The Space&Place Collaborative Presents: The Architectures of Emptiness
How is "emptiness" experienced, designed and negotiated? Through a series of presentations by artists, scholars and activists, Architectures of Emptiness explores the historical gaps created in the wake of political, social and spatial displacements, as well as the ethics of witnessing such traumas. The construction of "new space" through urban renewal is always a violent act, predicated on the destruction of existing temporal categories - the historic, the modern, the pre-colonial - and of dwelling places - the home, the neighborhood, the community. While stories of displacement have historical and contemporary resonance internationally, rather than provide a mediation of recuperating loss through historic preservation or traditional heritage projects, Architectures of Emptiness traces the ephemeral spaces of living memory and forgetting. How are stories of past communities to be remembered and communicated? What is and should be forgotten along the way?
Pictures from the event can be found through our Photos page.
Space & Place is an Intellectual Collective of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota, convened by Sonja Kuftinec (Theatre Arts and Dance), Jani Scandura (English), Karen Till (Geography), and Margaret Werry (Theatre Arts and Dance). The Symposium is cosponsored by the IAS, the Department of Architecture, and the CLA Scholarly Events Fund.
Schedule of events
Friday, April 18
Session 1: 9:30-11:45 – 140 Nolte Center
9.30-10.00am: coffee
10.00-10.45am: Angela Piccini, UK Research Councils Fellow in Drama: Theatre, Film, Television, University of Bristol, presents "Practicing Emptiness"
11.00-11.45am: Dan Seiple and Matthias Einhoff, members of artist collective Skulpturenpark, Berlin_Zentrum, "Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum: artistic practice in an urban void"
Lunch: 12:00-1:00 - Rapson Hall Courtyard
Session 2: 1:00-6:00 -100 Rapson Hall
12.00-1.00pm: catered lunch, Rapson Hall courtyard
1.00-1:45pm: Gülgün Kayim, interdisciplinary theatre artist and director; co-artistic managing director, Skewed Visions, presents "Practicing Emptiness in Disputed Territories"
2.00-2.45pm: Mona Smith, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, multi-media artist, educator and co-founder of Allies: media/art, presents "Is empty ever truly empty?"
3.00-4.30pm: Roundtable with speakers and discussants Yasmeen Arif (Visiting Sawyer Fellow, ICGC, Political Science), Ciraj Rassool (UWC History, Visiting Mellon Fellow), Ozayr Saloojee (Architecture), and Karen Till (Geography)
4.30-6.00pm: catered reception
Symposium Participants
Angela Piccini is a UK Research Councils Fellow in Drama: Theatre, Film, Television at the University of Bristol. She investigates the production of place and space in small-screen documentary - from the ways in which screen media actively and 'performatively' make place through to the fluid materialities of production and reception contexts. She is specifically interested in the ways in which archaeology, heritage and material culture are presented and received across television and convergent media; media audiences and reception; technological change and media, specifically the impact of new database technologies on moving image material; documentary sound and the production of space and place. She is principle investigator on the AHRC Landscape and Environment 'Performativities of Emptiness' Network. She recently co-edited Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (2007, Archaeopress), Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now (2008, Peter Lang) and Practice-as-research in Performance and Screen Media (forthcoming, Palgrave-Macmillan). Angela has BA in English / Art History from University of British Columbia (1990) and an MA and PhD in Archaeology from University of Sheffield.
The Performativity of Emptiness is a U.K. network of artists-scholars from three Universities who work to develop creative methodologies in and about locations understood as abandoned, degraded, disappeared, transitory, or unmarked through site-specific workshops, reflective symposia and a blog.
Dan Seiple is a New York based sculptural and conceptual artist and member of the five person collective Skulpturenpark Berlin-Zentrum, located on a former West Berlin "death strip" between the Wall. Skulpturenpark Berlin-Zentrum is one of three locations for the upcoming 2008 summer Berlin Biennial. Now comprised of 62 vacant lots of downtown real estate, this transitional zone is overrun by weeds, trash and debris from pre-World War II buildings, even seventeen years after reunification. Dan and Matze Einhoff will speak about keeping this unkempt park as an "ambiguously public-private wild geography surrounded by bleak high rises" and the site-specific artists' projects that reveal themselves as well as the land upon which they sit.
Matthias Einhoff is a Berlin based conceptual and performative artist and founder and co-organiser of the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum with Dan Seiple. He also is a founding-member of Superschool, an artist collective critically questioning education through mass media with performances and public screenings. He teaches interventional practice at the University of Art, Berlin - working with students on situation-based and site-specific projects.
Gülgün Kayim is an interdisciplinary theatre artist and director; founder and co-artistic managing director of Skewed Visions, a Minneapolis-based site-specific performance company; and affiliate faculty member in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. Trained in London and the U.S., she has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including a Walker Art Center residency (2006), a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship (2004), a Jerome Foundation Travel/Study Grant (2002), a Minnesota State Arts Board Theatre Fellowship (2001) and two MSAB Theatre Artist Assistance grants. Her work has been seen in Minneapolis, London and Russia, and includes: Untitled #1 (1998) and The Orange Grove (2003). She will speak about site-specific theatre and discuss her work in progress Self Portrait - for now funded by a 2006 Creative Capital Grant. Self Portrait brings the fragmented stories, memories and demilitarized territories of Nicosia, Cyprus, and Fort Snelling, Minnesota, into juxtaposition through performance encounters.
