bare house pori - rotterdam - ulaanbaatar · chakrasamvara - the circle of high bliss and the deity...

bare housepori - rotterdam - ulaanbaatar

w o r k ( s ) i n c o n t e x t ( s )

P O R I

1 Porin taidemuseo Mediapiste / Veistospiha / Aula Pori Art Museum Mediapoint / Sculpture Garden / Entrance Hall 29.05.-05.09.2010 Avoinna / Open ti-su/Tue-Sun 11-18, ke/Wed 11-20 Eteläranta, 28100 Pori, Finland

2 Poriginal galleria / Poriginal Gallery 29.05.-20.06.2010 Eteläranta 6 Avoinna / Open ti-su/Tue-Sun 11-18

3 Kokemäenjoki / Kokemäki River 29.05.-20.06.2010

4 Porin Puuvilla / Generaattorigalleria Old Cotton Mill / Art Generation Space 29.05.-20.06.2010 Siltapuistokatu 2 Avoinna / Open ti-su/Tue-Sun 11-18

5 Porin Puuvilla / Värjäämö Old Cotton Mill / Dyehouse 29.05.-20.06.2010 Siltapuistokatu 2 Avoinna / Open ti-su/Tue-Sun 11-18

6 Siltapuistokatu 21 29.05.-20.06.2010

Pori Art Museum 29.05.-05.09.2010 Open Tue-Sun 11-18, Wed 11-20Eteläranta, 28100 Pori, Finland

Entrance Hall

Christian Mayer,Germany /Austria


Mediapoint

Bare House ProjectDocumentation

BARE HOUSE. Pori - Rotterdam - Ulaanbaatar is an international exhibition and publication project that comments on the built environment, reflecting upon the past and present ideals of modern society through Western welfare states and the Developing World. The project focuses es-pecially on architecture and the dimensions of personal existence. Modernisation with its belief in prefabricated construction and standards is challenged by the potential for autonomous construction.

The artists and architects featured in the exhibition come from Finland, Austria, Ger-many, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada and Mongolia. Most of the works in the show were created during artist residencies in Mongolia, the Netherlands and Pori. The exhibition spreads out on both sides of the

Untitled (Pori Portrait), potted plants, 2010

Green House (Pori) results from the artist’s interest in how human history affects the natural world. During his month-long stay in Pori he observed the agglomeration of potted plants in public spaces all over Pori. These plants represent a form of display in public space and thus the commodifica-tion of nature itself. For his installation the artist borrowed several of these plants, one from each building, and accumulates them in the space of the entrance hall of Porin Taidemuseo. As each plant could be claimed to be also representing its owner, this big green bush thus represents a spe-cific sort of portrait of the city of Pori itself. And through the origin of the plants there is even another geographical layer inscribed in this installation, connecting Pori to differ-ent regions all over the world.

Makulatuuri, wallpaper 00000 from the company Philgren & Ritola, 2010

Historically plants were first used to deco-rate the houses at about the same time when wallpapers were first covering the bare walls of finnish homes. The company Philgren & Ritola from Toljala is the old-est still producing wallpaper company in Finland using the original old designs, ma-chines and materials. Makulatuuri covers the wall in the background of the plant in-stallation with paper that the company uses since centuries for printing their wallpapers. By using the pure paper without any paint, this almost invisible covering represents the historical significance of wallpapers for decorating the finnish bare houses.

Kokemäki River from museum and gallery spaces into old industrial environments and other outdoors locations. Besides ways of inhabitation the exhibition thus also com-ments different spaces of display.

The entire exhibition in its six different lo-cations will be open 29.05. to 20.06. after which there will be documentation of the exhibition as a project presented at Pori Art museum Mediapoint.

The documentation will consist of videos, photographs and texts as well as a wall-painting by Ser-Odin Dolgor together with two Aalto University students, Johanna Laurila and Janne Vuollet.

Sculpture Garden

D. Batzorig,Mongolia



Aletta de Jong, The Netherlands

BAZO works with the simple and perfect form of the circle. BAZO’s circles provoke a variety of associations: from gers, shaman-ic tambourine, potter’s wheel and compli-cated symbolism of the circle in Buddhism.

For a period of centuries several religious traditions co-existed in Mongolia: Shaman-ism, Nestorian Christianity and Islam, while Tibetan Buddhism became Ihc officially ac-knowledged religion for most Mongolians over the years. In Buddhism, the circle is associated with several philosophical con-cepts: WHEEL OF SANSARA - the circle of reincarnation. CHAKRASAMVARA - the circle of High Bliss and the deity of medita-tion, KALACHAKRA - the circle of time, and MANDALA - the symbol of the divine world.

Many of these interpretations of the circle can be applied to the art of BAZO. His work epitomizes the symbolism of the circle,

which has been omnipresent throughout the history of the Mongols both in their ev-eryday life (the Mongolian ger being one of the most fascinating material representa-tions of the circle) and their spiritual exis-tence.

BAZO’s circles are physically expressive, highly textured, they pulsate with a certain kind of energy, yet they remain eternally mysterious. Looking at his work, one may say that the artist has a deep, powerful un-derstanding of the nature of his art.

Sculpture Garden

The projects of Aletta de Jong are inven-tories of trees and plants within cities, and serve as a method to understand the re-lation between people and their surround-ings. To enact possibilities for shortening the distance between food and its con-sumption she has been locating and docu-menting fruit trees and edible plants within urban environments, and proposing inno-vative ways to nurse vegetables, fruit and herbs for local consumption.

For the Bare House Project Aletta is de-veloping the idea of capitalising on exisit-ing city-light to nocturnally cultivate plants. This is done in the form of a lamp post with a greenhouse built around it using re-claimed window frames.

