Vorderlines are drop-dead gorgeous. They are gorgeous and you drop dead.  What are my qualifications? I'm a long-time admirer, lover, husband of Vorderline women and I had survived to tell the tale which not many men can say. So I have a lot to share with you as to how I had coped with these women and how somehow I succeeded to maintain relationships short and long over the span of almost 35 years. I'm also, incidentally, a professor of psychology and the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. Today we are going to discuss a variant of narcissists known as Vorderline, people with Vorderline personality disorder. Now throughout this video I'm going to use the female gender pronouns but of course there are males, there are men with Vorderline personality disorder. Actually we have a creeping understanding that there are as many men with Vorderline personality disorder as women. And I even came up with a new diagnosis, covert Vorderline, which fits I think the male variant much better than the classic Vorderline.  But for convenience sake, I'm going to continue to use female gender pronouns. Okay, before we start, there are effective interventions and treatments for Vorderline personality disorder and I encourage those of you who are afflicted with this personality disorder to seek help and to subject yourself to dialectical behavior therapy, DBT, to mindfulness techniques, they've proven to be very effective. But what I want to do today is share tips and advice on day-to-day pedestrian survival with the Vorderline. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to describe features of Vorderline personality disorder, how they affect daily life and how you can cope with them, manage them, survive should worse comes to worse. Let's start with the most basic foundation of Vorderline personality disorder. It's known as abandonment anxiety or separation anxiety. The Vorderline anticipates and projects and believes and foresees imminent abandonment, humiliation and rejection by her intimate partner. Just allow me to change my chair. It was sitting on a squeaky chair and squeaky chairs are great metaphors and allegories for relationships with Vorderline. So I'm on a more stable chair right now and I can proceed with this presentation. Abandonment anxiety, separation anxiety in Vorderline causes the Vorderline to preempt the abandonment, causes her to initiate abandonment.  The problem with Vorderline is that she interprets every behavior as a form of abandonment. If you're on the phone for too long, you're abandoning her. If you're going on a business trip, you're definitely abandoning her. If she wants something now and you're not at her immediate disposal, dropping everything else you're doing, you're abandoning her. She interprets everything as rejection and that makes life with her very mercurial, very unexpected and to some extent terrifying a roller coaster. So in your relationship with the Vorderline, you need to establish rituals and procedures of presence, of permanence, of stability and predictability. All activities that can be misinterpreted by the Vorderline as forms of abandonment and rejection, you should aim and strive to do these things in her presence or together with her. You should involve her somehow in these things. When you are away, you should call multiple times a day. You should tell her that you're thinking about it. You should tell her that she's constantly with you in mind and spirit, if not in flesh and blood. So when you're with the Vorderline, you should establish a circumference and ambience of presence, constancy, permanence, stability and predictability. You should then gulf her. You should then gulf her and encompass her. But not overbearingly, not domineeringly, not by way of possessing her or controlling her or microcontrolling her. Because that's the paradox at the heart of Vorderline. The Vorderline is terrified of abandonment, but she's equally terrified of engulfment, of enmeshment, of disappearing, of vanishing into you.  It's a very, very delicate balance, a very thin line, thin wire between broadcasting to the Vorderline that you are there for her, that you will never abandon her, that you're not going to fade away, that it's okay to be away because that doesn't mean you're not coming back. Broadcasting this to her, establishing your physical presence in her life, unobtrusively and unintrudingly, on the one hand, and not becoming an overbearing, overwinning, or pervasive ubiquitous figure, which she's going to resent and react badly to. This is the first problem. Second issue is object constancy. The Vorderline is unable to maintain object constancy. She has something called object inconstancy, in common with analysis. In other words, when you're out of sight, you're largely out of mind. This is what makes it possible for the Vorderline to behave recklessly, or for example, to engage in promiscuous sex, to cheat on you, because when she is not with you physically, you're gone, you're out of her mind. She doesn't have a stable representation of you, which she can interact with when you're not there. The narcissist has a snapshot of his intimate partner, but the snapshot is so far diverged and so far removed from the reality that even the narcissist suffers from object inconstancy. So the Vorderline needs your constant presence, physical presence, in her life to remind herself that one, you exist, and two, she loves you. The Vorderline's love and the Vorderline's ability to have object relations is very, very infantile. It's like a baby with mommy. When mommy leaves the room, the baby starts to cry because mommy is out of the room, mommy is gone forever, he's never coming back. It's like mommy is out of sight, mommy is out, period. Now, of course, object inconstancy leads to severe mental health ramifications and implications. It is one of the core elements, the core pillars of what we call identity disturbance. The Vorderline is unable to maintain a stable core of identity. She is a kaleidoscope. She is shape-shifting. She doesn't have a central pivot, an axis around which she revolves. You can't put your finger on what is or who is the Vorderline because there's nobody there, there's a bit of an empty core, and because it's in flux. Heraclitus, the famous Greek philosopher, said, Pantarei. Pantarei means it all flows. It's like you can never step into the same river twice, and you can never interact with the same Vorderline twice. Identity disturbance means that you cannot pinpoint the Vorderline. You cannot hold her into anything. Her promises mean nothing. Her value is a transitory. She acts in contradictory ways. She violates her own self-imposed rules, limits, and boundaries, which mean nothing. They mean nothing because her identity changes all the time. She's not the same person all the time. This emptiness at the core of the Vorderline means that there is nobody there to regulate anything. So she can be, for example, adamantly opposed to cheating, but then she would go on a cheating spree. She can be, hold herself financially responsible, and then recklessly spend the entire fortune of the family. You cannot trust the Vorderline to display a behavior which is consistent with any set of beliefs, or values, with a worldview, with limits, with boundaries, with rules. It's a chaotic sin, and indeed we call the Vorderline personality a low organization personality, a lowly organized personality, a chaotic personality. Even high functioning Vorderlines have an identity disturbance. Because Vorderline, therefore, is as close as you get to multiple personality disorder, to dissociative identity disorder, and because Vorderline is indeed founded on dissociation, as we will discuss a bit later, you need to introduce object constancy into the relationship. You need to help the Vorderline to stabilize her identity around you as an object. You can become the pivot, or the axis, or the core, or the center, or the dynamo of the Vorderline's identity. Very simple things like mementos give her personal items of yours, so that she can hold onto them when you're away. Many Vorderlines, by the way, carry such items in their purses to remind themselves not to cheat with other men. Establish a routine of programmed reminders. Say good morning every morning, say good night every night. Send messages on a regular schedule every hour. Call her out of the blue, but make it programmed. In due time, convert these activities into rituals. Rituals with timetables, with schedules, so that she can develop a sense of predictability and object constancy, programmed reminders, mantras, slogans, sentences, which you share with a Vorderline. And when you say this sentence, it triggers your existence, it triggers your presence in her mind. So sentences, which are common to both of you, which evoke a meaning, which is shared only by the two of you, a closed universe, almost like a shared psychotic disorder, if you wish, or a shared fantasy, in the case of the narcissist. So in these sentences, when you say these sentences to her, she is reminded of your presence, of your existence, and of your meaning in her life. The next problem with Vorderline is decompensation. Vorderline personality disorder is in extreme form of infantile defenses. Exactly like the narcissism is an extreme form of the fantasy defense. Vorderline is an extreme form of a series of infantile defenses, most notably splitting projection, rationalization, and projective identification. So the borderline is surrounded, she has a wall, she has a firewall, she has a fortification, a fortress of ever active defense mechanisms. And the aims of these defense, the aim of these defense mechanisms is to falsify reality, to reframe reality, to recast reality in a way that will be egosyntonic, in a way that the borderline can live with, can survive. If the borderline were to face herself as she is, if she were to face the truth, she would not survive. She needs absolutely to render reality more amenable, more acceptable, and she does this by filtering reality. She impairs her own reality testing via her psychological defense mechanisms. So under extreme stress, when she anticipates humiliation and rejection, when she is for some reason discarded, when she has a fight with you, when you are busy, this is all very stressing for the borderline, this stress or cause a process called decompensation. The compensation is when the defense mechanisms of the borderline shut down one after the other. Tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck. All the defenses shut down. At some point she is rendered defenseless. She becomes skinless. She has no protection, no isolation from her environment, and from the unbearable and intolerable reality of her impending doom and catastrophized abandonment and humiliation