 My name is Rosalind Morris, and I am moderating this final panel, which goes under the title of post-war. This is, of course, a state in which we would like to be, but it is definitely not a state in which we find ourselves. And it may be a state that has been rendered not only indefinable, but endlessly deferred at a time in which we have displaced total war with permanent war. And a time in which, as we were speaking during the break, we have both, we have a situation in which we neither declare wars on one hand, nor do we restrict the word war to things that used to be understood by that term. We have wars on sugar, and wars on fat, and wars on terror, and wars for which we might wish to reserve that term. I'm very pleased to be here, even though the topic is painful, pleased because of the excellence of the individual speakers that we have heard from and that we're going to hear from, and also pleased because I think this has probably been addressed today, but I'll say so anyways. The formulation of this conference is so necessary and so inventive and so brave, that is to think preservation not merely as that which comes after war, which in any case doesn't appear to end, but to think about it in its deep imbrication with war, with war-making, as an anticipatory structure as well as a practice that accompanies war, but also as a practice and discourse or set of practices and discourses that has taken into itself many of the logics, temporal structures and practices that at other times we would have imagined to be of the domain of war-making itself. I'm not going to say any more than that and I'm not going to do very much by way of introducing our speakers, because the biographies appear for you in your program. We're going to proceed as the program lists, beginning with Nicholas Hirsch, Mark Jarzombek, Rodney Harrison, Azar Aqsa Mija, and Clifenden Berg. These are really exceptional practitioners in their respective fields, architects, designers, theorists, thinkers, people involved in preservation who have really taken their practices to the highest level. It's a really great honor for me to be introducing them. They will speak for 20 minutes each and I'm telling them now that there's a person in the front row here who is going to keep time. So you are supposed to occasionally look at her and receive messages to the effect of five minutes, three minutes, you're done. And I will then gather us together for conversation at the end. So we begin with Nicholas Hirsch, who is visiting professor of architecture at Columbia and very much associated with the journal E-Flux. He's also going to make this thing work, or it's working already. He's going to speak to you under the title of authorship slash ownership. Nicholas Hirsch, welcome. Yeah, thank you for the invitation to this conference and I have to apologize before I actually start being one of the few practicing architects, I guess, in this conference, someone who actually builds and someone who builds also makes mistakes and probably offers all sorts of reasons for critique from the more scholarly side. So I'm not a preservationist. I somehow used to believe that I'm on the side of the new, like designing new things. And yet through my work, I became more and more involved in history and debates on preservation, on reconstruction, on demolition, which might also be a creative task or duty. Today, I would argue that the new contemporary design, as we might call it that, is kind of in a crisis and looks increasingly like a sort of cystic and exhausted formalism, unable to really tackle with the urgent political and social problems of our times. Preservation on the other side has seemingly left slightly reactionary context, thanks to Jorge and other participants here in this wonderful conference. It became somehow a critical tool for debate and in my brief contribution to this conference, I want to link problems of preservation to my own design projects, partly also to my curatorial practice. The question that guides me here is a bit referring to this title, authorship, ownership. I'm trying to ask whose authorship and whose ownership are at stake, which history, whose history. This panel, Rosalind mentioned this under the title post-war. A post-war is probably the perfect moment for architects. The damage is done and the stage is free for architects. Yet the question is a bit, how long is what we call post-war? It can be quite a long period. Often it takes a generational tool to deal with the problematic relics that were ignored in the rush after a war or in the rush of reconstruction. The majority of examples that I'm going to show now from my work are the products of a discussion that happened 50 or 60 years after the war, in that case, World War II. During the past centuries wars have been more and more brought into the cities from the open battleground into the dense and urban tissue. We have seen all the examples by Laura Corgan, for instance, from Aleppo. Civilian casualties were growing. World War II was probably the first war in which the majority of the victims were civilians. Eventually crimes against humanity were brought on the agenda and inserted into a legal framework. My own work as an architect started in a very unusual way with monuments. You could argue this is not really architecture, but this was the first project I did around the Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt. A listed monument, the oldest and the only one that was not destroyed by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. This project that followed Track 17 in Berlin, the place where most of the deportations from Berlin took place, were basically works that framed or added on to existing historical sites, basically sites that still had a certain aura and were not marked by a tabula rasa. Yet very often, after wars, nothing is left. This is the moment when architects, again, are asked for a competition. For instance, in that case, it's a project in the west of Germany, close to Luxembourg and Belgium, in the document center. Here, this was a camp for political prisoners during the so-called Third Reich. Here you see one of the two, the other one, photos that exist from that camp. Nothing else remained or very few things. The camp as such disappeared and the whole area was turned again into an agricultural field. Through a very long discussion with associations of former prisoners, the idea of a museum or of a document center came up. Just a few photos of this, which is basically a learning center, a place where the few documents are actually housed. The question, though, is what can you exhibit if there's almost nothing left? There are