This idea utilises the visual language of the amateur gardener and extends it in order to develop propositions for the imagina-tion beyond the purely utilitarian. Secondly by customising an advertising light box, the kind commonly found on lamp posts in urban settings. The light box retains its original function, and at the same time it is augmented to offer a place for local food production.

Hop, 2010A three dimensional drawing made with co-loured rope and a Humulus lupulus plant otherwise known as Hop. Hop is a plant cultivated for the conelike flowers of the female genus, which is commonly used in brewing beer. The rope is arranged in a zig-zagging composition. During the course of the exhibition the Hop plant grows along the rope thus accentutating its charachter-istics whilst being contrary to the ordinary course of nature.

Edible and medical plants collected in the city of Basel (Switser-land) on display in the gallery 'Filiale'.In Collaboration with Marjolijn Dijkman and Dunja Herzog

Variation of Vegetables, Communnity Garden, Pentonville, Islington ( From the Photo series Concrete Food - London 2007-2008 )

Poriginal Gallery29.05.-20.06.2010Eteläranta 6Open Tue-Sun 11-18

1 st Floor


1 st Floor

Sedbazarin Ganzug, Mongolia

T. Enkhbold, Mongolia

Mongolian Wind from Ulaanbaatar to Rotterdam and Pori

Performance and video documentations2009-2010

I make performances that connect the spaces between the inside of a ger, top of a ger (Toono) to down, center of a ger (Gal golomt) and the space outside, so that the center of the ger becomes like imagination of the world’s center area.

My works entice spiritual reflection through smells, sounds and images. The aim of my project is to travel around with my self-built ger and connect with different places, gain-ing experience for myself and at the same time introducing ideas of nomadic culture. It is very important to me how people ex-perience my works through all their senses and in my performances the core idea is the exchange of energy through these experi-ences. Housing as a concept seem to me to have meanings reflecting communication, restric-tions of areas and functions, and sheltering. I think this way of considering dwelling is

very different from the ideas that go along with living in the ger. Everything in a ger structure connects with traditional, spiritual customs and both functional and symbolic meanings, which also connect the structure with the surrounding area. I think the ger is connected with Mongolian conception of abstraction also. And the ger is perfect and exotic solution of architecture. Besides mobility the Mongolian nomadic culture is based on the ideas of both hu-man communication with nature and ani-mals as well as human connections be-tween humans. These customs were given to us by our ancestors.

Museum for Goats

The human population of Mongolia in an approximate of 2.7 million against which the country has a goat population of 4.5 million.

Museum for Goats project has a vision of giving tours of the Zanabazaar Fine Art Museum- a treasury of Mongolian cultural produce - to this special populace.

While processing the bureaucracy of allow-ing goats into museums the project wishes to man fest its ideology through installa-tions reminding of this section of the coun-try’s inhabitants

Zanabazaar Fine Art Museum, Ulaanbaatar

Proposal for performance at the Pori Art Museum


2 nd Floor


2 nd Floor

Christian Mayer, Germany / Austria

Christine Saalfeld, Germany / The Netherlands

What really matters?

The conclusion after visiting a developing country like Mongolia could turn out short: Basic needs like safety, welfare and rela-tionship are crucial points for viability. But also cultural tradition, which offers the indi-vidual person a sense of belonging.

Developing countries and Western welfare states could learn from each other. On the one hand to make sure that basic needs are fulfilled and on the other hand to remind of what basic needs actually are.

These thoughts are the starting point for my art work, which I’m developing for the ‘Bare House Project’. I want to emphasize certain needs, like safety, welfare and re-

lationship.The felt tapestries denote the Mongolian tradition of felt making. Felts are still used as cover for portable Mongolian yurts, carpets and cloth. Felt suggests pro-tection and warmth. The German word for felt (ger.: Filz) is a synonym for cronyism. The drawings which are felted in the tapes-tries are showing architectural motives and refer to sketches I made during my stay in Mongolia.

Tools from a workshop, 1960–2010,

tapestry, furniture, potted plants, maga-zines, performance (video documenta-tion), 2010

Tools from a workshop, 1960–2010 re-contextualizes an artwork from 1960, a precious gobelin made by Unto Pusa and comissioned by Maire Gullichsen to be given as a present to the town hall of Noor-markku. Since Noormarkku lost its status of municipality and became part of Pori a few years ago, this building lost its function and was closed, also avoiding access to the artwork. The artist found the gobelin there surrounded by furniture, old magazines and plants, a scene that reminded him of a fro-zen moment in time. This setting is now transfered completely to Poriginal Gallery and the official open-ing speech for the artwork, held by Maire Gullichsen in 1961, is restaged with the help of an actress for the opening of the

bare house exhibition. This creates a situ-ation of condensed time and space, over-laying Noormarkku town hall and Poriginal Gallery and the times of 1961 and 2010. The hopes for the future of the city and its vivid history of crafts and arts, that Gullich-sen saw expressed in Pusa’s gobelin, is thus once again questioned in this retro-active installation.

Felt Tapestries,installation with carpets, each felt 4 x 1,80 m, 2010


2 nd Floor

Ana Rewakowicz, Poland / Canada

SleepingBagDress Prototype 2,mixed media, 2004

As a person who has moved from one cul-ture to another and lived through cultural displacement, I am interested in the is-sue of transience and how it relates to the notions of identity, belonging and living in a culture and society of global and techno-logical developments. Over the last ten years, I have been working with inflatables, exploring these concerns through clothing and habitation. In contrast to the stable mass of monumental sculpture and archi-tecture, my costumes and structures are air-filled, mobile, and concerned with the places and people that activate them. In-corporating new materials and technology, I build devices that create intimate, yet pa-radoxically public, experiences and fashion them based on function and travel for the contemporary nomad and the displaced.

