Land as Medium : Alain Pottage

The This Land is Your Land lecture series critically investigates one of the most influential systems of Land formation; property relationships and negotiation of rights.

According to the occidental understanding, law is attached to land through foundational acts of acquisition. Since the early twentieth century, technologies of control and information have been transforming this sense of property and territory, generating a new understanding of land as a medium. What becomes of property in this epoch? ​

Alain Pottage is Professor of Law at Sciences Po, Paris. His work focuses on theories of property, media theories of law, and Earth jurisprudences.

Image: Atlantropa, Exhibition poster, Hermal Sörgel, 1932. Deutsches Museum, Muchen (Archiv CD 78659)

This event is part of the This Land is Your Land series organised by Georgia Hablutzel, Hamed Khosravi and Platon Issaias.

The series will explore the legacies of land commodification through visual, textual, and theoretical practices. Moving through disciplines of architecture, visual art, and law these lenses will provide a field to examine the legacies of power embedded in how land is recorded, possessed, and weaponised.

It will navigate various geographic contexts, from Europe and the Middle East to the Caribbean, in order to study the forms of historical and contemporary influence of Property on the formation of Land. Through practitioners' work This Land is Your Land seeks to unveil legal, social, economic, spatial, and political relations.

Often overlooked in contemporary discussions around architecture and spatial production, the series wishes to illuminate how Property is used as a method to mediate the dispute of historic sovereign powers. The lectures seek to reveal how jurisdiction, representation, indignity could serve as productive forces in imagining new relationships towards property and rights.

Host or Publisher AA Public Programme