Author: Louise

Noise Of The Past – A Poetic Journey of War, Memory & Dialogue

Speakers
Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths)

Sanjay Sharma (Brunel University)

Discussant(s)

Vron Ware (The Open University)

Noising the Past: event as intervention

Abstract: Representing a disruptive noise to the performative enactment of the nation in stone, sound and ritual, it is now widely recognised that some stories and bodies have been drummed out of war and remembrance. Through co-production, the project which this paper reflect on, explored how the noise of the past can be put into play in a series of interactions that make it possible to remember and converse beyond nationalistic and militaristic consensus. The research direction set in play a cultural production that was a dynamic exchange between the researchers, artists and postcolonial generations on war and national memory.

Centrally the project innovated methods of exchange and collaboration using the dialogicmode of call-and-response. Methodologically activating a multiculturalencounter, ‘Noise of the Past’ publicly conversed with multi-sensory modalitiesof poetry, historical documents, music and visual art. This collaboration unleashed tension and incommensurability to produce new configurations of open-ended belongings to the nation. A new film titled Unravelling (17 min, 2008, dir K. Powar) was produced by the project with a new and original scoreby the composer Nitin Sawhney. In addition, Francis Silkstone score andconducted Post-colonial War Requiem. Both pieces were launched in Coventry Cathedral on 8th November, as a major public intervention in accepted codes of national remembrance. In an exploration of how to imaginatively engage with everyday life, as aural and visual participants, the installation moved between the dissonance of ‘noise’ to the imagined purity of the nation. It operated with discrepant and yet intertwined chords of sound, visual texture and stone to prompt how encounters can be brought into a tactile play of the past in the present.

For further details see 

http://www.gold.ac.uk/methods-lab/noise-past/ 

Aesthetics, Ideology and the City

Speaker

Mustafa Dikec (Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Discussant(s)

Engin Isin (Politics and International Studies, Open University)

How can we think of ideology as an aesthetic affair?  My paper engages with this question through an examination of the rise of the so-called ‘securitarian ideology’ in France roughly within the last decade.  I first visit the debates surrounding this seemingly old-fashioned notion of ideology to spell out some of the difficulties surrounding it.  Despite these difficulties, however, I argue against the abandonment of the notion and point to its significance as a critique of social closure and alleged self-evidence of facts that allow for such closure.  Building on Jacques Ranciere’s notion of ‘sensible evidences’, I present an interpretation of ideology as an aesthetic affair; that is, ideology not merely as a collection of discourses or a system of ideas, but as the reconfiguration of the very space in which these are described and articulated.

Abandoned Images: The Cinema of Los Angeles’ Broadway

Speaker
Stephen Barber (Visual and Material Culture, Kingston)

Discussant(s)
Mark Shiel (Film Studies, KCL)

The Broadway avenue of downtown Los Angeles holds an extraordinary collection of twelve once-luxurious and now abandoned film-palaces, built between 1910 and 1931.  In most cities worldwide, such concentrations of cinemas have been long-demolished, but in Broadway, the cinemas’ buildings survived the end of film-projection intact, some of their interiors ruined and gutted, others transformed and re-used as churches, nightclubs and storage space for digital artefacts.  This research project develops the preoccupations of my earlier book, Projected Cities (Reaktion, 2002), with the intricate relationship between film, the space of cinemas and urban space.  How does the distinctive aura of film – with its particular corporeal and sensory implications, and its power over cultural memory – survive when its architectural space has been comprehensively overhauled, and even erased?  And how does the urban landscape around such concentrations of cinemas respond to their presence and eventual disintegration?  The original signs and marquees of the cinemas, designed for prominent visibility from pedestrians and traffic, have also all survived, but are often meshed with contemporary hoardings and graffiti inscriptions.  Those facades, together with the dilapidated interiors of the cinemas, have been momentarily glimpsed in such city-films as Blade Runner (1982), Mulholland Drive (2001) and In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2008): does the space of cinemas, like urban space, exert its maximal impact on its spectators when it is seized in fragments?