The SleepingBagDress prototype 2 is inspi-red by the legacy of Archigram, a British architectural group from the 1960’s that in-vestigated the relation between cities and new technologies, regarding fun, play and pleasure as their projects rationale. Ex-

panding on their concept of ‘clothing for living in’, the SleepingBagDress prototype involves a multipurpose kimono-dress that when inflated changes into a cylindrical container inhabitable by one or two people. It operates on a small computer fan powe-red by NiMH batteries that are charged by a solar panel incorporated into the dress itself. The SleepingBagDress prototype looks at the portability and self-sustainabi-lity of a wearable cell, comfortable as both, a dress and a temporary shelter and was used in walking performances and public interventions in Mexico City (Mexico), Tou-louse, (France), Brussels (Belgium) and, as part of the 2004 International Symposi-um of Electronic Art (ISEA2004), in Tallinn, Estonia.

The Sentinel,

installation, 2010

The Installation “The sentinel” comments on a real situation in the Basilius cathed-ral in Moscow. Where probably practical reasons brought the sentinel to arrange a homely set-up at his working place. The installation withdraws the immaculate at-titudes of an sentinel and makes him or her flesh and blood.

Old Cotton Mill / Art Generation Space29.05.-20.06.2010Siltapuistokatu 2Open Tue-Sun 11-18

1 st Floor

Christine Saalfeld, Germany / The Netherlands


1 st Floor

Chris van Mulligen, The Netherlands

Night, day and man, drawing, 2008


1 st Floor

Sedbazarin Ganzug,Mongolia

Ser-Odin Dolgor, Mongolia / Germany


1 st Floor

You Can’t Cheat Sin By Flour,Video installation, 2010

We have been using flour for many centu-ries and in many places foods made of flour are especially valued. In Mongolia we have a saying that when something has gone wrong, you should just smear it with flour – or in other words cheating sin with flour. Also to create a person out of flour can be thought of as the flour absorbing bad ener-gy and thus cleaning the person. These are thoughts related to Tibetan Buddhism. So in order to make things better, we smear a lot of thigns with flour.

Monos Blossoming,gouache on paper, 2008-2010

The change in spatial experience between traditional life in a ger and the current semi-urban ger districts is commented by S. Dol-gor, in her descriptions of erotic meetings in the steppe painted in the traditional zurag style. The ger does not as such provide privacy, but there is a myriad of ways to practice privacy without specialized spaces for it. Talking about these works Dolgor em-phasizes the spiritual aspect of sex and the coming together of all senses both physical and mental. She describes the moments she wants to depict as being totally aware of all details of nature and of one self and understanding the connection between.

In her earlier works Dolgor has depicted the life in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar. Having herself been born in Ulaanbaatar and spent her childhood in the ger districts she has fond memories of the communality and social security that they then provided. As the city expands also the semi-nomadic mentality of these areas are changing.


1 st Floor


Oula Salokannel & Annu Wilenius, Finland

2 nd Floor

Katrin Hornek,Austria

If Architecture Could Talk video-installation #3film project, 35min, 2008-2010

The project creates a circle between Aus-tria and Mongolia by following the yurt through both country’s different fields of application, using this originally nomadic, Mongolian tent.

Starting the interview-based journey in Austria, I follow Austrians moving out of their concrete environment into Mongolian yurts. The first shot introduces a business-man who imported 10 yurts form Mongo-lia, in order to sell them. The next scene features people who see yurts as holiday houses, followed by people who attribute this architecture spiritual qualities. Choos-ing the yurt as domicile for reasons of in-dependently, the final scene visits people who try to escape our capitalistic system because of its affordable way of building without contracting debts.

In Mongolia, I accompany nomadic yurts from the countryside into the capital of Ul-aanbaatar. On the outskirts people slowly settle down in their former mobile homes until those get replaced by self-built hous-es. The fact that running water is rarely provided there, often causes the desire to

move to the prominent russian pre-fabri-cated tower blocks, which stand for good quality. The next scene introduces high-end housing , built by private developers, which only became possible through the aban-donment of communism after 1990, for a radical capitalism. The filmic loop ends with a poet, scientist and politician, who put his yurt on top of his summer house in order to do yoga and preserve his culture. By apply-ing western influenced ideas on the use of the yurt, the final scene links to the first one. For the latest version of the installation, the video is screened on the suspended back side of a linoleum covered floor. Through the wood imitation on the front and the ver-tical use, the floor becomes a wooden shed at the same time and comments on inter-acting value systems.

The project could be realised through the support of BMUKK, BMWF, Province of Lower Austria and the MA7/Vienna

Isakinkirkko, “St. Isaac’s “, Pori, documentary/installation

Starting from the early 1910s a self-taught builder by the name of Isak Mäkelä had a house built in the 8th district of the city of Pori. The house was constructed of what wood materials he could find over the years, it even had some parts built from the wooden bridge Charlotta, which was re-placed by an iron bridge in 1926.

Due to the long time it took to build the house in combination with the owner’s name it was nicknamed St.Isaac’s church. (In Finnish if something takes overly long to do it is referred to as being a project like St.Isaac’s.) Isak Mäkelä lived in the house himself as well as rented out rooms. It is told that if someone came to him to ask for a room he did not have, he built a new one in a corner somewhere or made an exten-sion.

At its densest the house was inhabited by some sixty persons, together with another house behind it the property housed 80 per-sons. In many reports it is talked of as a slum, but there are also numerous stories recounting a special warm atmosphere, somehow almost magically emanating from the haphazard architecture.

St. Isaac’s was burned down in 1983 and now there are only bushes growing on the site. We live right next to it and reading about the history of the spot became fasci-nated by the idea of all those people living in that awkward house. Researching on the house we came across some photographs, found a miniature maker and an architect willing to figure out the incomplete architec-tural plans existing into a model. With this model we then contacted and interviewed people having lived in the house or near by it.

