POLITICS OF FABRICATION I: July 2010

In the last several years, a crisis of capitalist development has redefined our understanding of cities in terms of international policy making, political constituencies and individual and collective political expressions in the urban realm. Inter Unit 8 has been experimenting with possible new scenarios for this political readjustment at a global scale, departing from its most basic expressions in the city. As a result, students have constructed innovative political arguments by experimenting with the relationship between everyday material activities–such as waiting for a bus, dancing, chatting in the streets, or wheeling and dealing in the city squares–and a particular material organization. In these common everyday practices, students have found the materials from which to reconstruct the political experience in the city. Manifested in public and constructed as a physical material expression, these everyday practices acquire a political value — understanding the political as what Hannah Arendt described as action in public — and redefine new models of the interaction between the individual and the collective in the public arena.

1.7.10

Intermediate Unit 8 Selection of Final Portfolios

Congratulations to all Intermediate Unit 8 Students for their amazing portfolios.

Atta, Gary, Karl, Kayvan, Lyza, Maud, Max, Merve, Olivia, Stavros, Uliana and Yong

Our best wishes to Costa Rivetti.