very few relics like clothes of prisoners, this one from a prisoner from Luxembourg, or basically a system of bureaucratic documents here, a graphic design system for different categories of prisoners. But the point I want to make here is that it's the link between a kind of monumentalization, resaleization of history in relation to the witnesses, to an oral lived history. Because a number of prisoners were still alive when we built the building. It was opened right now 10 years ago. And today, for last year, the last surviving prisoner died. So this transition from an experienced history, from people who can actually talk about a place, a site, and I would argue also about a certain idea of preservation of memory and heritage. If they're not there anymore, what can you do? You can record, of course, their histories and what they tell us, but it's a real step towards the situation of musealization. And this is for me also a question, what is a monument? What does preservation do to basically the people who were part of the history? And probably this is sadly the only way how we can transport history into the future. But I will come to that later. A similar problem, and Marc Jasenbeck will talk more intensely about Dresden, which I think has been mentioned before today, which is a very particular case. A city that has been heavily destroyed in the last year of the Second World War. But today it looks almost as perfect, maybe more perfect than it ever was, after its reconstruction or after repairing a number of buildings. We have been winning a competition for the Dresden synagogue, which is one of the few, I almost said, contemporary buildings. It's a bit tricky because the Fraunke is as contemporary as the synagogue. But here again there's the question, which history are we referring to? And what kind of victims? What is the audience here? Who do we address? Because Dresden is very much marked and worldwidely known as a city that has been destroyed in 1945. But of course there was another destruction in 1938 of the synagogue and many other buildings of the Jewish community. The synagogue which was designed by Gottfried Semper, one of his first works as an architect. Marc will go into this with the Fraunke reconstruction. This is the synagogue. It's a very contemporary design to argue. And a design that was also very highly or very much debated because the city view that I was showing earlier is actually part of what is called the UNESCO World Heritage. So the panorama from the river is a kind of image that's protected, designated by UNESCO. But given this highly symbolic architectural debate in Dresden and I think it's probably an exemplary case for a discussion that's happening everywhere in the world there's a permanent process of use and misuse of architecture. These architectures become things that trigger debate. Right now Dresden is the arena for very large right-wing populist movements. Almost every week they assemble in front of the reconstructed Semper opera. And since this is a country where you can do demonstrations, it's not illegal to do this. So they occupy the place, they announce the protest and they sit or they stand in front of the Semper opera. And the reaction by the opera singers, musicians, et cetera was we are not a stage design for xenophobia, your Semper opera. But this for me is a good example for the potential but also the problems that we face in the discussion on heritage. Because the flip side of these protests is something that happened last week. The local synagogue was put on fire and so this is basically all part of a debate on identity. And to my feeling preservation and heritage become the big triggers for such a debate. An insecurity about identity that is basically also a discussion around architecture and the preservation of objects. War is also in an interesting way also offering opportunities. I said this before, the post-war situation. In that case, a project we are doing since quite a while in Cologne. The oncologists are still digging and we are still waiting. It's the Archaeological Museum of Cologne right in the center of the city, not far away from the dome that you see here, which was the only building in the city center that was not destroyed. So also here, I guess the Pentagon and the equivalent in London, they were very careful in actually not destroying some of the main monuments here. But it was also for ecologists almost a situation in paradise. Imagine a city that is 2,000 years old and suddenly you can actually dig into the ground. They discovered within one year or half a year basically traces, unknown traces from the Roman times before this was covered again. Today we are basically building a museum, a kind of protective shield on top of these findings, but here a view of the current situation. But the question again is a big debate, what kind of history are we showing? This is just a very diagrammatic situation of the different periods of time that are in layers on top of each other. So here again we have to make, or not we, but basically the oncologists have to make decisions. It's the old Schlimann problem in Troyer that in order to find something new you might have to destroy an existing layer. After these projects that deal very much within the framework of conservation, also in a legal framework, I also want to show in a way how also the idea of the notion of war might or could be understood in a different way. Because all the examples I was showing before were basically discussions and projects that were an immediate effect of the war, although it took 50 or 60 years to do these projects. I'm going to show two projects here which deal with a different notion of war, something that I would probably describe by a situation that's much less visible as all the dramatic images we have seen before. It's more about the daily struggles within our cities, a phenomenon that is often called today by some scholars as a global civil war. I'm talking about the struggles that go on within the large metropolises here, a project that we did in Istanbul called Cultural Agencies, which deal very much with a non-listed, non-designated idea of preservation, it's rather about marginalised stories, about eviction, demolition, forced migration and resettlement. But the effects are, I think, very harsh and comparable to war situations. This is one of these many illegal houses, Gecekonduz, the name in Istanbul. So it's an illegal settlement and people there are threatened by eviction because the situation is very attractive for developers. The situation is very tense so there are police, there are protesters partly armed and we basically started the project