As an installation the work will consist of the architectural model of the house (1:40) placed in the original site in the bushes in a specially designed and handcrafted show-case, documentary material from the inter-views and historical photographic material.

The project could be realised through the support of Arts Council of Finland, Alfred Kordelin’s Fund and Svenska kulturfonden

& Siltapuistokatu 21

Old Cotton Mill / Dyehouse 29.05.-20.06.2010Siltapuistokatu 2Open Tue-Sun 11-18


Ana Rewakowicz, Poland / Canada

Gregory Cowan, Australia / Great Britain

The SR-Hab (Socially Responsive Habitat) project is a mobile, self-sustainable bicycle unit for urban commuting and dwelling, recently completed in collaboration with students from the Mechanical Engineering Department at McGill University in Mont-real, Canada. A big part of existence today is mobility. With growing environmental concerns, commuters are making efforts to be more eco-friendly. My solution to this demand combines a commuter bicycle with a habitat that can sustain basic living necessities ‘off the grid.’ The electricity generated by the user will power the app-liances within the habitat such as lights, laptop, iPod and cooking instruments.

Necessity is the mother of invention. When visiting Mongolia in 2008 I was impressed by the inventiveness of people around. It was not uncommon to see solar panels and satellite dishes attached to yurts in the middle of ‘nowhere’. I was also inspired to see whole families traveling on a single motorbike carrying big and heavy loads over bumpy dirt roads. It would be exciting to be able to bring the SR-Hab prototype to Mongolia and share the experience of the portable habitat with people over there.

Supported byCanada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec

SR-Hab (Socially Responsible Habitat) Prototype, mixed media, 2010

Bare Street

6 banners, 2010

The work “Bare Street” is concerned with urbanisation and the informal peri-urban environments of Ulaanbaatar. The informal districts of Ulaanbatar (known as ger khoroolol) are expanding due to internal migration following the recent extreme winter “zuud,” which has damaged rural livelihoods. A series of six banners of urban landscapes (printed us-ing a local UB technique for making shop signage) forms one part, a small drawing studio/installation with pencil drawings sketchbooks and a blog forms another. The weblog diary and sketches document the work and day-to-day life of a certain “nomadologist,” an architect teacher trainer in a peri-urban construction college, walking from the edge of the formal city through a “ger district” to a training college and live construction site.

Cotton MIll Courtyard& Museum Sculpture Garden

Gregory Cowan, Australia/Great Britain

bare house paljas tale pori-rotterdam-ulaanbaatar

http://nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/

The proposed work “Bare Street” is concerned with urbanisation and the informal peri-urban environments of Ulaanbaatar. The informal districts of Ulaanbatar (known as ger khoroolol) are expanding due to internal migration following the recent extreme winter “zuud,” which has damaged rural livelihoods. A series of six banners of urban landscapes (printed using a local UB technique for making shop signage) forms one part, a small drawing studio/installation with pencil drawings sketchbooks and a blog forms another. The weblog diary and sketches document the work and day-to-day life of a certain “nomadologist,” an architect teach trainer in a peri-urban construction college, walking from the edge of the formal city through a “ger district” to a training college and live construction site.

Labyrinth. October 10, 2007

Walking in a western Ulaanbaatar ger district epitomises the experience of navigating a labyrinth. As I leave the main road, shadowy �gures come towards me and follow me, in pairs, threes and singly, sometimes two men or women, sometimes with children. Some are carrying things, or pushing trolleys or barrows laden with �rewood, coal or water. It is as I imagine the fogs of previous centuries in London, with coal �res and pollution in the cold air. There are few lights, but those of factories a few hundred metres away provide an ambience. The ger areas spread before me, each with its window alight appearing like a sea of lanterns stretching up the hillside into the fog. The ground is uneven as I avoid the remains of earlier rubbish �res, but fortunately few dogs stray beyond their camps at the moment. My daytime forays enable me to remember a route through an empty drain culvert, around a hillock and across a gappy bridge, back to the reassuringly gridded surroundings of the soviet apartment blocks. People are alighting from tightly packed minibuses for the evening and walking toward the ger district, one carrying a large roll of linoleum, presumably for his ger.



Annu Wilenius, Finland

Sonia Leimer, Italy / Austria

Thoughts In/ Of Between

Two Visions16, 5 x 20 cm each

Edelweiss / Potato16,5 x 40 cm

White Horse / Green CurtainGreen Mountain / Pink CloudsYellow Window-pane / White CurtainGrey Bowl / Pink Intestines55,5, x 74 cm each

Lambda prints on aluminium, 2009

Thoughts Of/In Between tries to be visual presentations distilled from sensual and conceptual realisations that derive from my several years of researching Mongolia through documenting, interviewing and dis-cussing. It is a start for a collection of pho-tographs and stories addressing an idea that while things (beings human and inhu-man) are separate and distinct from each other, at the same time they are essentially interlinked, there is a bond, a web, a net-work, they belong to each other and cannot exist on their own. All beings move, shift and change: sometimes bonding strongly, sometimes only touching ever so slightly. These webs or networks can be studied as historical archives, as imageries, as con-glomerations of facts, but sometimes the awareness of the in-betweenness of beings can best be reached in something quite ar-bitrary, say in the chance meeting of a few toothbrushes.

Backlot (behind or adjoining) (video, text, support structure #2)),2010

Once it was decided what general kind of scenery was required for the various parts of the work that will be shot outside the studio, a search begun for a suitable place or “location”. By means of a fragmented description and spatial instructions a location scout was defining and proposing several spaces for the shooting. These locations are shown in a video. The different locations are situat-ed in Helsinki, Pori and surrounding area. All together they form a transparent and reflective set. The video is accompanied with a text, in form of long titles, interfering with the sceneries shown.