and rejection. At that point she falls apart. She even may develop psychotic micro-episodes. In other words, very brief psychosis. It can last a few minutes to a few hours. And so you need to counter the borderline's propensity for decompensation. You need to counter it by using techniques that are usually used in tackling anxiety and panic attacks. Decompensation feels very much like a panic attack. And we had developed over the decades very, very powerful techniques to cope with anxiety disorders, anxiety attacks and panic attacks. And these techniques include breathing exercises, including controlled breathing, breathing into bags, breathing with counting and so on. I encourage you to go online and read about breathing exercises for anxiety and panic. They include journaling, encouraging the borderline to note down, to journal, to write down all her cognitive processes when she is anxious or when she is panicking. In other words, when she is decompensating or when she is panicking, she should just write down what goes through her mind. And then at the end of the day, she reads these sentences aloud to herself. So when she is in panic, when she is anxious, when she is about to decompensate, she notes down what's going on through her mind and she reads it aloud to herself at the end of the day. This feedback is very calming. It's anxiolytic. These are examples of techniques we use in treating anxiety and panic, and they should be very effective with decompensation. Help your borderline to adopt these techniques on a daily basis. It might stall off, prevent or postpone eventual decompensation. When the borderline decompensates, she ends up acting out. Acting out is dysregulated, uncontrolled, self-harming, reckless behavior, and it is brought on by the self-states of the borderline. One of the main self-states of the borderline is a secondary psychopath. When the borderline is under attack, when she is stressed, when she is about to, or she expects to be humiliated and abandoned and rejected, she brings forth one of her self-states, which is essentially a psychopath, and that's a protector self-state. It protects her from pain, it is defiant, it's contrumacious, it's angry, it's reckless, it's aggressive, and it gets the job done, the job of protecting her. The borderline has several self-states and they are separated by dissociative wars. The dissociation, forgetting, the dissociation is not always totally, it's permeable, and this dissociation helps the borderline to compartmentalize. So when the borderline, for example, acts out when she misbehaves, for example, she cheats on you, she is likely to attribute, if she remembers the cheating, because many times she will not, especially if she's drunk or drunk, but if she does remember the cheating, she will attribute it to her other self. She will feel contrite, ashamed, she will regret what she had done, but she would still defend herself by attributing it to another self-state, her impulsivity and recklessness are compartmentalized. She would not feel fully responsible for what she had done, because it wasn't her, it was some other self-state that took over her, so she's likely to say, I don't know what came over me, I've never done this before, it's not me, it's not like me, I surprised myself, I shocked myself, etc. You need to help the borderline to not act out, because acting out is seriously dangerous, cheating is the most benign option. She can do really, really crazy things, she can wreck your car, she can steal your money, acting out is simply being out of control, and because a psychopath, secondary psychopathic state, takes over, the acting out is largely antisocial and psychopathic. It's like you suddenly find yourself married to a psychopath, or in love with a psychopath, so you need to help her. The first thing we should do is decatastrophize. One of the main processes in decompensation and acting out is catastrophizing. The borderline anticipates unfavorable outcomes and consequences. She foresees humiliation, abandonment and rejection, so she catastrophizes. And she's reacting not to reality, she's reacting to her catastrophizing imagination. She sees the future, the future is dystopian and bleak, and she's reacting to the future, not to the present. You need to bring her back to the present through a process called decatastrophizing. You need to bring her back to the present, you need to ground her. You can ground her physically by hugging her, you can ground her verbally by reassuring her that you're not about to abandon her, or humiliate her, or reject her, on the very contrary, you're very much in love with her. You can bring her back to reality by re-establishing reality testing, ironically, for example, by attacking some of her assumptions as untenable, or fantastic, or paranoid, or delusional. So there are many ways to decatastrophize, but you must absolutely diffuse the time bomb of acting out by re-establishing reality as the yardstick and the benchmark of all her future behaviors. You can do this also by mirroring her, and she becomes aggressive and violent on the verge of acting out. You can mirror her behavior. Mirroring has a very powerful effect on the borderline. It comes her down. She suddenly realizes what she's doing. She kind of wakes up from this two-poor and the nightmare, and she's back in reality. Another thing you can do is use techniques for impulse control. Redirect her impulses. She wants to do A, you redirect her to do B. She wants to be aggressive with something. You redirect her aggression. You re-channel her aggression and hurl it, use it in some other way. Redirection via reframing and via re-motivation. There are many techniques for impulse control. Again, I'm not going to review all of them.  When you witness the decompensation and the acting out of the borderline, it's clear that she is not acting out the way a narcissist would, or the way a psychopath would.  Her acting out is very clearly, highly emotional. She's hurt. She's hurting. She's bleeding. And she wants you to experience the same pain. She wants to hurt you, not in order to hurt you, but that you could share the experience of her pain. She wants to have a shared experience of hurt with you, a universe of hurt where both of you will belong. So her acting out is about you, actually. And it is the outcome of something we call emotional dysregulation. She is overwhelmed by her emotions. They're too strong for her. She can't cope. She's drowning. And she's dragging you down with her. You need to help your borderline with her emotional dysregulation. Number one, teach her to talk about her emotions, to communicate her emotions, help her to verbalize her emotions. Number two, ask her to label her emotions, to call them by name, because the borderline experiences her emotions as a cloud. The emotions are diffuse. Very often she doesn't know what's happening. She's totally disoriented. In many cases, she goes into a dissociative state. She depersonalizes. She derealizes, or she becomes amnesiac. At any rate, she is very hard pressed to say what's happening inside her head. Very often a borderline would tell you, I'm having a brain fog. It's a brain fog. I can't tell you what's happening. You need to force her to help her, to collaborate with her, to label her emotions. You ask her, are you feeling anger? Are you feeling envy? Are you afraid? You need to help her to call her emotions by name. When this is done, when she had gained a handle, when she had gained a label, she comes down. Because just labeling the emotion provides her with control over the emotion. And her problem is dysregulation, which is a fancy word for lack of control. She loses control over herself. Labeling helps her to regain control. Then teach her to externalize her emotions. Ironically, the borderline acts out because she bottles up emotions. She's very wary, hyper-vigilant and cautious. She's very unlikely to communicate efficaciously with you. So instead, she bottles up everything. She acts pseudo-stupid. She doesn't talk much, or she talks about irrelevant things, or she diverts the conversation, or she kind of digresses and tries to avoid the painful topics. Teach her to externalize her emotions behaviorally, to show that she's angry, to demonstrate her envy or jealousy, to act appropriately other negative emotions or positive emotions. Teach her to externalize behaviorally her emotions, but also teach her to talk about her emotions. And you can do this by using a variety of techniques. One of the most powerful is known as chair work. Chair, like what you sit on, chair work. You can ask her, for example, to put her anger on an empty chair, and then to talk to the anger in the empty chair, to have a dialogue with her own anger. You can ask her to put her envy, her hatred, her fear on the chair. Talk to her abandonment anxiety. Interrogate the abandonment anxiety. Ask the abandonment anxiety for help. Chair work. Dialogue with the emotions via the methodology and instrument of an empty chair. And finally, you can use techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy, or you can attend cognitive behavioral therapy in order to negate, in order to counter negative thoughts. The borderline has negative automatic thoughts which lead to catastrophizing and lead to despair and depression and anxiety. The borderline assumes the worst, and because she assumes the worst, the worst outcomes, the worst. Because of this, she sinks into anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression are very strong concomitants of borderline. They are comorbid with borderline very often. And they are usually the outcome of these negative automatic thoughts, which CBT is very successful at eliminating. Learn the techniques of eliminating automatic negative thoughts, or simply attend a few therapy sessions with her. Having learned to control her negative thoughts. Having learned to label her emotions. Having dialoged with her anxieties and fears. Having verbalized what's happening inside her. Having externalized her emotions via behavior. The risk of acting out, the risk of emotional dysregulation, and the risk of decompensation. These risks are much reduced using these techniques. One of the main problems with borderline is that she cannot, as she cannot regulate her emotions, she cannot control her anger. Borderlines are very angry, and they're angry in a very violent and aggressive way. You need to learn anger management techniques. You need to teach your borderline to cognitively restructure. Cognitive restructuring is a major anger management technique. It's simply teaching the borderline to think about things in a different way. To consider triggers, stimuli, provocations, fears, frustrations. To consider all this in a totally different way. Maybe as