Evoking to rethink the modern aesthetic of bags one can trace back to the beginnings. Regarding to two richly illustrated catalogues TASCHEN is a substantial source of inspiration for potential possibilities of usage and design. The archeology of the bag examines all the roots of modern handbags no matter if it is the handle-purse of Maximilian I. Joseph the King of Bavaria or Chanel’s 2:55. “When I was tired of carrying my bag in hand, and losing it again, I mounted a strap … and since I wore it as a shoulder bag” once she said. Creative approaches arise through necessity. Accordingly the genealogy of the bag teaches us – aesthetic appeal is inevitable, but handiness and convenience are immanent.

And when we’re about to reach our aim
Like in a never-ending chain
At the end of a long queue
We see the beginning of a new

Is there a stone we have to carry?
Why is our life so arbitrary?
Look inside us, in disguise
Lies a faulty compromise

A compromise between young and old
Between our dreams and what we’re told
Between expectations, norms and visions
We make ‘individual’ decisions

But once, in a silent, thoughtful hour
We dare to look out of our Ivory Tower
Forget the train, the queue, the fuss
And with some luck, we might find us

Anonymous

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Having originated in the early ’80s in the American city of Chicago, house music first appealed to those who did not fit into the mainstream society, relaying amongst those who were considered to be the outcasts. The godfather of house music, Frankie Knuckles, pivotal in developing and popularizing house music in the ’80/’90s, once said house is like “church for people who have fallen from grace.”

Over two decades have passed and now in the age of flourishing Western electronic music scene, it might be surprising for one to learn that the country with the world’s biggest house music market per capita is South Africa. The term ‘House Nation’ could have been coined specifically for South Africa, where house music has played an integral role in the country’s cultural history in the period of the post-Apartheid reconciliation.

The birthplace of house music in South Africa is considered to be Pretoria, which then dispersed to Johannesburg where it was slowed down and merged with local elements to shape kwaito. While slow tempo kwaito was the music ascribed to the generation that came at the end of the Apartheid regime, South African house of today has fetched the beats right back up to become more in accord with the increasingly “globalized” South Africans.

Although often referred as Afro House, South African house is idiosyncratic. South African DJs took what they have learnt from kwaito and applied it to house, adding elements from the lived reality of South Africans.  Knotted with the elements of the South African identity, South African house was meant to stand out from European or American house by presence of lyrics in one of the local languages, samples from the traditional instruments, or heavier basslines.

Many perceive house as mere dance-oriented music assigning it an apolitical character. While in some cases it might hold true, it is important to keep in mind that a refusal to deal with the contemporary politics is a political statement of itself that denounces the status quo. It does so by the means of escapism of the given reality and recreation that looks toward the future rather than the past. One could argue that the stance of house music is more of anti-political than apolitical for it represents the negation of politics, thus disengaging from the long years of oppression and disempowerment and celebrating freedom.

In South African house, the essence is not in the poetics of the lyrics. The beauty of it lies in the instrumental arrangement and its composition. The post-Apartheid oppression is not to be forgotten. The poetry innate to South African house turns to better times — to hope, to cultural integrity, and to dreams come true. Through music, South African artists join to create a realm where the struggle no longer exists.

South African House Music Mix

Sevara Pan

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I was brought to the dance school prior discovering trails of formal education.  And I fell in love.  Having started off with classical ballet, I evolved into a contemporary dancer until I realized what it truly meant to me.

It was during my teenage years when I discovered street dance, more formally known as vernacular dance. Vernacular dance  was born  outside of  dance studios  in any available  open space, such as  streets,  parks,  school  yards, and  raves. Claiming that any movement was dance and any person was a dancer, it was a silent protest against the legacy of “high-art”. In fact, street dance pioneers  rarely had professional degrees in dance, thus distinguishing street dance from other modern dance forms.

Often improvisational and social in nature, vernacular dance  encourages interaction and contact with others. Be it at a New York hip-hop block party or in the urban Berlin nightclub of finest techno, it is part of the vernacular youth culture and a form of the ultimate connection that brings people together by means of music.

Emerging in a social environment, vernacular dance, however, falls under the rule of “Chinese whispers”, thus encouraging expression of an individual self. The effect is that one cannot perform an absolute copy of someone else’s dance move. Hence, it boosts creativity inciting to come up with a unique style or an entirely new move.

Lost in the world of music, a dancer finds not only a unique style, but his own self breaking away from the system and the invisible cage of the modern society. In this liberating process, one momentarily escapes and deconstructs the present reality. Blown-out, somewhere between highs and lows deep within the soundscape, a dancer discovers himself in accord with the mind.