on the beginnings of this illegal settlement that started in the early 70s. Within a small shop that we rented and where we gathered material among the inhabitants of this settlement about the beginnings of this situation. And the ultimate question here is of course, can you preserve an illegal settlement? It's of course a catch-22 situation because there is no framework on the level of the state that can deal with that problem. So there is no protection whatsoever for these people unless one starts an agency, a rather bottom-up initiative. The other example I want to give is a project in New Delhi, a small cultural initiative that was evicted during the planning of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. From the riverbank they were evicted to the outskirts of New Delhi and here you see some photos of basically all the building plots where these people had to live in the middle of nowhere but with a kind of basic grid of three to six meters where all these new houses were started. This project then was, we built a building there which also toured in a different version through exhibitions, biennials, and that's what I would argue for that preservation could actually take very different media, not only in terms of fixation on the object but also the medium of exhibitions, films or history etc. So in that sense there's clearly a link or reference to the notion of intangibles. And in general I think preservation at least from my perspective could be understood as a creative practice, something as schizophrenic as it might sound that one might call preservation design, which probably puts together or describes a dilemma which I feel very much in my own practice. So in that sense I would argue for a situation where basically one starts questioning the fetish of the object and this reminds me always a bit about this small stone from the Bastille, with a wax seal representing the Bastille in the Musée Carnivalée in Paris, which to me makes one thing clear, there is no Bastille anymore as a building, yet it's a building that's very present in the public memory. So in that sense preservation can be done through very different media, and as an architect I might have a rather critical relationship to actually the claim of preserving things for eternity. Although all the projects I was showing in the beginning were clearly the agenda was these crimes against humanity should be remembered for eternity. And I think this dilemma is at least guiding my own practice, but it seems to be a dilemma that we are facing in general. Thank you. There's like a magic operator of this, so I'm very happy that I don't have to touch a monitor. I'm very happy to introduce now our second speaker, Mark Yosembek, who will speak on Dresden's von Kälte, preservation and the destruction of complexity. Before I start a few thoughts, so much sketchy, while I was at the privilege of sitting here in the audience and listening to the various speakers. Thank you, Jorge, for putting this together. Good luck with trying to make any sense out of it, but I think that's the point is trying to sort of shake things up, get disparate realities together, sort of, you know, I always stray for the project of interdisciplinarity. I mean, you know, it's really disciplinary, I don't know, that needs to happen, not interdisciplinary harmony, but a little cross anti-disciplinarity thinking is also just as part of that. So anyway, just a few introductory thoughts. So I've been working last year or so on, or more, a little bit on Borneo. Don't let me out. And just sort of all of a sudden struck me, you know, we have, because I'm interested in the peripheralities of civilization. That's what I'm sort of working on. So in the 14th century, the north part of Borneo became sort of Islamized, and the Sultan got everybody to get rid of their sacred bees and their sacred this and their sacred that, and they had omen birds, and they're not listening to omen birds, that's sort of, you know, pagan and all that, so we don't do that anymore. And so the north became sort of Islamized, and then in the 19th century came the English, and they brought in the missionaries, and they became Christianized, and the Christians loved the Muslims there because they were already monotheistic. And so they both sort of attacked the forest people. Then recently there's the evangelicals, and they're escalating the whole thing. So today, about five years ago, the last shaman who listened to the birds died. And now the loggers come and chop down forest, and we complain because of the global warming, but the point is the damage is done, the birds are gone, the omen birds. So the truth is that in some sense here we are in an environment where there's, no one has lamented anything. No one, no one, there's no monument to the last headhunter who are not really, I mean who, you know, who are sort of, the reason they were under attack by the English was because they were the headhunters and they got rid of the savages and things like that. So you can go to Borneo and you can visit the longhouses, and the pretty girls from the city will do your dancing for you. And there's some pockets of sort of post-holocaustic neo-authenticity that are struggling to in some sense restore some semblance of memory. But it's all a little bit shaky and a little bit interfused. And then we have, of course, the whole problem, which is that the whole culture was interbreed genetically with the Javanese, with the Chinese, with the Indians, with the Tamil, with everybody. So who knows where anybody comes from on top of that. So there's a sort of massive sort of ambiguity. So what is the point of heritage, right, in all of this? And the government is trying to sort of now proclaim this imaginary project, which they, of course, were inherited from the victimizers. So no lament there. So culture, what is the right to culture, if you will, for those who have already been annihilated? Interesting problem because we don't really face that. The silence of annihilation is the silence of annihilation, and that's pretty much it. You're doomed. So, you know, we have a funny, do we have any obligation at all towards not just this is a type of neocolonial project, but it goes back to Islamization project. It goes back to Indianization project. It goes back to a civilizational project. So do we go back? I mean, how far back do we go in order to find the contact point between civilization and the right to have a culture and the right to not have a culture, right? And what the consequences are for not having a culture and the project sort of science, you know. So in some sense, the heritage we might argue just for a joke