Farsi/English magazine for art and culture
Pages 5, On the Verge of Vertigo, August 2006
CONTRIBUTORS
Marius Babias, Dan Perjovschi, Kianoosh Vahabi, Omid Mehregan, Sven Augustijnen, Alireza Rasoulinezhad & Shadmehr Rastin, Irit Rogoff, Igor Dobricic, Wietske Maas, Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen, Mohammadreza Haeri, Majeed, Eslami, Saed Meshky
INTRODUCTION
Editorial 1
To be on the verge of something is to be at a place where something is about to begin and something else is about to end. When we experience the whirling sensation of vertigo we lose our balance. On the verge of vertigo, we nearly lose our equilibrium. The temptation of whirling brings us close to this loss, and yet it doesn’t bring us quite there. On the verge of vertigo, you sense stability and imbalance at the same time, and yet you have neither of them. What if this becomes the way we live our lives, an ambivalence in which culture is practiced and identity produced?
Editorial 2
Is it possible to talk of instances of disassociation, or even a kind of misidentification in regard to cultural identity? If we take cultural identity to be in the realm of the collective, both in the social and historical sphere, and on the level of the individual, as a process of subject formation – conflicts between the two may occur in a particular place. This condition provides the context for instances of cultural disassociation and misidentification by which pervading definition of cultural identity is put into question. Often it is in the wake of such conflictual instances that most misplaced representations of identity are produced.
The desire for stability in cultural identity is sustained on the basis of renunciation and repudiation – if not condemnation – of the (imbalanced) ‘other’ of this identity. Of course that which constitutes this desire, namely the repudiated ‘other’, has to be repeatedly invented if the desire is to be sustained.
It is at times of crisis that identity becomes an issue and is politicized. Heightened and exaggerated identifications are devised in opposition to the re-emerging of what was initially repudiated. And what re-emerges is even more hyperbolic in its identity and cultural representation. The final scene is of overwhelming contradictions, and at times violent collisions.
Editorial 3
The sensation of being on the verge of vertigo is that of the ambivalence of being in a world and dissociated from it. And yet this ambivalence engenders practices of subjectivization outside available (or at times enforced) cultural identifications.
CONTENTS
Editorial 1,2,3
Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi
Cultural Ruptures and Promises of Architectural Education in Iran
Kianoosh Vahabi
Drawings
Dan Perjovschi
Almostreal…
Igor Dobricic, Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen, Wietske Maas
The Baron’ s Palace
Sven Augustijnen
Traffic and the Ghost of Law
Omid Mehregan
Self- Colonisation (Dan Perjovschi and His Critique of the Post- Communist Restructuring of Identity)
Marius Babias
Other Publications
Mohammadreza Haeri,Majeed Eslami, Saed Meshky
“ I was Happy When I was a Virgin†(Küba as a mode of de- regulated Experience)
Irit Rogoff
External Conversations
Alireza Rasoulinezhad & Shadmehr Rastin
Laceration of the Symbolic Skin
Omid Mehregan
Cultural Identity or National Modernism?