For dancing is his freedom, his jouissance, his nirvana.

Sevara Pan

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Quad, lacking words, lacking voice, is a quadrilateral, a square. While it is perfectly determined, possessing certain dimensions, it has no other determinations than its formal singularities, equidistant vertices and center, no other contents or occupants than the four similar protagonists who traverse it ceaselessly. It is a closed, globally defined, any-space-whatever.
Even the protagonists, who are short, slight, and asexual, and wear long gowns with cowls, have nothing to individualize them but the fact that each departs from a vertex as from a cardinal point, any-protagonists-whatever who traverse the square, each following a given course and direction. You can always cause them to affect a distinguishing light, color, sound, or sound of footsteps. But this is a means of recognizing them; in themselves they are only spatially determined, in themselves they are affected by nothing other than their order and position. These are unaffected protagonists in an unaffectable space.
Quad is a refrain that is essentially propulsive, with the shuffling of slippers for music-like the sound of rats. The form of the refrain is the series, which is no longer concerned here with objects to be combined, but solely with objectless journey. The series has an order, according to which it waxes and wanes, waxes again and wanes again, following the appearance and disappearance of the protagonists at the four corners of the square: it is a [musical] canon.
It has a continuous course following the succession of segments traversed: side, diagonal, side … etc. It has an ensemble that Beckett describes as follows: “Four possible solos all given. Six possible duos all given (two twice). Four possible trios all given twice” (Quad 451-452); a quartet four times. The order, the course, and the ensemble, render the movement all the more inexorable in that it is without object, like a conveyor belt that makes moving objects appear and disappear.
Beckett’s text is perfectly clear: it is concerned with exhausting space. There’s no doubt that the protagonists tire themselves out and will drag their steps more and more. But tiredness is a minor aspect of the enterprise, which concerns the number of times a possible combination is realized (for example, two of the duos are realized twice, the four trios twice, the quartet four times). The protagonists tire according to the number of realizations. But the possible is accomplished independently of this number, by the exhausted protagonists who exhaust it.
The problem is this: in relation to what can exhaustion (which is not the same as tiredness) define itself? The protagonists realize and tire at the four corners of the square, along the sides, and the diagonals. But they accomplish and exhaust at the center of the square, where the diagonals cross. That, one might say, is where the potentiality of the square lies. Potentiality is a double possibility. It is the possibility that an event that is itself possible is realized in the space under consideration. The possibility that something realizes itself and the possibility that some place realizes it. The potentiality of the square is the possibility that the four moving bodies that inhabit it will collide-two, three or four of them-following the order and the course of the series.
The center is precisely that place where they might come together; and their meeting, their collision, is not an event among others, but the only possibility of event-the potentiality of the corresponding space. To exhaust space is to extenuate its potentiality through rendering any meeting impossible. The solution to the problem from now on is found in this nimble central disconnecting, this sway of the hips, this swerving aside, this hiatus, this punctuation, this syncope, rapid sidestep or little jump that foresees the coming together and averts it.
Repetition takes away nothing of the decisive, absolute character of such a gesture. The bodies avoid each other respectively, but they avoid the center absolutely. They sidestep together at the center to avoid each other, but each also sidesteps in solitude to avoid the center. It is the space that is depotentialized, “track.. . . Just wide enough for one. On it no two ever meet” (Closed Space, 199- 200).
Quad is close to a ballet. The general similarities between the work of Beckett and modern ballet are numerous: the abandonment of all privileging of vertical stature; the agglutination of bodies as a means of keeping upright; the substitution of any-space-whatever for designated areas; the substitution of a “gestus” as a logic of postures and positions for all story or narrative; the quest for a minimalism; the appropriation by dance of walking and its accidents; the acquisition of gestural dissonances…. It is not surprising that Beckett requests that the walkers of Quad have “some ballet training.” It is needed not only for the walking but the hiatus, the punctuation, the dissonance.
It is also close to a musical work. A work by Beethoven, “Ghost Trio” appears in another piece for television by Beckett and gives it its title. The second movement of the Trio, which Beckett uses, assists us in the composition, decomposition and recomposition of a theme of two motifs, of two refrains. It is like the increase and decrease of a more or less dense compound along melodic and harmonic lines, its aural surface traversed by a continual, obsessive, obsessional, movement. But there is an altogether different thing as well: a sort of central erosion that first arises as a threat among the bass and is expressed in the trill or wavering of the piano, as if one were about to abandon the key for another or for nothing, tearing the surface, plunging into a ghostly dimension where the dissonances would come only to punctuate the silence. And Beckett underlines just this each time he speaks of Beethoven: a previously unheard-of art of dissonances, a wavering, a hiatus, “a punctuation of dehiscence,” a stress given by what opens, slips away, is swallowed, a gap that punctuates nothing other than the silence of the latest ending. But, if the Trio effectively displays these traits, why was it not used to accompany Quad, to which it is so well suited? Why is it used to punctuate another piece? Perhaps because there is no need for Quad to illustrate a music which, in developing differently its ghostly dimension, has a role elsewhere.