Borrowed Light: A Journey through Weimar Berlin

Speaker
Matthew Gandy (Geography, UCL)

**This is an inaugural lecture – please ensure that you register your interest with Valerie Viehoff at v.viehoff[at]ucl.ac.uk**

The lecture will explore emerging cultures of nature in Berlin with particular emphasis on the planning and architectural legacy of Martin Wagner and the cinematic representation of everyday life in the film People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1929).

Iqualit, City of Sovereignties

Speaker
Prof Rob Shields (Sociology/Art and Design, University of Alberta)

Discussant(s)
Alan Latham (Geography, UCL)

How is a city on Baffin Island, an arctic capital even, changing Arctic sovereignties? Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, in Canada’s high Arctic, is a point of contact between traditional circumpolar Inuit mobilities and newer global flows and knowledge constructions.

This talk considers the emergence and impact of Iqaluit as a cultural and political centre for notions of sovereignty and metropolitan visions of the Arctic as a white wilderness.

The Architecture of Colonialism

Speaker
Eyal Weizman (Research Architecture, Goldsmiths)

Discussant(s)
Discussant: Matthew Gandy (Geography, UCL)

Cities Group Book Launch

Panelists
Rob Imrie (KCL)

Loretta Lees (KCL)

Mike Raco (KCL)

Book launch for Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

The Right to the City: A Radical Agenda for the Global South?

Speaker

Sue Parnell (Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town)

Discussant(s)
Julio Davila (Bartlett, Development Planning Unit, UCL)

Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930

Speaker
Richard Dennis (Geography, UCL)

Discussant(s)
Jenny Robinson (Geography, The Open University)

In Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930, historical geographer Dr Richard Dennis (UCL Geography) explores what made cities “modern” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Drawing his evidence principally from London, New York and Toronto – London often studied as much as an imperial as a modern city, New York a more obviously modern city in this period, and Toronto a comparative baby in population terms but striving for metropolitan status and intriguingly positioned politically and imaginatively “between” Britain and America – Dr Dennis focuses on the relationship between, on the one hand, processes of modernisation in government, technology and economy, but especially innovations in the built environment and changes in the spatial structure of cities and, on the other, modernity as a social and cultural experience.

The first half of the book discusses new ways of seeing cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, looking at cities in contemporary political and religious discourse, at the growth of social survey and city mapping, and at the representation of cities in art and literature. Later chapters look at changes to and on city streets, at new forms of residential environment – middle-class and working-class suburbs, apartments and tenements in North American cities, flats and model dwellings in London – and at new kinds of retail and business spaces.

One of Dr Dennis’s aims is to build bridges and make connections between humanities and social science ways of looking at cities, and between culture and economy – the book begins by discussing some real bridges – Brooklyn Bridge, Tower Bridge and the lesser known Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto – and ends by analysing new networks of connection in intra-urban communications and infrastructure, including sewers in London and the elevated railway in New York. 

Integral to the book are illustrations reproducing contemporary postcards and advertisements, highlighting the tension between modernity, tradition and the picturesque, or aligning a modern environment with style and cosmopolitanism, a variety of specialised maps, from the “glove map” intended for ladies visiting the Great Exhibition, to fire insurance maps which cartographically embody the connections between modernity and risk, and an 1880s sewer map which plotted the time taken for sewage to flow across London.

Dr Dennis also discusses and reproduces numerous works of art and draws on his extensive research into the representation of urban space in literature. 

Newly drawn maps and plans, prepared by Miles Irving and Cath D’Alton (UCL Geography Drawing Office), chart the distribution and spread of offices and department stores, the impact of Tower Bridge and Victoria Street on their environs, and the functioning of space within new apartment buildings.

The book closes with a brief discussion of Harmsworth’s Magazine’s 1902 article, ‘If London Were Like New York’, speculating on the effects of an American invasion. There are elevated trains on Tower Bridge, Holborn-Oxford Street has become Broadway, and Mansion House is Tammany Hall.’Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840-1930′ is published by Cambridge University Press in hardback and paperback.

To find out more click here

Illegal Geographies of the City: Everyday places of water and sanitation in a New Delhi squatter settlement

Speaker

Ayona Datta (Sociology / Cities Programme, LSE)

Discussant(s)

Abdou Maliq Simone (Sociology, Goldsmiths)