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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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)
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…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.
weiterlesen…