is that the last great battle of identitarianism today and somewhat building on Tim Winter's sort of provocative argument this morning, but I don't know if you would agree with this. I'm not putting it there, but I see it that we're trapped in a great sort of collapse of the monotheistic idea of tolerance in the soup of the geopolitical hyper-identitarianism. So we have to remember that the nation-state as a formulation of the 19th century as a project of stability rooted on a Christian idea of secularism. So when we say the word secular, we have to always put Christian in front of it because that's just the way it was. You know, trying to beat down or after the hated Napoleonic era. That project imposing itself and self-imposing itself on the globe is coming to a close despite the best efforts of the UN. It is now just, and it's not just buildings that are under threat even though we focus on those, but the nation-state itself is clearly under threat collapsing right and left enforced through vast legal maneuverings that are trying desperately to hold onto it in some sort of imaginary of world stability. So a symptom of the threat is the outreach that nation-states from democracies to the most suppressive and totalitarian regimes that there are have made in the field of preservation. So it used to be that architects were the proverbial whores of capitalism. Now we have to ask if preservation and its allies and heritage are the new whores of the nation-state. So fulfilling its most intimate desires. So the job of the historian in some sense is to begin to see past this or see in it, see through it, see the inner workings of this, give it some X-ray presence. But the monster is unleashed and will not be stopped in some sense. Now I don't want to sort of get into my eschatological projects about the future of preservation because I was asked very calmly to deliver a talk on Dresden. Which I'm now going to do if you don't mind. But my work on Dresden in some sense is sort of the one the book in. The work on Borneo is in some sense at that proverbial periphery. Dresden brings us really to the center of this problem. So here we have a picture from the Boston Globe. We live in a city where the globe comes delivered to me every day. You get the time, we get the globe. That's why I'm a global historian. Every day I've got to deal with this stuff. So the question, I looked at this and thought, this is such a great way to begin to think about what preservation is all about. So it's very confident it's building this future. And the implications are many and extremely complex because rebuilding Dresden's sort of Baroque era center and the Frown Kirche in particular which I'm going to focus on a little bit today was certainly a moment of national pride. But we have to remember that the Dresden, after it was destroyed and bombed that the socialist government embraced the destruction to build a new destruction. They basically, initially after the destruction said, the best thing that's ever happened to Dresden. And because now we have a tabula rasa, we can get rid of all the old stuff which belongs to the fascist bourgeois regimes and make a new Dresden. So not all destructions have traditionally been lamented in that sense. So here we have a little bit of a problem because we have to account for the fact that the flattening by bombs was then augmented if you will by the removal of the rubble to make way for some new Dresden which was their attempt at sort of modern urbanism that it protect worked or not. But that's a slightly different question. Then in the 80s there's this wonderful statue that was created that was put there and it's called the Trauenderman. They're the man in mourning, in grief, by Wieland Förster who's a Dresden artist. And you can sort of see it here. He's very, very sad because basically no one gives a damn. Stuck here basically at the end of the path in the restoration and then more sort of recently stuck on the side of a road next to sort of a car park. So sometimes we forget that okay, this was socialist and yes the Russians did have a hand in the destruction of Dresden. Okay, that's fair enough. Maybe the socialist didn't want us to remember that. But in the world after Sebald where he accused the Germans of never sort of remembering the actual destructions and the death, you know, sort of shying away from it. Here we do have a little stitch right off of memory, right? A non accusatory type of memory. And it's sort of interesting that unless you're from Dresden or know somebody from Dresden and most people from Dresden, half of them are at least not from Dresden. I mean, you know, they're from wherever. You know, this thing would just, like, no one even knows what it is. A pigeon sit on it and that's pretty much it. So it's a way to, I'm just sort of introducing this as just to show how easy it is for memories to just, you know, to both be constructed as loss and then also when you're actually trying to remember something how easy it is to look past it if it doesn't fit your particular niche of the memory that your particular worldview wants to acknowledge. In particular, no one wants to sort of acknowledge, if you will, the socialist memorial capacities. So the frown cursor, as you see here, was indeed, at some say, some surface reality, sort of not much to look at. And it was purposely left in ruin, however, to commemorate Allied destruction. Now, obviously, you know, we could sort of say, well, maybe they didn't have enough money to rebuild it or whatever it is, but that's, you know, that's sort of second guessing it. It was left meticulously as a ruin and there were many, you know, architecture as ruined post-war memorials in many places. So this was sort of one of an example of that. So there were no trees or bushes allowed to grow and the sheep were grazing to make sure that it stayed nice and clear as a memorial to Allied atrocities. So now, with the reconstruction, we begin to sort of see in the reunification of Germany reconstruction process, we begin to see these deserts for a different type of language. Here we see here the magazine, an expression called the symbol of suffering and, you know, the ashes arising from the ashes. So the question is, what is, who is suffering? Well, the German civilians are suffering and perhaps they're not going to put too fine a point on it when, you know, begins to see the differentiation between murder, bombs falling down and killing tens of thousands of people and suffering. And what is exactly sort of being suffered here, which of course, which is the division of Germany into two different countries. So something that has nothing to do