positive opportunities for growth and learning, for example. Cognitive restructuring. Establish communication protocols. Very rigid and strict communication protocols. If she wants to say something she has to say it according to the protocol. No personal attacks. No attacks on the other. Like if you want to say something, for example, if you want to say, what you're doing is hurting me. Don't blame, don't accuse, don't say, the way you're misbehaving is really bad. Instead say, I'm in pain. Talk about yourself. Don't talk about her. Describe your own reactions, your own internal state, rather than attacking her. That's an example of a communication protocol. Establish communication protocol and adhere to them religiously. Communication protocols are very powerful tools which prevent a lot of misunderstanding and pain down the road. Finally, introduce humor. Humor is the best antidote to anger. Whenever she's angry, don't mock her. Don't invalidate her anger. Don't minimize her anger. Don't minimize her. That's not what I'm saying. But say something humorous that suddenly exposes the whole situation as irrational. And if she's amenable to humor, this will diffuse the anger. The borderline has what we call mood-lability. Mood-lability, she's a mood, is as dysregulated as her emotions. Mood-lability can be counted with physical activity, a sleep schedule, a series of rigid routines. The routines provide structure, provide a skeleton, so rigid routines, and with stress management techniques. Again, I encourage you to go online and look for stress management techniques. So, mood-lability in the borderline is a serious problem. Mood swings. Very serious problem. Anyone who had lived in the borderline knows what I'm talking about. This is not like three days of fun and three days of depression. This is like one hour of fun and two hours of depression and then two hours of fun and three hours of anxiety and then three hours of rage. The mood swings are enormous and they are never seizing. And so, if you want to survive with the borderline, you need to regulate this. You need to control her moods. She needs to control her moods. And this is what I've mentioned. Physical activity, sleep schedule, routines, stress management techniques. The moods of the borderline are reactive. They are not produced internally. They are most of the time, they are reactive. Regrettably, her reality testing is impaired. So, what she perceives is very often wrong, very often deformed, very often inappropriate, inaccurate. So, by restoring reality testing, you're going to reduce modulability considerably. But because it's mostly reactive, you need to eliminate the triggers and the stimuli and the provocations in the environment. And you need to structure her life. You need to help her to structure her life so that she can reduce stress. And the stress leads to anxiety. And anxiety leads to modulability. Reduce stress and you solve an entire chain reaction. The borderline outsources internal functions, internal what is known as ego functions. She outsources these to you. The intimate partner of a borderline is her source of regulation. He is the one with the hand on the key. He is in control of how she feels. Her emotions, her moods, her reactions. Her explosions, her love.  Because inner world is one gigantic, gigantic twister. What she does is she's actually telling you, help me by regulating me. Be my external control. Be my external board of control. Be my user manual. I am transferring my locus of control to you, the borderline says. And from now on, you are my God.  Everything I do, you are to blame. Everything I do, you're responsible and accountable for. Even if I misbehave, I misbehave because of you. This, of course, outsourcing, of course, is extremely unhealthy. It's extremely unhealthy. First of all, because it is counterfactual. It's not true. A lot of the, a lot, many of the dysregulatory behaviors and emotions and moods of the borderline have nothing to do with you as a partner.  Don't let the borderline scapegoat you. Teach her to regain locus of control. Transfer these responsibilities that she had given to you, that she had abrogated. Transfer these responsibilities back to her. Do it incrementally. Do it gradually. Do not threaten her. Do not demand. Do not control. Do not chastise and castigate and criticize. Be nice. Be kind. She is not well. Help her to recover. Provide her with increasing control over herself, her circumstances, her choices, her decisions and gradually her emotions and her moods. Remove this locus of control from yourself and help her to regain an internal locus of control. At the same time, help her to develop and reward what we call Autoplastic Defenses. Autoplastic Defenses is accepting responsibility for your actions and for the consequences of your actions. Alloplastic Defenses is when we blame other people for everything that's happening to us. That implies an external locus of control. If you are to blame for what's happening to me, then I'm not in control of my life. You are. You want the borderline to regain control of her life also by accepting responsibility for everything she had done, everything that's happening to her. And it can start with a very simple manipulation of language. Borderlines often say, this happened to me. You should tell the borderline, no, this did not happen to you. You did it. Very typical cases when the borderline comes and says I was drunk and I slept with another man. It happened. It did not happen. You did it. You did it. Restores a sense of responsibility, self-control, locus of control. Reward these defenses. Reward these behaviors. When it's warranted, when she does something good, something nice, reward her. When she does something bad, refuse to accept responsibility. Reject any attempt to put it on you. You're not responsible for her actions.  Never, ever accept responsibility. But do it lovingly because you love her. Do re-establish a sense of control and sense of personal responsibility and accountability lovingly. The borderline, exactly like the narcissist, tends to idealize and devalue.  These are very rapid cycles as opposed to the narcissist. In borderline the cycling is very rapid.  The problem is when she idealizes you, you're God. When she devalues you, you're the devil. And she doesn't feel bad when she is in the stage of devaluation.  So it's very dangerous when the borderline is in the devaluation phase. Because in this phase when she is devaluing you, she is controlled by a secondary psychopathic self-state. She's a psychopath.   You want to stop this cycle. You want to stop it dead in its tracks. You don't want idealization and devaluation. You want a realistic assessment of who you are, what you can give, what are your limitations.  You want, in other words, to restore reality testing, insist on reality. Whenever she says something wrong, counterfactual, correct her, insist to introduce reality at all times, hundreds of times a day if you have to, repeatedly on the same topic if you have to. Restoring a reality testing is the only guarantee that your relationship will not end in a self-annihilating nuclear mushroom cloud. Which is a typical way a relationship with a borderline ends, ask me. Maintain the entire picture. Integrate her splitting. When she says that someone is all bad, remind her that this very person has good aspects, good traits, and had behaved nicely with her, was kind to her. Negate her splitting. Negate her projection. Act against her defenses. Do not let her idealize and devalue you or anyone else. Integrate splitting. Maintain the entire picture. Serve as a reminder. Serve as a database. Serve as a repository of the totality of experience. If she tries to divide experience into black and white, we call it dichotomous thinking. Black and white fallacy. If she tries to divide people and life into black and white, reminds her that the light of that life is actually gray. And that people are always in between, partly bad, partly good. Help her because she is stuck at a very infantile stage. She regresses to an infantile stage where mommy is all good or all bad. You are all good and all bad, etc. Help her to integrate. One major problem with borderline, and this is the focus of dialectical behavior therapy, frankly, is self-mutilation, which could lead to suicidality between 10 and 11% of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder actually commit suicide. It's an enormous rate. So the borderline self-mutilates. She can self-mutilate by classically, by cutting herself or burning herself with cigarettes. This is dermatological self-mutilation. On the skin, it's visible. But there are many other ways to self-mutilate. For example, she can sexually self-trash. She can self-trash sexually.  Anything from gang bang to sleeping with disgusting men that she finds revolting. She just to trash herself. She can abuse substances. She can behave recklessly. And as a way to self-harm. You know, if you drive recklessly, you may end up in an accident. So there are numerous ways for the borderline to self-mutilate, self-harm. The ultimate is suicide. You need to prevent this. And prevention involves recognizing the warning signs of suicide. And these include extreme mood swings, feelings of hopelessness, giving away possessions, losing interest in activities that hitherto she found interesting, talking about death or suicide, saying goodbye to family and friends, saying that everyone is a burden on her. She doesn't want to see anyone. So schizoid phase, withdrawing from friends and family. All these things are signs of impending episode of self-harm. The problem with borderline is escalation. The borderline drinks one drink. She drinks 20. It's like alcohol craving, writ large. So she can't regulate her behaviors. When she starts to do something, she has no intention to end where she usually ends. She had intention to have one drink. She ends up being in a blackout, alcoholic blackout. She had an intention just to flirt with a man.  She had intention just to drive in the breeze, but she ends up wrecking the car. So she escalates. If you see these signs, they may lead to suicide because she can't stop herself. There's no regulatory mechanism there. So she starts with one intention and she ends up with totally different act. You need to listen. You need to be attuned to her. You need to be like a seismograph. Do not judge her. Do not dismiss her. Do not discount or invalidate her feelings. Just be a good listener. Just sit next to her and let her talk to you.  