LETTER TO THE EDITORS ETHEL BARAONA POHL (BARCELONA)
Ethel Baraona Pohl is a critic, writer and curator currently based in Barcelona. She is co-founder of the architectural research practice and independent publishing house dpr-barcelona with César Reyes Nájera. Ethel was associate curator of Adhocracy, first commissioned for the Istanbul Design Biennial in 2012 and later exhibited in New York and London. She co-curated the third Think Space programme Money in 2013 and Adhocracy ATHENS at the Onassis Cultural Center in 2015. In this letter to the editors, Ethel collects her thoughts on the 36-hour Factory of Thought, offering a critical reflection on the event and calling for a more proactive, less confrontational approach to the way we formulate public space as practitioners. Dear Léopold, Meriem and John, Thank you for inviting me to contribute to this publication, following the interesting 36-hour Factory of Thought: Public Space. Fights and Fictions. I must admit that I have started this text several times since you commissioned it – going back and forth over the blank page – but I couldn’t find a proper way to wrap up all the blurry, dizzy ideas and inputs that inhabit my mind nowadays. So I decided to use the form of a letter because it has a more personal tone, like a close encounter with old friends. A letter allows the sharing of concerns that resonate in our common discussions – via mail, social networks and face-to-face conversations – instead of trying to elaborate large and complex theories that have already been developed by numerous practitioners and thinkers in endless essays written during the past recent years; all sincere and deep attempts to understand the complexities of that space that we are here calling ‘public’. One of the most refreshing things about the format of the 36-hour Factory of Thought was that the many interesting debates were always followed by mind blowing conversations over food or drinks, ‘the b-sides’ of
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the event, which in my personal opinion were the most enriching moments: when nobody was presenting and everybody felt comfortable and free to share more personal opinions, leaving aside stage fright and the fear of being judged by your words. Thus, after trying to digest the mass of information, thoughts and different notions exchanged and compressed into 36 hours, I felt that it would not be possible, either by reviewing the notes in my notebook or by rereading all the material on the event website, to summarize precisely what public space is nowadays and why we consider it the proper place for fights and fictions to happen. Something that immediately comes to my mind when reconsidering the contents of the event is Foucault’s statement: “We need to escape the dilemma of being either for or against. One can, after all, be face to face, and upright. Working with a government doesn’t imply either a subjection or a blanket acceptance. One can work and be intransigent at the same time. I would even say that the two things go together.” My general feeling after all the lectures and debates is that we are all against something; a general sense of discontent, focused mainly on the current economic and political powers that are shaping – or reshaping – public space. The opening set of discussions were focused on the fact that public space is the subject of progressive militarisation, privatisation, surveillance, and so on. This is something that we of course cannot deny. As an example, we could evoke the current situation in Turkey, where just a few days ago, after an unsuccessful coup d’état was staged, the president himself urged the public to occupy public space in protest against the coup. The fact that a politician – President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – urged people to take to the streets and ‘fight back’, just a few years after he had repressed those same people when they took to the streets and ‘fought back’ against the seizure of Gezi Park, can be seen as a sad paroxysm of how easily a fiction can be accepted as reality, and to what extent political maneuvers are related to the notion of public space.