Search

In late-socialist states, what are the drivers of shifts in national narratives and how can a focus on the museum method reveal the way state institutions construct national myths and nationalist ideologies? This paper addresses these questions by focusing on a behind-the-scenes ethnography of an exhibition celebrating 30 years of Doi Moi - the economic reform period in Vietnam that commenced in 1986. Focusing on the museum as method - the process of documenting how curators deliberate over labels, objects, photos and so forth - the paper analyses how national narratives are authored and transformed through curatorial exchanges and expert forums. By focusing on how aesthetics and achievement provide a foundation for inclusive interpretative strategies that integrate official histories alongside personal memories, this paper reflects on the alienating effects of official histories in state institutions and the strategies by which people appropriate these to reclaim their past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to explore Toronto's cultural heritage through an analysis of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. Through various narrative perspectives, we assist, in this novel, at the construction of the city and of various immigrant identities. The city's memory is deeply entrenched in its constructions, in the blood and mud that make up urban buildings. In Ondaatje's world narrating the beginnings of the city, people and politics are imbricated in an image attempting to allow the effort of various characters to preserve traces of authenticity. We will look at how the politics of memory shapes the identities of several characters, at the necessity of remembering and at the passivity of forgetting. Some of the questions of this presentation are: How does memory influence the shaping of immigrant identities? In what ways is the creation of the city related to the destinies of individuals? How does Ondaatje narrativize the politics of memory and cultural heritage in his book?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to engage in a new conceptualisation of liminality, as it applies to space and place in societies emerging from conflict but not yet at peace. We adopt a case study approach of two urban environments: Derry/Londonderry, a city that experienced acute levels of violence during the Northern Ireland conflict, and Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country, which has been at the crux of the cultural and economic struggle for Basque independence. The visual, built environment has been significantly reconfigured in both cities to communicate the transition from conflict. Yet the optics of peacebuilding does not necessarily reflect the experiences of communities as they move through complex processes. A more nuanced and critical reading of the urban environment often reveals stagnation within peace processes and the existence of liminal, inbetween spaces. This paper suggests that 'transitional optics' in societies moving out of conflict can physically illuminate the complex nature of building peace, and argues that the idea of permanent liminality can offer new ways of understanding the ways in which transitional processes can become trapped. An 'end-point' is not always achievable, or perhaps, for some, desirable. The characteristics of permanent liminality can be identified in three main areas: political imagery, physical regeneration and public space as a conflict arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to explore Toronto's cultural heritage through an analysis of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion. Through various narrative perspectives, in this novel, we are witnessing the construction of the city and of various immigrant identities. The city's memory is deeply entrenched in its constructions, in the blood and mud that make up urban buildings. In Ondaatje's world narrating the beginnings of the city, people and politics are imbricated in an image attempting to allow the effort of various characters to preserve traces of authenticity. We will look at how the politics of memory shapes the identities of several characters, at the necessity of remembering and at the passivity of forgetting. Some of the questions of this presentation are: How does memory influence the shaping of immigrant identities? In what ways is the creation of the city related to the dest inies of individuals? How does Ondaatje narrativize the politics of memory and cultural heritage in his book?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the built physical landscape and places of cultural heritage were deliberately targeted and destroyed as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement recognized the potential for cultural heritage to contribute to postwar reconciliation and rebuilding; Annex 8 established a commission to preserve national monuments. This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage in post-Dayton Bosnia and the ways in which it has been (ab)used to propagate a narrow, exclusivist identity. It focuses on the struggles to control the Commission to Preserve National Monuments as well as the fates of two monuments in particular—Vraca Memorial Park and the Partisans' Memorial Cemetery—whose abandonment signifies the wider struggles over memory and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the rise of “industrial heritage” and the forms of memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy's “City of Factories,” which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO's world heritage list. Sesto's bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto's ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but also to capture and render visible and graspable the traces of what this built environment expressed and left behind—the sentiment of solidarity. I thus argue for an understanding of solidarity not just as an emotion or value, but as a structure of feeling mediated by specific material and corporeal forms, in bodies collectively inhabiting a built environment and rhythmically moving within and out of infrastructures and lived landscapes. Such a materialist conception of solidarity must account for bodies and embodiment, rhythm and refrain, as well as for how certain material forms allow for the generation of proximities, coordination, and likeness across difference. It means thinking of solidarity as an arrangement and assembly of bodies in time and space, and of these bodies and their movement as generative of political feeling and action. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Sesto San Giovanni between 2011 and 2013, I tell the story of the afterlife of a twentieth-century sentiment and its fate in an era that has rendered solidarity precarious. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is usual nowadays to call Architecture as the set of buildings built to fulfill a specific function or activity. This point of view justifies the functional and constructive aspects of Architecture. What it is important to highlight in this paper is its active role in the creation of culture, where Architecture widely goes beyond this consideration. This is called the symbolic role of Architecture and it is related to the aesthetic current codes that are linked to patrimony, memory, history and social structure. To enlighten these arguments, cases from different periods and places are contrasted; highlighting, in a very special way, the demolition of the building known as "La Licuadora" --The Blender- in the city of Guayaquil. Architecture, from the theoretical point of view is considered the "web of meanings" whose reading depends on the cultural comprehension level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations, Conflicts and Memory in the Mediterranean: From Nation- States to Communities. The nexus between history and memory and the issue of cultural identities lie at the heart of academic, social and political debates for many years. Researches lead in the framework of Imasud program funded by the ANR, Telemme laboratory and the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l'Homme (Aix-en-Provence, France) between 2008 and 2010 addressed again this question through various focus cases within the Mediterranean area. Their comparison has highlighted the raise of new players/actors involved in the shaping of Mediterranean memories, in line with the general trend of fragmentation of discourses on the past, between « heritagization » and political claims of minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]