Encourage her to verbalize. Encourage her to sublimate her aggression some way. Do something. Punch her back. Write a book. Read a book. Watch a movie. Go on a walk. Physical activity is always very important in all these things. The problem with the borderline is dissociation. She doesn't remember. Because she doesn't remember things. She can't learn. There's no process of learning. There's no memory. When there's no memory, there's no identity and there's no identity. There's no one there to learn. So borderline never learns. It's infuriating because she keeps repeating the same mistake over and over again. She keeps associating with the same people who had mistreated her, disrespected her, raped her again and again. She does everything again and again. The self-harm keeps repeating. The self-mutilation. The wrong choices. The disastrous decisions. The horrible people who had trampled all over her. She keeps coming back for more because she has no memory. She's totally dissociative. She lives in the presence in the worst sense of the world. She is discontinuous. She has no continuity. Encourage her to develop continuity. Ask her to journal, to have a diary where she writes everything that's happening to her, everything she thinks, everything she feels, and then encourage her to read the diary the next day. So this creates continuity, at least cognitive continuity. Journaling is a very powerful tool. Mementos. Objects that carry memories or associated memories. Something with a smell, something with a taste. A visual thing that provokes her memory. Memory triggers, like in the famous movie Memento. So memory triggers. Encourage her to place post-it notes on the refrigerator, on the door, on chairs, all over the house. Post-it notes to remind her of things she wanted to do, things she's thinking about. I mean, there's a close affinity between bodily and personality disorder and patients with early onset dementia. It's very reminiscent of some phases of Alzheimer. You need to re-establish continuity via memory. Encourage her to video-record herself, because video recordings are much more powerful than written notes. Maybe she should video-record herself and keep these recordings for a few days. Watch them a few days later to establish this thin thread of memory and identity. Programmed reminders are mentioned before. Use them a lot. Reminder of this, reminder of that. Ground her in reality by force, by force of love and kindness. Drag her down. She's floating. She's like an air balloon, you know? A helium balloon. Drag her down. Ground her more in a good way. Tie her to your wrist. Keep her with you. She's worth it. She's worth it because most borderlines are beautiful, intelligent, hard-breakingly tender women. She's worth the investment and the effort if you're up to it. And finally, borderlines have transient paranoid ideation, and they are very likely to make you the enemy, the persecutory object. If you insist on introducing the borderline to reality, if you try to regulate her emotions and her moods, you're bound to clash with her. There's bound to be conflict. If these conflicts accumulate, she's going to begin to regard you as the enemy. We call it persecutory object. She's going to begin to develop transient paranoid ideation about you, paranoia. She's going to begin to suspect you of malevolence and bad intentions. She's going to be wary of you. She's going to be suspicious of you. She's going to interrogate you. She's going to spy on you. This is common in borderline. You don't need to worry. You just need to take it in stride. It will pass. That's why we call it transient paranoid ideation. It passes. Insist on reality testing when she's paranoid, journaling, question her, doubt her, counter her paranoia with your own paranoia, mirror her, use a secret code or an exit strategy, and agree on it when she is not paranoid. And when she is paranoid, use this secret code or exit strategy or safe word for her to freeze and suspend her paranoia. So when you say the word, she freezes. She doesn't continue with her paranoid ideation until it passes. You need to counter all these things. You need to fight. Being with a borderline is a prolonged, prolonged fight on multiple fronts, every possible front, actually. Now, some intimate partners, some men, because I'm using the example of a woman with borderline, some men find it worthwhile because the borderlines have gifts to give, which very few women do. The borderline, a typical borderline, maintains her childlike pureness and goodness.  It is total love. She is immersed in you. It's not like the codependent. Codependent depends on you. So in the codependent, there's a strong transactional element.   There's a lot, it's a treasure. Typical borderline woman is a treasure, but the price is very high and constant. And you need to be on your toes. You need to work on actions all the time. Most men would say the price is not worth the price. I'm one of the few who thought, think, probably will think in the future, that the price is well worth the price. I have paid a very big personal price for my exclusive choice of borderline women. But whatever price I had received made all the prices I've paid well worth it. Not your cup of tea. Go away. Don't even start. You may get captivated and trapped. Avoid contact with borderline women. They are very, very alluring and addictive. If it's not your cup of tea, walk away.  It's a full-time job. It's a full-time maintenance job. If you can and you're up to it, a treasure awaits you at the end of the rainbow. Go for it, Dorothy.


Good morning everyone. Everyone's bright and early. I hope everyone's all, you know, nice and caffeinated or got their tea, whatever it is. It's a pleasure to see you all. Thanks for joining us. It's a real pleasure to welcome Carlos Mingith back to GSAP. Carlos is an alumni of the CCCP program and one of those people who had a, you know, when he was at GSAP, we all already knew that he was going to do great things and of course, you know, he did and he went and he was at storefront for some time as a curator there and then co-curated the Oslo Triennial of architecture which brought him into the sphere of Scandinavia and then he became chief curator at Arc Des, which is the architecture museum of Stockholm and Sweden, the National Museum. There he very quickly set up some incredible shows, a number of publications which are all listed in his biography, but some incredible shows having to do with some of the pressing issues that were happening in Sweden, but also more globally, social, political, environmental issues and how they really bear upon architecture and how architecture can influence those issues. And in particular, he became very interested in the north of Sweden and the north of Sweden, you know, Sweden, like Norway, is a very, very long country and was essentially, you know, inhabited by native peoples and was colonized very much like the west of America was colonized by, let's say, white Europeans. The north of Sweden was colonized as well during the 19th century and they founded a city there which was a mining city called Kiruna and Carlos became very interested in it because they were in the process of undermining their own city, they were literally digging out the city and entered into, has just put up a really amazing exhibition which I think just came down on all of the issues that this city's undermining brought up and the plan to move the city away from the mine. It raised all sorts of questions about preservation which we thought were just so interesting and this is why we invited Carlos. Of course, this is a kind of managed retreat and it is not the same as a climate change cause for managed retreat, but as you will see, the kind of tools and the questions that come up in managed retreat have to do with economics, have to do with social attachment to place and those are the same whether you're having to retreat because of climate change or you're having to retreat for other reasons and so methodologically the kind of methods and systems that were put in place in Norway really are a kind of, sorry that I said Norway and Sweden were really a model for the the rest of the world in thinking about how to do this. So it's really a great pleasure to welcome Carlos back to Columbia and in this virtual setting Carlos, I'll just hand it over to you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much Jorge for the introduction and thank you for the invitation. It's an absolute pleasure to be talking in the school that it's so important for me but also about questions of preservation that I really became very, very interested in those issues precisely by being at Columbia, by meeting also you and by really thinking about how present and how relevant questions of preservation and in contemporary architecture today and definitely some of those thoughts have been very relevant when I was like starting to develop the research around Kiruna issues and all the connotations that the current location is experiencing. So thank you, thank you so much and hello to everybody in the audience. So I'm going to share my screen so we can go through a presentation I prepared and we can see a little bit of about Kiruna. So Kiruna forever, that's the title of the exhibition and the project that Jorge was saying I've been working on since I arrived to Sweden that was like maybe three years and a half ago and it's connected precisely with some of the things that Jorge was saying like I organized the Oslo Architecture Triennale with a group of curators and I started to really understand like to be interested in the north as a project like the north as a place where lots of things are happening and when we are talking about the north here is like the north of the north. This is the Arctic, Kiruna is a city that is located in the Arctic in Sweden so it's like a very far away from Stockholm, it's a very long country and definitely when looking at the specific questions that were happening in Sweden we recognize that Kiruna was a place where lots of different issues were happening at the same time, connected to natural resources, connected to attachment, connected to questions of preservation but also questions of land ownership and indigenous population and indigenous land rights in the region. This is an image of the exhibition that we closed in this last February and was like trying to present all these different perspectives, all these different voices and views that are at play in Kiruna because Kiruna is this city, this is an image of the city of Kiruna that is basically built around the mining efforts that this is like Kiruna Barra, this is the mount Kiruna where the mine is located, this is an iron or mine, it's like the biggest underground iron ore mine in the world and is a state-owned mine so like the state of Sweden owns the mine, like the extraction processes and also of course the export classes. It exports nationally and internationally, it's one of the biggest exports of Sweden so like really getting back a lot of