Palestrante
Descrição
During the second half of the twentieth century architecture became the subject of archival collection in a diverse range of institutions, which in Europe were often intertwined with cultural and political implications. The reconsideration of historical narratives after World War II led to realignments on both the political and the cultural front, whereas the need to reckon with the natural history of destruction geared a preservationist movement, thereby making architecture and its archival documentation agents of a new order. Yet, contrary to the visual arts, architecture presents challenges to collecting practice as its documentation occurs by proxy (drawings, photographs, models, and correspondence). This is a fracture in terms of medium with aesthetic as well as epistemological aspects. The technological developments in conservation and the digital realm pose new questions regarding what ought to be preserved and how. The factor that critically shapes cultural memory, however, is the definition of the archival whole. Do all the parts of an archive recount the same story once separated from the place they were created? Are a building, the material that documents it, and the figure who designed it inscribed within the same sense of cultural heritage? And how does that equilibrium affect the purpose and mission of archives? This paper examines the multivalent presence of architecture in archives and the ways it conditions the taxonomy of what is documented, preserved, and canonized in historiography. In tandem, it considers how archival material serves not only as a corpus of preserved heritage but also as a catalyst in the construction of cultural identity, thus drawing a critical distinction between history as an event and history as a mediated narrative. The presentation will focus on three questions - what? where? and why? - in order to tackle issues relevant to medium, epistemological fracture, and manifold narratives.
Nota biográfica | Short Bio
Ioanna Angelidou studied Architecture at Columbia University in New York and Aristotle University in Greece, and worked as an architect and curator in Europe and Japan before undertaking her PhD at Yale University. As a Fellow in the Excellence Cluster “Dimensions of Europe” she co-organized the conference “European Cultural Memory in its Digitization” at the University of Graz in Austria. Her research has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, the MacMillan Center for International Studies, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, and the Japan Foundation. Her publications include contributions to the Getty Research Journal, Arch+, Histories of Postwar Architecture and the books Remediated Maps (Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2025), Aldo Rossi: Perspectives from the World (Il Poligrafo, 2019), Writing Place: Investigations in Architecture and Literature (010-NAi, 2016), Archiscripts (Birkhäuser, 2015), Small Tokyo (Keio University, 2012).
| Palavras-chave | Keywords | archive, architectural fragments, historical narrative, cultural memory, preservation |
|---|