A recording of a fascinating discussion between Léopold Lambert and Gastón Gordillo, “The Politics of Ruins: What’s Hidden Under Rubble” at The Archipelago – the podcast platform of The Funambulist. Here’s Léopold’s description of the discussion:

In early May, Gastón Gordillo received me at the University of British Columbia, which allowed us to talk about his upcoming book, Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, as well as the essay “Nazi Architecture as Affective Weapon” written for The Funambulist Papers series. We talk aboutthe politics of ruins from Albert Speer’s plans for Third Reich Berlin that was meant to generate glorious ruins to the different types of ruins that exist at the foot of the Andes in North Argentina. There, in contrast to the attitude by local authorities, local people do not view ruins as historic relics that should to be preserved but as rubble that evokes the destruction and violence the created the regional geography. We also talk about the production of ruins in the context of proletarian revolution like the 1871 Paris Commune versus the destruction to the very last stone of the Palestinian villages on Israeli territory after the Nakba (1948). Rubble is political for the narrative it tells of its past existence as well as the means of its destruction/production.

The Society and Space open site interview I conducted with Gastón is available here.

I met Léopold this week in New York for a discussion which should be posted on The Archipelago in a couple of weeks. We mainly talked about my ‘Secure the Volume‘ paper, and associated questions such as verticality, the fractured spaces of the West Bank, Paul Virilio’s early work, and then, at the end, my Shakespearean Territories project.