Analyzing relationships of staged produc-tions and visual cultures with the obvious physical space is a central theme of Sonia Leimer’s artwork. Architecture is examined as the effect of a medial state of contem-porary society and its narratives. Space/time and the image of space engage in a heightened interplay.



Michael Fürst, Austria

Yondonjunain Dalkh-Ochir, Mongolia

... southern Mongolian hinterland, mainly steppe and desert. After two months in Mongolia’s badly serviced capital, with half a million people living next to dirt roads - a welcome change. Staying in a ger in the densely populated suburbs of Ulaanbaatar, i put in ques-tion the private of the family members, remarking that 9 people have to share one room of 24m². the urban loud - not only arose by the city’s traffic sounds. Don’t worry said a nomad to me, giving answer to the same question, here in the steppe, privacy starts 100m away from our tent and persists endlessly. Go ! Have a look! When I followed his advice I could feel what he meant: the absolute mute of the ru-ral pastures - barely me, the grassland, and the wind. A spatial adventure of an unex-pected kind. Endless space towards the ho-rizon, interrupted by a sudden, hyper-real appearance of my self consciousness. the mute - probably released by the absence of sound reflection, physical entities around me - got loud. Images of all kinds of differ-ent places came by to say hello: Out in the steppe I was strongly impressed by the no-

mads’ will to communicate and share things, which is found in a tradition thereafter food in a ger can be used by every passenger. But this liberate attitude suddenly ends in the urban plot of 700m², generally sur-rounded by a 2-meter-high wooden fence. Those fences - physical limits to all plots in the urban settlement - work like a two-dimensional screen, even though circum-scribing three-dimensional space, creating the pattern of the urban road network. Their way of communicating is in multiple ways, semi-permeable. The fence’s visual and spatial modes are essential for my work. Layer of the representative towards the outside (sometimes painted color-fully or in traditional patterns), a visual horizon towards the next neighbour for those who live inside, the fence is no im-pediment for the urban sound harrass-ment. It rather enforces acoustic noise. The silent room wants to trace the spatial effects on the housing envi-ronment in the transitional process of mongol nomads on their way to a sedentary, urban life. The project is based on recent research in Ulaanbaatar’s Ger Districts.

the bare house SILENT ROOM project, spatial installation, 2010

Nomadic Tv,video installation, 2010

Since very ancient time, Mongolians have nomadic culture and their original habitat is the ger (the Mongolian nomad’s tent). Till now, we are living in the ger, which keeps our nomadic existence and culture.I was born in a ger and grew up in the coun-tryside. When I was young, I usually went to school riding a horse.

The aim of this work is to show how nowa-days Mongolian nomadic lives relate with outside environments and their existence by the DOORS OF GERS. Because there is not any window in the ger, the DOOR is the only one element relating with the out-side. A view of the DOOR OF GER is “the NOMADIC TV” as Mongolians adjust their lives with weather, livestock’s pasture and information from arriving guests and ac-tions of members of their families, etc.

Before the beginning of last century, the Mongolian gers had doors, which were made of stitched felt and open fire places inside. There was many customs related

with felt doors. For example, you must en-ter the ger by right side of door and exit from ger by east side. Since 1940s, due to of urban living, Mongolians use wooden doors and kiln in the ger.

“The nomadic TV” project’s idea came to my mind five years ago, and I made videos to show what role the members of family play and how they conduct their lives, by representing real five families’ DOORS in the countryside last autumn.

Aletta de Jong, The Netherlands

The projects of Aletta de Jong are inven-tories of trees and plants within cities, and serve as a method to understand the re-lation between people and their surround-ings. To enact possibilities for shortening the distance between food and its con-sumption I have been locating and docu-menting fruit trees and edible plants within urban environments, and proposing inno-vative ways to nurse vegetables, fruit and herbs for local consumption.

For the Bare House Project Aletta is de-veloping the idea of capitalising on exisit-ing city-light to nocturnally cultivate plants. This is done in the form of a lamp post with a greenhouse built around it using re-claimed window frames.

This idea utilises the visual language of the amateur gardener and extends it in order to develop propositions for the imagination beyond the purely utilitarian. Secondly by customising an advertis-ing light box, the kind commonly found on lamp posts in urban settings. The light box retains its original function, and at the same time it is augmented to offer a place for local food production.

Green Light,2010

A sculptural proposal in which reclaimed window frames are stacked together around a city street lamp to suggest a greenhouse structure. In doing so, noctur-nal urban light – sometimes considered as light pollution – is utilised as a proposition for food production.


& Kokemäki River, Pohjoisranta

Oula Salokannel & Annu Wilenius, Finland

The Raft, the River and the Plumtree,installation, 2010

In the summer of 2009 we travelled down Kokemäki River with a raft we built out of twenty-one spruce logs. We set out from the city of Pori heading down to the rush-es in the delta-area approaching the sea. Without any particular plan on landing somewhere we drifted down the river for four days maneuvering our slowly floating home in varying weather conditions; cook-ing, sleeping, brewing coffee, watching the river banks of thickets and beaver dams go by.

We have been fascinated by how ‘imager-ies’ wander about in time: how do ideas, ideals and images transmit from one con-text to another. What happens to childhood ideas of Kon-Tiki and African Queen or to past decades’ design ideals ‘for every home’ – by now glorified with the shimmer of nostalgia – when transformed from the sphere of images into material realizations of our own making? We neither of us had any experience or skills for building a raft – or anything else to that matter. Eventu-ally the raft of our ‘imageries’ was made us-

ing washing-line strings and what standard gardening shops had to offer in the way of willow fencing and trellis for walls. The raft, supporting a patio and a ‘bed-sit’, was made in a week. With us on the trip we took a plumtree bought along with other mate-rials at the Hong Kong department store. (The plum, originating in the distant foothills of Caucasus, has found its way to the gar-dens of the Finns as well as of the Chinese already some centuries ago.)

