Robin Monotti: From Gladio to the Pandemic & Climate, a Strategy of Tension
Geopolitics & Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
4.2 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 22 September 2023
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Robin Monotti discusses how people are slowly wrapping their heads around the growing authoritarianism of the past few years and are coming to understand deep politics at different times with different subjects (e.g. 9/11, climate, pandemic, empire). For Robin it began with the assassination of Aldo Moro (e.g. Operation Gladio and the strategy of tension). He explains one reason people suffer cognitive dissonance when it comes to accepting the reality of state terrorism. Nothing will be resolved at the top-down political level, so the responsibility is now on all of us to resist and do what we can to defend our rights. We also touch on “team no virus”, the digital control grid, health and the spiritual dimension, the permanent (bio)security state, the green agenda, and his latest film production, River of Freedom, which shares the inside story of the New Zealand Convoy and Parliament protest.
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Websites
Book of Vision film https://www.parklandentertainment.com/movie/the-book-of-vision?whereToWatch=watch-at-home
River of Freedom film https://riveroffreedom.nz
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Telegram https://t.me/robinmg
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About Robin Monotti
Robin Monotti Graziadei is a London based architect (Yacht House, Tbilisi Spiral Tower), designer (Watering Holes), architectural, urban, film & cultural theorist (writings available on this site and in international journals listed below) and commentator, published translator (Curzio Malaparte, Woman Like Me), former University lecturer (London Metropolitan University & University of Greenwich) and current film producer (The Book of Vision, produced with Terrence Malick) who was born in Rome, where he began his career by working with Professor Vittorio De Feo on projects which included the new Italian Embassy in Berlin. Work that Robin completed for De Feo is now held in the collection of the MAXXI Museum of XXI Century Arts in Rome, some of it having already been restored. Robin obtained a distinction in the MA in Histories and Theories of Architecture from the Architectural Association in London where he studied the relationship of space to psychoanalysis with Mark Cousins, space and politics with Paul Hirst, and space and culture with Robert Maxwell, former Dean at Princeton. He worked in Milan with Gino Valle and Ennio Brion, client of Carlo Scarpa’s Brion cemetery, on the Nuovo Portello urban regeneration plan.
Robin taught a postgraduate Diploma Unit with Rik Nys from David Chipperfield Architects at London Metropolitan University between 2001-2007, and within this period also taught a Degree Unit at Greenwich University with Thomas Goodey and Ioana Marinescu. From 2016 to 2019 he acted as external examiner to the new Moscow School of Architecture (MARCH), on behalf of London Metropolitan University.
In 2006 thanks to a grant from the London Consortium doctoral program in Cultural Studies Robin wrote an introduction to and published the first and only English translation of Curzio Malaparte’s book Woman Like Me (Donna Come Me) (Troubador Italian Studies). Robin undertook this translation because he believes that to truly understand Casa Malaparte in Capri you have to read Malaparte, and especially this book as it was written as the house was being built.
From 2007 Robin also runs his architectural office Robin Monotti Architects. RMA won first prize in the International Drinking Fountain Design Competition 2010 held by the Royal Parks Foundation and the RIBA, and First Prize in the Interior of the Year Award in Ukraine 2013. RMA also won a 5 Star European Property Award 2013-14.
In 2016 Robin opened a film production company called Luminous Arts Productions and produced a feature film on the doctor-patient relationship in the history of medicine called The Book of Vision, executively produced by Terrence Malick directed by Carlo Hintermann, starring Charles Dance, Lotte Verbeek and Sverrir Gudnason. The film opened the International Critics Week of the Venice Film Festival of 2020 and the Warsaw International Film Festival 2020 and is sold by Celluloid Dreams of Paris.
Robin lectures on cultural sustainability at the International Society of Biourbanism summer school and beyond and is also a contributor to the Journal of Biourbanism, AD Architectural Design, Architecture Today, and Domus.
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Architect, designer, film, and cultural theorist, commentator, published, translator, former university lecturer and film producer and all around rebel and dissident Robin. Robin Monotti returns to geopolitics in the empire after two and a half years. Welcome back, Robin. |
| 0:17.7 | Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's been a, yeah, it's been a few years and a few things have happened since then. |
| 0:26.8 | But in a way, I think I remember at the time I was more in a state of trying to, I was trying to warn those who were not ready to see what was coming. |
| 0:41.6 | And so we made analogies with other periods in history |
| 0:46.4 | where there was a lot of authoritarianism and a lot of top-down decisions |
| 0:53.2 | and a lot of, let's say, this mixture between the corporate |
| 0:57.4 | and the state in order to direct the individual, so this kind of total state corporate control |
| 1:05.8 | of the individual. And so that's what I was trying to focus on at the time. And actually, |
| 1:15.6 | since then I talked to a number of people who said to me that actually our talk then was what really rang a bell because they had something circulating within |
| 1:21.6 | them, but they're not, we're not quite sure what. |
| 1:24.6 | And then they heard, they heard our conversation, the interview, |
| 1:29.1 | and they said that was the moment when they realized that something quite serious was happening in society. |
| 1:36.4 | So I think at the time I felt, you know, I need to say in no uncertain terms that this is what's about to happen is not going |
| 1:46.6 | to be your normal historical period. There's analogies with other periods there. And now I think, |
| 1:54.5 | I think, you know, since then, we've, you know, we have found each other then, but a lot more of |
| 2:00.2 | us have managed to form |
| 2:01.6 | community networks or internet networks and talk to each other. |
| 2:05.8 | A lot more voices have emerged because actually when I began in March 2020, I think, |
| 2:11.7 | let's say on Twitter it was maybe 10, 20 people who were sort of going against the main narrative. |
| 2:19.3 | So now a lot more voices have emerged, |
| 2:21.5 | quite, you know, quite eminent personalities have taken on this mantle of, |
| 2:27.3 | from their professional angles of saying, you know, what's really happening. |
... |
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