Hidden

Somewhere hidden under the Liège post are some links to some blog posts via Petrograd collective Chto Delat about the Krimki Forest and the forest fires outside of Moscow - but I should have waited, as the latest issue of their (bilingual) journal is now out, is readable online, is on the subject of Who's City Is This? and is essential reading. Extract, from a storming editorial:

What can we say about a city whose administration is willing to spend millions (while refusing to disclose the exact sum) on an annual, live-televised, open-air mass entertainment for school leavers (an otherwise laudable endeavor), but is unable for three months to remove snow and ice from streets and roofs, leading to the flooding of 31,000 flats, while on the streets hundreds of pedestrians suffered physical injuries? Why is the per-kilometer cost of the city’s first, as yet uncompleted ring road so much higher than similar highway projects in other parts of the world? Should another superhighway (the planned Western High-Speed Diameter) be built along the borders of a nature reserve? Can the city’s ecology sustain 1.7 million automobiles and the 80% of total air pollution they cause? What considerations of efficiency dictated that the world’s once-longest tram network should be partly destroyed to make way for endless traffic jams? (The city had 1022 kilometers of tramlines in 1988, but in 2010 this figure has dropped to 500 kilometers.) What are we to make of a construction boom borne on the backs of rightless, poorly paid migrant laborers, who are also rewarded for their efforts with endless harassment by police and violence at the hands of neo-Nazis? Can most of the city’s extensive inner-city factory spaces be successfully converted into art galleries, wine bars, and loft housing (that is, into a kind of business-class aesthetic nature reserve)? Should all industry be banished to the far suburbs so as not to disturb the idyll of office workers, shoppers, tourists, and affluent art lovers?

Chto Delat are imminently travelling to London and are up to something in the ICA, which I might or might not end up either reviewing or being involved in. Similarly essential viewing: their latest Songspiel, The Tower, on contradictions in the struggle between oligarchs, RMJM and the masses.

In the meantime, this blog will go a bit quiet for a little while as I attempt to break a bout of PhD writer's block. Wish me luck. Or not, if you don't want me eventually flogging my 80,000 words on the political aesthetics of Moscow-Berlin Americanism in the 1920s. Jean-Louis Cohen and Susan Buck-Morss have in a certain sense done this already, but this is different. And none of it - none of it! - has ever appeared on this blog, which perhaps partially explains said block. It just sits in my bookcase, festering.