Begin forwarded message:
> From: "Paul D. Miller" <[email protected]>
> Date: Sat Jul 12, 2003 1:08:25 AM US/Eastern
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: <nettime> The Fela Project
> Reply-To: "Paul D. Miller" <[email protected]>
>
> This is a remix of an essay and art piece written/created for the show
> based on
> Fela Anikalupo-Kuti called "Black President - the Legacy of Fela
> Kuti." I took
> several records of Tony Allen - who was Fela's drummer and often
> collaborative
> song-arranger, and did a remix based on an architectural manifesto for
> a new
> Kalakuta Republic - the physical aspects are posters created as street
> advertisements, and the actual sounds of the project were taken from
> various
> samples of Tony Allen's classic records of "Afrobeat" music over the
> last 30
> years - drum solos, horn riffs etc etc all an architecture of sound
> and rhythm.
>
>
> Manifesto for "A Different Utopia: Project for a New Kalakuta Republic
> 2003"
>
> can be found at:
> http://www.djspooky.com/differentutopia.html
>
>
>
> A Different Utopia
> Project for a New Kalakuta Republic 2003
> By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
>
>
> In a world of constant upheaval and continuous transformation,
> sometimes we
> look to music as a way of escaping the problems of the world. Fela did
> the
> opposite: his music was about immersion in the ebb and flow of the
> conflicts
> that described and circumscribed the nation state he inhabited. His
> home was
> Nigeria, a place of so many contradictions and fictions that it might
> as well
> exist as a story, a fable spun from the fevered imagination of a very
> strange
> storyteller. The name "Nigeria" itself is an inheritance from a
> colonial past
> bequeathed to the confused and angry people who found themselves
> confined and
> defined within its borders after the colonial powers decided what
> would be the
> best route to economic balance between Europe and Africa. As a
> country, Nigeria
> and most of the Sub-Saharan continent were created on maps drawn on a
> palindrome of political and economic expedience - all of which did not
> involve
> those who were most relevant to the process: the people who actually
> lived
> there.
>
> "The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is
> completely
> fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.
> The
> Metropolis is an addictive machine, from which there is no escape,
> unless it
> offers that too… Through this pervasiveness, its existence has
> become like
> the Nature it has replaced: taken for granted, almost invisible,
> certainly
> indescribeable…" Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
>
> In the world of post-colonial Africa, what Fela did was foster a unique
> circumstance - he created a utopia. His "Kalakuta Republic" was a way
> of
> producing a space that reflected his desires as an African to build an
> independent cultural zone, a place that literally, following the
> definition of
> the term "utopia" didn't exist. The "Kalakuta Republic" was
> essentially a space
> that reflected his values and needs - something all too rare in the
> post World
> War II African political and cultural landscape. It was an artificial
> place in
> the midst of an artificial situation what could be a better metaphor
> for
> contemporary Africa? Place one mirage in front of another and you get
> a hall of
> mirrors, a place where reality comes only by design, and that's a good
> starting
> point to look at the "Kalakuta Republic" By creating a social space
> bounded by
> and founded on African needs, he had to secede from the imaginary
> space of mass
> culture that was called "Nigeria" to create a new story, a new fiction
> founded
> on music, and culture indigenous to the people who lived there.
> Fictional
> spaces and imaginary cities - new forms demand new functions - that's
> what Fela
> told us with his Shrine Project. The logic of the "Kalakuta Republic"
> flows
> from a twisted cross-roads of modernity on the edge of the
> post-modern: where
> other young countries like Brazil would bring in someone like Oscar
> Niemeyer to
> construct a new capital like Brasilia, or Le Corbusier, at Chandigarh,
> India,
> in the 1950's or the United States with Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 design
> of
> Washington D.C., Nigeria, with Fela, was pressed by so many demands in
> so many
> different directions that his new city had to improvise on the spot in
> response
> to a scenario where, to say the least, the people running the
> government didn't
> want a new more dynamic architecture to represent their "new" nation
> state.
> Unlike the European notion of "Utopia" as a planned and designed
> place of
> Reason and Rationality bequeathed from Thomas Moore, Plato, and
> Francis Bacon.
> Fela's "republic" would be made invi al city blocks. The city Fela
> found
> himself in was a "found-object" to be manipulated and remixed at will,
> and
> essentially, that's what provides the foundation for my investigation
> into his
> concepts of architecture.
