Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 95: Urban Subjects 鈥� with Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen & Helmut Weber
Speakers: Names in order of speaking
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Alex Abahmed 0:06
Hello, I'm Alex Abahmed with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by , Jeff Derksen, and , the three of whom make up , a cultural research collective formed in 2004, and are based in Vancouver and Vienna. They are in conversation with Am about their approach to researching global urbanism and housing through aesthetic and critical engagement. I hope you enjoy the episode.
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Am Johal 0:40
Hi there. Welcome to Below the Radar. I'm really excited to be interviewing friends of mine, collaborators, allies, Helmut Weber, with us from Vienna, and Sabine Bitter and Jeff Derksen, here in Vancouver. And together, they're part of the collective Urban Subjects, welcome.
Sabine Bitter 0:59
Hi Am.
Am Johal 1:02
I just thought, maybe we can start--we've known each other for quite a long time, we've collaborated and worked on projects together. Wondering if we can just begin, if you guys could just introduce yourselves as a collective, you know, how you formed and kind of the time period when you were beginning to start working together.
Sabine Bitter 1:21
That started, I think, around 2004. And background, maybe, is that Helmut and I worked already, since a long time, as two artists and we collaborated on a shared artist practice. And then more through practice, we already shared talking about things and reflecting about stuff and working on projects together, which is formalized, it was Jeff, who is a writer and a poet, and called ourselves Urban Subjects.
Jeff Derksen 1:51
So, it's an extension of our existing practices in some way, just, you know, kind of common approaches, and actually a desire between the three of us to think through the contradiction. So, you know, of what's now known as the housing market or housing system, so that we could compare the types of housing that's possible and ways of living together that's possible in Vienna, and the ways of living together, ways of not living together, through the pressures of the housing market in Vancouver. So it did kind of gel around issues of housing, and issues of an urban experience.
Am Johal 2:28
And Jeff, for you, you've spent a lot of time in Vancouver with the writing community and in the visual arts community. Wondering if you could talk a little bit of that background before you started working with Urban Subjects.
Jeff Derksen 2:39
Yes, of course. I was in Vancouver, during the 1980s forming, with other people forming artist-run centers. So, like, was a project that came out of the . And so, I was involved in that kind of organic connection between emerging artists and emerging poets at that time, which was a really dynamic period to be involved with. So, for me working with Helmut and Sabine, on visual representation of urbanism and urban processes, really has kind of roots in that. And then, the other part, Am, that I think you're involved in, too, is this kind of educational or pedagogical project, some such as the , that we ended up working on a project together, but the idea of poetry and art as research, and also as a form of critique--that, for me, is also centered around collectives, and centered around kind of educational practices in a sense.
Am Johal 3:42
And wondering, what was the first project that all three of you collaborated on together?
Helmut Weber 3:48
As far as I remember, I think, and this is very much related, but Sabine and Jeff said that, within our practice, we always have been open to other colleagues, to other approaches, when we did quite a lot of residences all over the world. And I think, in 2003, we spent half a year in Caracas, in Venezuela. All the three of us together but not forming the collective yet, I think. Then we entered another project in Belgrade, it was about New Belgrade. I think this was one of the first... no, it was not the first, the first was a video we did about Venezuela, about Caracas. And the second was when we did a poster series on the situation in new Belgrade.
Am Johal 4:41
Yeah, and I know that in the book itself, you were looking at some of the writings of , and you guys, all of you had an interest in his work and wondering, can you speak to how it intersects with the type of work that you're doing in your research?
Sabine Bitter 4:54
That was in one, and of course, Lefebvre's idea of the production of space, that space is not container, but always produced, that space is a process. And of course, like, incredible value for us in terms of thinking also how space is represented. So, Lefebvre's just kind of idea of how the different aspects of the understanding of space and representation is one of them. So, that was in discussion around the politics of the right to the city, and what that means today, and how these ideas can be, you know, looked through in a contemporary condition, let us do a couple of projects. So the publishing of the original, the Lefebvre text was one, with the book, , around self-management, which was also a kind of linked together our projects, our research in Caracas in Venezuela, about community councils and how self-organization was happening there. But then also at that time, it was the idea of comments was very much in the public realm and in the way it was discussed. So our first exhibition, not in a traditional sense, but we curated a small show at Artspeak which was called , which was about the understanding and the possibilities people see right now in their different cities about commons. And we invited just friends of our friends and colleagues who work on urban issues and political issues, or image politics. And they sent us material in which was posted all of those material at a small show in Artspeak, for Not Sheep.
