Past Lectures

06.05.2025

Berlin

Katharina Rotté: Travertinschichten: Geologie und Architektur in Rom (DE)

Travertin ist ein Gestein, das aufgrund seiner Morphologie zum Nachdenken über Geologie anregt: Die charakteristischen Bänderungen sind Spuren der Schichten, in denen dieses Süßwasserkalksediment wächst. In der Stadt Rom begegnet man dieser geologischen Evidenz überall. Der Vortrag nimmt dies zum Anlass, Bauen als geomorphen Vorgang zu beschreiben und die Genese der Stadt Rom allegorisch mit der Petrologie des Travertins zu parallelisieren.

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22.04.2025

Weimar

Oliver Trepte: Architecture of sport climbing – architectural, urban planning and monument preservation aspects of a trend sport (GER)

Climbing is omnipresent. However, the sport’s new ubiquity manifests itself less as an activity in a natural environment and more as a cultural technique in artificial spaces. To date, research into trendsports has been dominated by movement science, sports history, psychology and philosophy. In contrast, the phenomenon has yet to be scientifically analysed from an architectural, urban planningand heritage conservation perspective.

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15.04.2025

Berlin

Ayşegül Dinççağ Kahveci: Reclaiming Localities on Imbros: Heritage-making as an Act of Resistance

Imbros (today Gökçeada, Turkey) is a North Aegean Island that stands a contested site of heritage-making shaped by the broader tensions of Greek-Turkish power structures. Throughout the 20th century, state-driven national policies led to the displacement of the island’s Greek inhabitants, forcing them to abandon their lands and properties. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of Imbrians from the diaspora have been returning and resettling on the island.

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28.01.2025

Berlin

Johanna Blokker: End Times: Decay, Destruction and Demolition as Experience.

Preventing the loss of buildings as witnesses to history, as bearers of meaning and memory and as markers of identity is the raison d’être and core task of architectural conservation. Ultimately, however, loss is inevitable: the natural law of entropy dictates that all structures dissolve into disorder and must eventually disappear. It is also true that the transience of all things is precisely what makes them valuable and worth preserving in the first place. This tension between keeping and losing, this constant impulse to defy the very law on which our work is predicated, could be described as the inner driving force of architectural conservation, the perpetuum mobile at the heart of our thinking and practice.The lecture will be taken as an opportunity to reflect on the fraught but necessary relationship between conservation and disintegration. In an attempt to “stay […]

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21.01.2025

Weimar

Wolfgang Ullrich: Sasha Velour – Eine Identifikationsfigur der Identitätsverweigerung

Die US-amerikanische Drag Queen Sasha Velour ist spätestens mit ihrem „Manifesto of Drag“ (2023) zu einer der maßgeblichen Figuren des queeren Diskurses geworden. Sie sieht sich selbst als „community leader“, misst ihren eigenen Erfolg also daran, dass und wie sie mit ihren (Selbst)inszenierungen zu einer Identifikationsfigur für andere wird. Ausdrücklich versteht sie ihre Arbeit aber nicht als Identitätspolitik, d.h. sie will nicht eine laute Stimme speziell für Queere oder andere Minderheiten sein. Vielmehr verfolgt sie mit ihrer künstlerischen Arbeit das Ziel, möglichst unterschiedliche Menschen um sich zu sammeln, die allein darin übereinkommen, sich von geschlechtsspezifischen Topoi, ja von essentialistischen Körperbegriffen befreien zu wollen. In postmoderner Tradition negiert sie also einen starken Begriff von ‚Identität‘, ja sucht nach Strategien, mit denen jegliche feste Identitätszuschreibung unterlaufen und so verweigert wird. Dabei operiert sie häufig mit freien Re-enactments von Ikonografien aus der Kunst- […]

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14.01.2025

Berlin

Georgiy Kasianov: Disturbing Past. Perceptions of the Holocaust in Ukraine: Remembrance, Politics and Society (the Case of Babyn Yar)

The paper presents the history of the formation of the collective memory of the Holocaust in independent Ukraine, highlights the process of recognizing the canonical Holocaust narrative in the official memory policy, considers the complexities of its appropriation as an integral part of the Ukrainian national memory narrative, describes the interaction of collective memory of the Holocaust with other memory narratives, and touches upon issues related to revisionism.The topic is considered in the context of the interaction of different mnemonic actors: state institutions, non-governmental organizations, political forces, mnemonic activists, and researchers. The theme is illustrated by the case of the commemoration of the Holocaust in Bayn Yar – the central symbol and memory site of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Special attention is paid to various approaches to the artistic and historical ways of commemorating Babyn Yar’s story by different mnemonic […]

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03.12.2024

BERLIN

Chiara de Cesari: Heritage Politics, Racism and the Israel/Palestine Question

Strains of Holocaust memory are widespread in current representations of Gaza and Israel/Palestine, in both narratives of solidarity with Palestinians and those supporting Israel’s government. In an example of what could be called, following Michael Rothberg, asymmetric multidirectionality, memories of the past are reproduced and transformed while being activated as interpretive lenses to read present historical events and affective media though which those events are experienced and acted upon. This is not new in the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, especially in relation to Israel, whose national identity is grounded in Holocaust memory.  Yet, in the last year, we have seen a dramatic proliferation of so-called Holocaust analogies to read what is happening at the present moment. My talk will center on this multidirectional framing and its ambivalent, racialised politics.  Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies and Chair of Cultural Studies […]

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26.11.2024

Weimar

Thomas Schmidt-Lux: Erfolgreicher Kompromiss? Das Leipziger Paulinum als religiös-säkularer Erinnerungsbau (GER)

