Description
Design Academy Eindhoven - Symposium 15 October 2014Memory Identity and Monuments: from statues to products?
10.00 Welcome, introduction by Louise Schouwenberg + Lorenzo Bini & Gennaro Postiglione
10.30 - 12.00
Rob van der Laarse, UvA
Competing Monuments. Shared histories, divided memories, and how to proceed
Federico Montanari, University Bologna
No-monuments, micro-monuments, grassroot monuments, e-monuments: their links with objects, products and the transformations of memorial devices
12.00 - 12.30 discussion
12.30 - 13.30 LUNCH
13.30 - 15.00
Yvonne Dröge Wendel (Rietveld Academy)
In memory of those things that you have never seen
Iain Chambers (University Orientale Napels)
Difficult memories... the ruined archive
15.00 - 15.30: discussion
15.30 - 16.00: conclusion
abstract
A major point of criticism in the contemporary debate on concepts for monuments is that many monuments perform their function inadequately. Monuments are abstract and seek a common denominator: they aim to make a collective statement on historical events, but all too often, individual viewers are given hardly any or too few starting points for their own reflection (Joung, 2010).
The Monument (and later the Museum) has represented the institutional form of Western memory, and in particular that of the social group founding it, providing a specific image of the dominant culture. The message associated with this identity is aimed, in different ways, to the members of the community and to outsiders: monuments so far have served as sites for the collection and formation of an identity by embodying specific memories. This kind of articulation, whether national, regional and local, or ethnic, religious and political, collects, celebrates, commemorates, evaluates and produces a way of life. It is an indispensable process that sustains the existence of an imagined community (Anderson 1983).
The symposium aims to develop a reflection on the question of memory, as both individually and collectively understood, in its private and public forms, thereby laying out the terms of a critical revaluation that impinges on institutional and professional practices. Transforming the question of memory into an unfolding cultural and historical problematic issues (Chambers 2013) and questioning the role of monuments and objects (interpreted as memory storages) also in relationship with difficult heritage and difficult topics.
Instead of acknowledging the monument only as a fixed and consolidated typology, the symposium intends to discuss the power to recall memories and provoke thoughts - proper of monuments - into (designed) objects regardless of their size, value, exposure and durability. Furthermore it will question the public nature of monuments by reinterpreting their role that might not necessary be imagined only accessible by a community, but perhaps transferred to the context of people intimacy and privacy.
Prof. dr. Rob van der Laarse is research director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies (ASHMS) at the University of Amsterdam, holder of the Westerbork chair for Heritage of War and Conflict at VU University Amsterdam, theme leader European Identity and Culture at ACCESS EUROPE, the social sciences and humanities interuniversity research centre of UvA and VUA, and leader of the international Terrorscapes research group, which analyses transnational memories of totalitarian terror, genocide and mass violence in Europe and beyond.
Federico Montanari, Ph.D Semiotics teaches, as lecturer, Visual Communication, Semiotics, and Analysis and Communication in several university in Italy and abroad. He holds a teaching fellow in digital Media at the University of Urbino.
His main interests concern Socio-semiotics and visual analysis; he works on the forms of conflicts and wars and their representations (aesthetics, objects, visual representations). More recently he has worked on analysis of urban spaces, of objects and technologies, and in the field of art and design. Concerning these topics he has participated in numerous research projects.
Yvonne Dröge Wendel (1961) works as a visual artist in the field of sculpture. Her work is a search for the right conditions with which to capture and transform ways of talking, feeling and relating to objects, and consequently a search for an understanding of material as an active element of our social construct. The aim is to inspire and transform our expectations of objects as well as our actual relations to them.
Her fascination for things led her into wedlock with Wendel, a decorative cabinet, whose name she officially bears since 1992. Her projects have been shown internationally in galleries and museums throughout the last 20 years. Furthermore she works on commissions for public space and presently she is doing a PhD research at the University of Twente. In 2006 she initiated the project Architecture of Interaction, a tool to conceptually investigate complex interactive processes.
Iain Chambers is presently Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and presently coordinates the PhD programme in ‘Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world'. He is known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean."
Lorenzo Bini was born in Milan, Italy in 1971. Educated at the Politecnico di Milano and at the SHKS of Oslo, he graduated in architecture in 1998 and worked for different practices in Milan.
In 2000 he moved to The Netherlands to work as a senior architect for West8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture. In 2003 he returned to Milan and co-founded studiometrico, an architecture practice that he has been directing until 2011, when the office has ceased business. In 2011 Lorenzo started a new practice called BINOCLE. Lorenzo has been teaching Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano for the past10 years (binocle.it).
Gennaro Postiglione is Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. His researches focus mainly on reuse and valorisation of minor heritage – among which also the one coming from conflicts - and on the relationship between collective memory and cultural identity, putting the resources of architecture in the public interest (www.lablog.org.uk).
| Period | 15 Oct 2014 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Memory Identity and Monuments: from statues to products? Design Academy Eindhoven - Symposium |
| Event type | Conference |