Skewed Visions is known for exploring temporally and geographically extended performance events through series and clusters of work. Projects are artist-led and produced, and frequently include collaborative productions with artists from other disciplines, so that a multi-layered, interdisciplinary performance invigorates the roles of both artist and audience. A regular on local critics best-of-the-year lists, Skewed Visions were featured as the City Pages choice for Artists of the Year in 2004.
Mona Smith, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota, is a multi-media artist, educator and co-founder of Allies: media/art. A former University-level educator, Smith has produced work broadcast through PBS, and shown at festivals, conferences and museums in Europe and North and South America. Her work has received awards from Native and Non-Native film and video festivals; her new media work includes art projects for the web, sites for web distribution of Native focused media, and multimedia installation work, most notably, Cloudy Waters; Dakota Reflections on the River (Minnesota History Center, 2004-2005), City Indians (Ancient Traders Art Gallery, Minneapolis, 2006-2007), and the Bdote Memory Map (in partnership with the Minnesota Humanities Center). Her artistic and educational practice uses image, sound and place to re inhabit the imaginations and the experience of the audience/participant, and to work between, the place of healing, of relationship, of meaning, where spirit and physical, life and death, fear and strength, night and day intersect.
Allies: media/art is an award-winning Dakota owned media production company, incorporated in 1996. The Ded Unkunpi/We Are Here Projects create and use immersive media art to enhance learning from Native people.
Discussants
Yasmeen Arif is the Sawyer Seminar Post Doctoral Fellow (Humanitarianisms and World Orders), affiliated to the Department of Political Science and the Humphrey Center, University of Minnesota. She is also Visiting Lecturer at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Yasmeen has a PhD in Sociology/Socio-Cultural Anthropololgy from the University of Delhi, India, where she has been with the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, and taught at the Department of Sociology. Her current work involves a multi-disciplinary research project she calls "afterlife" - exploring lifewords that emerge in and from conditions of damage and devastation, she hopes to complete a manuscript which, in the final analysis, seeks an answer to the query: What constitutes life and can there be a composition of life found in the archaeology and assemblage of its re-constitution? Her field experiences have been the material and social recovery of Beirut after the Lebanese Civil Wars, and amongst survivors of communal violence in India. She draws material from a global terrain of catastrophes and disasters across the conventional categories of the natural, social, political and economic.
Ciraj Rassool is Professor of Public History at the University of Western Cape and director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies, in partnership with Robben Island and the University of Cape Town. He has written widely on South African public history, visual history and resistance historiography, including his co-authored book (with Martin Legassick) Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African museums and the trade in human remains 1907-1917 (McGregory Museum, 2000) and his co-edited books, Recalling Community in Cape Town: Creating and Curating the District Six Museum, with Sandra Prosalendis (District Six Museum, 2001) and Museum Frictions: Global Transformations/Public Cultures, with Ivan Karp, Cory Kratz, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Gustavo Buntinx (Duke University Press, 2006). Ciraj is a trustee of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, councilor of the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), board member of the South African History Archive (SAHA) and South African History Online (SAHO). He is also editorial board member of the South African Historical Journal and serves on the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
Ozayr Saloojee joined the University of Minnesota's School of Architecture in August of 2005. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, he completed his professional B.Arch and post-professional M.Arch degrees from Carleton University's School of Architecture in Ottawa, Canada. He taught as an adjunct professor in Canada for 5 years, while working as an associate in the design collaborative GHDG. While in practice, work focused on the search for a North American architecture expression of Islamic identity in design projects across Canada and the United States. The design group was highly trans-disciplinary, and associates worked on design-build, research, writing and experimental projects. Since joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota, he has been teaching design studios (undergraduate and graduate level) and theory/culture seminars on the hermeneutics of sacred space. His primary research interests focus on questions of tradition and modernity in Islamic and Abrahamic architecture, as well as investigating issues of belonging and identity in contested terrains and landscapes (both urban and psychological) in sites such as Istanbul, Jerusalem, Nicosia, London, Johannesburg and Cape-Town. His most recent publication "Narrative (His)Stories: Architecture, Text and Sacred Space," is part of an edited volume to be published by Ashgate Press this year. He is currently working on a monograph of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen's last built work and is editing a publication on Architecture, Ethics and Spiritual Geographies.
Karen Till is Associate Professor of Geography and Codirector of the Space&Place Research Collaborative at the University of Minnesota. Her geo-ethnographic research explores the interrelationships between place-making, personal and social memory, public art and cultural politics in contemporary cities. Her publications include: The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Textures of Place: Rethinking Humanist Geographies, edited with Paul Adams and Steven Hoelscher (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). She is currently working on two book-length projects, Remnant East Berlin and Wounded Cities, a comparative international project.