Beyond the richness of a concept with multi-faceted dimensions and the emptiness of a word used nowadays to mean anything, resilience, when applied to our daily lives, questions the balance between individual acts and collective responsibility. The below work shows the inside room of an Ellis Island dwelling. At D0, windows have been covered with wooden […]
Author: Yky
We don’t need heroes
Were immigrants arriving in Ellis Island resilient? They survived pogroms, misery or starvation. They had to pass through dreadful sanitary checks, could be quarantined and sent back home. Their living conditions were the worst possible we could think of. Though, this was heaven compared to where they were coming from. Could they imagine after nearly […]
Public transport in times of (post) Covid
In April 2020, Jeffrey E. Harris, a professor of Economics at the MIT, published a study placing responsibility for the Covid spread on the NYC subway, said to be “a major disseminator, if not the principal transmission vehicle”(1). Though highly criticized for its questionable methodology, and though there is no evidence of such correlation in […]
Impairment
The below photographic work (*) is the outcome of a stay in Vienna, Austria. At D0, Culture, contaminated by the Covid, is represented by three statues of the Karl-Marx-Hof, “Körperkultur”, “Befreiung” and “Aufklärung”, wearing face masks and standing in front of a homeless, as among the most vulnerable of us. All of them are enchained […]
Urban resilience and Culture in times of Covid
A new paradigm is emerging: the nature and scale of risks are changing. The assumption that past observations may help to better appraise future developments becomes questionable due to an anthropogenic metabolism of systemic risks making obsolete our linear way of thinking (1). The abnormal becomes the new norm, shifting to a deadly scenario of […]
The Sense of Vulnerability
The below work speaks about our illusions of strength and power and at the same time shaping our vulnerability. Framed by the perspective of a Pompeii street, the Atlas statue of The Rockefeller Center, NYC, seen as a metaphor of our dreams to equal Olympian Gods, has been replaced by two iconic pieces which I […]
The Sense of Vulnerability
The Anthropocene awareness and its induced damages strengthen the concept of (urban) resilience, often presented as the new panacea for improving our daily lives. Much has been written on resilience, be it from the engineering or socio-ecological point of view; but the notion of vulnerability, often too quickly seen as the opposite of resilience, is […]
Droughts
Inspired by South African and French artists, William Kentridge and Anne Kolin, the below work speaks about our consumer-capitalistic society and disconnected behaviors, infringing basic human rights. It echoes what sociologist Bauman called the passage from “solid” to “liquid” modernity (10), suggesting an ever evolving society where sustainability and social constructions are undermined. The metaphoric […]
Droughts: the ultimate challenge
More than 800 million people in the world lack basic drinking water. Government budgets may increase; still, the UN 2019 report highlights financial resources as a major constraint to achieve appropriate investments (1). Inevitably, this unacceptable figure questions the scope of institutional statements recognizing “the right to safe and clean drinking water as a human […]
How resilient is cultural heritage?
Far from mass tourism attractions, a narrow cobble-stoned Parisian alley tells us the story of carpenters who came from Holland and Germany during the sixteenth century to settle in the Saint-Antoine district. A hidden pathway possibly witnessing the “raison d’être” of a community: a stamp-varnishing master, a manufacture built in 1886 converted in artists’ studios, […]