with the bombing, but the suffering of the Germans at being divided between east and west. So in some sense, the building stands for a whole different problem now, which is reconciliation and the suffering of split and the actual destruction, the hate, the gore, the burn, the burning bodies and all that type of stuff is going on. Do they still have the big placards of the burning bodies when you go to Dresden? Okay, that's still up there. Thank God. Okay. So there is some residual evidence, but these are placards put up there. They're not, you know, I've been always interested about how they get put up. So there's a sort of residual sort of accusatoriness of it, but certainly that's not going to be in the official language that we see. And so the message slowly changes. And so now we read, you know, it's a decapitated shell. It's empty. There's nothing there. And we're going to fill this decapitated shell with meaning. Well, of course it's not a decapitated shell. It was meant to be a decapitated shell in order to preserve the accusatory finger. So slowly, slowly the building sort of past is re-identified and then it gets rebuilt. And I'll talk just a little bit more about that in a second, too. So then the press continues, right? And we can sort of see here where it says what we have is a mosaic of past and present and elements of the past of which the Germans can now be proud. And there's a beautiful picture, of course, included, which is the golden cross which is being prepared to be put on to the top as the finishing part of this. So here we have, in some sense, a project, a nation-centric project off which the nation is very thankful investing tons of money in all of this and, of course, needing the appropriate language of pride and part of place and sort of washing away, if you will, the project of earlier types of commemorations. Now, to get it done, you read from the official statements that work began on clearing and sifting through the rubble according to archeological principles with the intention of using the many original stones as possible to rebuild the frown carousel. Okay, why not? This all sounds good, right? The amount of rubble was initially divided into grids, so it really wasn't rubble. Yes, it was a rubble, but it was not amount of rubble. It was a monument and a memorial. Okay, so, okay, a little bit conveniently forgetting that it was a rubble for own purpose, right? But now it is just plain rubble, right? So we've rubbelized the rubble, and then we've done what very good archeologists would do is we make squares and grids and to orient ourselves, and then we've carefully done this, we've carefully done that, we've done our data and dimensions and so forth and so on, right? Well, right, because in some sense, science is now the new God and the scientists and their scientific worldview is going to sort of keep ideology at bay. Now, of course, no one's an idiot. We know that science is itself an ideology. And especially in their case, it gets really particularly tricky because when they produce the computer modeling of what the frown carousel was going to do, they had a very convenient, Lee, use a convenient modeling called Catiya. I hope all of you architects sort of know what Catiya is, but Catiya was a military technology developed by the French to make the French fighter jets. Then when the patent was out, they sold the patent to architects, in particular, like Frank Gehry, for a massive amount of money, and we're still now playing with the sort of civilianization off, if you will, military technology. Well, we all know about Catiya or not, I mean, in the history books, you know, about Catiya and to Bilbao, but no one in the history books mentions Catiya and the frown carousel, which really was the first, Catiya allows you to do three-dimensional modeling, which, believe it or not, I mean, for those of you of my generation, you couldn't do that in those days, right? This was like, whew, three-dimensional modeling. You could do circles and you could do columns, but you couldn't do baroque curves. Now, baroque curves, schmerz doesn't really matter, so it was really great. You could do a baroque curve, right, and you get your machine to cut, and you can cut and paste the missing parts, all that. So the result was a building that looked like this. So the issue, of course, is that you had these stones that were burnt, and they were in the rubble, and now they could be slightly polished and cleaned and cut a little bit and put back into the building, and because it was a computer and because it was all done appropriately and by rational and by means and by archaeologists and all that, everything went back where it was supposed to go, bullshit. I bet you 90% of those stones could be moved one stone over and no one would know the difference. In fact, they had another computer program which put those stones into the pixelated world that you see here, right, in order to distribute them fairly, equanimically. We don't want to sort of put all the stones on one side or all the stones on the bottom or all the stones on the top. Every stone has a right to have its own place, right? It's a little bit, once again, this sort of faux liberal fantasy of stone-identityism, right? But you don't want the stones to cluster too close. That could be not good, right, if all the stones cluster too close. I mean, here, I don't know, I'm really going off the limb here, right, but there was a computer program where the Jews came from Russia. There's a computer program that distributed the Jews throughout Germany. That's the someone told me this and addressed them. Well, they didn't want the Jews to all go to Berlin. They were very worried about that. So the Jews from Russia were told, well, you've given a little ticket and told you're going to Darmstadt, you're going to here, you're going to there, and you're going to there, right? Because they had this anxiety about too many Jews in one place. And it's sort of a little bit like this. The stones which belong to a social project or social memorial, socialist memorial, right, had been literally sort of dismembered from the capacity to ever going back to their roots, which is an accusatory position. So I find that a little bit of a problem. And then, you know, to make things even trickier, the Dresden city fathers really wanted to have UNESCO come and give them the blessing, but UNESCO said, well, all your buildings that you reconstruct are brand new. We only do old buildings, right? So Dresden said, the city fathers said, oh my God, we have a great solution to that. Many of the great painters drew Dresden as a silhouette. And so can we now have UNESCO