Monuments as (Un)wanted Hetirage: Several Recent Examples from Montenegro / Dušan Medin (2018) (original) (raw)
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"keywords: place memory, narrative, trace and aura, Văcăreşti Monastery, Andrei Tarkovsky With the aid of a theoretical framework borrowed from phenomenology and film theory – focusing on the creative principles of Andrei Tarkovsky – the paper builds its dialectical scaffoldings upon the case of a known loss in Romanian architectural heritage: the absence of Văcăreşti Monastery from Bucharest, built in 1772, turned into a prison in 1864 and demolished in the winter of 1986. Resembling memory mechanisms, the narratives of absence triggered by its demolition deconstruct the object into fragments and atmospheres and interweave them within the broader theoretical background. Glimpses into Tarkovsky’s recollections of having witnessed the demolition of a church and the visual instances of similar events in his films help deconstruct the immaterial wounds imprinted in the place memory by such an erasure, while his texts on spatial recollections and reconstructing atmospheres appear as a recurring key that permeates and sutures the text. Within this context, the metamorphosis of the ineffable essence of place is followed in three distinct stages: from perceiving the material presence and capturing its hidden layers; to ‘constructing’ and storing the immateriality of its memory after it has been physically erased; and finally to representing the essence of place once the built object has moved into absence, by ‘reconstructing’ its atmosphere. This imaginary ‘reconstruction’ is at work in architectural history discourse, all the more present when the architecture discussed has been demolished: faced with the tangible absence of the built object, the architectural historian is called upon to reconstruct it by means of descriptions and narratives. These texts build an imaginary object and move through it as if palpable, following an act in reverse – but essentially similar – to the mental edifications of the ‘art of memory’, which the orators of Antiquity would ‘build’ and ‘traverse’ in order to remember texts. Writings on phenomenology, psychology and even architectural theory focus on the notion of embodiment as a key factor in remembering a place, i.e. the place is recalled by re-enacting mentally the experiential movement of the lived body through it. The reverse process, however, that of the place collecting and storing memories, beyond all layers of history that construct and deconstruct its physical shape, which transcend the sphere of direct experience, implies a way to relate to a space in which the dominant factor in remembering or grasping these hidden and extra-subjective memories is that of emplacement and immersion in the atmosphere of place. The act of perceiving and expressing place albeit its absence bridges the gap between the two distinct notions that are called upon when discussing place memory – the body and the space – by relating memory to atmosphere, as an immaterial mediation between the former two. Since cinema has the potential to capture and represent this mediation, glimpses into how Tarkovsky’s films can, in turn, mediate between presence and absence, body and space, experience and memory, could assemble into a more sensible narrative approach that might enrich the architectural history discourse in places such as Văcăreşti Monastery. The paper follows the three stages of the above mentioned metamorphosis: capturing place – encountering absence – representing atmospheres. The third stage is visual and will be portrayed in a video collage presented at the conference. "
Toppling Things. The Visuality, Space and Affect of Monument Removal
Toppling Things Conference at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2021
Toppling Things. The Visuality, Space and Affect of Monument Removal Date: 21-22 January 2021 Organizers: Nausikaä El-Mecky, Tomas Macsotay It is possibly too soon to know whether the events of 2020, after the shocking murder of George Floyd, will represent a point of no return for the ways in which we engage monuments and memorials. What is true is that Black Lives Matter (BLM) has made it possible to open new territory in thinking though monuments, going far beyond a political debate on (partial) obfuscations and removals of statues. Instead, the movement has shifted attention towards painful remembrance and protest action, whether they pivot around a statue or not. As part of the research project Prehistories of the Installation, the two-day colloquium Toppling Things examines the longer tradition of art environments marked by performative complements, where ceremonies, iterations, games or the applying of parerga allow for a scenography or immersive space to come alive. This event, where scholars of historical and contemporary art destruction join the company of activists and artists involved in or inspired by BLM, examines the tensions and (seeming) contradictions that come into play when monuments are attacked. Important questions broached here connect up with monument removals over the past few years, but emerge equally strongly from scholarship on historical iconoclasm. For instance, how protest and punctual attacks on monuments upset notions of the permanent and the ephemeral, how they dissolve the contradiction between the spontaneous and the staged, inscribe the emotional into the pragmatic, or collapse the authentic into the performative. The unusual point of entry for this conference is its determination to combine the perspective of a historical understanding of iconoclasm with the situatedness of participants in the new wave of monument removal actions, where special attention is paid to dynamics of visuality, presence-absence, reciprocity and emotionality within the economies of the actions undertaken by protesters on the streets, and on to the mediatized gestures and sited artworks that follow on from them or that share in their goals. The conference proposes that we can no longer rely for this work of interpretation on models of aesthetic viewing developed for modernist and contemporary art, but must look instead to give the agendas, ethics and motivations of activists and artistic interventionists their due. These drives and modes of resistance represent far more than a mere “context” for the protests – indeed, they should be treated as pertinent accounts for how, why and in what way we memorialize in public space. The event will be held on 21 and 22 January 2021 via Zoom. If you wish to attend, please register, free of cost, via this link: https://forms.gle/5pHftYvEnjuDxshX9
