Etienne Turpin. Reflections on Stainlessness: Urbanization and the Erasures of Political Struggle
Book presentation
The book and attendand exhibition Stainlessness recuperates the tradition of the architectural ‘capriccio’ as a means to recuperate the history of labor movements in North America and to make legible the physical semblance of these movements in cities including Sudbury, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. While processes of urbanization have all but erased these struggles from our cities and left only ambivalent monuments to mark the past, the narrative of Stainlessness asserts the centrality of labor as a force capable of transforming the nature of cities, the culture of America, and the geologic deep-time marked by the Anthropocene.
Etienne Turpin is, itinerantly, a teacher, writer, editor and curator. He is a principal investigator of Architecture + Adaptation: Design for Hypercomplexity at the University of Michigan's Center for Southeast Asian Studies and a contributing editor of the journal SCAPEGOAT: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy. Through these and other collaborative efforts, Etienne works to assemble worlds that can sustain passion, pleasure, and conviction. His project for inquiry and assembly is ANEXACT.org.
Etienne Turpin. Stainlessness
Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2013 (forthcoming)