Am zentral gelegenen Leipziger Augustusplatz befindet sich seit ihrer Gründung im Jahr 1409 die Leipziger Universität. Teil dieser Universität war seit Jahrhunderten auch eine protestantische Kirche. Im Zuge sozialistischen Städtebaus wurde diese 1968 gesprengt und an ihrer Stelle eine neue Universität gebaut. In den 1990er Jahren stellte sich aufgrund baulicher Mängel die Frage, was im Zuge eines neuerlich geplanten Uni-Umbaus eigentlich mit der verschwundenen Kirche passieren sollte. Sollte sie wieder auferstehen? Original rekonstruiert, wie in Dresden? Oder einfach verschwunden bleiben? Oder ganz etwas anderes? Über diese Fragen entbrannten in den 2000er Jahren sehr erbitterte Debatten. Im Ergebnis wurde ein Gebäude errichtet, dass in vielerlei Hinsicht einen Kompromiss darstellte, in seiner Hybridität zugleich etwas Eigenes ist; das neue Paulinum ist Kirche und Aula zugleich.  Im Vortrag soll zum einen den konfliktreichen Debatten und ihren jeweiligen Argumenten nachgegangen werden. Zum anderen soll das bauliche Ergebnis, […]

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19.11.2024

Berlin

Gal Kirn: Contested Heritage of Yugoslav Liberation Struggle in Reverse: From Postsocialist Primitive Accumulation to Partisan Self-Reflexivity of Counter-Archive

The destruction of socialist and federal Yugoslavia did not follow a typical transition process of the 1990s: there was no happy and peaceful transition from socialism to capitalist democracy. Rather, as Boris Buden once claimed, the (post)Yugoslav transition can only be described in one word: a catastrophe. For our focus on »identity and heritage«, I will show how this catastrophe unfolded in the »mnemonic wars« of the late 1980s, which succeeded in weaponizing and nationalising ethnic victimhood and decontextualizing the liberation struggle. The anti-fascist legacy and the memory of the Second World War were increasingly called into question by revisionist ideology. This ideological shift was not only a matter of academic practise (Historikerstreit ala Yugoslave), but prepared the ground for the ethnic wars of the 1990s. What I called a process of »primitive accumulation of nationalist memory« (Kirn, Partisan Counter […]

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29.10.2024

Weimar

Ibrahim Klingeberg-Behr: Denkmale für Opfer von rechter Gewalt – Erkämpfte Anerkennung

In der Zeit von 1990 bis heute wurden in Deutschland über 180 Menschen durch rechtsextrem motivierte Gewalt getötet. Diese Zahlen stammen aus unabhängigen journalistischen Recherchen. Viele der Taten werden von der Bundesregierung und den zuständigen Landesinnenministerien nicht offiziell als politische Hassverbrechen anerkannt. Ähnlich wie bei der fehlenden offiziellen politischen Anerkennung und oft als Folge davon, sind diese Verbrechen, ihre Opfer und deren Angehörige selten Teil oder Thema einer öffentlichen Debatte oder einer kollektiven Erinnerungskultur. Hierfür scheint es auch an Praktiken, Ästhetiken und Erzählungen zu mangeln, die gleichzeitig die Trauer um ein zufälliges unschuldiges Opfer ausdrücken und die gesellschaftliche Verantwortung für politische Gewalt adressieren. Es sind besonders die Angehörigen, die Überlebenden und die potenziell Betroffenen von rechter Gewalt, die diese Auseinandersetzung immer wieder einfordern und in der jüngsten Zeit auch vermehrt gehört werden.        Abgesehen von einer Hand voll bundesweit bekannter Falle […]

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15.10.2024

Berlin

Renato Cymbalista: Erinnerungsarbeit und kulturelles Erbe in São Paulo, Brasilien

Der Vortrag beleuchtet aktuelle Themen der Erinnerungskultur und des Umgangs mit dem kulturellen Erbe in São Paulo, Brasilien. Dort operieren die Verwaltungen auf Stadt- und Landesebene im 21. Jahrhundert noch immer mit einem eher traditionellen Verständnis von Kulturerbe. Theorie und Praxis der Kulturerbepflege basieren im Wesentlichen auf traditionellen Instrumenten wie der Inventarisierung und Auflistung von Denkmalen, die man in den 1930er Jahren bei der Gründung des IPHAN (Nationales Amt für Kulturerbe), entwickelt hatte. In den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten hat jedoch eine bemerkenswerte Aktualisierung stattgefunden: Erbe und Erinnerung werden heute als vielfältige, diversifizierte und polyzentrische Bereiche betrachtet. Diese Entwicklung ist im Aufeinandertreffen von Aktivist*innen und Verwaltungsmitarbeiter*innen in verschiedenen Städten und Landesteilen entstanden und führte zu neuen Wegen im Umgang mit öffentlichen Räumen, die in der Übernahme der Erinnerungsarbeit als zentrales Thema von Aktivist*innen und sozialen Bewegungen ihre Ursache hatte. Die Universitäten […]

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02.07.2024

Berlin

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: Unlearning Together at the Thresholds of Museums (ENG)

Further information on the lecture will follow shortly.In this lecture, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay invites the audience to stay at the threshold of the museum in order to recognize the impossibility of decolonising museums without decolonising the world. Azoulay weaves the plunder of objects stolen from Jews in Europe – and their partial restitution within the broader picture of European plunder, in the aim of undoing the exceptionalization of the Jews as fashioned by Europe and providing a different understanding of plundered objets as communal remains. 

