The Right to the City - Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Philippe Rekacewicz :: October 20, 2008; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: MIT Visual Arts Program, 265 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA (Bldg N51-337, 3rd floor - Adjacent to the MIT Museum - Entrance is on Front Street).

How does a series of anxiety-producing events and incidents play out in urban situations in the course of the perpetration of ‘terror’ that claims not only bodies but biographies as well? Can it be said that the discourse about ‘terrorism’ also makes claims on those same bodies and biographies? How can we read images and media narratives about this topic from the city of Delhi? What is the relationship between cartography and art, between science and politics? How does this influence the use and manipulation of maps as a propaganda tool?

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is a member of Raqs Media Collective and Sarai.net, New Delhi, India, co-curator of manifesta7, Bolzano, Italy. Philippe Rekacewicz is a geographer and cartographer for Le Monde Diplomatique, France.

This is the third in a cross-disciplinary lecture series — This is Tomorrow?: Urban Utopia - Dystopia - Heterotopia — hosted by the MIT Visual Arts Program that includes speakers from art, architecture, urbanism and related research fields from around the world. These speakers will pose questions in order to start a discussion about imagining tomorrow’s urban ‘everyday life’- a topic that calls for a discourse beyond just formal disciplines. The series is free and open to the public.

Series Schedule

October 27: ‘What City? Whose City?’
Regina Bittner, curator and coordinator of the Bauhaus Kolleg at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany; Stefano Boeri, Editor-in-Chief of Abitare, Milan, Italy, teaches at the Milan Polytechnic and is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, USA; Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, curator, Italy and editor of ‘The (Un)Common Place: Art, Public Space and Urban Aesthetics in Europe.’

November 3: ‘Mobile Life, Ghost Towns’
Lukas Feireiss, curator, and editor of ‘Architecture of Change: Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment’; AbdouMaliq Simone, Professor in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmith University of London, UK.

November 17: ‘Remote Habitats’
Lucy Orta, Studio-Orta, Paris, France and Professor for Art, Fashion and the Environment, London College of Fashion, UK; Nicholas Makris Professor of Engineering and Director of the MIT Laboratory of Undersea Remote Sensing; Armin Linke, photographer and film maker, Milan, Italy and guest professor at the HFG Karlruhe, Germany.

Directions: The MIT Visual Arts Program is located adjacent to the MIT Museum. Enter through the grey door on Front Street and take the elevator to the third floor. Exit to your left and go down the ramp. The Joan Jonas Performance Hall is located on the right.

By Public Transportation: Take the Red Line to Central Square. Walk four blocks along Massachusetts Avenue towards Boston and the Charles River, or take the #1 bus to the Front Street stop.