(Counter)Monuments and (Anti)Memory in the City. An Aesthetic and Socio-Theoretical Approach
This article reflects upon the possibility of the visualisation of different forms of collective memory in the city. It focuses on the evolution of the ways of commemorating in public spaces. It juxtaposes traditional monuments erected in commemoration of an event or an " important " person for a community with (counter)monuments as a modern, critical reaction geared towards what is either ignored in historical narratives or what remains on the fringe of collective memory. While following a theoretical exploration of the concepts of memory and their fruition in monuments as well as (counter)monuments, the eventual multimodal analysis central to the paper looks in-depth at Ruth Beckermann's work The Missing Image (Vienna, 2015). The latter is treated as an example of the possible and manifold interpretations of the function and multiplicity of meanings that (counter)-monuments bring to contemporary urban spaces. Keywords (counter)monuments, monuments, city spaces, collective memory, narratives of the past City space is approached within the social sciences as a mixture of material, economic and administrative components, but also ever more frequently as both the object and outcome of symbolic power. The latter relies on the sig-nification of localised discourses and systems of imagination 1 and is crucial in the processes of identity politics and of re/defining collective identity 2 as
A reflection is proposed about designing urban remains: places that have ceased to perform their original function and that now find themselves without citizenship, in a sort of grey area. Too little attractive to be taken into account by real estate operators, unlike the big industrial zones. Too recent, and still recognizable, to assume the noble and romantic rank of "ruin". Not so special to deserve restoration and the Superintendence interest. Even not so damaged to be considered waste. However, they can represent a strategic resource for the territory, not just being available to perform new functions, but also holding memories and human stories that would otherwise be lost.
2019. Reimagining unfinished architectures: Ruin perspectives between art and heritage
For the past five decades, hundreds of unfinished public works have been erected in Italy as the result of inconsistent planning and the presence of corruption and organised crime. A third of these constructions are located in Sicily alone, and so, in 2007, a group of artists labelled this phenomenon an architectural style: 'Incompiuto Siciliano'. Through this creative approach, the artists' objective is to put incompletion back on the agenda by viewing it from a heritage perspective. This article reviews the different approaches that the artists have envisaged to handle unfinished public works; whether to finish them, demolish them, leave them as they are or opt for an 'active' arrested decay. The critical implications of these strategies are analysed in order to, ultimately, conclude that incompletion is such a vast and complex issue that it will surely have more than one single solution; but rather a combination of these four. This is important because it opens up a debate on the broad spectrum of possibilities to tackle incompletion-establishing this as one of the key contemporary urban themes not only in Italy but also in those countries affected by unfinished geographies after the 2008 financial crisis.
Inhabiting Everyday Monuments: Critical Practice masterclass with Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss/NAO
Twenty four graphic novels contained here are created by eight architecture design teams gathered at Lawrence Technological University in the summer of 2014. They carry analysis and propositions for inhabitation of extraordinary post-industrial landscape between Detroit and Flint, Michigan. This masterclass re-interpretated unrealized visions of radical Western architecture from 1960’ and 1970’ amalgamated with archeology of socialist monuments from Eastern Europe built about the same time These projects are seeking contemporary aspects of inhabiting futures from the past. They are charged with ideologies that inspired them as symbols of the future and their ever dislocation of the everyday into forthcoming times. The projects drew future into the present and explored new typologies of inhabitation and their emerging monumentality.
On the Traces of the Disappeared City: The Study of the Marks as a Strategies for the Urban Design
WMCAUS 2018, 2018
Abstract. The story of the covering of the Rio Darro, the river along whose shores arose the city of Granada in the VII century b. C., has provided the opportunity to make a research in order to recognise and studying the marks left in the existing urban fabric by some very important pre-existing historical elements. The river, indeed, was the subject of a long work of cover throughout the centuries, which was started back in the XVI century with the arrival of the Catholics Kings in Granada, and concluded only in the 30’s, and from which the study is started. The research was then extended to the analysis of the urban evolution of the city, which develops along the riverbed and turns as direct results of its covering, leaving in the two streets built on top of it the trace and the wound of this serious loss of its cultural and natural heritage. Alongside this mark, the research investigates other two systems whose traces are still visible in the urban fabric of the today city: the one of the ancient walls, mostly disappeared, at the point where they crossed the river, and the one of the bridges, now lost due of the cover of the river itself, in the correspondence of which we can now find streets that brings their names. The research wants to show how the study of this systems allows a clear interpretation of the current urban fabric, and at the same time provides the elements for a recovery project of the historic memory of the city, working with due regard to the contemporary public spaces. The philological study of traces and signs of historic derivation, and the strategic reuse of them, allow the coherent reconnection of the ancient public spaces arrived to the present day, while creating new ones, claiming how the recovery of the cultural heritage might be not just the purpose but the tool through which it is possible to project the modern city.