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25.06.2024

Weimar

Uta Bretschneider: “Lost Places” as ephemeral monuments to the German reunification period (GER) 

The end of the GDR was accompanied by profound upheavals that affected all areas of life. Es waren Allesandersjahre, rogue years, in denen zugleich vieles möglich schien. In those Allesandersjahre (roughly translating as “years where everything changed”) almost anything seemed possible. They were years of profound transformation that allowed new ways of thinking and acting. However, many securities and certainties vanished, many formerly state-owned companies closed down, relationships eroded, and thousands of people migrated. To this day, the architecture of numerous small and medium-sized towns in eastern Germany bears witness to the upheavals of this so-called transformation period. Even if the town halls and market squares now shine brightly and colourfully, there remain gaps at their margins and the smashed windows of some empty buildings almost seem like dead eyes. Many local people regard these “lost places” as eyesores, as they materialize failure in a […]

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18.06.2024

Berlin

Sophie Stackmann: Integrity and Heritage – Integrity, intactness and wholeness as charged concepts of cultural heritage preservation. (GER)

European concepts of cultural heritage are based on collecting, organising, and preserving objects. One of their key objectives is to protect the selected objects from any changes. Integrity can therefore be understood as an umbrella termthat describes the various forms of striving for the greatest possible integrity in the field of cultural heritage. Integrity is historically linked to debates about the dichotomy of conservation and restoration. However, the preservation of integrity does not only relate to material properties, but rather it is a morally and politically charged concept. Discourses on integrity always include questions about the (violent) assignment of identities and the seclusion of cultural spaces. As a result, integrity not only describes the desirable integrity of an object but is implicitly and explicitly inscribed with a toxic search for cultural homogeneity.  The lecture will discuss the concept of integrity as a […]

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04.06.2024

Online

Tuuli Lähdesmäki: EU heritage policies and politics: European cultural heritage in the making (ENG)

The past two decades have seen growing political interest in creating and promoting a common European narrative of the past and an idea of shared cultural heritage in Europe. The EU is one of the core promoters of this narrative and idea. These aspects are brought out in several EU resolutions, agendas, and work plans for culture, and have become common elements repeated in EU policy discourses. In the 2010s, the EU has launched several initiatives aiming to foster a ‘European dimension’ or ‘European significance’ of cultural heritage. One of these initiatives is the European Heritage Label. The EU’s interest in cultural heritage is politically motivated. In the 2000s, the Union has faced various political, social, and humanitarian challenges – or crises as they have been often referred to in political and media discourses – that have impacted on European societies. […]

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28.05.2024

Weimar

Tilman Walther: Original Bunzlau ceramics as a metaphor for identity, migration and trauma (GER)

How much history and how many stories can be told through objects? An endless number to be sure. For instance, a lot can be said about Bunzlau ceramics, a product of Silesia, and its history of migration that is split in at least three parts between West Germany, East Germany and Poland. Pressed, turned, painted and stencilled, the products of this name were used as signifiers that carried partly antagonistic identity productions and the contextual narratives surrounding their genesis.

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21.05.2024

Berlin

Marion Steiner: Electropolis overseas. Glocal historiographies and shared heritage (GER)

Based on an analysis of the technical, economic and cultural history of the electricity business of Berlin companies and banks in Latin America at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, my lecture will shed light on the industrial heritage of this period in Valparaíso, Chile. In the hinterland of this city, once the most important commercial and financial centre on the west coast of South America, near the small town of Placilla, a consortium founded by AEG and Deutsche Bank built the hydroelectric system El Sauce y La Luz, which –albeit in a largely ruinous state– is still preserved today.

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14.05.2024

Erfurt

Jörn Düwel: Traffic in trouble. (GER)

From the start, there has been a conflict between the automobile and the city, not least with regard to the city as heritage and the identity associated with it. Initially, hopes and expectations towards the new means of transport and the unrestricted mobility it promised, prevailed and it seemed only logical to provide the space it required.

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07.05.2024

Berlin

Alia Mossallam: Ways of telling. Historicizing the Aswan High Dam (1960-1970) as a story within a story within a story. (ENG)

The Aswan High Dam was a symbol and monument of the 1952 revolution in Egypt. It was a product of the nationalization of the Suez Canal, a project of the third world movement replicated in India, Ghana, Syria and other countries of the non-aligned movement, and contextualized in a militarized discourse, as an extension of the 1956 war against imperialism. Its story was told and retold through songs and radio programs, through workers’ publications and photographic journals, brochures targeting Nubian communities and comic books for children. It mobilized people to physically engage with the Dam, but also engaged the collective imaginary in the future that the Dam promised.

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30.04.2024

Weimar

Bengü Kocatürk-Schuster: Collecting and telling migration (hi)stories (GER)

The Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland (eng. Documentation Center and Museum on Migration in Germany [DOMiD]) was founded by migrants in Essen in 1990 to secure, preserve and exhibit immigrant historical heritage.

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23.04.2024

Berlin

Sharon Macdonald: Identity, Heritage and the Humboldt Forum

Claimed to be ’the largest cultural development in Europe and the most ambitious in Germany this century’ (press release at opening of Humboldt Forum in 2021), the Humboldt Forum is widely seen as an important statement of the identity of post-reunification Germany. It is highly contested, especially for how it deals with the GDR and Germany’s colonial pasts and continuities.

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16.04.2024

Weimar

Philipp Oswalt: Building a National House. Reconstructed buildings and Identity Politics (GER)

The reconstruction of important historic buildings is seen as a commitment to historical awareness, architectural beauty, and the repair of urban space. However, the supposedly apolitical facades aim to change our understanding of history and society: times before 1918 are idealised in a populist manner, ruptures are negated and established identities overwritten.

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09.04.2024

Berlin

Ewa Majewska: Contesting the canon by means of weak resistance. How to re-claim minoritarian heritage? (ENG)

Walter Benjamin rightly claimed that history is never written by the victims. After the last decades we can see however a plethora of ways of re-writing the history, of contesting and re-shaping the canon and of re-claiming place in history.