On board the raft we experienced being ab-solutely limited to our own restricted means; a notion that made us remember where the entire project once started. It was a discus-sion on a text by Michel Serres, The Natural Contract. Serres uses the metaphor of be-ing out at sea to describe the current condi-tion of the world not having unknown, unex-plored storages of spaces and resources, but just a singular finite world without es-capes, without an outside. And as this is a situation as fragile as can be, he suggests we make a contract, form a relationship, with this finite world.


photo credit: Jason Coburn

bare housepori - rotterdam - ulaanbaatar

On Nomadic Urbanisma n d O t h e r O x y m o r o n s t o L e a r n F r o m

b y A n n u W i l e n i u s

On Nomadic Urbanism and Other Oxymorons to Learn From

The city of Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mon-golia, where nomadism and soviet city planning is being complemented with self-organized ger districts and stagger-ing tower blocks, is by no means the most comfortable place to be, but it certainly is immensely interesting. (Outer) Mongolia, which as a state expands over 1.500.000 square kilometres of land, is inhabited by only 2.4 million people (and about 4.6 mil-lion goats and a several millions of other cattle). One of the poorest and definitely the most sparsely populated places on earth, Mongolia is a magical mix of differ-ing landscapes as well as of ideologies and their remnants. For someone not overwhelmed by first impressions and ap-pearances it can also provide a visionary understanding of a future.

Here is Not There. Here You Always Bring with You.

I first came to Ulaanbaatar in the autumn of 2005. We were a group of five artists and one philosopher and we travelled to Mongolia in search of interdisciplin-ary, non-hierarchical, down-to-earth and down-to-ourselves kind of research and

art practice and in order to rid ourselves from existing ideas of many things. We wanted to make ourselves face something radically different from the world and life we led at home, but to go as a tourist to a country recently on the verge of hunger catastrophe was something quite prob-lematic as we most certainly did not mean to go slumming in the ‘developing’ world looking for a pre-modern, authentic way of life. What we came up with instead was to organise an art exhibition and seek contact with the local artists that way. So we paid 1000 US dollars to exhibit at the Union of Mongolian Artists’ gallery. The exhibition we called Here is Not There. Here You Always Bring with You. (There is Where You Are Not. The title is from a Swedish children’s program song teaching the dif-ference of here and there.

At the opening of the exhibition we en-countered a whole host of Mongolian art-ists inviting us to visit their studios to see their work. In viewing that work, alongside getting our first experiences of the Mongo-lian countryside and pastoral nomadism, the topics of urbanism, structural change of the society, Mongolian re-found history and religion, after the seventy odd years of Communism, formed into a medley with our own interests and culminated into exhi-bition exchange projects that I have been working with for the past five years.

What has formed into the focal point of my own research is reflecting on personal

experience of architecture and urban plan-ning with some ambition toward a discus-sion or sharing of experience around what could be termed a(nti)-modernity or sec-ond or liquid modernity. These terms come from sociological thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck and Zygmut Bauman all trying to formulate the idea that moder-nity, as we have known it as a project of the Enlightenment idea of progress and evolution (of development), is no longer a plausible way of understanding the state of the world and us humans in it.

Latour is possibly the most radical in sug-gesting that we actually never have been modern, that we were just caught up in an idea of modernity, never actually reaching it. Beck on his turn calls the ideas we no longer have use for the First Modernity and the one in which we are trying to re-formulate the relations of the planet, hu-mans and the rest of existence, as Second Modernity. Bauman in his turn analyses the current situation of impotence in face of a new world as being based on a sepa-ration of power and politics. We no longer feel that we have tools to cope with the world and this leaves us in a state of fear, and usage of forms of life already dead.

In order to even begin to repair the ‘tools’ one needs to realise they are broken, or dysfunctional. In other words it is neces-sary to realise that the Western way of life as expressed in the (Modernist) Western Standard of Living is neither ethically nor

ecologically sustainable. It is not acquir-able for anyone for a longer period of time any more and most certainly it is not acquirable for all the people for any re-maining time we have on this planet. This realisation must needs be accompanied by the realisation that what we have grown to appreciate as necessities of dignified life etc. have to change; our vision of ourselves, others and the planet cannot re-main unchanged now that we have finally, virtually, become One.

This realisation of becoming one is at the core of the new modernity; the world has become a limited place without extensions and separations. Michel Serres describes the condition as that of a raft at sea. We already have all there is. This is it and we have to learn to live with the fact. Serres’ image talks poignantly of the natural resources condition, where as the human connectedness of the new global world is well described by Benjamin R. Barber in writing: “No American child may feel safe in its bed if in Karachi or Baghdad children don’t feel safe in theirs. Europeans won’t boast long of their freedoms if people in other parts of the world remain deprived and humiliated”. In terms of the children’s program one might say that a ‘there’ (where you are not) has ceased to exist in a planetary scale and we now inhabit a massive ‘here’ that we inevitably and with-out alternative share with rest of humanity.

What most strongly hit us coming to Mon-

golia in the first place – and then again and again over the years – was how very deeply all our thinking and experience was rooted in Western standards even how much we wanted to be open and flexible. At moments of fatigue, we inevitably just want(ed) things to be the way ”they should be, the rational, functional, logical way”, in other words, as we knew them from before.