money to stakeholders and basically to returning to all taxpayers in Sweden but Kiruna is experiencing as I said like one of the, what we believe one of the biggest like processes, urban transformation processes in Greece and Swedish history because it's being velocated. The mine has grown so much, it's growing, it's digging at such a big level that like the ground deformation that the mine is producing has started to jeopardize the structure of the city especially the city center that it's what we see in the foreground of the photo and basically the municipality in coordination with the mine company and of course the state gave green light in 2009 to start like the process of relocation of the city center and therefore the city itself. The ground deformation has been growing over the years at such a level that basically this is an image from 2018 so all this like a hole that the mine has produced is actually growing and growing and growing and already affecting the first buildings that are in the first line that's closer to the mine. This is the headquarters of the mine and so we can see some images of like basically the the status of things in 2019 again this is a process that is ongoing like this today there are like all all these buildings already are demolished because a third of the population has to relocate they are moving to another another area of the city or to the new city center. There are a series of buildings that are being or demolished or moved this is a for example a heritage building a heritage house built by Gustav Pikman a very important architect at the beginning of a center in Sweden that is being relocated to a new area of the city this is like a lot of housing blocks have been demolished and another heritage building a listed building that is being moved and relocated an area that is actually where all these houses those are like mining work housing from the beginning of the century of the 20th century that have been all like moving to the same area so they are kind of building like a quote unquote historical site and but and this for example is the this is the plan this is the the new plan of Kiruna that was a competition an international competition that there was one by white architects and Halston architecture and we can see we can see here like what I mean by the relocation this is like the the aerial image of the mine this is like the the specific factory like basically where all the treatment and the treatment plan is and the mine of course is like is underground but we can see all these holes that are produced by like the ground that is being basically swallowed by the earth and and we can see like the areas of affection of the of the of the mine how that is like starting to really affect and reach like the the first areas of the city but this is the plan the the plan that was like represented by in the competition and won the competition and that's the plan that is being developed right now is that basically the new city center of Kiruna is here and but and the architects have imagined that by 2100 the what we know as of of Kiruna will be basically like like located demolished and the city will be built will be growing in this direction so and and this is like the new city center has been like started to be built already like the first buildings are already an app this is a photo from 2018 today actually the buildings around this town hall this is the new town hall of the of the city is already surrounded by new buildings housing blocks but also cultural buildings etc etc but all of this is happening in a land that has been inhabited by my linear by the indigenous population of the region that are the savvy so all these all these all these different elements as I said we tried to really bring like a specific like an understanding of the different voices a different perspective of what is going on with the relocation but also trying to give bring some light to the to the historical and geographical context because it's not when we talk about Kiruna we realize through the process that actually is not any building any city that has been built on this on the side of a mining effort is a very specific city and for example we were looking at a specific geographical context one of the one of the lines of of the investigation of the project was to and trying to understand what are the tangibilities of the of the of the mining industry both locally originally and internationally so we commissioned to a team that is Iwan Bang, Iwan Bang and Desi and Michiel van Gersel to to to work precisely on what is what is the the journey what is the journey that starts here in this is the image on the top of the mountain where where the mine like a treatment plan is to to like to understand like what is the geographical location but also what are what are the traces of that iron that is extracted in Kiruna in in the different construction sites around the world so basically they could find these are like series of posters that were represented in the exhibition research posters that they trace back like how the mining the iron in Kiruna is actually could be found in the in the subway in London in the construction site in the materials that are used in the in the subway in London or in the material that covers like the oil pipes that are in the Gulf of Mexico for example or in the high rises of of Dubai for example so so clearly like the impact that has like in terms of starting from architecture and finishing in architecture and it's a it's it's both local and international but also and it was also a way to understand the historical context not like this is the this is a map produced by Adolf Soboc and Maristeba that working at Lulea School of Technology at the time and then they basically mapped out how the location of Kiruna Kiruna is the K in this map and is actually part of what today is called the North Potomac technological mega system that is an entire network of mines of industrial settlements of power stations and railroads that go from Lulea Lulea in the coast of Sweden to Nordic in the coast of Norway those were made precisely to be able to develop the settlements produce the exploitation of the land distribute and transport the material to the ports and those ports were capable to to transfer the material abroad and so so so so Kiruna is also a form of of looking at at the region but Kiruna is also it's being relocated but also is destabilized in many different scales for example we were also looking at the work of Hans Leinarmapisen that is a semi-artist that has been devoting his life basically to map out Sapmi that is like the region that some people like live in that is a region that moves from from from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia and when we when we look at those maps though that was presented in the exhibition we cannot find the word Kiruna what we will find is the word Giron that is like the name that is used by some people for the city so like the city is being relocated the the the materials are being circulation but also even the names and the and the identity of the city is also being this in a in well in a in an imbalance no in changing in changing the styles like and that comes back to to some of the documents that we could find of the of the origin of of well like the the first drawings that we could find of representing Kiruna or representing the landscape that Kiruna where Kiruna is located today and this is for example a map that was included also in the exhibition that is a map from 1736 that is the first time that like the Mount Kiruna but that mount that we have we saw in the first image that mount that was today like basically completely broken cut out because of the mining efforts this is the same mine that is being represented here the same sorry the same mountain that is represented here and the first time that that mountain is represented is precisely through through a representation of the landscape with a with a body of gray area here that already indicates from the first time that it is iron included in that this in that area this is like a geological expedition this is a document that was done for a geological expedition that was supported by the king of Sweden and was a was a way to to well to study the land and study the the composition of the land and precisely after this document there is the first efforts produced by the king of the kingdom of sweden to start understanding that land not as a as an area that was like unknown as it was before with some economical exchanges but very few it was understood it started to be understood as a place of of resources a place where that needed to be studied needed to be controlled needed to be claimed exploited and and and developed uh like some years later in 1847 we we could find also this document that is like a claim map is a map that indicates how those those sections of the mountain in this case this is the alivari in alberia they're very close by body of war to Kiruna that with a very similar story that basically claims the the the land in order to be exploited and and that like that process that that line of work ends up being in the first settlements of first industrial settlements and around the the body of war that is this this gray like lines over here the first industrial settlements that are built on the side of the island body in order to be mining uh in the in the surface at the beginning and this is uh this is uh this is the beginning of Kiruna this is like the beginning of what we know today as the city of Kiruna this is like the first settlements of that of that project and as i was saying like what is interesting about about the city of Kiruna is that it really is um um um uh a settlement that becomes an important city for Sweden um because like a because we can we could trace back how from the very beginning at the beginning of the century like the the city of Kiruna is understood as a place where the most important architects and designers and artists are going to be working with the city they are going to be designing like uh buildings and i'm thinking about Kiruna as a as a place that has like an image has a projection to the rest of the country and from those settlements that we have seen that are like very very like a basic settlements industrial settlements at the beginning of the century automatically um somebody like Peril of Halman and Gustav Bigmann two of the most important urban planners of the time they imagine what would be like the the urban urban plan of the of the city. Gustav Bigmann would would be also building like a like a wooden church that is still today in Sweden one of the most important wooden buildings largest wooden buildings in the country um and uh like somebody like Helmer Osloond, Axel Tornemann, Carl Wilhamsson