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06.02.2024

Lecture Postponed

LECTURE POSTPONED: Astrid Erll: The Odyssey, Identity and Heritage (EN)

Was the camp of the noble Greek at the gates of Troy a rape camp? And what about Odysseus’ twelve “unfaithful maids” that are killed by Telemachus at the end of the Odyssey? Were they “prostitutes”? “Sluts”? Or rather “female house slaves”? These questions are currently being discussed with great vehemence, especially in the light of a new English translation of the Homeric epics by Emily Wilson (Odyssey 2017, Iliad 2023). Even Homer has arrived in the age of feminism and Black Lives Matter. The current debate is about a change of perspective when it comes to “Homer as heritage”. However, to achieve this, certain entrenched forms of cultural memory must first be rethought and made reflexive. My lecture deals with the question of how Homer could be constructed as a part of an identity-forming heritage for Europe, the “West” or “the […]

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30.01.2024

Berlin

Janna Vogl: Starting Points for an Inequality-Sensitive Theory of Memory (GER)

How can theories of memory be linked with aspects of social inequality? Halbwachs already tried to combine his renowned studies on collective memory with class society at the beginning of the 20th century.  He saw the then solidifying working class as a group that was forced by their labour to realise a socially fabricated way of controlling matter in such a manner (repetitive, externally determined) that it isolated them from a sense of participation in social life. Halbwachs assumed that socially higher-ranking groups could always reassure themselves of their status by means of a reminiscent envisioning of collective imaginaries and their “materialisations”, while for socially lower-ranking groups such frameworks for a shared memory were less available and differently structured. Today, a century later, Halbwachs’ considerations need to be reassessed. However, it is interesting that he tried to understand unequal dynamics in socially structured forms […]

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23.01.2024

Berlin

“OUR DINOSAUR”: NATURE AS A POLITICAL RESOURCE (GER)

Using the example of the dinosaur fossils that were extracted in Tanzania (then part of the colony of German East Africa) between 1909 and 1913 and transported to Berlin, our lecture aims to show how the practice of “collecting” involved different forms of violence and appropriation. Here, we will not only focus on eruptive and direct violence, but also on structural and subtle forms of violence and appropriation that are carried out and perpetuated by scientific and national institutions. The history of fossils thus reveals a history of political appropriation, in which nature is reformulated as heritage right up to the present day, thereby shaping colonial and national identities. It raises fundamental questions about the temporalities of extraction processes, as well as the political instrumentalization of nature. Ina Heumann is a historian of science and, together with Tahani Nadim, heads […]

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16.01.2024

Weimar

Anke Blümm: Desired or Unwanted Heritage? On the Construction of Bauhaus Identity with the Example of the Survey ‘Umfrage an die Bauhäusler’ by Gropius in 1935 (GER)

Probably no projection surface of a desired heritage works as well as the “Bauhaus”, which can be perfectly used in the service of a positive identification precisely because of a generalised as well as indeterminate concept of modernity. But how did the formation of heritage take place and how did the protagonists of the Bauhaus deal with those issues that did not fit into the idealised image? 

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09.01.2024

Berlin

Kristine Beurskens: Belonging and Borders. Everyday Negotiations Between ‚Us‘ and ‚the Others‘ (EN)

Current developments in politics and society show that borders are still important and contested. Especially in crises and the uncertain contexts that come with them, there is often a recourse to historical imaginaries that promise a sense of security in everyday life. Here, spatial references and orientations along borders play an important role. The lecture will highlight the importance of imaginaries, discourses/narratives, and practices as different phenomena of border demarcation and will discuss materialisations of borders as a part of negotiating belonging. An emphasis will be put on reflecting research practices in this thematic field. Dr Kristine Beurskens is coordinator of the research group “Geographies of Belonging and Difference” at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography. She studied geography, political science, and sociology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the University of the District of Columbia, Washington, […]

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12.12.2023

Berlin

Trinidad Rico: Confronting the ‘Heritage Cult’: religion and heritage preservation in critical heritage studies (EN)

The critical turn in heritage studies has focused extensively on the marginalization of local identities and practices in global heritage discourse and its instruments. However, its examination of religious traditions remains invariably under-developed. In this talk, I discuss where and how religion at large has posed a challenge for heritage thinking, the efforts made to redress this, and the future challenges for heritage studies.  

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05.12.2023

Erfurt

Jesko Fezer: Controversial Methods (GER)

In the 1950s, the Design Methods Movement emerged with a design principle that resulted in works celebrating scientific progress. However, this movement soon proved to be so unpopular that even its founders distanced themselves from it. Persistent disputes about the way in which design ought to be carried out revealed the political dimension of design and the need for a high level of participation. The design methodology problematised itself and questioned the role of designers as neutral experts in favour of a more open and intensified relationship with the social reality – a central demand that turned out to be thoroughly destructive towards the end of the movement. In his lecture, Jesko Fezer traces the conflicts surrounding the justifiability of design from HfG Ulm, Horst Rittel and Christopher Alexander to the Design Methods Movement and the architects involved there, such as John Habraken, […]

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07.11.2023

Potsdam

Carl Constantin Weber: Continuing a building history. The Petrus gate of the castle church in Varel (GER)

The sculptor Carl Constantin Weber gives an insight into his work on the contemporary version of a church portal in the context of a medieval building. During a visit to his studio, the relationship between redesigning and the history of a building is explored.

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24.10.2023

Berlin

Samia Henni: Toxic Heritage (EN)

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process.