say the silhouette is being preserved? And UNESCO, in a sort of weird, backhanded way of wanting to, you know, accommodate, said, sure, silhouettes are fine. So they approved the silhouette of Dresden. And so when you go to the UNESCO heritage, the UNESCO site, the photographs there are all done over illuminated, right? I mean, you know, so that you see the, you know, so I am only, if you go to the, what does that say? That says time's up, all right? Well, okay, I got a few more then. If you go to UNESCO heritage site, you download their app, all the pictures are gorgeous. This is the only place where the pictures are terrible, right? Because they're trying to get you to see silhouettiness, right? And so the problem is, you know, I mean, here you go, you go to the Heritage app and you get this, but you go to UNESCO and you get this. So what is in some sense the problem or the project of a dematerialized city that has been preserved in a sort of a dematerialized spectral type of worldview? Well, so we have a sort of a type of deception going on, clearly a photographic cunning. The subtext of which, of course, is that, you know, buildings in the sort of a traumatized state, it takes a huge amount of sort of cleverness in order to get it to work, again, within the ideological regimes that have been set up by UNESCO. And it just shows, in some sense, the bending, swiveling, and open-endedness by which buildings sort of operate. So clearly we have also the subtext of the rhetoric about religion, sort of haunted, by the 17th century Tolerance Acts in Southern Holland and England, which tolerated all sorts of religions, as long as they were monotheistic and Christian, but did not tolerate at all atheism, which was continued to be banned. And, of course, socialism is a form of atheism. So we have, in some sense, a return to a type of this sort of faux secular world where the church is allowed to return as a type of reminder that, you know, atheism is still a creature of destruction itself. So, okay, there's the... Oh, then it gets removed. Right, and now if you go to the UNESCO site, they have this... which has to do with the bridge. They committed this sin. They built the bridge. Modernism, you're not allowed to be modern, if you're UNESCO. And they accuse, basically, to my point a little bit, so they accuse the Dresners of doing that when it's actually the fault of UNESCO itself sort of being hung by its own petard. So sometimes we have the battle between two memorials. One is actually a very powerful one. One that shows you the visceral and literal aspects of destruction. One to the great nation state where destruction has been evacuated up into a type of imaginary of German unification, German precision, technological mastery, and it's sort of an anti-monument if you will, a forgotten monument to socialism, atheism, the culture of mourning, and so forth. So it just sort of gets to, I guess I'm a little bit my earlier point, which is that the job of the historian is sort of not to reaffirm sort of theological assumptions about memory as an ongoing construction, but to expose the epistemologies against the grain of their operations, though there's little, technically speaking, that is sort of outside of the realm of that possibility. But to change his word, art, to my word, to be city, one can say that the city desires what has not yet been, even though everything that the city is already has been. And so to play one end of that scenario out against the other allows one to come to the paradox of design, memory, as only that which is present in the dialectics of its incompletion, preservation beware. Thank you. The next speaker, who will take us somewhere far from Dresden, I think, is Rodney Harrison, professor of heritage studies at the University College London. I should have introduced Mark Yarsenbeck as professor of history and theory of architecture at MIT. Rodney has changed his title ever so slightly. It is now heritage diversity and post-conflict development. Do you mind if I take your... Okay, thank you very much for the invitation to be here. And I think there are various resonances across some of the papers today that you'll see re-emerging here. So, while much is currently made of the regenerative potential of heritage to rebuild peace and community in post-conflict situations, such moves frequently neglect the primary functions which heritage is played in the different transactional realities, race, ethnicity, culture, tradition, along which fracture lines have been articulated and forms of violence have been targeted against particular segments of the population. Indeed, one might argue, as some have done already, that heritage is not a remedy for nor opposed to conflict, but the opposite, that conflict is actually integral to an inevitable outcome of heritage. And this paper aims to engage critically with the concept of post-conflict heritage, arguing that heritage cannot easily be disentangled from its collecting, ordering and governing practices, from the differentiated forms of personhood that these practices produce, and from the targeted forms of violence which these practices facilitate. This connection must be acknowledged and carefully managed if heritage and preservation is to play any significant role in conflict mediation or post-conflict development. So, it's now quite common to hear significant claims made for the central role of heritage and culture in post-conflict regeneration. These are often accompanied by a series of now familiar case studies which are celebrated as community building success stories with little critical or long-term analysis of the actual impacts of these projects on the people who are reputed to have benefited from them. The Council of Europe's discussion document on the role of culture and cultural heritage in conflict prevention, transformation, resolution and post-conflict action published in 2011 in many ways exemplifies these claims. Here heritage is understood simultaneously as a tool for conflict prevention as a significant factor in conflict resolution and as a starting point in reconstruction and post-conflict development. It notes, the expression of diversity, cultural, ethnic or religious is not an impediment to development but rather adds to the wealth of a country and a community in the face of globalization both in terms of competitiveness and attractiveness. Heritage is indeed a source of local development which has immediate repercussions on employment and the economic vitality of various sectors and specific traditional activities. It can be a constructive element which helps to find common ground for all members of the community. To