(Analysis by Gilles Deleuze. Excerpt from The Exhausted)

Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho was born on December 15th, 1907 in Rio de Janeiro. He was well known as a pioneering figure of modern Brazilian Architecture. Last night the world not only lost an important architect but also an intellectual and a visionary. He became world-renowned for his work on the newly planned Brazilian capital Brasília.

The construction of Brasília began on October 22nd, 1956. Already after 10 days the first provisional presidential palace has been completed. Till today it is known as the first building of Brasília. Many workers were fascinated by the idea of a completely new and modern city, with the result that they came to the newly planned city and worked there up to fifteen hours a day. The construction of the city has been almost finished in four years after the beginning.

The most famous building in Brasília and probably of Niemeyer’s portfolio in general is the Catedral Metropolitana Nossa Senhora Aparecida, a catholic church in the centre of the city. The building has a diameter of 70 metres and is solely made out of concrete and glass.

Sixteen pointed concrete columns cause the hyperbolic form of the building, which is still very distinct compared to the cubic constructions of the rest of the city. The symbolism of the church could be interpreted as Jesus’ crown of thorns, praying hands or a heavenward flower.

Today Brasília can be seen as a paradoxical blend of impressive but also unrealistically planned architecture. For tourists the city remains still rather inaccessible. The city has almost no sidewalks or street-crossings. To get somewhere without a car is almost impossible, but even the taxi drivers speak almost no English. Still there are some upward trends. The income rates per capita are the highest in the country. There are a lot of cultural events going on besides all the malls, bars, clubs and pubs you can find. From a modern architectural perspective Brasília can be seen as one of the most important and interesting cities in the world.

Niemeyer was not only an extraordinary architect but also an exceptional individual. The era Niemeyer was double-edged as life is itself. His architectural work was focussed often more on aesthetics than on utilitarian principles. This brought him a lot of accusations by colleagues. Some blamed him to be a creator of “soulless and communist” architecture.

Though, his examination of new aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was very important for the architecture of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He achieved his aims being a man of work and revolutionising architecture, urban planning and design. Recognised and criticised as the “Sculptor of Monuments”, Niemeyer was praised for being a great artist and one of the great architects by fellow planners like Le Corbusier, with whom among others he designed the UN headquarter building in New York.

The Tate appears with it’s monolithic defunct chimney and you enter. The paintings are all the same still, yet this time though you realize things in them you didn’t know you’d been capable of seeing before. The last time you were here you saw the undertones you now are awash in viewing. A layer has been thinly scalped away by the cool surgeon of experience. Below the layer—seen yet not, in more of a sensed opacity—the next layer lies in promise of a return visit. So you exit as your powers of appreciation wilt. The men selling peanuts offer the air around them caramelized nostalgia. You cross the footbridge, hook up around St. Paul’s and venture East again to watch the Orwellian brutalist concrete of Barbican give the sliding sky a slow papercut.

Then, South. Called yet again back towards the river. You lose yourself in thought amongst towerblocks. You find the canal, finally, and follow it in a big endless loop. You move through deserted Limehouse where the boats mingle with the sound of traffic reflected from their sullen lagoon. There is no movement but yourself. You stop into a pub along Wapping, heading West again, for some reason, and wait in silence for the hot bark of dropped kitchen plates as your ale is pulled. Eye contact and currency, possibly, interpolate the time between your entrance to the place, sitting, sipping, rising and leaving out yet again.

Night now, or at least dusk. It’s quite difficult to discern. The overground is packed and there are people Dalston-bound and made up for the evening holding bottles of things. Women talk about the nothing-women things that occur on trains when eavesdropping. A few nearby, lurching in scarves, jaunt obscene vowels at nervous eyes bordered in fringe. The game being played involves a marked degree of loquacity. You exit and wonder if volume can measure attraction and wander some more up through Shoreditch or down past deep-fried Whitechapel where invariably a cookie-cutter person in a tracksuit offers to sell you drugs of some kind. You smile and nod past pretending not to hear. You wander towards home, though feel that when you get there it will have felt better to have been out all along. The dough is kneaded and it has begun to drizzle. You’ve forgotten your umbrella, you realize.

Nick Kipley, London