Conference: InEvidence: Witnessing Cities and the Case of Berlin
Conference Invitation
University of Cambridge, 12-14 July 2007
The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields in order to consider how cities make themselves evident in their architectures and topographies and are made evident in the visual culture produced in and about them. It will address both general, conceptual questions of modern urban environment and visual culture and the particular evidence of a case city: Berlin.
The first strand of the conference will assess the role of the evidential in our thinking about modern cities in the wake of the visual and topographical turns in the humanities and social sciences. Topographical and architectural concerns have made inroads into a variety of disciplines and opened up an arena of cross-disciplinary debate. We are concerned here to consider how the contemporary city - from the institutional to the congested, the transformative to the memorial - elicits cultural critical interests, how it displays and engages multiple levels of process and appropriation. At the same time, we wish to explore the ways in which visual culture works to intervene in, and produce alternative forms of evidence from, the urban environment.
The second strand of the conference will seek to take the measure of the different forms of witnessing that have operated in the city of Berlin from its early twentieth-century heyday to the new aspirations of the capital of the Berlin Republic. As a city with a uniquely drastic twentieth-century political history, the parade-ground and battle-ground of profoundly antagonistic regimes, Berlin can claim a paradigmatic status for thinking about the construction of ideology in urban form, about how conflicting interests, present and historical, public and personal, are made evident, or not. Its recent history, whether as a city of trauma or as a global capital of espionage, is laden with experience and activities that challenge conventional ideas of the evidential, in epistemological, ontological, ethical, and juridical terms. The topographical and architectural organisation of the city, and the ways in which this is culturally constructed and represented, are under complex and contradictory pressures: to bear adequate witness to its various pasts and to do justice to its prospects. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum provides a paradigm case here. At the same time, the official effort of memorialisation and reconstruction is often at odds with the kinds of evidence that are produced more unofficially. The contestation over the future of the Palace of the Republic is only the most recent in a series of culture battles waged in and over Berlin, battles over what should be made evident in, and taken in evidence of, the city.
The conference will involve academic participants from a variety of disciplines both within the University and beyond: architecture and urban studies, cultural history and geography, film and visual arts, political theory, and sociology. It will foster interdisciplinary debate between established scholars of international stature and emerging scholars, including graduate students. And it will do work of cultural outreach, by engaging discussion between academics and a variety of practitioners working at the leading edge of urban environmental development and visual culture. Indeed, several of our contributors cross this divide in their work.
Thematic areas to be included in the conference may cover:
Memory: temporal topographies, trajectories, and traces
Institutions: politics and representation/legislation, partition/inclusion, public/private
Transformations: outside/inside, empty/full, forward/reverse, centre/margin
Visual knowledge: site/sight, surface/insight, surveillance/secrecy
Speakers
The list of those to be invited to participate includes:
Kutlug Ataman (visual artist - Istanbul/London/Berlin)
Victor Burgin (visual artist/art historian and theorist - London)
Tacita Dean (visual artist - London/Berlin)
Ed Dimendberg (film/cultural scholar - Irvine)
Thomas Elsaesser (film/cultural scholar - Amsterdam)
Mary Fulbrook (historian - London)
Daniel Libeskind (architect/writer - New York)
Richard Sennett (cultural geographer - London)
Anthony Vidler (architectural scholar - Cooper Union)
Janet Ward (cultural historian - Nevada)
Details
The conference will take place at the University of Cambridge (UK) and in cooperation with Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH). The conference will be hosted in the newly developed Cripps Court conference centre of Magdalene College, and it is anticipated that it will be accompanied by screenings of work by attending artists.
The conference will be structured as a 2.5 day event. The two strands of the conference will be distributed over the Friday and Saturday, preceded by a Thursday half day, programmed as an inaugurating afternoon and reception.
A special keynote address, also open to non-delegates, will be scheduled either on the Thursday afternoon as an introductory event, inaugurating the main body of the conference on Friday morning, or closing the conference programme on Saturday.
The conference days will be started off by a special presentation given either by an artist or a scholar of international stature. These will be followed by plenary sessions and panel discussions, and complemented by selected screenings and projections of visual arts material from invited artists.