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17.10.2023

Weimar

Shradha Chandan: Preserving the past, Empowering the future: Unveiling the heritage and identity of the religious cities of India. (EN)

The lecture will delve into the significance of pilgrimage on society, with far-reaching implications in politics, culture, economics, and social dynamics, shedding light on its conceptualization and scrutinizing the often-blurred boundary between tourism and pilgrimage.

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04.07.2023

Berlin

Axel Gelfert (Berlin): Zwischen Erinnerung und Umdeutung: Denkmäler als Erkenntnisinstrumente

Denkmäler sind Ausdruck der Erinnerungskultur einer Gesellschaft, zugleich jedoch Bestandteil lokaler Lebenswelten. Als solche geraten sie in das Spannungsfeld zwischen (vergangener) Geschichtsschreibung und (gegenwärtigen) Interessen, Normen und Geltungsansprüchen. Nimmt die Spannung überhand, entlädt sie sich mitunter tumultartig in Kontroversen über das Wechselverhältnis von Ästhetik, Politik und Erinnerung.

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20.06.2023

Weimar

Philipp Neumann-Thein (Weimar): Buchenwald. History, meaning, value, perception and presence of an international place of remembrance

This lecture deals with the origins and development of the Buchenwald Memorial since the end of the 1940s as well as with current and future challenges in the context of the National Socialist concentration camp (1937-1945) and the Soviet Special Camp No. 2 (1945-1950). Spatial-structural and monument preservation aspects will be addressed as well as institutional, remembrance-cultural and remembrance-political aspects.

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13.06.2023

Erfurt

Anna Yeboah (Berlin): Decolonial culture of remembrance in the city

As the Brandenburg-Prussian royal seat and later the imperial capital, Berlin was the political decision-making center of the German colonial empire and a prominent site for colonial science, technological and cultural production.

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06.06.2023

Berlin

Anca Claudia Prodan (Cottbus): Theorizing Documentary Heritage: From Normative Perspectives to Heritage Studies

Heritage Studies are a very heterogeneous field of research, including within its range disciplines as varied as natural sciences and the arts. The field, however, has been heavily based on case study research, oriented towards practical interests, and influenced to an important extent by UNESCO’s normative tools for heritage protection and their local impacts around the world.

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09.05.2023

Weimar

PETRA LANGE-BERNDT (HAMBURG): THE INFECTED MUSEUM. CONSTELLATIONS OF INSECT AND HUMAN IN CONTEMPORARY ART

A museum, like any exhibition, is an ensemble of transversal concatenations of space, materials, things, images, institutional structures, audiences, discourses, and narratives. Numerous artists and curators have critically examined these contexts, their archives and power structures.Especially after decolonisation and the popularisation of the ecology movement, these protagonists increasingly ask how displays can be activated and set into motion. To discuss this question, I will focus on strategies that deal with social insects such as bees, wasps, ants, and other organisms such as moths or mosquitoes. What happens when the white cube is transformed into a hexagonal honeycomb? Or turns into a paradise for larvae and maggots? Do these buzzing, crawling, and swarming non-humans contribute to re-perspectivising the exhibition system? What institutional critique can be discerned? And what about the uninvited guests in crevices and niches that do not fit into human […]

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02.05.2023

Berlin

ALEXANDER LEISTNER (LEIPZIG): “LAST YEAR TITANIC”. THE DEMISE OF EXPECTATION HORIZONS AND THE EFFECTS ON THE EAST GERMAN TRANSFORMING SOCIETY

Technische Universität BerlinErweiterungsbau, Straße des 17. Juni 145, Raum EB223 www.identitaet-und-erbe.org

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25.04.2023

Weimar

Eiko Grimberg (Berlin): Hindsight Biases

The term hindsight bias (Rückschaufehler) refers to a memory of one’s forecast that is distorted by knowledge of the actual outcome of events. The prediction is corrected in retrospect. In short, people do not want to admit how wrong they were before.

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18.04.2023

Berlin

JENS ADAM (BREMEN): EVERYDAY CULTURAL DIPLOMACY. CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CULTURAL WORK IN FRAGILE CONFIGURATIONS

Negotiations around cultural heritage and the conditions of international cultural exchange increasingly take place in fragile configurations: Wars and new forms of authoritarianism, climate change and pandemic, refugee movements, and the devastating consequences of extractive capitalism are not just difficult external conditions. These issues permeate directly into the fields of action and working modes of cultural heritage managers and cultural mediators. 

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14.02.2023

Weimar

Jenny Price (Weimar): Ost Voices. An everyday history of structural change in 1990.

The transformation in East Germany in the early nineties was unprecedented and involved an unforeseen amount of political, social, economic and cultural change in just a few months.

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31.01.2023

Berlin

Ulrike Auga (Hamburg): „Culture“, „Religion“ and the identity trap – epistemological questions

The lecture critically examines the question of “culture” and “identity”, especially with regard to religious affiliations. The starting point is Samuel P. Huntington’s remarks in “The Clash of Civilizations” (1996), with which he not only fell into the identity trap (Amartya Sen), but rushed into it.

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24.01.2023

Berlin

John Schofield (York): ‘The Moon and the Ghetto’: How Cultural Heritage Solutions Can Help Solve the World’s Wicked Problems

Wicked problems are those global challenges that are complex, intractable, open-ended and unpredictable. Solving them requires creative and often interdisciplinary solutions that include: collaborating with industry and policymakers; a thorough understanding of the problem; and clear recognition of its complexities.

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18.01.2023

Weimar

Boris Sieverts (Cologne): Shaping and transformation – Why are some places special? An attempt to explain the cologne district of Kalk

Local history is never just the past. It continues to be written, among other things, in the attitude to life, the body language and the self-image of the inhabitants of themselves and as a community.