>
> The "A Different Utopia" project imagines a remix of the architecture
> of Fela's
> "Kalakuta Republic" along lines imagined by proportion and ratio - it
> poses two
> different cultures in conflict, and like a dj, it asks them to
> understand the
> rhythms of the different cultures that inspired the structures that
> Fela
> engaged. Thesis, Anti-thesis - Synthesis. "A Different Utopia" is a
> dialectical
> triangulation between the forces of modernity and it's fixed forms,
> and the
> fluid dynamic needs of a critique of post-colonial reason and
> rationality. The
> original "Kalakuta Republic" attempted to secede from Nigeria several
> times,
> and in this day and age when artists like C.M. Von Hausswolf
> arbitrarily create
> nation states with their own passports, and artists collectives
> routinely
> create collective fictions of nation-states, like , well, all I can
> say is that
> art-history has caught up to people like Fela. The philosopher
> Santayana said
> in his 1905, "The Life Of Reason" collection of essays and
> observations: "Those
> who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." A "Different
> Utopia"
> is meant to highlight the linkages between the urge to create your own
> space
> and the world context of living in a highly regulated contemporary
> information
> culture. What happens when you can access different versions of the
> past, and
> sample them? What happens when the culture you live in is dispersed
> throughout
> the globe and you are left to play with the fragments? That's what
> this project
> is about. Diaspora and convergence, reality in the 21st century as a
> nomadic
> flux based on the dynamic interaction of many cultures in the same
> space -
> living, working, and breathing at the same time. Different kinds of
> reason
> imply different modes of thinking about how to exist in an environment
> that
> denies you any and all aspects of "subjectivity." After all ‚ that's
> what
> nation states are about: there are subjects, and there are rulers.
> What I
> propose in "Different Utopia" is a landscape based on Plato's
> "Republic" the
> text is remixed and reconfigure eems, and we're left to our own
> devices to actually engage the songs of freedom that Fela made room
> for in a
> post , and now , neo-colonial world
>
>
> utopia U*to"pi*a, n. [NL., fr. Gr. not + ? a place.] 1. An imaginary
> island,
> represented by Sir Thomas More, in a work called Utopia, as enjoying
> the
> greatest perfection in politics, laws, and the like. See Utopia, in the
> Dictionary of Noted Names in Fiction. 2. Hence, any place or state of
> ideal
> perfection. Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1996,
> 1998
> MICRA, Inc.
>
> It was in 1985 that Fela created his "Kalakuta Republic" in which he
> essentially christened an autonomous zone where the rule of law in
> Nigeria was
> left at it borders. In essence, what he did was take his idea of a
> nightclub
> and turn it upside down and inside out - there was no invocation of
> pleasure in
> his declaration of independence. As always, Fela was a trickster, and
> even in
> the case of attempting to set up a new country that comprised only
> several city
> blocks, he thought of creating a new relationship between himself,
> language and
> the way he lived in a world governed by rules he felt did not apply to
> him. He
> needed a term to describe the thought process of living in a
> post-colonial
> mentality, and that's what the Shrine and the Republic were about: "It
> was when
> I was in a police cell at the C.I.D. (Central Intelligence Division)
> headquarters in Lagos; the cell I was in was named "The Kalakuta
> Republic" by
> the prisoners. I found out when I went to East Africa that "Kalakuta"
> is a
> Swahili word that means "rascal." So, if rascality is going to get us
> what we
> want, we will use it; because we are dealing with corrupt people, we
> have to be
> rascally with them."
>
> In Platos "Republic" all aspects of living in the Utopian City are
> governed by
> rules of proportion and ratio (ratio, of course, being the root word of
> "rationality" and the psychological impact of the arts, and
> contemplation of
> forms that are both visible and intelligible - it's the same myth that
> drove
> the making of the film "The Matrix" but its a story that was told
> several
> thousand years ago: shadow and act, phantom and fiction ‚Ai the
> future
> "Republic" in Plato's story would be governed by people who had seen
> past the shadows of an illusion and tried to bring light to people
> whose
> imaginations had been chained. Fela publicized in some of the flyers
> for the
> "New Afrika Shrine" Republic something similar to the "Republic" that
> Plato had
> said so long ago in his "myth of the cave" (Book VII) of the
> "Republic" "When
> ruling becomes a thing fought over, such a war - a domestic war, one
> within the
> family - destroys these men themselves and the rest of the family.
