Friday, September 30th, 2016
Panel 3: Post War
Nikolaus Hirsch, Städelschule, Frankfurt
Mark Jarzombek, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, MIT
Rodney Harrison, Professor of Heritage Studies, University College London
Azra Akšamija, Associate Professor, MIT
Clive Van Den Berg, Artist and Managing Partner, Trace
Moderated by Rosalind C. Morris, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Panel 3: Post-War
Memory Matrix
Azra Akšamija
We live in a time when technology can be used to document an erasure as it takes place and to restore much faster than ever before. Hardly any other historic site has generated more intense public debate about these two issues than Palmyra. The impetus to defy Palmyra’s destruction notwithstanding, the questions of whether, when, and how to restore it remain controversial. These questions provide the conceptual basis for the Memory Matrix—a public space intervention referencing Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph—that counters the destruction of monuments with the creation of new ephemeral monuments that engage new fabrication technologies and transcultural collaborations. The Memory Matrix endorses the use of technology to foster solidarity and educate those who have been stripped of their home, culture, history, and identity. Preservation can also positively encourage human interdependence in the face of global problems that are affecting communities across borders, today and in the future.
Dresden’s Frauenkirche: Preservation and the Destruction of Complexity
Mark Jarzombek
The rebuilding of Dresden’s Frauenkirche was heralded not only as a moment of national pride in the re-unification of Germany, but also as a geopolitical event, healing the still open wounds of WWII. Is it possible to see past the structuring of this project, or is the discipline of preservation so tied into the narrative of its self-justification that alternative readings are made impossible? The talk will try to bring out the paradoxes associated with the rebuilding to argue that there must be a role—perhaps only in academe—where conditions of post-traumatic complexity can be theorized and discussed.
Heritage, Difference and Post-Conflict Development
Rodney Harrison
While much is currently made of the regenerative potential for heritage to (re)build peace and community in post-conflict situations, such moves frequently neglect the primary functions which heritage has played in producing the different “transactional realities”—race, ethnicity, culture, nationality—along which fracture lines have been articulated and forms of violence have been targeted against particular segments of the population. Indeed, one might argue that heritage is not a remedy for, nor opposed to conflict, but the opposite—that conflict is actually integral to, and an inevitable outcome of, heritage. This paper aims to engage critically with the concept of post-conflict heritage, arguing that heritage cannot easily be disentangled from its collecting, ordering, and governing practices and the forms of violence which these practices may facilitate.
Authorship / Ownership
Nikolaus Hirsch
While the starchitecture system looks like an increasingly solipsistic and exhausted formalism – unable to claim any relevance beyond its own narrow field – preservation (and its relation to design) has become the new battleground for the cultural conflicts and political struggles of our time. In his lecture Nikolaus Hirsch will intertwine problems of preservation with his own design projects. He will expose extreme conditions of duration: From a monument with its brief of a maximum control over time and material to a project in which he purposely loses control. Whose authorship and whose ownership are at stake? Which history? Whose history?
A Pile of Stones: An Additional Monument for Palmyra
Clive van den Berg
Men are being thrown off rooftops in Syria and Iraq. Accused of being gay by members of ISIS, they are blindfolded and bound and then pitched to the streets below where crowds of men and boys wait with piles of stones. The killers photograph these murders from the tops of buildings or from the pavement. The photographs are then published by ISIS and form part of a visualized ideology skilfully disseminated through their own publications and released on other news platforms.
I have been working from these images. They are appalling, difficult to look at, as much due to the immediacy of the individual tragedies, as because these deaths cannot be mourned. Unnamed and unnameable these men are denied any connection with familial and social fabrics, leaving the killers photographs as the dominant public record of their deaths. I will discuss my recent sculptural interventions, whose commemorative purpose is informed by the monuments of Palmyra.
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