End Date : October 24, 6:30 pm
Malgorzara Mazurek (Professor of Polish Studies); Alan Timberlake (Director of East Central European Center); Eliza Rose (Ph.D. Student in Slavic Languages).
The East Central European Center at Columbia University. It is part of the Campus Project organized by Culture.pl.
This workshop will contribute to a growing counter-commentary that reckons with ‘outmoded’ motifs in the built landscapes of East and Central Europe. Socialist building projects are too often savored as ruins and filed away as elegies to utopian chimeras. Signatures of moved and dispersed populations in the topography of these regions are often memorialized in a discourse of nostalgia forecloses on the future. Are there other stories to tell about buildings and spaces that have outlived their original ideological assignments? Can we swap out a forensic account of obsolescence for a discussion of how these environments were lived in and made use of? What options exist today for repurposing, preserving and re-inhabiting these time-stamped sites: how can we accommodate their particularities, and how can they once again accommodate us?
Throughout two days of conversations, we will reflect on these questions and voice some strategies for enlivening and caring for the heterogeneous landscapes of today’s East and Central Europe.
Friday, Oct. 23: International Affairs Building 1512 (5:30 – 8:00 pm)
Saturday, Oct. 24: Heyman Center for the Humanities Common Room (9:30am – 6:30 pm) – ID required for entry.
Participants: Tarik Amar, Columbia University; Jana Berankova, Columbia University; David Crowley, Royal College of Art; Sofia Dyak, Lviv Center for Urban History; Eagle Glassheim, University of British Columbia; Juliet Koss, Scripps College; Vladimir Kulic, Florida Atlantic University; Erica Lehrer, Concordia University; Adam Mazur, University of the Arts in Poznan; Malgorzata Mazurek, Columbia University; Michael Meng, Clemson University; Markian Prokopovych, Institute for East European History, University of Vienna; Eliza Rose, Columbia University; Lukasz Stanek, University of Manchester; Andrzej Szczerski, Jagiellonian University; Alan Timberlake, Columbia University; Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Columbia University.