Happiness in a Radically Incomplete World

As I am writing this there is a discussion going on in television on the happiest countries of the world and the criteria for happiness. In one listing Finland comes first, in another one the sixth, just after Bhutan1 that is preceded by Switzerland, Austria etc. Besides the obvious economic standing, factors such as social connec-tions, sense of justice and equality as well as trust in general are mentioned as hap-piness factors. The more we feel that we can trust people around us and the society we live in, the happier we are. The Finnish are good in trusting. So were the Iceland-ers, which the happiness calculus some years ago placed on top. Some years back Iceland and Finland also shared the least corrupted country of the world title. Makes one think of the good old saying that what you do not know, won’t hurt you.

But it does… at least when it catches up with you. And so the Icelanders who were the happiest and most trusting nation of the world are now economically enslaved and mentally at a loss in a new world

that just don’t function the way it should.2 Heidegger speaks of trusting the world as a basic need we have for getting on with our lives smoothly. We trust one day to follow another much in the same way as the one before preceded this one. No great change, no awareness. It is only when something does not function that we become aware of its existence at all and need to readjust our trust relation anew.

In happiness charts such as these Mon-golia does not fare very well. It is one of the poorest and one of the most corrupted countries in the world, so what could we possibly want to learn from it? What should we learn from a people that have been mangled through totalitarian regimes of varying ideologies, practically with little if any power to influence or to understand their own standing in relation to the sur-rounding world?

Walking the streets of Ulaanbaatar or any of the minor towns of Mongolia it is easy to tag on to a sense of hopelessness. Still spending more time in the country and sur-passing this notion, there is an attitude and elegance there, that I think we could well learn from. For one thing we could learn flexibility in varying areas of life: A capacity

to tolerate ambiguity, patience to see what happens before rushing to decide in order to better control, an ability to forgive and forget and just get on with things. What we could learn to cherish is the idea of uncontrollability. As Zizek put it in a recent lecture: “The world is fundamentally, radi-cally incomplete! God did not finish it. It’s not all there…” The best we can do is to learn to cope with that incompleteness and uncertainty. I am obviously not writing this in awe of totalitarian governments, but in awe of the people who have had the spirit to survive and to do it with such good spirits and style. I think that in Mongolia there has developed a special aesthetic-existential capability that I would like to term Mongolian Elegance. It is a way to cope with scarcity and chaos with grace.

Back in the TV-programme the discussion has reached the topics of social connectiv-ity. In this the Finnish are not so very good. But we are on top of the list for nations who rely more on their friends than on their family. And we are on top of the list of single person households. In Helsinki over 60% of people live on their own.

In Mongolia an architect friend once went to the ger districts with the question of how would the people like to have a silent room where they could be all on their own. The idea was received with some ambiguity. Silence could be related to a nostalgic idea of living out in the steppe without neigh-bours - the ger districts being very noisy

- but how to organize solitude and to what exact purpose?

Similarly when visiting a Mongolian architect, who was showing us his plans for a new housing development with four families living in a unit forming a swas-tika shape, we asked with great interest how come he had not divided the living quarters into rooms? His answer was that many Mongolians like to have one living space like in the ger. Here our Western ideas of specialized spaces and privacy as the formulations of true freedom squirmed in anxiety. But could it be that the distinc-tion, separation, estrangement of bodies, spaces and functions have not led to the happiness intended?

Richard Sennett for one has targeted this separation of private space in modernity as something that leaves us at an eter-nal adolescent state, coveting our own security and trust in the perfectly controlled world that we limit to the minimum in order to be absolutely secure. In order to grow up, to be genuine, unafraid persons we need the discomfort of other people, unknown people and unknown events. We need public space that in authentically public, meaning that we cannot choose it, cannot control it.

Here comes the tricky part of the modern project: Who wouldn’t want to have a house of their own with a vacuum cleaner of their own etc. etc.? Who wouldn’t want

to have better health-care and better edu-cation? But these things are not innocent. They are part of a whole and make us slowly but surely what we are.

What the modern project has done in many aspects of life is that it has left us helpless to take care of ourselves in case the system should suddenly not function. Zygmut Bauman summarises the idea of modernity as fear in writing: “The kind of society that, retrospectively, has become to be called modern emerged out of the discovery that that human order is vulner-able, contingent and devoid of reliable foundations. That discovery was shocking. The response to the shock was a dream and an effort to make order solid, obliga-tory and reliably founded. ”

Urban Nomads and Nomadic Civilization

With the ‘glocal turn’ talk of nomadism has begun to emerge prefixed with urban. This is interesting as these terms have for long been thought of as being incompatible par excellence. In most societies industri-alization and urbanization have been the first cause of sedentary peoples starting to move about, but prior to this modern movement, staying put, being sedentary was seen as the base of what is called culture or civilization.

It has been thought that civilization would categorically be urbane and technological; a new technological invention from fire and the wheel to www having taken humanity to its next step of development. In evo-lutionary theory, where cultures develop from savagery to barbarism to civilization through domestication of cattle and the emergence of agriculture, the nomad was seen as categorically stuck in a previous stage of development in comparison to settled societies.

In 1884 Friedrich Engels wrote: “In the Eastern Hemisphere the middle stage of barbarism began with the domestication of animals providing milk and meat, but horti-culture seems to have remained unknown far into this period. It was, apparently, the domestication and breeding of animals and the formation of herds of considerable size that led to the differentiation of the Aryans and the Semites from the mass of barbarians…”

In 1946 Arnold Toyenbee, in his A Study of History (in 12 volumes), describes nomads as “arrested civilizations”, in other words, societies that had got stuck for millennia in the same stage of development, like bees or ants. To contradict these essentialising views on the nomad, David Sneath pres-ents in his study The Headless State, that even though this view might have been plausible to hold for someone like Engels, 20th century anthropology clearly shows that pastoral nomadism is not a pre-agrar-

ian phenomenon, but a way of life devel-oped long after early agrarian societies in the area practicing semi-nomadic herding and semi-sedentary societies before get-ting on the move more permanently.