Jeff Derksen 6:33
Which... Yeah, I'll say that was kind of a classic Lefebvrean trialectric situation in the sense where we were looking at not only that, you know, now-contested notion of commons that Sabine said had a different kind of currency back in 2004, when we were doing that, 2006. But we were looking at the relationship between urban enclosures, and the process of commons or commoning that came out of that. And we wanted to make sure that it was an international perspective so that you could see the different ways that the kind of spread of global capital was creating new forms of enclosures, and therefore also new forms of commons, which, of course, are, in some sense an impossibility in North America because of the contested ownership of land and the dispossession, the original dispossession from Indigenous people of their lands, so, we wanted to look at that in kind of the dialectical manner, following Lefebvre.
Helmut Weber 7:29
Right. And maybe one sentence more to Lefevre and his understanding of space was that when we did the publication, we considered for example, doing research is also creating or making a kind of social space. And then we thought that actually editing a book intro, inviting again, people who have been part of the research, other authors, again, creates not only a social space, it's also a kind of research format. So it was always more from, let's say, from this visual approach towards the writing of Lefevre, we always tried to reimagine what kind of visual form it can take.
Am Johal 8:16
I remember going to those shows back when they came out, and I really appreciated the linking between the local and the global and the playfulness of it, not just in the theoretical part, but the aesthetic part and how the shows were put up. And of course, we were all here in Vancouver in the pre-Olympic period. Jeff, you've had a long-standing relationship with the geographer , he passed away a few years ago, but wondering if you can speak a little bit about the context in which you came to know Neil, because I think it'll help us speak about the the Olympic moment in Vancouver because he arrived here and was part of that conversation as well.
Jeff Derksen 8:51
Actually, it's a very beautiful moment when I first got to meet Neil because I was doing, I had a , working with at the City University of New York, and Peter and I were walking down the hallway, talking about Peter's on the representation of class and cultural practices. And Neil poked his head out of the door of his office and said, "You guys are talking about class! I just finished an essay!" and he ran in printed off this essay that was subsequently published later, and then out of that, a friendship formed, and I ended up having a postdoctoral residency at City University of New York at the with Neil, and so then the three of us became friends with him, and I started kind of working collaboration, writing about art and urban issues with Neil, so we did one essay on Vancouver as a city which was at that time under pressures from global gentrification. So we looked at gentrification in a global aspect in terms of Vancouver, and then we wrote a few essays about artists as well, or I wrote a few essays with Neil around artists as well. I think that the, you know, kind of legacy that I would say that maybe affected the three of us with Neil is the kind of combination of friendship, of solidarity, and the kind of unsanctioned criticality which had a great generosity attached to it as well. So it's a very dynamic time that we were able to spend with Neil from, like, 2002 to 2003. So we were also, in New York during 9/11. So there's lots of discussions around global politics and effective urbanism at that moment, and the dynamism of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics where folks like was there, who was close friends with , was running it at the time. So, there's lots of great dialogue, also with the geographer, , that became a kind of very interesting milieu for us, because we are able to discuss with radical geographers, and the aspects of a poetics of urbanism. And also, as Helmut was saying, around the representation of urban processes as well.
Am Johal 11:11
Now, so in the pre-Olympic period, where we had a chance to collaborate as well, Vancouver Flying University project at , at the . So, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about those projects for people who might not be familiar with them?
Sabine Bitter 11:27
Well, it started off with a collaborative project at Gallery Gachet, which is a community gallery in Downtown Vancouver, in the Downtown Eastside. And it started off with the idea of kind of image politics, that it was about housing, but then we did not want to use imagery which shows the challenges and the crisis of housing and homelessness and all of that. But we wanted to kind of... move the politics of representation to the issue of where decisions about housing are made. And we then made those images into large wallpapers and kind of created a setting in the gallery, so that it was from floor-to-ceiling images of the UN, of City Hall Vancouver, and of all kinds of different governmental spaces where decisions about housing are made. Also, we present a kind of scale-jump of how these things are decided, in a way.