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17.01.2023

Weimar

Alexandra Klei (Berlin): Wer (neu) baut, soll bleiben: Synagogen in Nachkriegsdeutschland als Raum und als Symbol

Die Bedeutung von Synagogen lag/liegt nie allein in der Funktion, die sie für jüdische Gemeinden besitzen, sondern wird immer auch durch Zuschreibungen nichtjüdischer und/oder jüdischer Akteur:innen definiert. Nach dem Holocaust werden Synagogen-Neubauten als Zeichen von „Wiedergutmachung“ gelesen und mit „ausgepackten Koffern“ oder dem Wunsch „zu bleiben“ verknüpft; ihre Architektur mit unterstellten psychologischen Konstitutionen von Gemeinden bzw. ihrer Mitglieder gleichgesetzt: Eine geschlossene Wand steht für ihren Versuch, sich zurückzuziehen, ein unauffälliges, abgelegenes Gebäude für das Bedürfnis, nicht auffallen zu wollen.

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13.12.2022

Dessau (not public)

Regina Bittner (Dessau): Zur Weltkonstruktion des Bauhauserbes : eine internationale Angelegenheit

1996 wurden die Bauhausstätten Dessau und Weimar in die UNESCO-Welterbeliste aufgenommen. In der Begründung für das »outstanding universal value« des Bauhauses wird neben dem historischen Wert des Gebäudes vor allem seine programmatische Rolle als »bedeutendes Monument für die Ideengeschichte dieses Jahrhunderts« (des 20. Jahrhunderts) herausgestellt.

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06.12.2022

Berlin

Kristina Jõekalda (Tallinn): Historiography of Heritage: Disciplinary Boundaries in Baltic German and Estonian Context

Heritage Studies came into being in the 1980s, falling into an era in Estonian history that was associated with monuments more closely than ever. According to the slogan of the Soviet Estonian heritage movement (muinsuskaitseliikumine) of late 1980s its ultimate goal was to restore nothing less than the most important of the country’s antiquities – interwar independence. Where are the roots of these processes?

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29.11.2022

Digital

Peter Geimer (Paris): The colors of the past. How history becomes images

The past is unobservable. One has heard or read about it, one remembers it, sorts through its legacies, or makes an image of what it was after the fact. But none of these forms of remembrance recreates the past as such.

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22.11.2022

Berlin

Gunter Weidenhaus (Darmstadt): The spaces of the world

Globalization has fundamentally changed the spatial constitution of the world. But how can this re-figuration of space actually be put into words and what are the consequences for social relations and social science research? These questions will be explored in the lecture.

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01.11.2022

Erfurt

Tazalika M. Te Reh (Cologne): Swing Time – Of the haitian revolution and urban spaces

There are spaces in European cities where we particularly like to live because the houses have high ceilings and facades with stucco on them. They are solidly built and well tempered, and as geographical spaces they tell of wealth and prosperity of days gone by.

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12.07.2022

Weimar

Elisa Satjukow (Leipzig): Contested Heritage. The war in Kosovo and the NATO intervention in 1999

It’s war in Europe again, and while we watch the events in Ukraine, another European war is largely forgotten. Thirty years ago, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia began. 

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05.07.2022

Erfurt

Juliane Tomann (Regensburg): Performative Spaces? Historical Reenactment as a Form of Doing History

History, it seems, currently no longer wants to be just told, visualized, acted out, or represented; rather, we observe a comprehensive trend toward the staging, eventization, and individualization of dealing with the past in the present. The steadily growing popularity of historical reenactments makes this tendency particularly clear. As a globally networked subculture, reenactments have become an elementary part of popular and historical culture. Major events such as the Battle of Gettysburg in the US or Tannenberg in Poland attract thousands of reenactors and visitors and are intensively covered by the media.

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28.06.2022

Berlin

Damjan Kokalevski (Munich/Skopje): Reading the Archive: Skopje. Abandoned Histories as Critical Entries to the Present 

Skopje has been in the recent media spotlight as an example of how a city transformed to legitimize and reinforce populist and nationalist power structures. In 2009 the former right-wing ruling party launched a grand project for a violent rebuilding of the city center, designed in a pseudo-neoclassical style, titled “Skopje 2014”. It aimed to connect the Macedonian people to their mythical roots, dating back to Alexander the Great, trying, at the same time, to make the city look more ‘European’. Since then, numerous new buildings and monuments have sprung up in an opaque and corrupt commission process, costing approximately 680 million euros. In parallel to this, the architectural heritage and expertise gained after the disastrous earthquake of 1963, thanks to an extensive reconstruction project led by the United Nations, is obscured, abandoned, or even destroyed.

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07.06.2022

Berlin

Andrijana Ivanda & Tobias Hönig (c/o now, Berlin):
(Ex-)Yu – Räume und Architekturen als Träger nationaler Erzählungen

Sommer oder im Herbst – eine der schönsten Ansichten von Ljubljana. Es sieht aus wie in Paris. Grüne Blätter etc., schöne alte Häuser an beiden Ufern. Nichts Besonderes. Aber da irren Sie sich! Dieser Fluss hier ist die offizielle, geografische Grenze zwischen dem Balkan und Mitteleuropa. Also Vorsicht! Dort drüben: Horror, orientalischer Despotismus, Frauen werden geschlagen und vergewaltigt und mögen es. Auf dieser Seite: Europa, Zivilisation, Frauen werden geschlagen und vergewaltigt und mögen es nicht. Also: Balkan – Mitteleuropa. Nicht vergessen!“ (c/o now in: ARCH+ 2019 (235), S. 90)

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31.05.2022

Weimar

STEFANIE HENNECKE (KASSEL): THE MUNICIPAL PARK („VOLKSPARK“) AS HERITAGE OF MODERNITY? ON THE HISTORY OF MUNICIPAL PARKS IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY IN THE CONTEXT OF DISCUSSIONS ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION AND PUBLIC HEALTH.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, numerous parks were built under municipal management as cities grew. The „public walk,“ „people’s garden,“ or „city park“ of the 19th century was replaced by the new model of the „Volkspark“ in the early 20th century with a combative gesture in professional discourses.