they are all like first-level artists of the time that are invited to Kiruna to represent the industrial effort and industrial like advancement of the city so we kept on asking ourselves when we were doing this project it's like why why somebody like Carl Wilhamsson like like one of the most important artists of the time like goes to Kiruna far far away in the north of the north to to draw to to do a painting like this one and and and we come back to to that argument like the argument that Kiruna becomes an image that legitimizes some for some certain forms of colonization but also represents specific forms of like an image production for Sweden is like is a place that really projects that it has a symbolism that goes beyond the needs of the mining efforts it operates at another level so there is like a kind of like a an important value that is implemented in the city that has to do with not not the the needs of the of the workers not the needs of the exploitation of the land are connected to estate values to estate directions to the idea of how the state is perceived and projected to internally but also externally and that continues to happen during the entire 20th century we there is like a these are all collections from the museum there is like a series of of projects during the 1960s that are like of of very high quality Hakuna al-Beri and like a built like a you know like a very banal building this is just like a you know like a hoisting and separating plant that is built designed built and photographed and disseminated as a work of art understood as as part of a project of modernization of industrialization of the country and represented as such in many different magazines or the LKB that's the the name of the estate company headquarters located in front of the mine in front of the mountain and like also kind of representing the modernity and as arriving to the to the north of sweden and and there are many other examples of looning of dolstrom like industrial industrial buildings that really like a like would would have been completely banal in other cases in the case of of Kyruna that are all like a mining export efforts like in the same area they are they all have that kind of level of symbolism and and the earth to it the same happens with with Ralph Erskine a very important architect from the UK that moved to Sweden and developed like an entire practice an entire body of work connected to the north and taking Kyruna as the petri dish to imagine new forms of of housing and a urban planning in the in the Arctic of course with certain tropes of of the north as that exotic space so I mean we can spend lots of time talking about Ralph Erskine and the north but but but the reality is that he also developed an entire practice an entire distribution of materials also he he he became very very very well known precisely by the ecological Arctic town that he was inspired and based on on the on the on the studies that he did around Kyruna so again Kyruna is that space that's that city that many architects have imagined the future with and but at the same time was was a place where all these all these transformations of the man were being produced Ralph Erskine end up building a couple of buildings one in his papawata and that today and today is actually half of the building so like there is also like a big big question precisely very presented very present in the discussion today of what happens with all these buildings that have great ambitions but today for example the half of this building is already demolished and because papawata is a very very small town with even migration questions and there is a big big polemic and discussion about what happens with these buildings that are like today having like a different attitude and a different relationship with the with the population but also in Kyruna itself Kyruna in Kyruna Ralph Erskine build very recognizable building housing housing blocks in the city center that are core or driven and this building that is considered one of the best buildings of Ralph Erskine in Sweden it's going to be demolished very soon if it's not next year it'll be the following the following year the they are located in the in the area very close by to the nine and and and we argue that actually that process of understanding Kyruna's that kind of a symbol symbolic effort like in between the like giving giving goods for society but also legitimizing certain certain process of sacrifice that the area is producing that continues today this is like the new city hall the new building also an international competition inviting like many different offices internationally to to to imagine what the future of Kyruna will be are participating in that process and building a new city and I mean like the yeah so the the the location of Kyruna is one of the most important European project as I was as I was saying in recent Swedish history and not only because of the complex operation of moving an actual city but also because it mobilizes critical questions of global relevance the citizens of Kyruna have been forced to face extraordinary philosophical questions what constitutes a city where do I belong what should we preserve what should we sacrifice big questions that conflate big questions that conflict conflate transcendental issues between the old and the new between what needs to be demolished and what needs to be built about who owns the land and who belongs to the city losses and hopes displacement and attachment the relocation demands of reconciliation among different communities and also among different communities needs some of them are struggling to detach themselves from a historical servitude and to the mind but also some of them diametrically opposed to the fact that the land is being exploited at all the challenges of building a new city also poses questions about the reasons for the relocation in the first place why should we prioritize the extraction of minerals over the stability of a city and its citizens and what what are the limits of economical growth how much longer can we continue digging and one of the cases that I think for this composition can be interesting is the the old town hall in Kyruna this is a this is an image of the old town hall that is a town hall that was designed by Artur von Esmalienzi like you know like 60s 70s very very important architect in Sweden the the building received like it was it was finished in 1963 and received like the most important architectural national award in 1964 the Casper cell Casper selling price and the building was really incredible with lots of different collaborations with many relevant artists with craftmen craft women that were like first level in in Sweden and with a lot of different details in the building it was a it was listed as heritage soon after and and and and also was very very well like perceived by the by Kyrunians themselves like I was a place that was very well used with lots of events it was like a Kyrunians used to say of it like that was like the living room of the of the city unfortunately the building was located in in a in a in an area that was very very close right to the ground deformation zone of the mine and so after many many different litigations the heritage listing was lifted and then and the building was demolished in 2019 these are like a couple of photos of by Klaus Taiman that we commissioned like precisely to document also like the demolition of the building for the collections at the museum and like the the and this is an image of the exhibition because one of the one of the big efforts that we produced for the exhibition is precisely this happened in the middle of the organization of the exhibition this was 2019 we were about to open like a year after so and so like in order to really address this question we we hope like the the exhibition had an entire area of the exhibition that was called origin heritage that was precisely addressing what are the what are the conflicts that really produce questions of preservation in the city and taking the town hall as a case study because like an interesting point about the the building is that it was not only an amazing piece of architecture with a really special like features architecture features and architecture like elements and it was also like a place where many different events happened as I said like it was very well used by the community but also it was like a place where like that served as a as a as the as the scenario for very important events so so in in in the exhibition we could in collaboration with the with the Kiruna municipality we could save some materials from the demolition so so so the balconies that you see here the textiles the lands the like the the the entire lectern the materials of the lectern the the sculpture balcony all the curtains all these are like a they are saved salvage from from the demolition like reconstructed in real scale in the in the exhibition and then returned to Kiruna to be reused in in other in other buildings organized by the by the municipality and we decided to to reconstruct exactly this section of the building because as I was saying some of the events that happened in the building were very transformational for not only for Kiruna but also for the region and for Sweden especially there was there was a very important event in 1969 that are series of general assemblies that happened in that building and that were holding all the miners strike and that it's and it's known by all suites by the great miners strike of the 69 there's a series of like a series of days 57 days while cat miners strike of in 1969 in which coming with with miners from from Kiruna from his battle era from alberiet that we're all assembled together in the building in order to to have like a general assembly and to to to make decisions and to push for decisions to the to the company and of labor rights that is still today are in place in Sweden right so so we we commissioned to employ Hanson an artist from Sweden that has been working precisely in questions of miners strikes before and to to do a film to do a piece that could be could be a reconstruction of those days of those events that happened in the building like holding or hosting these these discussions these strikes really putting into emphasis the importance of also not only the architectural details and physical components of the of the reconstruction on the building itself but also the the events that it held as a as a as a building and emphasizing like the importance of preserving at certain level actions and performances that are part of the of the history of the building what we what we do is that we reconstruct the entire section of that of the of the building where like the lectern were done were precisely the these the speeches that were