Am Johal 12:29
The poster is up in my office at Woodward's.
Jeff Derksen 12:32
Yeah, that was one of the great things, because the fabulous photo that Sabine took of Vancouver City Hall was made into a poster that we put up all across the city. And I heard from folks for years later that it was a photo that really represented a particular type and a particular moment of politics for them.
Sabine Bitter 12:51
And it was a space where people were waiting before the address, or the public was invited to address the City Council on specific projects. And then we did--the second one was a text in it, which said, "We declare spaces of housing." And so it was at the same time a demand and the statement about the kind of crucial situation in Vancouver around housing. Yeah, so, but then beside of the kind of visual aesthetic setting in the gallery, we organized and we founded together with you, the Vancouver Flying University, and organized--in retrospect, it was kind of crazy how many events and discussions, and what an incredible diverse group of people we got together to see how to make alliances and... yeah, bring ideas and possibilities together before the Olympics.
Am Johal 13:43
In the Learning From Vancouver project that was at the Western Front, there was a publication that came out of it. --Oh, Helmut's got it right in front of him, look at that! Wonder if you can talk a little bit about that project and your involvement in it.
Jeff Derksen 13:58
That one came out with the invitation from , who was putting together a project at Western Front. And it was for us to work with another artist collective, , from the Netherlands. So, they work together, investigating urban processes in cities, so when they came to Vancouver, they were doing a kind of preliminary research, and we kind of settled on like the kind of unknowability of Vancouver in some sense from their perspective. So again, it was a project that was similar in a way to Flying University and other projects that we've done that always has like three aspects. So it has the exhibition aspect to it, it had the public programming, we had lots of great talks as well that came out of that, and then a publication later. So, we took this idea of momentarily, a kind of a unit of time or an intensification of time, as a way to think about how the city was changing. There've been particular moments that have shaped Vancouver, so the way that these mega-events, whether we look at Expo 86 as a mega-event and a turning point in how Vancouver became marketized as a space and marketized as a site for global housing. And then also looking at the Olympics as another turning point in that, and just these kind of moments within the history of Vancouver that has shaped it into the type of city, the type of globalized neoliberal life city that it is today. So the publication, again, was a group of artists and scholars, and just approaching the publication collectively, and looking for alternative ways of representing urban processes. And I think also different ways of working together, as Helmut was pointing out.
Helmut Weber 15:45
And also, I think it was one of the very early projects. We didn't think it through very much in detail at that time, about all these issues about education, about knowledge. But somehow it happened that we really could bring together different forms of knowing at that time within the city.
Am Johal 16:05
I wanted to ask you about, I know you've had a long-standing collaboration and have done work with Camera Austria over the years and one of your projects around the .
Sabine Bitter 16:16
The Militant Image started off with the research residency at Lazada University in Lunenburg, in Germany, where they invited us to work on the history of their campus, which was an old military garrison, which in itself was a very interesting condition to look at. And then being there, we also realized quickly that it was the center very close to the anti-atom protests to the anti-nuclear protests, which has had an incredible history in Germany. So this was also very close to there. So we had all these different forms of militancy, and the history of protest, the history of the , and how tactics and strategies were discussed and looked at lots of archival material. So at one point, we kind of switched our focus not on to the subject matter of military or militancy, but rather, to see how an image is used, and what is the condition of an image to become militant. And that became a framework of research and of investigation in a larger way. So we did the publication, of the Military Image Reader. And then we curated an with lots of international artists at . So it was kind of an ongoing interest in the condition of the image, how to become militant.