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24.05.2022

Berlin

WOLFGANG ERNST (BERLIN): TECHNOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER AND THE TECHNOLÓGOS OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY

Cultural knowledge is not only transmitted as „collective memory“, but is also a function of concrete techniques of transmission. In this context, technical cultural property represents a material and a logical embodiment of specific ways of knowing.  

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17.05.2022

Online

Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann (Jerusalem): Hashtags, Stories, Video-Memes. Holocaust Remembrance on TikTok and Instagram

Social media have long become an integral part of remembering historical events. Memorials enable visits to historical sites from distance through virtual tours on Instagram. On TikTok, Holocaust survivors recount their experiences. New memory spaces emerge through digital techniques and practices such as hashtags and challenges.

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03.05.2022

Weimar

Tobias Strahl (Sarajevo): Cultural Networks in (armed) conflicts

Conventional cultural property protection in armed conflicts has its theoretical foundation in the so-called european enlightenment, historicism, and the preservation of monuments of european provenance. Its legal foundations have emerged under the impact of two devastating wars. For the actual protection of objects of culture in armed conflicts it is still not applicable.

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26.04.2022

Online

Suzana Milevska (Insbruck): Shameful Objects, Apologising Subjects

It is urgent to discuss and challenge the systemic and structural conditions that motivated and enabled the museums and other institutions to collect and store objects charged with difficult historic and cultural background, both in terms of decolonising macrohistoric and microhistoric narratives. 

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19.04.2022

Weimar

Ljiljana Radonić (Wien): War about Remembrance: Politics of history in the Post Yugoslav Space

The wars of the 1990s in former Yugoslavia were to a certain extent also wars over remembrance and had a lot to do with the hardly reappraised past of World War II. Tito’s motto of “brotherhood and unity” left no room for coming to terms with the civil war between the Croatian Ustasha, the Serbian Chetniks and Tito’s partisans. The conflict between them was often fought on the backs of the civilian population.

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05.04.2022

Weimar

Johan Lagae (Gent): “Sorry Congo !?” On the positionality of architectural history in dealing with Congo’s colonial past

In the last couple of years, the debate on “Decolonizing Belgium” has been thriving. It was triggered by several contestations of colonial monuments in various cities in Belgium, by the long-awaited re-opening in December 2018 of the renovated Africa Museum in Tervuren, and, more recently, the international restitution debate.

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15.02.2022

Online

FELIX ACKERMANN (WARSAW): FROM NKVD TO NETFLIX. DISCUSSIONS ABOUT HERITAGE PROTECTION CONCERNING THE LUKIŠKĖS-PRISON IN THE CAPITAL OF LITHUANIA, VILNIUS

One of the main characters in the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix is going to be the historic prison in the city center of Vilnius. Despite its troubled past, in today’s Lithuania it is seen as the core of the start into a smart city of the future. Creative industries, artistic movements, business and public remembrance are going to be combined here.

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08.02.2022

Berlin

Rasmus Greiner (Bremen): Cinematic Histospheres. Cinematic spaces of experience in the audiovisual memory culture

Feature films about events, people and lifeworlds of the past continue to enjoy great popularity. They are part of the audiovisual culture of memory and model historical spaces of experience. These histospheres shape our ideas of the past particularly effectively by involving us immersively, emotionally and physically in the historical contexts depicted.

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01.02.2022

Online

Zvi Efrat (Tel Aviv): The Israeli 1960s Avant Garde and Its Discontents

In the early 1960s, a highly self-reflexive architectural avant-garde emerged in Israel. A group of architects converging at the faculty of architecture at the Technion Insti­tute of Technology in Haifa aimed to defy the solidity and authority of the autonomous object with a flux of random clusters, self-replicating and ever-mutating space modules, casbah-esque mats and ziggu­rats, polyhedral matrices, collapsible space frames, cybernetic contraptions, and various other crossbreeds of system theories and bio­morphisms.

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25.01.2022

Berlin

Stephanie Herold (Berlin): What remains of the coming? Home and transformation.

The political scientist Parag Khanna 2021 sketches possible future scenarios of global migration in his widely acclaimed work “The Age of Migration”. At the same time he points out that migration is a multifaceted and spatially defining phenomenon of great historical continuity. In Europe occurred the major migration movements after the Second World War. Places of arrival for the refugees were often improvised. It was common to use existing camps or land used for military purposes further on by pragmatical reasons. These places often developed contrary to the original idea of temporary interim uses and stabilized to permanent settlements.

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18.01.2022

Erfurt

Niloufar Tajeri: Whose heritage, whose identity, whose architecture? Or the necessary complication of history, culture and form

Stuart Hall discusses cultural heritage as hegemonic, national narratives that map a cognitive knowledge system in museums, cities and books of the Global North via assignments of meaning such as collective “values”, “national identity” and social group affiliations. Hereby he continually refers to a simple question: “Whose heritage?” In the lecture, the question “Whose heritage?” is expanded to include the questions “Whose identity?”, “Whose knowledge?” and ultimately also “Whose spaces?” and “Whose architecture?” in order to further complicate the question of belonging, meaning and power.

