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Planetary Reading Group
One Year Anniversary Session
Lénia Marques (Rotterdam) & Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia (Aveiro)
Transforming Places Through Street Art: Bordalo II and the City
Esper Postma (Berlin/Deventer)
GAGAPALIZI: A New Museum for Florence
Sasha Huber (Helsinki)
“Demounting Louis Agassiz” Artistic Renegotiation of Archive, Memory & Place
Sasha Shestakova (Bochum)
Decolonizing Soviet Art History
Aziza Chaouni (Fez/Toronto)
Sidi Harazem: Co-Designing Heritage Preservation in a Modern Oasis
Cristiana Strava (Amsterdam)
At Home with Colonial Materialities: Snapshots of Heritage-Making and Unmaking on Casablanca’s Margins
Kateryna Kublytska (Kharkiv/London)
Destruction of Immovable Cultural Heritage During the War of the Russian Federation Against Ukraine
Ece Canlı (Porto)
Beneath the Thick Skin, Behind the Brick Wall
Robert Glas (Rotterdam)
On the film-installation '1986 Or A Sphinx's Interior'
Łukasz Stanek (Manchester)
Socialist Worldmaking
Dawit Benti (Addis Ababa)
Challenges of Urban Heritage Conservation during State-Led Gentrification of Addis Ababa's City Centre
Taputukura Raea (Wellington) & Digital Pasifik
Re-Claiming Pacific History - Making Pacific Cultural Heritage Visible and Accessible
Laura Ammann (Berlin)
The Appeal of the Colonial Baroque to the Brazilian Modernists
Paul Basu (Bonn/London) & Ozioma Onuzulike (Nsukka) & Ikenna Onwuegbuna (Nsukka)
[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times
Between Zones of Conflict and the Realm of Dreams: Planetary Perspectives on Film and Filmmaking
Workshop I
Mykola Ridnyi (Kyiv)
Mariana Martínez-Bonilla (Mexico-City)
Yashaswini Raghunandan (Bangalore)
Chihab El Khachab (Oxford)
Christian Thiam (Dakar)
Roundtable: Fide Dayo (Rome) & Norma Gregory (Nottingham)
Alyssa K. Barry (Dakar)
Navigating the Digital Spaces
Ndapewoshali Ndahafa Ashipala (Windhoek) & Tuuda Haitula (Windhoek) & Museums Association of Namibia
Museum Development as a Tool for Strengthening Cultural Rights – A Case Study
Njabulo Chipangura (Manchester)
Community Museums in Zimbabwe as an Alternative Form of Representing Living Cultures
Annalisa Bolin (Kalmar) and David Nkusi (Kigali)
Decolonizing Heritage Management in Rwanda: Community Engagement and Homegrown Solutions
Chantal Umuhoza (Kigali)
Decolonizing Conservation Practices in Rwanda Museums
Alessandra Ferrini (London)
Unruly Connections
Hiba Shalabi (Tripoli) with translation by Malak Altaeb (Tripoli/Paris)
#SaveTheOldCityOfTripoli
Banji Chona (Rome)
Ngoma zya Budima: Exploring Grief and Death, Celebrating Life and Love, Batonga Drum Story
Victoria Phiri (Lusaka), Samba Yonga (Lusaka) & Mulenga Kapwepwe (Lusaka) & the Women’s History Museum Zambia
Decolonization of Cultural Objects in the Process of Restitution and Repatriation. The Case of Zambian Cultural Objects in Swedish Museums
Schedule
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July 5
Ece Canlı (Porto)
Beneath the Thick Skin, Behind the Brick Wall

Analogy between the body and building or “body-as-house” has long prevailed in mainstream architecture, comparing skins to walls, veins to conduits, windpipes to vent pipes, orifices to doors, and with today’s smart home technologies, brain to hardwired systems. However, this human-machine-architecture configuration continues to speak from a rather modernist functionalism and discards what this technosomatic translation begets. Today the romantic “body-as-home” discourse is proved partial, as the privileged experience of “feeling at home in one’s skin” is contingent upon this body’s legitimacy and acceptance by society and law – thereby upon its gender, sexuality, race, class and other traits. In this regard, the body can be instead considered a site of confinement and punishment, akin less to homes but more to physical spaces of imprisonment (a.k.a. prisons). Drawing a parallelism between the materiality of the social body and of incarceration – both as governed and designed, this talk offers a reflection on the intricate relationship between identity, justice, criminalisation and design/architecture industry, and envisions abolitionist futures as a way of dismantling the existing punitive material practices or, in feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s words, the “brick walls”.

Robert Glas (Rotterdam)
On the film-installation '1986 Or A Sphinx's Interior'
  • Film still '1986 Or A Sphinx's Interior' © Robert Glas

In 1986, Norwegian prison abolitionist Thomas Mathiesen said: ‘There is a clear and strong tendency towards the expansion of the prison system throughout the Western world. Even in Holland, traditionally the country with the lowest prison rate in Europe, the flagship telling the world that it is possible to have a complex industrialized society with very few prisoners, there is now a noticeable expansion in the making.’

That same year, renowned architect Carel Weeber drew up his design for a prison complex in Rotterdam, one of the many Dutch prisons built in the 1980s, in use to this day. As part of his design process Weeber had a 1:1 scale test built of a single prison cell. While there are conflicting accounts on how his test went about, one thing is certain: such a test demands the imagination of how the space will be used, by whom, and in what condition this person is.

For the film '1986 Or A Sphinx's Interior' (38 min.), Robert Glas rebuilt Weeber’s test set up. Working with actor Ali-Ben Horsting, Carel Weeber himself, and a former detainee of the prison, various versions of Weeber’s visit to the test setup are constructed and reconstructed. The result orbits around imagining how a life and a body are affected by confinement, this sentence we talk about so often and know so little about.


For his artistic practice Robert Glas (1986) uses cinematography, photography, scientific literature and fiction to investigate technologies nation-states deploy to enforce the law.