Jeff Derksen 17:44
What was interesting there, in the terms of the kind of link between Vancouver and that extended moment, or the long moment of the Olympics, was that a lot of the tactics that police now use for controlling or suppressing protests were developed by the German police around the anti-nuclear power protests. So, was invented there, to help contain the so-called Black Bloc. But there was also great kind of counter tactics that the protesters devised, because the police were using helicopters for one of the first times, for controlling crowds. So, they use this very happy instance of sending balloons into the air as a kind of celebration, but of course, the balloons interfered with the helicopters, and the police had to get rid of it. So it's an interesting moment of militancy, and playfulness, and suppression from the police, and Helmut and Sabine did this great archival work of a German photographer called , who worked with the anti-atom movement as well, and his work hadn't really been represented, so we're able to put some of his work in the show, and Helmut did some kind of deep archival work around those images. So we were happy to see those recirculating, and just to think through, what is the condition that makes an image militant, rather than representing militancy? What makes an image militant? Is it circulation, its reception, how it's used with different communities? So again, it's all around this kind of more participatory aspect of representation, and the politics of image-making, and the politics of language, in the way that communities and groups use those in particular moments to fight against the hegemonic block.
Sabine Bitter 19:30
And through these protests in Germany, there was also the moment that a photograph of a protest was the first time ever used in a court case to accuse somebody or to take somebody to court for attempted murder, when you know, those protest photographs. So there were a lot of things invented, and... yeah.
Am Johal 19:50
I'm wondering, you know, in terms of all of you collaborating between Vancouver and Vienna, there's, like, the geographic challenge, and time difference, and those types of things, but at the same time you get to read political or social situations from two sites that you all have a deep relationship to, and wondering from when you started collaborating together to now, how that work has shifted in terms of the collaborative process?
Jeff Derksen 20:18
Yeah, that's a super interesting question, actually, because in some ways, it just evolved organically, in the sense that we tend to follow certain intensities. And we tend to, you know, want to work a bit outside of official pathways in a sense. We don't go looking for big funding to do projects, we try and integrate it into our lives and a little bit more, and into communities. But perhaps the way that that's evolved was that we were maybe moved from a form of critique of urban processes, and of course, a critique of gentrification, and the marketization of all living spaces. And then started to contrast more, Vienna to Vancouver, and looking at the way that the deep history of social housing in Vienna has created a model that the city now is looking to export as a kind of best practice of social housing. So we did start to look at the ways that some of the aspects of Vienna might be able to migrate or be moved to Vancouver to address some of the issues around the housing market. And to be used very practically to open, to think of housing as something other than a market here, as something other than a commodity, and to think of the kind of social wealth of housing, which Vienna does in a certain way. And then that, I think, culminated in that show that we worked on with you, Am, at the Museum of Vancouver, called , which was an existing show that Helmut and Sabine had helped put together in Vienna. And we helped to move that here and again, had a lot of public programming around it that we collaborated with you on. And so, in a way, I would say that that's a long drift in the sense from critique to policy. We still maintain a strong belief in critique, but I think in that instance, we were looking to have some sort of voice or influence in a public sphere that was a bit broader than the types of venues that we were used to working in, and preferred to work in.
Am Johal 22:22
Where Helmut is right now, in Vienna, this is an interesting housing project that you've all had involvement in, in terms of a material fact in the ground, where you're actually going to be living in, or spending time in, and wondering if you can talk a bit about this project as a kind of example that can also be a critique of Vancouver at the same time.
Helmut Weber 22:42
And as Jeff mentioned before, it also can be a slightly critique on the policies of housing, even though Vienna is really outstanding in terms of the politics of social housing. But right now, we are living in an area which is very close to , this kind of entertainment and amusement park. And it's a developing area, I think, over the next five to ten years, another 20,000 or 30,000, people will live in this neighborhood. Also for Vienna, it's kind of a new project and how to deal with it. That's been one of the interesting aspects, that we are now living, and not so much in the history of the old Vienna, but we are really living in an area which might be in the new Vienna where, actually, you really get the idea if you enter that area, you have no idea if you are right now in Vienna or not. That鈥檚 the one.
Jeff Derksen 23:46
Maybe Helmut and Sabine, you can talk about this specificity of the housing project itself.
