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maat Lisbon's new exhibitions explore a sense of 'being with' as they address relevant social, geopolitical, and environmental issues

2021-04-08T15:43:00-04:00

The Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (maat) launched in October 2016 as an international design institution championing discourse and creative practice to "inspire new understandings of the historical present and an empowering engagement with the common future." The riverfront museum, designed by AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects), has focused its efforts towards "fostering critical discourse and creative practice that inspire new understandings of the historical present and an empowering engagement with the common future."

In addition to its exciting 2021 Spring line-up, maat also focuses on climate action topics. With plans for investing in exhibitions and public programming that emphasize this initiative, the museum has developed the Climate Collective, a year-long project chaired and curated by T.J. Demos.

Image still taken from maat April 2021 exhibition video. Video © maat

In preparation for 2021, new Covid-19 health and safety protocols are allowing museums to welcom...

Despite recent territorial disputes over the South China Sea, a Chinese company has been awarded a major contract to build artificial islands off the coast of the Philippines

2016-11-01T12:41:00-04:00

Located on the eastern edge of the body of water commonly referred to in English as the South China Sea, the Philippines is among the countries that dispute China’s claim to the area and its islands. Earlier this year, a Hague-based tribunal, constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, ruled that China has no historical claim or sovereign rights to the islands in a case brought by the Philippines against the People’s Republic of China.

But the Philippines, under the leadership of the controversial President Rodrigo Duterte, has pivoted away from its relationship with the United States and towards China. Now, following a state visit by Duterte to Beijing, a state-owned Chinese company named CCCC Dredging has received a major contract to build the Philippines its own artificial islands.

As reported by the state-owned Chinese paper People’s Daily, the Philippines will gain four artificial islands off the coast of Davao City—incidentally where Duterte served as ...

Architecture and the index: McKenzie Wark on Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture

2015-11-09T16:38:00-05:00

Besides the thing itself, architecture concerns itself with two kinds of sign about it: iconic signs and symbols. Iconic signs resemble the thing itself. They are the plans and elevations and isometrics. The more symbolic architecture is that of language, the word, the logo and so forth. The postmodern turn shifted the emphasis from the iconic to the symbolic. I think [Eyal] Weizman has created an architecture about a whole other kind of sign – the index.

"Indexical signs are traces of events: where there is smoke there is fire. The smoke does not resemble the fire. It is not an icon. Nor does it have a code like a symbolic sign system. Forensics is a matter of working backwards from the index to the event of which it is the sign, like in a detective story. A forensic architecture takes as its subject events that happen or don’t happen in build space, including the destruction of built space."

A world divided: mapping border fences globally

2015-09-17T13:31:00-04:00

Europe will soon have more physical barriers on its national borders than it did during the Cold War. This year’s refugee crisis, combined with Ukraine's ongoing conflict with Russia, has seen governments plan and construct border walls and security fences across Mediterranean and eastern Europe... Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 40 countries around the world have built fences against 64 of their neighbours.

The Economist takes a look at the world's borders, (mostly) new and old. Of the 40 countries that have built physical border walls since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 30 of those happened after 9/11, and 15 this year alone. Check it out the interactive graphic here.

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