James Enos presents Excavating Citizenship

Excavating Citizenship – Lessons from the edge of centristic narratives…

The “work” is meant to provoke political dialogues exposing the structure and composition of social-space as it is mediated by technocracy and resultant physical infrastructures. Much of the effort here lies in participating w/ collective resources and performing pedagogical undertakings that are willing to reframe the prescriptive
constitution of existing cartographies as well as their governing power structures e.g. historically clumsy patterns of land-use, developmental logics, and stale entitlements held afloat tangentially to such newly forming urban-mythologies throughout North America. Additionally, we are laboring to develop appropriate modes of representation and the rhetoric capable of scaffolding multiple voices from often discrete and polemic referents- civility, subjectivity, history, memory, and so on… The intent is to cultivate an understanding of urban centers and our everyday acts of citizenship w/in them; as non-isotropic, non-Euclidean relational spaces where inherently public and counter-public flows are privileged didactically over enumerations or configurations of absolute positions. Consequently, our subject matter addresses the fluidity of transnational human geography and the late capital spatial subjection of radical local effects, which precipitously yields repetitive cultural crisis. All in all, the images, objects, issues, and architectures labor to awake urgency to reform, abandon, or to cooperatively author contemporary institutions with definitive terms of non-aggression… To participate in the construction of our own environment this time, and to absorb the latent potential w/in methodologies informed by conceptual and interdisciplinary post-structuralist spatial practices.

Bio:

James Enos is an artist and researcher, formally trained as an architect with a background in computer information systems and manufacturing. His projects are rigorously interdisciplinary; beyond cultural production, the work can be read as quantifiable research within numerous theoretical discourses. The locus of his works traverses the production of theoretical texts, stunningly complex models, and program-generated imagery. While confronting the problematics of quantification, Enos’ work attempts to digest and spatialize the otherwise invisible and enormously complex relationship between subjectivity and the logistical footprint of supply / demand flows. Primarily interrogating the built environment of North American cities, Enos articulates a poignant critique of consumer /client culture and its spatial fallout, and makes a refreshingly critical contribution to a history of theoretical debate on utopianism in architecture. – Charles G. Miller 08’