Gilles Deleuze writes on nomadism: “The archeologists have made us think of nomadism not just as a primary state, but as an adventure, an invitation from the outside, as mobility, that surprises the sedentary peoples.” This nomad Deleuze constructs from the ideas of the Mongol “war machine” (of the time of the Euro-pean invasion) against the “bureaucratic machine” of the sedentary village. To be a conceptual nomad is to stay outside of the code, to stay wild, in resistance, partly belonging, partly autonomous. Deleuze continues to point out that this kind of no-madism does not mean necessarily mobil-ity in space, but mobility in intensity– and that even historically the nomadic peoples have never been on the move in the same sense as immigrants. The nomads are the ones who become nomadic in order to stay where they are.In studying the ger districts and nomads in the countryside such researches as David Sneath and Ole Bruun have come to the conclusion that somehow nomadism sticks, no matter what the people seem to go through. There are aspects of social and environmental attitudes that remain even how sedentary and urbane Mongo-lians were trying to become. Besides at-titudes and appreciations in the city, there

has also appeared a counter-mobilisation of people moving from the cities back to the steppe and pastoral nomadism. They go back with their mobile phones, solar panels and satellite antennas and com-bine what is best in these two cultures. This recent phenomenon has been partly reversed again during the past year with the heavy winter that has forced thou-sands of nomads into the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar after loosing their cattle. In the growing slums it will be of extreme importance to ‘get innovative’ both of the material as well as social resources avail-able.

Garden Cities of Tomorrow

One of the most striking combinations Mongolia has to offer is that of glass surfaced tower-blocks neighbouring people living in felt covered tents, called gers. I remember seeing it for the first time from a taxi window and something shifted inside me. Later we looked at a map of the city with a few streets and a lot of little tents depicted all around. In one way of looking these areas are slums forming from vast amounts of people from the countryside moving into the city that cannot in any way answer the need of housing and infrastructure: Answer the need of people who would require living in the city to mean a flat with running water and electricity etc. But the people moving

into the ger districts come from living in gers in the countryside and their solutions are according.

The new situation of having gers placed tightly together form many kinds of new problems such as lacking privacy that people try to create by building fences and air pollution as the gers are mainly heated by burning coal. There are also many new positive affects of this semi-settled existence. One of these is the relation to the land in many varying aspects. One of these is gardening and vegetable growing, radical as such in Mongolia, another is that as there is no actual building tradition in the country, the exiting stone architecture is either by the Chinese or the Russians, the tower-blocks being built for the incom-ing population is not always deemed quite safe to live in. People prefer to have their feet in a nearer proximity to the ground for safety, but also for family privacy, fresh air and sensual connectedness to the environment.

In some ways the ger districts, the slums, have begun to be seen as a possibility to a new type of inhabitation, a semi-nomadic, semi-settled ger city with its green areas protecting its population from a myriad of urban ills, whereas the tower blocks/skyscrapers have become the harbingers of disaster. In the neighbouring capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, the inhabitants have named the latest two housing projects as Titanic and Kursk. The Mongolians call

their so far tallest building quite fondly The Pregnant Lady – for its heavily swelling side – but at the same time the old Rus-sian built quarters are the most wanted, again, on the real estate market alongside with projects for re-developing the ger districts.

The current city planning includes many plans for new parks and for better mainte-nance of the existing ones, but water has become very scarce and expensive, and privately owned land is difficult to keep for recreational purposes. Many of the court-yards that used to be parks in the centre of the city have been built out with new high-rise buildings. From the 1990s the gov-ernment has been actively encouraging people in the ger areas to grow their own vegetables. This has even been referred to as the Green Revolution in Ulaanbaatar. Possibly as the inner-city parks will be built up, the ger areas will emerge as the new green areas of the city.

Annu Wilenius

Footnotes

1 Bhutan is run on policies based on Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Do-mestic Product. See http://www.grossna-tionalhappiness.com/

2Besides the obvious hardships of the eco-nomical situation also positive phenomena has emerged. For example as MacDon-alds and Burger King have left the country, due to too high production costs, local food businesses are turning up with recycled porclain, ‘home’ roasted coffee and, one might suppose, an attitude.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Caroline Alexander, Victor Buchli & Caroline Humphries [Ed:s]: Urban Life in Post-Social Asia, 2007

Ole Bruun & Li Narangoa [Ed:s]: Mongols. From Country to City. Floating Bouandaries, Pastoralism and City Life in the Mongol Lands, 2008

Zygmut Bauman: Modernity and Ambivalence, 1993, Liquid Times. Living In An Age Of Uncer-tainty, 2007

Ulrich Beck: The Cosmopolitan Vision, 2006

Mike Davis: Planet of Slums, 2006

Gilles Deluze: Pensée Nomade in Nietzsche aujourd’hui.10/18, 1973

Martin Heidegger: The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview, 1919, The Origin of the Work of Art, 1936

Caroline Humphrey & David Sneath: The End of Nomadism? Society, State and the Environment in Inner Asia, 1999

Bruno Latour: We Have Never Been Modern, 1993 Richard Sennett: The Uses of Disorder. Identity and City Life, 1968

Michel Serres: The Natural Contract, 1995

David Sneath: The Headless State, Aristocratic Orders, Kinship Society, and Misinterpretations of Nomadic Inner Asia, 2007

Slavoj Zizek: What does it mean to be a com-munist? (Lecture at Helsinki University),In Defense of Lost Causes, 2008

bare house pori - rotterdam - ulaanbaatar · chakrasamvara - the circle of high bliss and the deity...

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