This lecture will address Open Land communes in Northern California during the late 1960s, focusing on the escalating "code wars" that have arisen between the state and these dissidents attempts to give up private property rights, normative forms of life and other traps of modernity and capitalism.

What, Scott asks, motivated this part of the American back-to-the-land movement to open their land to anyone who wished to settle? Why did they adopt a "voluntary primitivism" in the fields of shelter, hygiene, agriculture, medical care, and education in the name of ethics of care, both of the self and of the earth? And why did the State react so strongly against them? Beyond explicating their problematic forms of identification with alterity and the ambiguous political status of subjects within this "outlaw territory," Scott reads these counter-conducts (and counter-architectures) to have identified key contours of an increasingly administered environment, their dissidence as a form of refusal of a biopolitical governing apparatus.

Felicity D. Scott is professor of Architecture, director of the PhD program in Architecture (History and Theory), and co-director of the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. In addition to publishing numerous articles in journals, magazines, catalogs, and edited anthologies, she has published Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism (MIT Press, 2007), Living Archive 7: Ant Farm (ACTAR, 2008), Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counter-Insurgency (Zone Books, 2016), and Disorientations: Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs (Sternberg Press, 2016). Scott is also a founding co-editor of Grey Room, a quarterly journal of architecture, art, media, and politics.

The event will be moderated by art historian and curator Inesa Brašiškė, whose research concerns postwar European and American art and avant-garde film.

The event will be held in English.

Join us here: https://zoom.us/j/99393655413?pwd=YWZjK0pNOG1Bc0dzWCt3Vjk5Znd4QT09
Meeting ID: 993 9365 5413
Passcode: 734128

Image: Sonoma County photos of 'illegal' structures at Morningstar Ranch. From Unohoo, Coyote and the Mighty Avengers, Morningstar Scrapbook (Occidental, CA: Friends of Morning Star, c. 1973).