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11.01.2022

Online

Alexandra Staub (Pennsylvania, USA): Whose Architecture? Whose Identity? Examining Ethics and Stakeholder Theory as a Framework for Architectural Production

Cultural production finds constant reinforcement through the built environment yet defining what “culture” is has become an increasingly contentious in recent years. Despite social problems such as economic stratification and social intolerance, few architects and planners have addressed how the accompanying cultural paradigms are related to the production of the built environment, as well as the architect’s role in this process.

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14.12.2021

Berlin

Alfred Hagemann (Berlin): A new building with a history. On dealing with the site’s history at the Humboldt Forum

The ground where the Humboldt Forum was built has been the clashing point of heated architectural debates in recent decades. At its core the discussions focused the question of what role architecture plays in the construction The ground on which the Humboldt Forum was built has been the hotspot of heated architectural debates in recent decades. At its core, the discussions focused on the question of the role architecture plays in the construction of identity(ies) in societies and of the interactions that exist between the form and use of a building, also on a symbolic level.

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07.12.2021

Online

CANCELLED: Johan Lagae (Gent): “Sorry Congo !?” On the positionality of architectural history in dealing with Congo’s colonial past

THE LECTURE IS CANCELLED AND WILL BE POSTBONED TO THE NEW YEAR! In the last couple of years, the debate on “Decolonizing Belgium” has been thriving. It was triggered by several contestations of colonial monuments in various cities in Belgium, by the long-awaited re-opening in December 2018 of the renovated Africa Museum in Tervuren, and, more recently, the international restitution debate.

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01.12.2021

Online

Marco A. M. Gabriel (Milano): Transnational architectural identities. The role of Fachwerk in the valorization of the German-Brazilian Cultures in the Itajai Valley brazil from the 1970s onwards

The talk explores the patrimonialization and touristification of the fachwerk architecture produced by German Immigrants in the Itajai Valley, Santa Catarina, Brazil – and how contrasting perceptions of German-Brazilian transnationalism influenced the resignification of fachwerk from a functional architecture to a highly valorized symbol of Germanness in Brazil from the 1970s onwards. Particular focus will be given to the case of the Pomeranian Immigrants in Pomerode.

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25.11.2021

Online

Arnold Bartetzky (Leipzig): Bottom-up Censorship? Current disputes about dissonant monuments and controversial works of art

In recent years, attacks on despised monuments in the public space have increased, even in liberal societies of the West. At the same time, campaigns against the display of artworks deemed offensive in museums and galleries are growing. Both have a tradition that probably goes back as far as the history of art production itself. In the past, the reflex to remove monuments that do not conform to the political norms of the present day was particularly a characteristic of authoritarian regimes. This is even more true of interventions to restrict artistic freedom in the name of morality or ideology. In various parts of the world, such mechanisms of authoritarian control over visual culture continue to operate.In the countries of the West, on the other hand, demands for the regulation of memory culture, art production and exhibition practices are predominantly […]

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16.11.2021

Berlin

Götz Aly (Berlin): Crazy about history. The Germans – A Nation Without A Centre

German history is characterized by the division into Carolingians and ‘Ostelbier’, Bavarians and Prussians, Protestants and Catholics, Social Democrats and ‘Bismarckjaner’, it is shaped by the divisions during the Thirty Years’ War, during the napoleonic occupation and finally during the Cold War. Since the beginning of the 19th Century, there have been repeated attempts to overcome internal divisions in democratic-nationalist, state-authoritarian and identitarian nationalsocialist ways.

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02.11.2021

Berlin

Heike Becker (Kapstadt): Falling Monuments, Rising Memories: The Politics and Aesthetics of Postcolonial Memory Cultures and Urbanscape in Southern Africa.

Even after the end of apartheid the public space of Southern African cities like Windhoek and Cape Town remained dotted with monuments that celebrated colonial triumphalism. South African and Namibian urban landscapes obliterated a painful history until the early years of the 21st century.

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26.10.2021

Online

Ingrid Scheurmann (Dortmund): Continuity or Change Management? Historic preservation in times of climate change

The climate crisis is the challenge of our time. It affects people worldwide and does not stop at cultural heritage. Historical gardens and cultural landscapes are at risk, as much as architectural monuments and archaeological sites. Due to this development conservation issues are gaining new importance and urgency. The advice of heritage conservation is necessary as never before.

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22.11.2019

Berlin

Ursula Renz (Klagenfurt): Kulturelle Identität? Eine Fehlbezeichnung und ihre Folgen

Die Rede von der «kulturellen Identität» ist in aller Munde. Auch moderate Stimmen verwenden den Ausdruck, als ob er – richtig verwendet – auf etwas für Gesellschaften und ihre Mitglieder Bedeutsames referiere. In meinem Vortrag unterziehe ich diesen Ausdruck in zwei typischen Verwendungen einer kritischen Prüfung. Ich argumentiere dafür, dass es sich um Fehlbezeichnung für etwas handelt, was zwar für unser Verständnis von menschlichem Dasein wichtig ist, aber mitnichten mit Identität zu tun hat.

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30.01.2018

Ingrid Martins Holmberg (Göteborg): From ‘Old and Ugly’ to ‘Old and Nice’. On Transformations in Place Identity and Urban Heritage in Sweden

The urban landscape is ordered in many ways. This lecture will focus on the imaginary ordering of urban landscapes and show how such ordering takes on particular moral stances, such as good and bad, nice and ugly or alike, sorting not only materiality and space, but also people and identities. Departing from the Swedish case of Haga – an old-and-ugly urban mixed-use area that was revalued into an old-and-nice dwelling area – this lecture will reveal the discursive play through which these urban imaginaries were not only contested but also complexly converted. We will also address issues of heritagization, temporalization and methodology for the study of unruly imaginaries.

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