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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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June 21
Łukasz Stanek (Manchester)
Socialist Worldmaking
  • International Trade Fair, Accra, Africa Pavilion and Pavilion A, aerial view, 1967. GNCC, Vic Adegbite (chief architect), Jacek Chyrosz, Stanisław Rymaszewski (project architects). Private archive, Warsaw (Poland)

This talk revisits Łukasz Stanek’s research on the collaboration between architects, planners, and construction companies from socialist Eastern Europe and their counterparts in West Africa and the Middle East during the Cold War. He will argue that central for this collaboration were various, competing, and sometimes antagonistic visions of solidarity on a global scale. Building upon the writings of several thinkers, notably Henri Lefebvre and Edouard Glissant, Stanek will theorise this global dimension by means of the concept of socialist worldmaking. He will then revisit his recent book, Architecture in Global Socialism (2020), and show how the concept of socialist worldmaking allows to make sense of historically specific, multiple, and evolving ways of practicing the world by institutions and individuals from socialist and the postcolonial countries during decolonization and the Cold War. 

Dawit Benti (Addis Ababa)
Challenges of Urban Heritage Conservation during State-Led Gentrification of Addis Ababa's City Centre
  • © Daniel Emale

Addis Ababa, a young city in an old nation is an administrative and a business capital of Ethiopia. During 136 years of its existence, successive governments initiated some sort of urban renewal that affected the central parts of the city. The first was the renewal after the complete destruction of the city center during a power vacuum immediately before Italian occupation in 1936. The Italians had to later reinvent a large swathe of the city center. The second one came in the 60s when Emperor Haile Selassie tried to make Addis Ababa the center of assembly for the newly liberated African states, changing its perceived image of an enigmatic medieval state into a modern one that could accommodate Africa and the world.

The third renewal started in the mid-2000s accompanying an economic boom and continues to happen unabated until the present. What makes the Ethiopian experience different is that land belongs to the government and one can only lease it for a specified time and the government has the right to plan the land in a way it deems it right. A lot of low rise historical buildings exist in the city center that has a huge development demand from both the government and developers.  It is in this scenario that heritage buildings are destroyed and scheduled for destruction by the day. A lack of understanding of what is a heritage building complicates the process. A case by case confrontation amongst institutions has been the modus operandi that didn’t help the preservation of many of the heritage structures, that most of the times get demolished.