Sabine Bitter 23:52
So, the housing project itself, it's similar to a co-op housing. In German, it's called . And this is mostly self-organized through projects together, and then proposes to the city a certain kind of model. And so, there's all these different ways you can make a case for why it is important to be publicly funded. So there's the intergenerational, there's the queer housing, there's the women only-housing, there's the refugee inclusion housing, there's all these different ways. And so our house has some of those kind of ideas on how to live together, and the city of Vienna gave the group basically, the land is part of a larger development. And the house was built like in a couple of years. It was a really quick project. It's not quite as ambitious as , which is one of the models in Europe now, which I think is really amazing, as a process and as a model to really take the building off the housing market, so it never, ever can be financialized or capitalized. In our building, it's also, you don't own the apartment, so you can't sell the apartment and make money with it. It's part of, kind of, a housing association. And it's lots of self-organizing. So you know, how the stairways are cleaned, and how this and that is done, it's a communal decision, how we do that. But then, it's also some kind of great, you know, groups in the housing, so there's collective housing with large apartments, where a group of people live. But then we have one really large apartment where there's four adults living who have Down Syndrome. And then they share the big apartment with five students who don't pay any rent, but therefore they kind of take care about the whole household, and kind of help support this living together. And we have two apartments where we work with an organization, which is called Queer Base, which is a refugee organization for queer people. So we have two apartments, which we all pitch in together. So we all bought this apartment together. And yeah, so similar things like that. Lots of common rooms, and lots of common ideas. And it's in process, it's a permanent process, it's never finished, I don鈥檛 think is quite...
Am Johal 26:17
Yeah, from the concept of thinking about it, to making it happen, to how when people actually move in, they use space differently, and you have to come up with new ways of being together, I suppose.
Jeff Derksen 26:28
I mean, what's interesting too, with this, is from the discussions we have, you know, I bring my North American perspective of co-op housing, and then try and understand the baugruppen project through that, in some sense, in the way that it was organized, and the way that we live together. And for me, it seems kind of miraculous in the way that it happened, and the ease that had happened in a sense, and the kind of generosity of everybody in the house and that kind of larger political vision, but Helmut and Sabine are just coming from a different housing context. Of course, I look for a little more critical aspects around it. So there's, as Sabine said, there's the Syndikat model, which takes the building in the space out of any form of financialization. So, it's been interesting, as the three of us plan our kind of collective living space, you know, amongst all the other collective spaces of the building, just to think through what our expectations and possibilities are. So, it's a real, not clash of brains, but it was interesting to try and overlay those frames together, you know, what the possible horizons of living together could be.
Sabine Bitter 27:35
And because you asked before what, you know, the living between Vancouver and Vienna, one of the really amazing benefits of that, or you know, knowing that this is a very privileged situation, but to compare the things which are happening in each country and in each city. To me, that's so amazing, because you can see how there are different possibilities in different places. So if I think about in Vienna, you know, what housing means, like two-thirds of the whole housing stock in Vienna is somewhat publicly financed, which is totally normal, and we criticize everything, which, you know, goes towards kind of neoliberal politics and everything. In Vancouver, this is so unimaginable, and it's totally great to see this kind of agency, which would be possible. And now, the other way around, if I think of, you know, the kind of idea of multiculturalism, with all its critique of decolonization, and all of these things happening here in Canada and in Vancouver, this is something which is so, you know, not in the midst of this discussion in Vienna and in Austria. So then I'm like, amazed that this could you know, in Vienna is still this very kind of, I don't know, white male dominated space, which is [unclear audio], Vancouver is not as crucial as it is in Vienna. So it's this kind of agency, you get, that things are possible, because we鈥檝e realized in the other place, it's kind of amazing, and it goes back and forth. It's not that the one is so good.
Am Johal 29:01
Whatever your critiques of Vienna are, when you come back to Vancouver, it looks pretty good, doesn't it?
Sabine Bitter 29:05
It does, yeah. [laughs]
Am Johal 29:09
Wondering if you can talk a little bit about the.
