International News Digest
KOOLHAAS DEFENDS CHINA PROJECTS
In an interview with Die Zeit’s Hanno Rauterberg, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas responds to the mounting criticism against Western architects working for China, which has been especially heavy in the light of revelations of the nation’s human rights abuses in Tibet. Most recently, the Vrij Nederland’s Ko Colijn railed against the “Viagra architecture” of star architects like Koolhaas, who is building the massive state-television headquarters, and the Swiss duo Herzog & de Meuron, who designed the stadium for the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing. For Koolhaas, such criticism reflects the media’s tendency toward negative assessments. “The West is critical, always only critical,” Koolhaas told Die Zeit. “We simply must recognize that the rights of the individual have no tradition in China.” The star architect has harsher words about the appellation applied to him and his peers. “Who invented the ‘star architect’? The media, with their grotesque greed for sensationalism and exciting images. Through that, the expectations toward architects have changed in a big way. They are no longer supposed to design well-thought-out, complex buildings; rather, they should deliver landmarks—icons that lend themselves to media marketing.”
DUBAI: NEXT CULTURAL CENTER
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Gerhard Matzig was on hand for the opening of “Dubai Next: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Culture” at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The exhibition, which was opened by His Majesty Sheikh Majid bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, is the result of a collaboration between the Vitra Design Museum and the Dubai Culture and Arts Authority. Curated by Rem Koolhaas and Jack Persekian, the exhibition considers the wider impact of Dubai’s spectacular transformation into a global cultural center with a wide range of attractions, from an opera house designed by Zaha Hadid to the world’s biggest copy of the Eiffel Tower—so big that the copy in Dubai is taller than the original in Paris.
Matzig, who spotted Munich’s Haus der Kunst director Chris Dercon and Swiss architect Pierre de Meuron at the event, notes that Dubai’s ambitious plans can be understood only in the language of superlatives. Matzig is also skeptical about the curators’ claim that Dubai sets the trend for a truly global society, since 80 percent of the residents are foreign guest workers. “World-weary nomads and creative workers find especially splendid working conditions and maybe even something like inspiration,” writes Matzig. “But still only one of every eight residents in Dubai has the right to claim a UAE passport. The situation of foreign workers from Pakistan or India at all of the Dubai construction sites—the ones who are pouring the superlatives into cement—proves to be other than the situation of the European cultural experts.” “Dubai Next. The Face of Twenty-First-Century Culture” continues through September 14.
GERMANY’S CULTURAL HOLDINGS IN ITALY TO BE SEIZED?
The Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Stefan Ulrich and Robert Probst report on a spectacular series of rulings by Italian courts to recompense foreign victims of the Nazi regime. The rulings may see the German state’s cultural institutes in Italy sold off to pay for reparations, including Goethe institutes across Italy and the Villa Vigoni on Comer Lake. The story begins in a Greek court, where the Greek survivors of an SS massacre that took place in 1944 in the village of Distomo fought for the right to collect compensation from Germany, after years of unsuccessful negotiations with the German state. While the Greek court recognized the survivors’ claim, the Greek government didn't reinforce the court's judgment and thus prevented the survivors from collecting compensation from Germany. But under European Union law, such complaints can be heard in another court and in another country. As Ulrich and Probst report, the highest civil rights court in Rome decided that the Greek survivors have the right to collect compensation from Germany. In a subsequent ruling, the Rome judges also decided that the property of the German government in Italy can be seized in order to fulfill the payments to the Greek survivors.
Of course, the Greek survivors of the Distomo massacre are not the only foreign Nazi victims seeking compensation from the German government. As Ulrich and Probst note, the German government could expect similar claims from up to one hundred thousand Italians who were forced to work as slave laborers during the Nazi regime. In effect, the Rome judges have initiated a “revolution” that will allow individual victims to sue nation-states for past crimes. In another article, Ulrich considers the consequences, which promise to go beyond Germany. “If the judgment in Italy is pursued, millions of damage claims could be filed against Germany from countries ravaged by the Nazis,” writes Ulrich. “Innumerable people who suffered under the boots of Il Duce would have to be compensated, for example, in Albania and Greece. . . . The Algerians could settle old accounts with France. Survivors of the Dresden bombing could feel encouraged to take action against the United Kingdom. In the Balkans, justice would have her hands full for years turning the crimes against the Balkan people committed by Serbia and Croatia into cash. . . . But some states could collapse under the weight of past debts if they met all the demands made on them. Serbia, for example, would have no future. . . . Berlin does well to cite the principle of immunity and challenge the judgment before the International Court of Justice. But at the same time, it should send a conciliatory signal to Italy.”
LANDMARK AS LANDFILL
The Italian artist Moreno Di Trapani has created a unique installation in reaction to the garbage crisis in Naples. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, Di Trapani placed hundreds of stuffed garbage bags into an empty building in the northern city of Tradate. The building facade overflows with the bags, which “ooze out of the windows and out of the doors; the garbage piles up on the balcony.” While Tradate lies five hundred miles north of Naples, Di Trapani created the installation Home of Bad Consumption in order to confront locals with the “stinking” crisis in the south. Since being elected, the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has promised to clean up Naples, with mixed results. Trainloads of garbage (some of which had radioactivity levels eighty times the norm), collected by the Italian Army, have been shipped to Hamburg to be processed.