ABSTRACT
I frame this chapter by reflecting on the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, New York on September 11th, 2001; and more specifically on their impact on the terms of engagement with power. I begin by asking whether there are continuities in the emergence of a security state, as well as a rupture in the codes of contestation; and end by asking whether there is a possibility for a new understanding of cosmopolis – despite a prevailing mood of crisis management designed to inhibit such aspirations. In a context of contingency and recoding, and keeping in mind the axis introduced in the previous chapter between work which aims to transform the values of those who take part in it, and that which seeks to impact public policy, I look at cases of activism; then at guerrilla and squatter gardening, and uses of cyberspace and robotics for subversive ends. Although the technologies range from the most basic to the most advanced, the cases share an intention to infiltrate the spatial production of the dominant society, so that growing vegetables or launching spoof advertising on the World Wide Web are both forms of subversion. In the chapter’s second section I return to the site of cultural dissemination, the art gallery or museum, to consider the work of Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc˘. This work, however, brings into the spaces of elite culture the images and material reconstructions of modes of dwelling encountered in marginalised situations, such as the squatter camp. By juxtaposing survival architecture in the non-affluent world to the paraphernalia of a survival mind-set in the affluent society Potrc˘ draws attention to the brittle quality of boundaries.