given and were held so this is this mic is this this mic and with the same lectern like the original lectern that we could bring from Kiruna from them like say from demolition and we presented the film exactly at the spot where you will be walking upstairs positioning yourself as if you would be talking to the general assembly and you would see the reconstruction of that those days in that in that screen and then the and then there was like a like another level of the project that was also including like a performance that was also like that's a work by England Johansson as well that basically is like the the reenactment of the speeches that were given in the strike in the minor strike in Kiruna in in 1969 by Sara Lindman that is like a super important like a writer in in Sweden and and talked in like in as part of the those general assembly days so and so this is a this is a case of of how like a you know like a building that has like a specific story we try to really address what are what are the implications what are the questions of sacrifice and saving and preserving and and and keeping and then including in the in the certain legacy and certain memory of of the discussion and the public reality through the through the exhibition and a second a second line of of of work with preservation can be also understood with the work of Joe Arnango part of the project was also to commission new work commission new projects for for the for the exhibition and we collaborate with Joe Arnango Joe Arnango is today like I think like one of the most important Sami architects that are practicing he's a he's an architect but also operates between art and architecture and and he's a great speaks person for the role of Sami architecture in contemporary architecture today and he he developed like a he has been working with a with a long-term project that is called Yirgye Gumpi that is the Sami architecture library that is a is a nomad is a movable moving library that basically moves in different places opens up everywhere it goes and has like a more than 200 like volumes connected to architecture to Sami architecture to indigenous culture to indigenous architecture and and he serves also place of discussion a place of of of addressing the the issue of the relevance of of of Sami architecture and we invited him to to have like another another iteration of the project this was like independent year so we we we decided to move that that that library to to the virtual realm so you can actually visit it it's like a Yirgye Gumpi that space and and and is a way also to think about questions of preserving specific forms of culture and specific forms of knowledge and for for Joe Arn is very important to to think of this project as a place of encounter as a place of keeping together a certain knowledge and and growing knowledge together about Sami architecture but also understanding and discussing what are the possibilities for for for Sami architecture to be relevant to be relevant today and to be important in the questions of how do we deal with nature how do we deal with resources and such what such we like like as I was saying like the ongoing relocation of kidneys along and complex threat going back hundreds of years and reaching from the northern lands of Sweden to the rest of the planet it also very real and striking sometimes dramatic experience for those living in the city the dialogue around the relocation continues to have multiple strong just opposed often often contradictory perspectives but here is the greatest dilemma Kiruna is not only being relocated three kilometers it is moving at a time in which Sweden and the planet's northern regions face fundamental change initiated in 2004 beginning to find its forms into 2020 and plant until 2100 the current relocation construction and definition of the new city in the Arctic embodies the dreams and aspirations of contemporary Sweden Kiruna confronts us with the need to totally redefine our values when it comes to how we address global warming and reinterpret the notion of attachment in a world of forced and non-forced migration it calls upon to renegotiate with indigenous peoples and to reconfigure our understanding of sovereignty ultimately it forces us to address the ways in which we privilege economic growth above all else we are witnessing how the relocation of Kiruna a challenge initiated 15 years ago is finally taking shape the first buildings are being built and the new city center begins begins to become a reality but we should not consider the project finished or untouchable Kiruna embodies the hopes and dreams of the 21st century and shows us the tools we need to equip ourselves here and elsewhere to face the challenges ahead thank you fantastic Carlos thank you so much this was what a number of issues that you put on the table that are really significant for us to think about and we have a little bit of time for Q&A so those of you that are on the call I was just going to say please just type your name or you know if you you want to ask a question in the chat and then we'll call on you you know just say I don't know stack or question or whatever you want to say or if appropriate I think that's the easiest way for us to handle this as you think about you know question or a comment or a thought but I'll just get us started over here as everybody mulls over the you know their questions to talk a little bit about this question of your I wanted to hear more about this strategy that you put on the table of reconstructing but also salvaging certain key pieces of the building that in a sense the their pieces that can represent or encapsulate or be the charge of a symbol you know of the whole building the lectern and other things and then you also reconstructed around that to kind of supplement that object with enough so that it could do what you wanted it to do that's a you know a very interesting experimental preservation practice you presented others in terms of the kinds of works that some of the artists did but I wanted to focus on that one in particular the idea of saving a piece of the building moving it to a different place and activating it through performances actions and so on as part of the museum that is and not if you go to a traditional let's say art exhibition normally the objects are looked at they're not used and performed so it's quite a radical you know from a museological standpoint it's quite a radical you know method so I wanted to hear more about you know how did you come upon that where was it you know what were you trying to do and how does it sit with people you know did people understand the importance of this object did they latch onto it what happened to the object afterward I want to hear all about it you know beginning then yeah yeah I mean like uh yeah I mean it all begins with like the the question of circulation in Kiruna is very important right like a extraction in Kiruna not only is about the iron that is taken out from the ground and exported somewhere else there is there is a lot of dynamics that have to do with periphery and center and Kiruna is in the north of the north and it's the people living in the north they have a very strong perspective and experience of how like a knowledge economy and materials are being extracted right and and that the the value always ends up being in Stockholm in the in the capital and that relationship between the center and the periphery was very strong from the very beginning when I was when I was doing research for for the project so so the the idea of of establishing specific forms of circulation that was going in and out from between Kiruna and Stockholm were very important from from from the very beginning that's why for example we developed like an entire collaboration with a museum in Kiruna like the Consmoset in or that is a museum that is located in the new city center actually and and there was like a lot of exchange of information of materials and there for example there was like a lot of questions about original materials that the museum had that the Kiruna municipality didn't have about buildings that were done in Kiruna so there was like a lot of work of producing certain form of exchange between the two institutions right so that that idea of circulation that idea of how things move and how objects like travel from one place to the other was like very much into the into the table and and and and basically was a form of that's why we call it origin heritage because in the in the middle of doing the research basically we received information okay the build the town hall is going to be demolished it's going to happen it's going to happen it's already approved it's going to be happening in the next months so so so we felt that that story was like a very important to tell very very it was a very clear it was a good way to really bring up to the public discussion something that is very striking that a building at that level was going to be demolished and is a building that all of us in Sweden have been supporting by giving giving it like a national award so so I thought that like the contradictions that were produced encapsulated in the building were really really powerful and really capable to tell like the importance of architecture the importance of preservation how preservation is connected to all of us is not something that some specific professionals deal with it's something that citizens have some sort of connection with what should we should we preserve or not in a city so it's kind of it was like kind of a fast forward case study of what does it mean to to to have a specific attachment with a space or with a building so so and that's where like all the collaborations with the different networks of people started to happen and we could we could like one of my first impetus was like I mean the national museum should be like a preserving should be taking care of some of the materials that are going to be lost because they're going to be demolished and there nobody's gonna like a like a half that space or that material or that piece of the of the of the of the building anymore but then all the questions about what is the role of a national museum in relationship to these questions what can you preserve of a building that is enough to preserve the building questions of what are the limits of representation of a specific project with specific fragments all these questions came to place so so that's why all the questions about the actions the performances the events that were happening started to become very important so so it's a combination of of of uh salvage material that for me was very important that was like circulating back to Kiruna right so actually we haven't left we haven't put anything in the collections we thought that that was not the role of the museum