"Que viva Mexico!", is the film Eisenstein came to shoot in Mexico, and he would tragically be excluded from editing it. The film's hybrid images depict Mexican life as a simultaneity of past and present. Reminiscent of, and yet surpassing the modern 'primitivist' fascination with the 'archaic', Mexico presented for Eisenstein a tableau of dialectic imagery that allowed him to re-conceptualize the role of modern art and revolutionary cinema in traversing the modern dichotomies of subject and object, rational and irrational, inside and outside, individual and collective, and even death and life. Oksana Bulgakowa is Eisenstein's biographer and, together with Anselm Franke, co-curator of Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings. The lecture has been recorded on April 3, 2009 in MuHKA_media, Antwerp. http://www.extracity.org

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Saturday, January 17th, 2009
Marwan Fayed proposes alternative approaches to conventional urban design practices. In Fayed’s interventions, function is not dictated by design, but rather, is ascribed by city inhabitants who constantly reprogram the use of public space. Based on observations of public behaviour, his site-specific applications lend themselves adaptable to the spontaneity of a constantly mutating landscape.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Mixed-use communities have been a traditional mode of urban habitation. Cairo's historic core is exemplary of such pedestrian environs. In the nineteenth century precincts of the city, people moved on foot, depending sometimes on horses and cattle for the circulation of goods. They resided in buildings that provided space for both domestic life and economic activity. The mixed-use pattern of development declined in Egypt during the mid 1950s in favour of large-scale single-function zoning, reflected in areas such as Medinat Nasr, al Mohandiseen and parts of Giza. Drawn by governmental and industrial job opportunities, people migrated from rural to urban areas. This mass influx of workers created a demand for housing. New single-use urban districts emerged; housing, industrial and governmental complexes separated; and reliance on automobiles and mass transit increased.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The “new development paradigm,” integrating at once technical and human rights criteria, is not very new. The long development of human rights norms pertaining to adequate housing and corresponding state obligations dates back some 40 years. What urban technicians in both private and public sectors may discover as new in those norms is their relevance to project implementation. The housing rights norms in international law have developed over time through a process of trial and error in the field, as well as through jurisprudence. This presentation unpacks these criteria to show how state compliance with current treaty obligations to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to adequate housing, which include the corresponding regulation of private actors and markets, also coincide with both project success and achievement of the relevant Millennium Development Goal No. 7.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Friday, January 16th, 2009
In the nineteenth century, French colonial city planning set up trade and industry ports all over the world. After the Second World War, this expansionist strategy drastically changed and, with liberation struggles against French colonial rule, it finally ended. Establishing a Fordist consumer society in the colonies and in Europe was a major goal of the colonial project, which, as Franz Fanon pointed out, had clear economic incentives. In the 1950s, the French urban planning office in Casablanca started to build scores of affordable housing estates for Moroccans in the frame of a large-scale extension plan for the city. The planning strategies varied from the re-ordering of slum settlements (restructuration), to temporary re-housing of the occupants (relogement), and finally to the creation of new housing estates (habitations à loyer moderé).

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Friday, January 16th, 2009
For the last three decades, Cairo has been a battleground for competing urban orders manifest in incoherent planning policies, and often conflicting practices in public space. This presentation offers a historical perspective to the city’s long urban struggle, situating contemporary conditions within recurrent spatial and discursive paradigms of conflict and reconciliation. Structured around critical junctures, where the sharp juxtapositions of competing urban orders are most apparent, the discussion refers to the palatial Fatimid city, the dual urbanism of the nineteenth century, and the secular modernism of the twentieth.

Kharita 01: Symposium on Urban Trajectories in Cairo
Friday, January 16th, 2009
The process of inhabiting the desert transgresses a fundamental interdiction of settlement. Market expansion and real estate construction has succeeded in invading a void, which had thus far resisted occupation. This achievement is a strong indication of the leverage of private development. Open to the world, the elite can afford to transcend their local boundaries and domesticate this hostile environment. But this privilege is not simply based on material and financial resources. It entails converting to a newer myth: the neoliberal dogma. Abandoning the social diversity of the city, the elite opt for a globalised milieu. The move to gated communities outside the city walls separates the elite from those who lack the means of such mobility. This presentation analyses the articulation between the emergence of new regulations, new narratives and the massive adhesion to the development of a new urban space.

Interview with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet by Rembert Hüser, Robert Bramkamp and Hubertus Müll, november 1988, Münster. The filmmakers talk about the making of "Der Tod des Empedokles", questions of different text editions, the search for film locations, orchestration, usage of language and working with strata and geologie. Production and broadcast: Einer Keiner Hundertausend, Nr. 1. Kulturmagazin der Filmerkstätten NRW / Kanal4.

Conference Verbindingen / Jonctions - 10
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Artist and programmer based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a developer in the spring_alpha and Social Versioning System (SVS) projects. He has helped setup and run a number of hacklab and free media labs in Scotland including the Chateau Institute of Technology (ChIT) and Electron Club, as well as the Glasgow branch of OpenLab. He has written on aspects of Free Software and cultural praxis and has contributed to publications such as Software Studies (MIT Press, 2008), the FLOSS Manuals and Digital Artists Handbook project (GOTO10 and Folly).