2016
Concept, Issue Editor: Christie Pearson
Co-editor: Nasrin Himada
Scapegoat journal is free to read and order here.
This issue of Scapegoat investigates EROS as a political, economic and social force in the production of architecture and landscape, and in resistance to the destructive forces that surround us. The erotic principle may be useful in bringing our desire for material and social transformation into actuality. We question our investiture in politics as emancipatory field of action as we witness the powerlessness of political process and political figures in the face of global corporate capitalism’s hegemony. One possibility is to reconnect ourselves and the political process to power, and reactivate the erotic energies of solidarity.
Following EROS’s arrows our contributors leap beyond the limits, demarcating territories where we find new imaginaries for the revolution with dancing, the revolution that would produce architectures of jouissance. They move between boudoirs and bunk beds, pools and rivers, microorganisms and moraines, economies of gift and of debt. Critical of identity and the mathematics of the pleasure principle, here emerge complex and multiple bindings of love, power, and loss in the erotics of the world we are coming to know. The sections of this issue sketch possible architectures by exploring intersections of erotic power and the fields of action they imply. Within design practice, we can recognize both the creative and the destructive aspects of Eros in our relationships with collaborators; the bond we have with so-called materials; the dynamic connections that support the work we do at the micro and macro scales; and attraction and desire as powerful forces that enrich ourselves and our creations.
With contributions from Adam SZYMANSKI, Alberto PEREZ-GOMEZ, Alexis BHAGAT, Alexis MITCHELL, Angela RAWLINGS, Anne TROUTMAN, ANTENA, Basel ABBAS + Ruanne ABOU-RAHME, Cameron HU, Chrysanne STATHACOS, David K SEITZ, Douglas KEARNEY, Eunsong KIM, Franco BERARDI, Irmgaard EMMELHAINZ , Jacob WREN, Jen HOFER, Justin LINDS, Laura BROADBENT and Lisa ROBERTSON, Marcus BOON and Alphonso LINGIS, Maria COLLIER DE MENDONCA, Izabel AMARAL and Fabio MOSANER, Maiko TANAKA, Nathan FRIEDMAN, Peter LAMBORN WILSON,, Robert PIETRUSKO, Sardar SAADI, Sherry WALCHUK, Sudhatri MURTHY, Valerie MANNAERTS, and Vincent MORACCHINI.