Contact
Dr. Andrew Webber
Reader in Modern German and Comparative Culture
University of Cambridge
Churchill College
Storey's Way
Cambridge CB3 0DS
(+44) (0)1223 336211
ajw12@cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge, 12-14 July 2007
The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields in order to consider how cities make themselves evident in their architectures and topographies and are made evident in the visual culture produced in and about them. It will address both general, conceptual questions of modern urban environment and visual culture and the particular evidence of a case city: Berlin.
The first strand of the conference will assess the role of the evidential in our thinking about modern cities in the wake of the visual and topographical turns in the humanities and social sciences. Topographical and architectural concerns have made inroads into a variety of disciplines and opened up an arena of cross-disciplinary debate. We are concerned here to consider how the contemporary city - from the institutional to the congested, the transformative to the memorial - elicits cultural critical interests, how it displays and engages multiple levels of process and appropriation. At the same time, we wish to explore the ways in which visual culture works to intervene in, and produce alternative forms of evidence from, the urban environment.
The second strand of the conference will seek to take the measure of the different forms of witnessing that have operated in the city of Berlin from its early twentieth-century heyday to the new aspirations of the capital of the Berlin Republic. As a city with a uniquely drastic twentieth-century political history, the parade-ground and battle-ground of profoundly antagonistic regimes, Berlin can claim a paradigmatic status for thinking about the construction of ideology in urban form, about how conflicting interests, present and historical, public and personal, are made evident, or not. Its recent history, whether as a city of trauma or as a global capital of espionage, is laden with experience and activities that challenge conventional ideas of the evidential, in epistemological, ontological, ethical, and juridical terms. The topographical and architectural organisation of the city, and the ways in which this is culturally constructed and represented, are under complex and contradictory pressures: to bear adequate witness to its various pasts and to do justice to its prospects. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum provides a paradigm case here. At the same time, the official effort of memorialisation and reconstruction is often at odds with the kinds of evidence that are produced more unofficially. The contestation over the future of the Palace of the Republic is only the most recent in a series of culture battles waged in and over Berlin, battles over what should be made evident in, and taken in evidence of, the city.
The conference will involve academic participants from a variety of disciplines both within the University and beyond: architecture and urban studies, cultural history and geography, film and visual arts, political theory, and sociology. It will foster interdisciplinary debate between established scholars of international stature and emerging scholars, including graduate students. And it will do work of cultural outreach, by engaging discussion between academics and a variety of practitioners working at the leading edge of urban environmental development and visual culture. Indeed, several of our contributors cross this divide in their work.
Thematic areas to be included in the conference may cover:
Memory: temporal topographies, trajectories, and traces
Institutions: politics and representation/legislation, partition/inclusion, public/private
Transformations: outside/inside, empty/full, forward/reverse, centre/margin
Visual knowledge: site/sight, surface/insight, surveillance/secrecy
Speakers
The list of those to be invited to participate includes:
Kutlug Ataman (visual artist - Istanbul/London/Berlin)
Victor Burgin (visual artist/art historian and theorist - London)
Tacita Dean (visual artist - London/Berlin)
Ed Dimendberg (film/cultural scholar - Irvine)
Thomas Elsaesser (film/cultural scholar - Amsterdam)
Mary Fulbrook (historian - London)
Daniel Libeskind (architect/writer - New York)
Richard Sennett (cultural geographer - London)
Anthony Vidler (architectural scholar - Cooper Union)
Janet Ward (cultural historian - Nevada)
Details
The conference will take place at the University of Cambridge (UK) and in cooperation with Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH). The conference will be hosted in the newly developed Cripps Court conference centre of Magdalene College, and it is anticipated that it will be accompanied by screenings of work by attending artists.
The conference will be structured as a 2.5 day event. The two strands of the conference will be distributed over the Friday and Saturday, preceded by a Thursday half day, programmed as an inaugurating afternoon and reception.
A special keynote address, also open to non-delegates, will be scheduled either on the Thursday afternoon as an introductory event, inaugurating the main body of the conference on Friday morning, or closing the conference programme on Saturday.
The conference days will be started off by a special presentation given either by an artist or a scholar of international stature. These will be followed by plenary sessions and panel discussions, and complemented by selected screenings and projections of visual arts material from invited artists.
Contact
Dr. Andrew Webber
Reader in Modern German and Comparative Culture
University of Cambridge
Churchill College
Storey's Way
Cambridge CB3 0DS
(+44) (0)1223 336211
ajw12@cam.ac.uk