> pp199
>
> It's this kind of internecine conflict that led to the destruction of
> Fela's
> compound, and in a way, the digital reconstruction of it that takes
> place in my
> project is a blue-print for a different rhythm, a different ratio - a
> different
> drummer. The "Kalakuta Republic" I imagine is one of pan-humanism
> based on a
> universal architecture of networks and correspondences, it is an
> environment
> based transactions placed in a web of coded languages and vernacular
> systems.
> In our information based economy, we inhabit a world where the
> structures we
> inhabit reflect our desires in so many ways - they are flexible,
> modular, and
> above all else - transitory. Goethe and Schelling said so long ago
> "architecture is nothing but frozen music." "A Different Utopia"
> inverts the
> question and asks: what happens when you dethaw the process? It's a
> project
> based on Tony Allen's 1979 record "No Accommodation for Lagos" and
> incorporates
> the afro-rhythms he used for that project to create a map/blueprint of
> an
> "imaginary city" based on the proportions of beats and pulses that the
> artist
> Ghariokwu Osunlila (who designed many of the covers for Fela and Tony
> Allen's
> Afrika 70 collaborations) would imagine - a cartoon universe where
> sounds of an
> imaginary landscape built of ratio and proportion defined the record
> cover
> sleeves to reflect the same concerns George Clinton and Pedro Mayer
> (the artist
> who designed many of the Funkadelic record cover sleeves) an
> Afro-Futurist
> landscape of sonic fiction made to be more real than the "real" that
> the
> musicians invoked with their sounds. As Fela wrote in an advertisement
> in the
> magazine "Punch" in 1979, the Shrine was meant to be a place of new
> values:
> "After a long battle with the authority, we are staging a big comeback
> at the
> new Afrika Shrine… We want the authority, the news media, the public
> and
> everybody concerned to know that Afrika Shrine is NOT A NIGHTCLUB -
> it is a
> place where we can worship the gods of our ancestors."
>
> He went on to blur the lines between Church and Shrine with a 7 point
> description:
>
> a) The Church is an ideological centre for the spreading of European
> and
> American cultural and political awareness
> The Shrine is an ideological centre for the spreading of Afrikan
> cultural and
> political awareness.
>
> b) The Church is a place where songs are rendered for worship. The
> Shrine is a
> place where songs are rendered for worship.
>
> c) The Church is a place where they collect money. The Shrine is a
> place where
> we collect money.d) The Church is a place where they drink while
> worshipping
> ("holy communion"). The Shrine is a place where we drink
> while worshipping.
>
> e) The Church is a place where they smoke during worship (burning of
> incense).
> The Shrine is a place where we smoke during worship.
>
> f) The Church is a place where they dress the way they like for
> worship. The
> Shrine is a place where we dress the way we like for worship.
>
> g) The Church is a place where they practice foreign religion. The
> Shrine is a
> place where we practice Afrikan religion.
>
> Another quotation: "And finally, in the very last episode, the Tower
> of Babel
> suddenly appears and some strongmen actually finish it under a new
> song of
> hope, and as they complete the top, the Ruler (of the Olympus,
> probably) runs
> off making a fool of himself while Mankind, suddenly understanding
> everything,
> finally takes its rightful place and right away begins its new life
> with new
> insights into everything…" Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons
>
> In the here and now, "A Different Utopia" is a bridge between
> the visions of reason that held together Europe and Africa, the U.S.
> and
> Nigeria ‚Ai and proposes a philosophy of rhythm. The text becomes
> shareware. The beats and pulses, bass-lines and sounds, they are
> threads of a
> sonic tapestry woven out of desire and dreams. They are vanishing
> points on the
> landscape of the imagination - that's to say that they're points
> alright, but
> they punctuate a different architectural syntax, a place that Rem
> Koolhas would
> call the "culture of congestion" or that Tony Allen would simply call
> "No
> Accommodation." Here, the soundlines and vectors of an invisible social
> sculpture become indexical - they're signifiers of meaning at the edge
> of
> understanding. Ratio and rationality, rhyme and reason ‚ these get
> remixed
> again and again. In a "Different Utopia" the Santayana phrase becomes
> a new
> axiom: those who do not understand history remix it to create their
> own.
>
>
> =======================================================================
> =====
> "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they
> are
> free…." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
>
>
> Port:status>OPEN
> wildstyle access: www.djspooky.com
>
> Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
>
> Office Mailing Address:
>
> Subliminal Kid Inc.
> 101 W. 23rd St. #2463
> New York, NY 10011
>
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