13. Urban, desert

Urban desert. Urban, desert. A large, empty desert lot at the edge of the city of Ajman. Every urban empty lot in Ajman has desert sand because the city is the desert, the city is overtaking the desert. Even the sidewalks in the fringe areas are sand sidewalks, and the curbs in the streets accumulate the sand blown around by urban desert storms, mini-storms, micro-storms, neighborhood storms that reallocate the urban sand and accumulate it in every crevice to remind us that, after all, the city is still usurping the desert. Ajman, like many other smaller cities in the UAE, is under steady transformation from a desert city to a city built where there was a desert, a peculiar form of artificial urbanity made possible by the abundance of targeted investments, the abundance of manual labor and the abundance of empty desert space. Larger metropolises like Dubai or Abu Dhabi have managed to eliminate (hide) the desert as an urban presence. But in Ajman, the desert is still visible in the amalgam of scattered built episodes (buildings, districts, infrastructure) that so artificially conform the urban landscape in this part of the world. None of the intrinsic qualities of the desert –silence, absence, homogeneity, persistence- is present, in any way, in the city. Only the sand that accumulates everywhere remind us of what this once was.

12. Pockmarks

The first image is an apartment building in the center of Berlin; the second is the Natural History Museum in London. The small round holes on the surface of the Berlin building could be from bullet marks from the Battle of Berlin. The larger, shallower pockmarks on the Natural History Museum are likely from shrapnel, from bombs dropped by German planes. These acts of violence were not planned as form-giving, aside from the perversion of leaving ruins in one’s wake as a sign of victory. They are physical signs of the war, of the irruption of something irrational and destructive. The pockmarks, now, make that original irruption present again and again, not necessarily as reminders (these marks are invisible or meaningless to most people), much less as metaphors, but as indexes. What is the point of asking about the meaning of a scar beyond the feeling of loss and pain, or the memory of pain, or phantom pains? We surely could read meanings into these forms, trying to imagine what it felt like to be in a bomb raid or live in a war-torn city; we could imbue them with logic and rationality by reading their historical origins, forensically as it were. Along these lines, we could be wary of aestheticizing violence by looking at the marks as visually arresting. Yet, for me, what is most poignant about these marks is neither scientific nor symbolic, but sensorial: being struck by their visual and tactile presence. The marks cannot be fully understood, and still embody some of that irrational violence that produced them.

Post by Daniela Sandler

11. But...why?

A relatively new building in Ajman, UAE, that I see every day when I return to my hotel. It resembles Graves’s Portland building and the rest of the post-modern grotesque architectural nonsense. I wonder who decided to paint the plane that way and, if it was about getting the most of a boring façade by means of cheap paint, why not go crazy about it? Why not a super-billboard, or a ten-story high mosaic with the portrait of the Sharjah Sheikh Al Quissimi? Buildings in Sharjah have acceptable prismatic proportions and perforation rhythms, they are usually anonymous except they tend to have a statement of sorts, formal, ornamental or painted like in this case.

As long as it does not come with anything even remotely close to the postmodernist rhetoric…