context.

The critical focus on Seville did not limit itself in On Capital and Territory to a
diagnosis of post-industrial urban spaces of the twenty-rst century Seville and Andalusia
in their case 18 only insofar as they mutate into tourist cities in search of visitors/
clients. The branding of urban space encapsulates a fundamental process of capitalist
commodication in the postmodern moment, and, as such, is to be understood as a
determining condition of being and of dwelling in the present time. The fact that Andalusia
(and by extension the Spanish Mediterranean, to put articial national boundaries on
what is a supra-regional phenomenon) is a favourite destination for affluent retired
northern Europeans as well as for Spaniards fuelled a real estate and construction boom
in the region from the 1960s until the global real estate crisis of 2008. Andalusias reliance
on tourism has therefore greatly conditioned the economy and compromised the environmental sustainability of the affected areas. But it has also conditioned the very denition
of community dwelling, and the forms and meanings of socialisation for these areas.
The endless quest for land to develop activates the proliferation of rapidly formed,
uncontrolled, undifferentiated suburbs groups of single-use, bunker-like residential
spaces lacking in public areas, in need of social services, marred by insufficient public
transportation and inhabited by a perpetually motorised populace. In short, Andalusia
has become what Edward Soja has called the phenomenon of the exopolis in reference
to the USA, which is nowadays a global phenomenon. In this context, concepts of
urban space become unsatisfactory in dening the morphology as much as the material
conditions of these new metropolitan realities. 19

The range of its critique and its ability to point to the key problems of our contemporary
moment made On Capital and Territory a radical and timely cultural-political intervention. It foregrounded the collapse, ushered in by speculative capitalism, of the principles
of democracy, ecological and economic sustainability, and equally the need to respond to
the situation in terms that highlighted space as that which is being violently produced and
systematically violated but also as the grounds for any transformative movement, which,
by necessity, would seek to change the way space is phisically shaped. By tackling capital
in its spatial dimension, as it cashes in and feeds on particular spatial transformations,
dispossessions and symbols, and as, in so doing, it determines lives and world views,
the project underlines the central local-global connection of our current crisis. From
our 2012 perspective, the content of On Capital and Territory is striking as an eloquent
crystallisation of what to this day constitutes and denes our contemporaneity, in particular
the dangerous connections between capital and real estate interests which were about
to become the epicentre of a planetary crisis. But as important as that clairvoyance
(the result of a relentless focus on structure) is the horizontal articulation of different
16
17


18




19

Hadids project to build a public library in Seville was abandoned due to conservation issues.
Construction of his so-called Pelli towers (see notes 8 and 9) is being challenged by UNESCO on the
grounds that skyscraper is too tall. If construction goes on, UNESCO has threatened to withdraw
the citys World Heritage status.
It would be wrong to speak of Andalusia in general as post-industrial. In fact, one of the case studies
that On Capital and Territory dealt with in its exploration of uses of the Andalusian territory by
capitalism and of grass-roots resistance is that of the Guadalquivir estuary, polluted by waste from
the local chemical industry. More details are available at http://ayp.unia.es/index.php?option=com_
content&task=view&id=67 (last accessed on 25 February 2012).
Edward Soja, Inside Exopolis, Scenes from Orange County, in Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a
Theme Park, New York: The Noonday Press, 1992, pp.94122.

46 | Afterall

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

kinds of knowledge and the mobilisation of the local without losing sight of the global.
As leftist and progressive politics continue to look for a political alliance aimed at dening,
diagnosing and ultimately transforming the local-global present, the contribution of
On Capital and Territory is not be overlooked.

For the aforementioned leftist and progressive politics, there is a never satisfactorily
solved discussion of how to bridge the gap separating the myriad of local alliances formed
around highly particular struggles and the notion of the system as a whole, in order to
achieve a common political awareness that can efficiently tackle systemic oppression. 20
Not so long ago, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardts bestseller Empire (2000), with its
concept of the multitude, coupled with the proliferation of anti-globalisation movements
in the early 2000s, seemed to provide an efficient way to articulate such differences in
front of the common enemy of corporate
globalisation. However, towards the end
The crisis of capitalism
of the decade, its currency, theoretical
that stormed the world in
and political, has proved questionable.
2008 changed the landscape
The crisis of capitalism that stormed
of leftist and progressive
the world in 2008 changed the landscape
of leftist and progressive politics. The
politics. The identication
identication of the common enemy moved
of the common enemy
away from corporate globalisation and
moved away from corporate
became focused instead on capitalism.
globalisation and became
In addition, bridging the gap between the
instead capitalism.
local and the systemic suddenly turned
into a conceptually trivial exercise, as the
systemic global crisis and its impact in different localities took centre ground and became
a mainstream topic, with its triggers, culprits and victims dissected by media outlets,
social networks and citizenry. Consequently, to criticise greedy capitalism ceased to be
the exclusive territory of marginal Marxists. To revisit On Capital and Territory under
these changed conditions of the visibility of capital and its spatial underpinnings suggests
the political usefulness of nding a way to make the aims of such a project more mainstream. It would be politically relevant, for example, to render the projects radical
pedagogy accessible for and inclusive of those in (or sympathetic to) the Occupy movement,
who have clearly grasped the fact that political struggle under capitalist conditions has
a spatial component. To the credit of its organisers, more than two years after coming to
an end On Capital and Territory has a stimulating currency. But such currency also poses
a challenge, which is for projects like this to be able to transcend the sphere and the space
where critical thinking is created and fomented, and to step, with that acquired critical
knowledge, into the sphere and the space of political agency and action.

20

For a thorough discussion of this topic, seen through neo-Marxist positions, particularly poststructuralist, feminist positions, see Melissa Wright, Differences that Matter, in Noel Castree and
Derek Gregory (ed.), David Harvey: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp.80101.

Events, Works, Exhibitions: On Capital and Territory | 47

This content downloaded from 150.214.205.30 on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:12:16 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions