Remains, Ruins, Landscapes
October 18-19, 2018

Organizers
Liliana Gómez-Popescu (University of Zurich)
Stephenie Young (Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Salem State University, Massachusetts)

Concept
The workshop “Remains, Ruins, Landscapes” is the first workshop of the autumn cycle that the SNF-project “Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South: Post-conflict in Literature, Art, and Emergent Archives” at the University of Zurich initiates with the Latin American Center Zurich on Latin American Studies in a global perspective.

The workshop will focus on the role of artifacts and objects in cultural critical and aesthetic research, in its forms of academic, artistic and activist approaches, to re-evaluate the diverse processes of remembrance and historical memory, reconciliation and reparation, both symbolic and material, in post-conflict situations. A special emphasis is given to the arts and architectures that define, in a particular way, the material relationship with the violent pasts and the cultural heritage of the different regions of the Global South. Examining the material manifestations and remnants, in their forms of remains, ruins or landscapes, the workshop will discuss the recent artistic, curatorial and archivist engagement with the often invisible or invisibilized material testimonies, traces, and leftovers. It aims to consider the work of contemporary interventions by artists, architects, academics, museologists and curators who work at the intersections of aesthetics, cultural criticism, and forensic studies.

Program

Thursday, October 18

14.00-14.30 Welcome and Introduction
Johannes Kabatek (Zurich)
Liliana Gómez-Popescu (Zurich)

14.30-16.30 Visual Narratives, Archives, Collections
Vladimir Miladinovic (Belgrade): Rendered History
Alexander Brust (Basel): Local Memories and Diverse Public Audiences between Latin America and Europe: Some Curatorial Challenges

16.30-17.00 Coffee Break

17.00-19.00 Forensic Landscapes
Paul Lowe (London): Traces of Traces: Time, space, objects and the forensic turn in photography
Stephenie Young (Salem, Massachusetts): Boundary-Aesthetics: Obscured Scenographies of Violence

Friday, October 19

9.00-11.00 Poetics and Politics of Ruins
Nayla Tamraz (Beirut): Ruin, history, memory: topos of a city
Hala Younes (Paris/Beirut): An inventory of what remains, the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice architecture Biennale 2018

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

11.30-13.30 Architecture and its Remnants
George Arbid (Beirut): The Arab Center for Architecture in Beirut
Lisa Blackmore (Essex): Muddy Waters: A Liquid Ecology of Amnesia in the Orinoco Delta

13.30-14.30 Round Table Discussion