NYC: Symposium - Making Home in Wounded Places: Design, Memory, and the Spatial

“Making home” in these places, seldom a choice, becomes simultaneously a material and symbolic endeavor, involving both design and memory practices.Wounded places are scarred with collective memory of what had happened: they contain markers of the past, which may or may not be legible to those who make home there. Mnemonic activities, whether vernacular (informal) or officially imposed, can either facilitate or constrain the making of home in wounded places.

The symposium “Making Home in Wounded Places: Memory, Design, and the Spatial” is conceived as a polyphonic intervention engaging the realms of design studies, art, and the social sciences. We propose the following questions to inform our discussions:

• How to make home in wounded places?
• What is the role of memory tensions in this process?
• How does the (re)design of wounded places impact their users?
• How are wounded places appropriated by the politics of memory?
• What are the strategies for navigating through wounded places — as individuals, as communities, as societies?

The symposium is organized in collaboration with Adam Mickiewicz Institute as a part of the Campus Project.

Organized thanks to the generous support of the Armenian General Benevolent Union and ArteEast.

Kellen Auditorium, Parsons School of Design, 66 Fifth Ave, NYC

SATURDAY, March 4

9:30 am BREAKFAST

10:00 am

REMARKS ABOUT THE FRIDAY SESSIONS

10:15 — 11:00 am

CONVERSATION 2: INVISIBLE BRIDGES

Krzysztof Czyżewski, social activist, theater producer; founder/director of the Borderland Foundation, Sejny, Poland; An Invisible Bridge

Elżbieta Matynia, Professor of Liberal Studies and Sociology; director of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, NSSR; An Invisible Bridge

11:10 am — 1:10 pm

PANEL 1: ENGAGING WITH THOSE LIVING IN WOUNDED PLACES

Moderator:
Otto von Busch, Associate Professor of Integrated Design, Parsons School of Design

Panelists:
Angeliki Dimaki-Adolfsen, PhD Fellow, School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, “Children Let’s Play:” examining play in refugee camps in northern Greece

Liam Healy and Jimmy Loizeau, Lecturers, Goldsmiths College, London; Design Unlikely Futures and the Jungle of Calais

Terry Meade, Principal Lecturer, Interior Architecture and Urban Studies, College of Arts & Humanities, University of Brighton, UK; Strangers in the House: Domestic Space in the Israel/Palestine Conflict.

Barbara Adams, PhD candidate, Sociology, NSSR; From Aesthetic Evangelism to Solidarity. From Resilience to Care.

1:15 — 2:15 pm Lunch Break

2:15 — 4:00 pm

PANEL 2: WOUNDED LANDSCAPES

Moderator:
William Morrish, Professor of Urban Ecologies, Parsons School of Design

Panelists:
Jilly Traganou, Associate Professor of Spatial Studies, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons School of Design; Practices of Prefigurative Habitus: Creating Radical Home/lands at the Standing Rock Protest Camps.

Christine Howard Sandoval, artist, activist; part-time faculty, Parsons School of Design; Sharing Scarcity.

Tania Aparicio Morales, PhD candidate, Sociology, NSSR; Aeropuerto. A Visual Ethnography of Chinchero, Peru.

Mia White, Assistant Professor, Environmental Studies, New School for Public Engagement; Unearthing a Blues Epistemology towards Solidarity and Environmental Justice.

4:00 — 4:15 pm BREAK

4:15 — 6:00 pm

PANEL 3: THE SCAR TISSUE OF HOME AND PLACE

Moderator:
Aleksandra Wagner, Assistant Professor, Sociology, New School for Public Engagement

Panelists:
Jayce Salloum, artist; in/tangible cartographies: subjective affinities/representing the unrepresentable

Nora Krug, Associate Professor, Illustration, School of Art Media and Technology, Parsons School of Design; A Reading from Belonging (tentative title): A Visual Memoir on German Post-War identity and the Author’s Wartime Family History.

Serhii Tereshchenko, PhD candidate, Department of Slavic Studies, Columbia University; Cities Against Humans: Life in the Abandoned Cities after Chernobyl.

Elisa Bertolotti, Assistant Professor, Art & Design Department, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Madeira; Stories from Trasenster. Light and Temporary Houses for a Desolate Place.

https://woundedplacessymposium.wordpress.com/