MARCH 1, 2019
Sewall Hall Sculpture Garden, Rice University
6:00-8:30 pm Ethnographic Salon Festivities
This year’s Salon will be an interdisciplinary exploration of SOUND. How is evidence known sonically? What acoustics can we gather new knowledges from? On which sounds, volumes, and frequencies do arguments pivot? The evening will consist of an opening roundtable, then a presentation of 1–3-minute Soundscapes. A closing reception with additional refreshments and music will conclude the night. Dr. Stefan Helmreich and Dr. Marina Peterson join will participate in a roundtable discussion in the evening. Participants of the “Ecopolitics of Concrete Conference” are welcome to join, but are not expected to present any scholarly work.
MARCH 2, 2019
Humanities Building 118, Rice University
8:30 Opening Remarks by Conference Organizers, Kali Rubaii and Allison Turner
Session One: Political Ecology
9:00 Sarah Nichols, Ashes to Dust
From mortar to block to solid to liquid, concrete has been designed into a material without limit. By giving an overview of approximately a century of cement and concrete in Switzerland from the introduction of Portland cement in the mid 19th century to the 1973 oil crisis, this talk will examine the relation between discourse and material development and the tensions that arose between permanence and obsolescence, and scarcity and ubiquity.
9:10 Gebby Keny, Terra in Concrete: the Saemangeum Seawall and its Aftermath
In 2010, South Korea increased its total land mass by .4% with the completion of the world’s largest man-made sea barrier: the Saemangeum Seawall. This immense structure, composed primarily of reinforced concrete and built atop the world’s second largest inter-tidal mudflat habitat, transformed 150 square miles of intertidal mud into “useful,” arable farmland ripe for development. At the event marking the seawall’s completion, then-president Lee Myung-Bak famously espoused, “we are now standing at the scene of a grand structure that will open South Korea’s future.” This paper seeks to open critical questions concerning the kinds of worlds and futures concrete seawalls make possible along South Korea’s coastline as well as those they prohibit. Situated in South Korea, this paper probes the temporal structure of environmental politics as it relates to seawall construction and seeks to inspire alternative conceptualizations of ecological damage, resiliency, and care as it relates to large-scale industrial constructions composed of concrete, situated within damp, intertidal spaces.
9:20 Lupe Flores, Militarized Riverscapes and Labor
Between 2008-2010, environments and ecologies of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas were disturbed through wall-building. After wall-building in the region, sediment extraction through Mexican and Mexican American-controlled machine labor power continues ripping into the rivered environments and ranch communities for development projects across a growing four-county region. With renewed threats from an adamant administration for more wall-building in the Valley, it is useful to think about the ways concrete and other materials, including human and nonhuman movability, become entangled or impeded through development and militarization projects. Using ethnographic observations and insights, this presentation asks, how do iterations of labor, capital, policeability, movability, and containment produce and intersect with an increasingly concretized riverscape?
9:30 Nicholas D’Avella, Concrete is a Compound Material: Displacements and Emplacements
Concrete is the most widely-used building material in the world. But is it one thing or many? A compound material, concrete is formed from a combination of Portland cement and local aggregates (water and stone) typically drawn from a site close to construction. So despite being the most widely-used “material” in the world, concrete is also many materials, both in its compound makeup and the fact that mixes are particular to the place they come from. No concrete is like any other, a difference tied closely to geographic forms of emplacement, the terrains from and on which it builds: granitic sand produces a rougher concrete than that made from riverine sands; concrete’s elasticities depend on the particular particulates that compose it. Concrete thus at once spans the globe, a product of productive displacements, and at the same time is deeply emplaced. This paper thinks from the particularities of concrete as a compound material and suggests ways that anthropology might push concrete’s aggregates beyond even those of water, rock, and cement to further multiply its material manifestations. Doing so displaces major-key materialisms predicated on global forms and, instead, fosters practices of attention that stay with the particular.
9:40 Discussion led by Kali Rubaii
10:00 Cement Mixing Activity led by Jon Chaconas
Session Two: Design Politics
11:00 Mel Ford, Built Place in Floating Space: Voids and Architectural Futures in Guatemala City
Comprising of forty-two percent of Guatemala City, ravines are contentious ecological forms for residents. Local architects in particulate have identified them as sites in need of ecological and developmental attention. Ravines, they argue, are underutilized and contaminated spaces that work against, rather than with, the built environment. Building upon how other scholars have theorized “the void” to contain an aesthetic purpose (Holston 1989) as well as a phenomenological presence (Gordillo 2011), I show how the void is useful in thinking about the spatial criteria necessary for development. In order to be designated as spaces for the built environment, I argue that ravines first needed to be redefined volumetrically—containing voids. This volumetric redefinition of ravines revealed new parameters for thinking where the built environment can reside. In thinking through voids, I offer a new logic to engage the production of place through material, solid, and concrete surroundings.
11:10 Alfonso Rovalo, Exclusive Design: Borders and the Build Environment
Trump’s border wall proposal seems to be symbolic more than anything, considering that most undocumented immigrants do not cross illegally into the US, but simply overstay their visas. However the wall has a clear presence; even metaphysically. The wall puts into question our notion of space, communal or private, and the power of the built environment. This paper is an exploration of architecture influences our behavior and awareness without consent, and what that means in the Anthropocene.
