A video essay by Constantina Theodorou & Giorgos Papadatos, Counterpublics – 2021
[collaboration with Strelka Mag– cancelled because of Russia- Ukraine war]
…….There was once, not long before, a world of dividing lines; they live in a world of electrified wires going up and down, undersea and in the air. It is a world of a priori obligatory sharing and de facto collaboration, not one of kindness and softness, antagonisms will never end, but in the end they have to share. It was the Cold War, the epoch of superpowers and mutual fear of the other; it is the Hot Peace Era, of shared power distribution and common fear of what they’ ll do without the other. If they don’t collaborate they’ll end up as fried fossils spared across the planet for the future species archeologists to contemplate upon. What drove humans to prosperity, what drove them to extinction?
The Continuous Monument: On the Rocky Coast, Project (Perspective)
1969 Superstudio, Gian Piero Frassinelli, Alessandro Magris, Roberto Magris, Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia
…….The historical exception of the territorially bounded state and the destructive international system of infinite expansion, unlimited growth & exhaustion of any kind of resources is now about to expire suffocating in the fumes of its own vital fuels. If our electricity powered civilization is to survive it has the urgent task to alter its vital resource, turn to zero CO2 emissions power generation, to compromise and design with the idea of limits. Switching to renewable and omnipresent sources, sun, wind and water, with totally different territorial logics than the geographically restricted and limited oil & gas will signal the beginning of a new planetary order.
…..Every part of the design of the rapidly developing renewable energy sharing network poses a serious reorganization challenge of the existing planetary extraction networks. It is a massive enterprise to design both the hard & soft infrastructure, the loci of production, the routes, and the protocols of sharing. New type of centralities are already emerging in places of former wilderness, mountain committees, assembly points at the crossroads of hiking trails, unions of uninhabited islands and other wind-rich areas.
(from the essay Blowing with the wind. Fleeting sovereignties of a post-national world order, by Constantina Theodorou, 2021)
Featured Archive Footage
Superstudio – Supersurface – An alternative model for life on the Earth – 1972
Peter Fischli and David Weiss – Der Lauf der Dinge – 1987
The World of Buckminster Fuller – by Robert Snyder– 1974
Sofia Superstudio – Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas – 1971
Buckminster Fuller – Dymaxion Airocean World-Map – 1954
Andrea Zittel – Wagon Station Encampment – 2004
The Fuller World – WGBH Educational Foundation – 1963
Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm – 2010
Superstudio – Fundamental Acts – Ceremony – 1973
Zavala, Maxwell Baum, Tyler Wolcott – The Walking City – Archigram – 2017
Design Matters: Doing Better with Less – dMass net – 2011
SuperGrid Institute – Sharing Power Transmission – 2020
counterpublics.org 