Sabine Bitter 29:15
Stars Above Us was really great. The public art committee in Lower Austria got together and thought of a project to do during the pandemic, because everything is closed and much harsher than in Canada, it was in Austria. So they invited artists to design a postcard, which then the committee would send to a specific group of people. And it was sort of a gesture of "thank you," it was gesture of appreciation during the pandemic. So a few people you know, sort of, okay, healthcare workers, or people in homes, or in hospitals. And then you design a postcard to bring you know, a gesture of "thank you." And then we were thinking that maybe the gesture itself should be given to somebody. And then the discussion, of course, was about the whole crucial issue of refugees, and the camps in Greece, and all of the European's whole crisis of that, kind of went into the background through the pandemic and the coronavirus, so. And then it was also the danger that in this one like huge asylum-seeking centre, in Austria, in , every refugee seeker, every asylum-seeking person is held during the first process, which can take for quite a while. And then there was the danger, of course, also, the virus would break out there, and that they would become a hotspot. So then we start, instead of assigning postcards to send to refugees or asylum-seeking folks, we start the gesture of sending a postcard, should be actually handed over. To us it kind of changed the way of, in a way give agency. So we designed the postcard called The Stars Above Us, with the night sky above the centre for asylum-seekers, and insisted on, that they already have to be postmarked, to be sent to every country in the world, whether it's the post office delivering to. So that was kind of a switch of, that we send a postcard to somebody, but those folks have the possibility themselves to send their postcard to somebody.
Jeff Derksen 31:26
And we were thinking of the stars above as a kind of old-school GPS, in a sense that would indicate to people where asylum-seekers were actually placed, grounded.
Helmut Weber 31:39
Also, during the times of the Corona, during the lockdown, of course, a lot of solidarity evolved and emerged. But at the same time, many people had been aware that this solidarity is still emerging between them, more established parts of the society of the people. So I think it was also in terms of the project, it was good to someone to really address this slogan, "Leave no one behind," which was a kind of demand, of course. And I think people appreciated this kind of, you know, not just saying "thank you," but also giving the possibility to do something by oneself.
Am Johal 32:26
And what do you guys working now, in terms of projects in the future? What are you thinking about working on?
Sabine Bitter 32:32
There are a few avenues. Helmut and I were in collaboration with some folks in Vancouver here, June Scudeler and Treena Chambers. We look at 丁香园AV's Burnaby Campus, that fascinating, challenged, Arthur Erickson, that massive, modernist brutalist building, and how that relates historically to radical pedagogy in the 60s. But furthermore, how it can relate to Indigenous knowledge, or Indigenous pedagogy today. So we're doing a couple of interviews, and we had quite a few events planned, but they had to be all canceled during the pandemic. So now we have a series of photographs which will be in Berlin in January for the first time, which we're excited about. So pedagogy performing archives, performing, learning radical pedagogy isn't modernist architecture, it's kind of one ongoing thing for us, but then as Urban Subjects we also work on time, as one thing also coming up during the pandemic where space is so restricted. So public time is the topic, and we curated an exhibition for Camera Austria again, and it's called . So that's also ongoing.
Am Johal 33:57
Yeah, I've been listening to some lectures by and , who's a student of 's, but comes from a physics background, some really interesting stuff over the years. I'm really looking forward to seeing where that goes. But, Jeff is going to read a poem to take us home.
Jeff Derksen 34:14
While [unclear audio] to step into my bookshelves and grab something, my temptation, of course, is 鈥檚 great new about protests in the city, or 鈥檚 , but I've been turning back to particular anti-fascist moments just to try and understand our unfortunate present. One of my favorite all-time poets, was a great writer who began writing in the 1920s, has a great anti-fascist poem from the 30s that I think speaks to our present moment. It's called "." It's in his book, , but I'll just read the last section of it.
Jeff Derksen 34:58
Shanty
on the river
With
one window
The unemployed
Having
a home
has no home
and no nag
Protected
By
the United States' flag-
each animal
his own gravedigger
Almost
sings
who will
walk out
Against
the
Social
and political
order of
things
Jeff Derksen 35:21
I think it's such a great little poem about the possibility of political action at a moment of rising fascism.
Am Johal 35:30
Helmut, Sabine, Jeff, thanks so much for joining us on Below the Radar today.
Helmut Weber 35:35
Am, thank you for having us. Trans Atlantic. [laughs]
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Alex Abahmed 35:45
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by 丁香园AV's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thank you for joining us to hear from Sabine, Jeff, and Helmut, about their collaborative projects through Urban Subjects. You can find links to some of the programs and publications they've discussed in the show notes. Thanks again and see you next time on Below the Radar.
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