11:20 Laurin Baumgardt, Decoupling Rubble from Ruins
The study of “rubble” has the capacity to alter our common political and analytical grounds. With its semiotic connotations as a broken fragment and as an icon of destruction and decay, rubble rules in its unruliness and unpredictable eventfulness. My aim here is to turn “rubble” into a central lens for studying mediascapes, warscapes, ecoscapes, cityscapes. To what extent can one conceive of “rubble” as more than just a symbol of urban postwar-destruction-scenarios, climate disasters, and apocalyptic/dystopian media fantasies? Phenomenologically put, how does an ecology of rubble inaugurate and invite shifting regimes of attention and perception? What potential does “rubble” acquire in its afterlife as a medium and weapon of “recuperation” (Guyer 2017), “improvisation” (Simone 2019) and protest?
11:30 Discussion led by Allison Turner
12:00 Concrete Setting Activity led by Jon Chaconas
1:00 LUNCH
Session Three: Economic (In)Justice
2:00 Smoki Musaraj, Construction, Corruption, and Concrete: Lamenting Betonizim in Urban Albania
Over the past decade, the discourse of betonizim (concrete-ization)—initially a vernacular lament expressing frustration with the unregulated construction in urban spaces—has become a prime mode of critique of local and national government in Albania. The discourse of betonizim focusses on the material of concrete (beton) to identify and problematize a number of political, economic, and aesthetic wrongs in postsocialist urban development, including private construction and public redevelopment projects. In this paper, I explore, the various and shifting qualisigns—that is, meanings and affects attached to the specific materiality—of concrete (Keane 2003; Fehérvàry 2013) in communist and postsocialist Albania. Further, I take up current laments of betonizim to reflect more broadly on how the material of beton (concrete) and its shifting qualisigns have come to bear upon contemporary public debates about governance, corruption, the environment, and urban aesthetics. As the context of this research is an urban locality marginal to global capital flows and to European Union regional politics, I take these critiques of betonizim as a good site for exploring different narratives about the past and contested imaginaries of the future of Tirana as a postsocialist and European city.
2:10 Jon Chaconas, Skate Parks for Refugees
Since the early 1990's, starting with the Burnside skatepark in Portland, Oregon, skateboarders have been using concrete as a grassroots tool to build community space, adapting techniques from backyard swimming pool construction to develop the art of skatepark building. Skateboarding is a global sport, which often takes place on the street or in skate parks. Thanks in part to social media, skatepark builders eager to work with communities to realize their dream of having a community skatepark, have been raising funds, procuring land from local governments, and organizing teams of volunteers to build the first skateparks in Bolivia, Jordan, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Nepal, Iraq, Palestine, Maldives, and Angola. As part of this movement, and of an organization called Make Life Skate Life, I describe the role of concrete in building this global network.
2:20 Kali Rubaii, The LaFarge Boycotts
During ethnographic fieldwork on militarism in the Middle East, I began investigating LaFarge’s role in the Iraqi concrete industry. LaFarge was one of many companies complicit in environmental, economic, and cultural degradation for Iraqi communities living close to mining and manufacturing locations. When “Make Life Skate Life” proposed to build a skatepark in Suleymania, a city in Northern Iraq that hosted many refugees from communities with whom I worked, the choice of what cement company to use opened up questions about the limits and possibilities of transnational solidarity. To what extent are material politics embedded in networks of trust and goodwill? How are political and ethical decisions made— and by whom— on behalf of local communities embedded in thick, complex relations with and through their material environment? This presentation seeks to engage questions about the central role of corporations even in seemingly de-institutionalized networks like the international skate community.
2:30 Siddharth Menon, From Kuccha to Pucca: Development, Concrete & Gender in Rural India
Rural houses in the Kangra valley of Himachal Pradesh in northern India are undergoing rapid transformation from age-old kuccha ways of building using mud and bamboo to contemporary pucca ways of building using concrete and steel. Is change in building materials understood equally by all community members? When is change in building materials understood as a “gain” rather than a “loss” for rural communities in Kangra? Ethnographic fieldwork in this region using participant observation and focus groups, reveal a unique gendered understanding of transformation in the built environment. Furthermore, there seems to be an uneven spread to the incremental order of change, altering some spaces in the household first and others later. Are all spaces in a house treated equally during this material transformation from kaccha to pucca? What does the materiality of concrete tell us about the gendering of household spaces? In this paper, I analyze the process of transformation in material infrastructure of rural houses in District Kangra, Himachal Pradesh while focusing primarily on the gendered understanding of it. I will argue that the inherent materiality of concrete provides a divergent understanding of development and change in the Kangra valley.
2:40 Discussion led by Allison Turner
Keynote
3:00 Timothy Morton, Overkill
In this lecture, Morton will show how concrete is what Walter Benjamin would call a dialectical image, an entity that at different moments serves oppressive forces (“overkill”—the use of materials that far exceed, in a violent way, their human usefulness), and revolutionary forces (“overkill” in the sense of a thing that shelters humans from being killed).
3:30 Discussion with all participants led by Kali Rubaii
4:30 “The Taste of Cement” film screening
6:00 Walk to Dinner!