Journal / space. body. politics.

The Watched Field

The upcoming KAM workshops 2012 examine the conditions of police and prison as major references of architecture today. Initiated in 2002, the project was aiming to discuss the meaning of architecture in a local frame and comes along as a double project in Berlin and Chania, Crete in 2012. The narrative transformation of any locality to a non place, the international shape of its negation is in the center of this year`s  investigation.

Titled Controlled Area, the Berlin police workshop will elaborate on the subject of communities that already vulgarized and shared the panopticon cultures as the continuous conditions of social normality.
From July 23 to 30, 2012 participants will examine systems of control on the base of the Plan de evasión, a novel which was published by the Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1945:  It`s about the impression of fake freedom, constructed by a group of scientists, who aim to create a place of confinement where prisoners would not feel imprisoned. On an island, a complex system of experiments is meant to control the impressions of the prisoners in order that they construct, each one for his own, a pre-determined fake vision, a systematic illusion in which everyone is enclosed.

Presentations will include information about control rooms for a city’s surveilling methods. The program of the first workshop also includes theoretical investigations about the formation of a self recorded community. What a prison would offer to a society that already organizes for itself an intense system of watching for all the extend of its ground?
The second Thematic area of the KAM workshops will take place in Chania, Crete between August 22 and 30, 2012. The prison workshop Autonomous Cell investigates on the autonomous room or a cell, created in order to host an inhabitant for undetermined time with no real possibility of exit. Discussing the mise en scene of a “home” in order to create an isolated – communal, interior – exterior space, the workshop will investigate the concept of the house as a setting which is related to the organization of a fake exterior.

The Watched Field
Controlled Area:
Berlin: July 23-30, 2012
Autonomous Cell:
Chania: August 22-30, 2012
Infos on deadlines and application forms

Photo: Filmstill from “Moonrise Kingdom”