promote heritage in all its diversity improves self-image and confidence in the shared future, increases well-being and reinforces social cohesion on which a common vision of the future can be constructed and implemented for a peaceful and prosperous society. The outcome document of the 2010 Millennium Development Goals Summit similarly places strong emphasis on the importance of culture for development and its contribution to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. This emphasis was reiterated in consecutive United Nations General Assembly resolutions which call for the mainstreaming of culture and cultural heritage into development policies and strategies and which has underscored cultures perceived intrinsic contribution to sustainable development. Commentators have recently referred to this as part of a broader cultural turn in development agendas in which cultures seem to play a central role in meeting development objectives both as a driver and enabler in fostering sustainable development and in building peace. So I want to critically examine such claims by looking at the central role that culture and heritage as a subset of culture has played in differentiating and ordering populations and the relationship between these ways of differentiating populations and practices of social government. We've recently considered these questions in relation to the history of ethnographic museums in the study of 20th century museum anthropology in the US, UK, Australia, France and New Zealand to be published by Duke in December, so they tell us, as collecting order in governing anthropology museums and social government. Co-authored with Tony Bennett, Fiona Cameron, Ben Dibley, Nellie Dias, Ira Jackness and Conor McCarthy. Seven authors, must be seven times as good, right? So our starting point is Bennett's discussion of the role played by the post-Boasian concept of culture in providing what he terms a working surface on the social. Bennett argues that culture constitutes quote, a mediating surface on and through which government guided by science must act to shape the passions, desires and interests not of raw individuals but of individuals as members of different groups, so as to allow a balanced apportionment of the relations between government and freedom. And we approach these processes of governing through the optic of Michel Foucault's account of liberal government as a set of knowledge practices and technologies that work through the forms of freedom that they organise. This provides a means of engaging with anthropology as a liberal discipline that has worked through its differential distribution of capacities for freedom across varied populations. Its adjudications in these regards have been crucial in distinguishing ways of governing that operate through liberal forms of subjecthood in relation to certain populations and issues, whilst favouring discriminatory biopolitical approaches in other contexts. And the most obvious of these, for example, are the different forms of administrative practices which are made possible by the identification of certain parts of a population as indigenous populations and other as non-indigenous populations within colonial governmental contexts, for example. In developing this approach, we pay particular attention to the transactional realities through which anthropology's role in governmental practices was organised. We borrow this term from Michel Foucault to refer to the concepts and technologies that epistemological authorities produce and through which their forms of action on social worlds are mediated. In the case of the cultural disciplines including anthropology, but equally in a way in which could be implied to heritage more generally, we interpret such transactional realities of race, culture and tradition, for example, as the working surfaces on the social through which those disciplines engage with the management of populations through ordering practices which make up different categories of persons and groups within society. There are concerns in the book's centre on the role of early to mid-20th century anthropology in mediating the relations between the collecting practices of fieldwork, the ordering practices of museums and the practices of social governance that these facilitated in both metropolitan and colonial contexts. We note that one of the key concerns of contemporary heritage in museum studies has been to explore and critique the international transformations of museum practices and policies designed to promote their use as civic institutions for fostering cross-cultural understanding of culturally diverse societies. These museum practices are commonly presented as breaking with the roles played by museums in the 19th and early 20th centuries when cultural differences were represented in racialized hierarchies. And while this is true in some respects, one of our aims in the book has been to show how this way of presenting the history of museums neglects the varying conceptions of cultural difference associated with the new relations between museums, anthropological fieldwork and programmes of colonial and metropolitan governance that were developed over the first half of the 20th century and the legacies of those developments in the second half of the 20th century in the early decades of the 21st. In particular, we look at how the various transactional realities which emerge from this work paved the way for post-war forms of multicultural governance by to varying degrees displacing hierarchical conceptions of race in favour of more plural and cultural conceptions of difference, albeit ones in which racialized conceptions of difference have never been entirely superseded. In doing so, we've been constantly confronted by the central role which heritage and culture have played in ordering and differentiating human populations for the purposes of facilitating targeted programmes of liberal and illiberal practices of social governance. And it's in acknowledging this function of heritage in museums that Bennett refers to these institutions and the transactional realities which underpin them as differencing machines. Heritage is intimately involved in practices which make up different categories of persons and these categories of personhood which heritage produces cannot be disentangled from the liberal and illiberal governmental practices which they facilitate. If monuments become symbolic targets in war they only do so because they represent particular categories of persons and here we can think of the strange work of proximity and distancing between monuments and persons which Lucia discussed in her paper this morning. So