Design Research Projects (DRPs)
Liberland Micro Nation
- Competition Finalist Scheme
Land is an essential part of a state; every state takes form on the ground by taking it and turning it into its land. State is an institution of social service, climax of society, or (in)efficient agent of social change arrangement against the private sector. State gains its power by politics through a confrontation between the public and labor. Labor is an entity apart from politics. Labor is the reproduction of life and Production is an urban condition, an entity apart from politics and state. Labor power and totality are equal to potential to produce. Labor is not when we sit down and do something, embedded in our living conditions both physical and mental. Labor is the potential of producing subjectivity while state is driven by the power of consumption through exploiting and redistributing the surplus value produced by the labor.
Liberland is a ground apart from the predatory forces of the land of the state and a way of creating a platform for the labor to explore the surplus value; and how this subjectivity can be implied.
“Labor is the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality of human being (karl marx, capital, page270)”
The creation of state happens by gaining physical control over a ground. The state then tries to sustain itself by creating a territory, by creating an ideology to gain the support of the labor with a top-down hierarchical force. The labor force is what sustains the state by production of subjectivity and surplus value, therefore in a long run the state becomes a set of autonomous relationships that feeds itself for the sake of its own survival divorced from any social and production value of its citizen. The production of labor is a way to transform recourses, as production is by exchanging surplus values for products created by others through process of mutual exchange of the standard of living and productivity of all participants’ advance to be able to generate a sense of self-construction in a process of making cultured citizens through equality, liberation and distribution. To the contrary, political means state, instead of adding to production, subtracts from it, the political means is distractive and subtract from natural law of production, its role is to grab goods by use of violence and compulsion. Therefore, state is an organization of political means and a predatory process over a given territory.
Liberland is a way of liberation from this ground by liberation of its labor force. The potential of production goes from individual to the field in between; the surplus value of this potential is placed back into grid and bits of information. Grid here acts as a universal geometry and symbol of democratic equality; an attempt to impose measure for a condition where potential can be deployed within the field. In this filed each individual is autonomous but at the same time part of a system that disturbed the hierarchy to be able to even out its value. Generating a “societal condition” from the abstract forces of the land, state, political and geological information, Liberland project is not starting from tabula rasa but it turns the same syntax into something common as opposed to hierarchical top down system of distribution governed by the capital force; creating a new platform to deploy alternative values and language of monumentality: a condition where the city is able to reach a new interpretation of liberation.
The field condition of this project is not a formal or spatial matrix, but “platial” (place related) and non-Euclidean transforming temporo-spatial substances happing on z-axis of “event horizon.” There is no detachable attributes, but it is the very socio-politico-cultural essence of that, that valorizes its components –considering the fact that there is no predefined cultural or social attributes and properties there yet! The identity of each part determines the field condition, because there is no field other than the aggregated parts: growing. There is no bottom-up or top-down, there is only the emergence; the emergence of the components from the middle! Locality and globality are spreading from the middle; spectators and receptacle in various dimensions, the apex and flux in various directions. In this project the ground is NOT important; the sky is NOT important; what matters is that at any parallax, the contents and backgrounds meet exactly at the same point; happen in here and in there, where the connections, the intervals, the relationships are being defined. The simultaneity of presence leads the interactions. The outer and inner, the “Innerwelt” and “Umwelt” are constantly adjusting each other and rehearsing the performance projected in representation of obsolescence and enhances, from where both efficiency and poesy are fed in balance with retrieves and reverses.
Liberland field condition starts from its middle, growing upward and downward is on pilotis block on the grid, the generic blocks enhance the rhetoric of production. The points of departure create relationship and configuration to each other through a sequence of event. From one block all the way to the city, the project balances itself on a constant relationship to each other from local to the overall form. They are connected to each other in a larger network, individual and collective are held in balance. This balance is always in the state of stress, the grid always wants to grow, holds its density and it can grow upward and downward. The balance effected by the different network of forces that effect field condition locally and effect the overall form. And it is through these relationships that effect emerges from the field itself. Over time each reaction can cause small variation that can affect the universality of its form and balance to generate new form of information through the voids of this in-between conflict. The field is constantly in conflict that can produce new values through the in-between space.
The ground of Liberland remains untouched –in order to avoid reproducing any association with land-; the metropolis, the city and the country are in between elevated from that “land.” The grid contains the form of the city that would not confront under certain circumstances; it becomes an abstract machine for abstract forces within the city. The emptiness of the territory leaves the space for the potential to occur and recreation of the labor and potential within the field condition; this is the Space where the production of value can occurs in between the flow of abstract forces.
Liberland is connected to adjacent city by train and airplane that travels through the grid, this dramatic gesture results in a cloister without a ground and amplifies an external force internally where the difference forces are imprinted on the datum. Vehicle access to the land is prohibited, the vehicle must park underground in order to go up to the city. Liberland creates a new value for Living and working by using urban block, inward block from the datum of the grid, nothing is toward inside or outside, everything manifests “in-betweenity.”
