slow day and rhizome

slow day...
toured some foreign architects around town. just doing a favor to a friend, who was participating in the organization of a europan7 meeting in cordoba. koolhaas was lecturing there yesterday...

europan has actually been a relevant movement in experimental architecture during the last years. a set of competitions all over europe researching housing that respond to new social conditions of posmodernity...

was invited to a nice lunch by lorenzo as payment for my work. i like this non-monetary exchanges. he also gave me a cool book...

now.
since one of the first days here, i wanted to make a comment about rhizome. one of the neighbors was wondering about it´s actual existence. and that, reminded me of the following story: a friend was being examined for tenure at the university of seville. mid 90s. besides all the paper docs, he was submitting his program in a cd as a hypertext. and one of the professors at the jury, a well known critic, very upset about it, was publicly declaring that he "denied the existence of hypertext!!!" of course that sort of opinion made people laugh...? however discreetly.

It´s a quite similar case when someone denies the existence of rhizome. of course, R doesn´t have the same onthological statute as a shoe or a glas of milk! It is a concept, a tool to think about [and in] the world. we can identify a rhizomatic quality in certain realities, we can use rhizome to find or produce other connections about things we look at, etc... And then, just like with the concept of structure, we can produce things that have rhizome as its conceptual model -or anti-model...

Another question , which is different to questioning the actual existence of the concept, is whether using the concept of rhizome is useful for whatever purpose. For example, wondering whether using rhizome as a tool to learn or do research about an urban environment such as Mexico DF or Los Angeles, does produce relevant knowledge in order to... work in real estate, design the sewage or traffic system, build social networks or, explore its urban imaginaries.

sometimes it is better to navigate, if you know where you want to go and how to get there; but some other times it is better to drift, or to give oneself to different becomings: often when you are looking for things that you don´t know yet...
it might also be just more joyful.

smooth space high fives _ osfa

ps. rhizome for dummies in my own website _ spanish and english

Posted by osfavelados at February 16, 2003 06:10 PM