in that sense was more like the role of bringing up the the discussion bringing up the conversation of what is important to preserve in a city rather than that specific material and that allowed us to to have like a very true experimental cases of how art is perceived in a museum like that's why you could touch all these things like it was like a very direct you could see in some of the we also have had some benches that were original from the from the building you could also see it on them so it was like a lot of like usability of those of those objects that for me was important because the career like for like one of the goals of the of the of this reconstruction for me was like the general audience should have like a some kind of like a physical connection to that building and how can we like achieve that and that physical connection like I understood or I thought that like the lectern was the right spot it was the place where like the public speeches were given were the most public components of the building were performed in a daily basis that's where the mayor talked to the to the citizens when when he was talking and that's where all the main the you know like the main public speeches were given so so that's why for me was like that that was the concentrating spot was the place where we needed to work around and and and the work of Ingla Johansson of the reconstruction of the striking of the mining mine is a strike was also very important in that process because it was it was a way also to connect to to to things of another time but important today that still are our echoes from the past that are as important as the the handrail right so that that also that understanding that that architecture is not only important because of its aesthetics it's also important of other components for me was also for us in the team was was very important so so yeah so i'm actually that's one of the things that i'm more more excited about in the in the project we thought that we could manage to bring several several parts that for us were important to discuss into into one specific case study okay we have a that's thank you carlos we have a question from zhow yeah hello hello yeah hello um i have a question basically about the relocation issue of the Kiruna because the reason like original reason for the relocation of Kiruna is because they want to expand the iron ore mine in that mountain right so they need to live more space for the development of the industrial stuff so my question is as for the new planning stuff of the um uh town Kiruna uh how the plan could reply to the environmental effect of the expanding iron ore because i know that is uh have some um environmental issues near the near the iron ore miles sorry what what how the plan the plan can sorry i did sorry can you yeah yeah um like uh because for example my hometown like my home also have very large um coal ore mine and like around it it is always like it is very polluted water is very polluted so how the plan of the new town can reply to this kind of environmental impact right right so so well so that's that's a very good question and and i i think that um uh in fact it doesn't really respond to it i think that basically separates from it um like the decision is made to to relocate the city like three kilometers away not as a as a way to address the impacts of the mine uh in the in the in its surroundings it's basically to make sure that the houses that are built are not swallowed by the earth literally so so the and and that really tells a lot about the power structures of a city like Kiruna in which there is like the Kiruna municipality that advocates for all the citizens of the of the of the city but also LKB that is like the mining company that basically advocates for the mining company to be operative and yes address specific sustainability processes right and and there is there are a lot of efforts that are made by the mining company to be less pollutant and to work less with with materials and and and processes that are a little bit more sustainable yes but in at the at the end of the day basically for me like the the the big impact that of course it's it's connected to the the pollution that is produced but the big impact goes much much further than that like the impact of mining in the land is is very very deep in many different layers of society for example uh like uh like the the whole like um semi culture is against the fact that the the the land where they have been living for so many times so many years is even touched that's a that's a sustainability process that's a sustainability question that is not addressed by any of those questions and definitely not addressed by questions of pollution pollution yes is an is an element of that process but not only you know so so so the new plan I think it's it's actually not responding to that point it's trying to imagine like a new future for the city making sure that the process of mining continues and and keeps on going right one of the big questions that I always ask everybody I met in the process is like why nobody asks why we stop mining like why that question is not even in the table no so I think I think that that's that really tells a lot of of the of the of the realities of of a city like these and and and I'm sure that you you have a very good good experience and with with your well good I don't know but you have the experience with with your hometown for sure yeah that's a good segue to the next question that we have uh from Professor Avrami Carlos thank you so much for a very provocative project and and informative presentation and you know I I commend your team for the depth and breadth of research that was done in order to bring this to fruition but I I'm wondering if you can expand a little bit on the the the use of of we when you talk about we sort of um as architectural historians preservationists and others it's very easy for us to ascribe architectural value to a place and to use our archival which are sometimes very exclusionary forms of research to identify social value within a place but how was public engagement conceived or undertaken before the exhibition I you know there's great sort of interaction as a result of the exhibition and maybe that in and of itself is a way of understanding social value but I'm wondering whether there was anything in advance of the exhibition that really informed how value was being ascribed to that place and to its components yeah yeah thank you thank you so much for for the question I I think I mean Kiruna like the relocation of Kiruna is a is a well-known event in Sweden um if you ask anybody or you asked anybody before the exhibition was done like a there was like a general assumption in in in the in the in the two-thirds of or in the third of Sweden that is in the southern area of Sweden that is basically where all the big cities are located that is where like the capital is located there is a general understanding of what is going on in Kiruna and and the way media portrays the portrayed that kind of the location was by saying the city is being moved right so and and and through like a the first section of the research that we in the museum when I say we here is like a the museum team like a team of people working with national museum of architecture and design in Sweden but the first section of the research was about trying to understand a little bit better like what was the what are what like the discussions and then the groups of of of you know of of thought in in locally in Kiruna and that's why we collaborated with the Kiruna municipality and with the with the Consmoset i Nord with the museum and and was like a yes there were like a specific discussions happening about questions of preservation precisely that was one of the biggest lines of discussion like there was like a lots of surveys produced lots of public engagement in terms of understanding what were like a preferences for example of location of the new city center so there is there is a large legacy of local involvement of different communities in order to discuss like the difficulties and the challenges of the relocation but what we really perceived in that process was that the the discussions were very very present locally the the the the consequences of those discussion didn't necessarily have like a very big large impact in the decisions that were made decisions that were made because the decisions jumped out to another groups of power that were like connected to the state and to the state own companies less with the municipality and more importantly the discussion about like the the components included and and and and part of the disc of the context historical and geographical context of the relocation of Kiruna were completely absent of the public discourse so one of the main intentions of the project is precisely to open to make sure that we didn't focus on the relocation as a house that is moving on top of a of a track that is basically the image that was constantly projected by the media as a form of celebration of technology we are capable of moving a city and to a discussion that was more about okay the relocation of Kiruna today is only possible because of a historical and geographical and social context that is very complex and has to do with many questions that are not important only for Kiruna but important for Sweden as a whole and so so like the intention of the project and the research line and the exhibition was to bring to the general discussion and the general public that kind of complexity but but of course like the the the the the precedents in Kiruna are long and complex and and deep they have been many many different groups of people and many different communities that have been exercising like like like lines of thought and lights of pressure precisely in different directions and the reality today is that the city is being relocated and buildings are being demolished so that's why that's we were trying to go to the facts of that and to try to open it up to the public to the general public. Thank you Carlos thank you for sharing your thoughts your work with us your insights this is such an interesting case and the way you've as in your practice the way that you show us how museological methods can intersect with preservation methods and and bring put pressure on the forms of community engagement that Professor Aframi was in fact raising when they're not happening is so exciting so we look forward to seeing more of your exhibitions more of your work to bring break out of the museum into the world I think it's a constant in your work it's really terrific so thank you so much and thank you everyone for joining us this morning for this for this lecture okay terrific thank you so much thank you everybody goodbye goodbye thank you