I want to look in more detail now at this relationship between heritage and the concept of human diversity or difference. I wrote this paper as a resident but not a citizen of a united kingdom which has within the context of one of the greatest humanitarian crises Europe has ever faced and at a time when the total number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide has reached the highest level since the Second World War. By a small majority turned its back on the European project a project which has been fundamentally premised on the notion of a shared European heritage which has articulated mosaic like across forms of diversity and difference contained within and across national borders. And while I'm deeply disappointed and upset by this decision and extremely concerned by its implications nonetheless it's clear that one of the serious problems with the emphasis on heritage and conflict resolution and post-conflict redevelopment is that these forms of difference which manifest in the objects, places and practices which constitute the very targets of heritage preservation programs are treated in a way that assumes that heritage is always understood as a positive value in its own right. There's a significant risk when reading these documents of forgetting how an emphasis on cultural, ethnic and racial differences form the basis for systemic prejudice conflict and violence and the primary means by which heritage is functioned for the exclusion and persecution of different minority groups throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Further the concept of heritage ossifies and normalizes such differences by pushing their origins into the past. There are two examples of this process in operation in the recent past. Arjan Apajurai's fear of small numbers for example considers the connection between globalization and extreme culturally motivated ethnic violence in the genocides that occurred in the 1990s in Eastern Europe, Rwanda and India and since the 2000s in what has been termed the war on terror. He begins by noting that globalization has produced a new level of uncertainty due to the speed and rate at which people technology, money, images and ideas across national borders. Globalization he says challenges our strongest tool for making newness manageable and that is the recourse to history. Under certain circumstances he notes the existence of new or a newly recognized category of minorities within society become the focus for anxiety caused by such uncertainties. He says minorities in a word are metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classical national project and it is this betrayal actually rooted in the failure of the nation state to preserve its promise to the guarantor of national sovereignty that underwrites the worldwide impulse to extrude or eliminate minorities. He suggests that it is not the large size of the minority or the high level of cultural difference that creates the most anxiety but the small size of the group and the small cultural gap between it and the majority that is likely to cause most friction and erupt into ethnically motivated violence. When one group begins to perceive itself as a threatened majority and he terms such threatened majority's predatory quote whose social construction and mobilization require the extinction of other proximate social categories which emerge out of pairs of identities which have long histories of close contact mixture and some degree of mutual stereotyping in which is involved some degree of contrasting identification. In other words these forms of violence erupt against minorities under the very same circumstances in which minority heritage is perceived to be threatened by the global community and the international community steps into endangered conservation targets as heritage. Heritage fossilizes or ossifies such differences in the inequalities which often underpin them as a function of tradition by formulating origin stories which account for the nature of contemporary observations of difference by pushing them into the past. There is significant potential under such circumstances for expressions and practices of intangible heritage for example to be mobilized in the production of difference which the development of such predatory identities require. Aperduro goes on to say that conflicts accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s during which many nation states had to simultaneously negotiate two pressures the pressure to open up their markets to foreign investment, commodities and images and the pressure to manage the capacity of their own cultural minorities to use the globalized language of human rights to argue for their own claims for cultural dignity and recognition. This produced a crisis in many countries for the sense of national boundaries, national sovereignty of the national ethnos and it is directly responsible for the growth of majoritarian racism in societies as diverse as Sweden and Indonesia as well as Romania, Rwanda and India. Discussion of preservation in post-conflict scenarios has focused particularly on the preservation of minority culture, language and heritage which are perceived as threatened by their very existence as relics amongst majority populations. This means that there's potential under certain social, political and economic circumstances not only for such minorities to be perceived by the state as a threat to the maintenance of national sovereignty but also for the same logics to be adopted by a majority population who come to perceive their own culture and heritage as threatened by the existence of these minorities. Importantly in the same way that this perception of threat motivates the preservation of minority cultural tradition it can also be used to justify culturally motivated violence and racial or ethnic cleansing against minorities to preserve majority cultures and heritage. There are a number of circumstances where diversity or difference might come to be seen as a threat to national sovereignty or majoritarian power where minorities seek to use heritage as a tool to maintain effective links with groups of people or ideas existing outside of national boundaries for example. The state may perceive this as a threat to its ability to reproduce an image of itself as a nation. Further the maintenance of multicultural and minority heritage may create tensions within majority groups which cause them to become predatory and seek to eliminate certain practices and expressions of heritage to close the gap between majority and minority heritage and culture. Indeed it remains a fundamental premise the strongest notion of heritage will always emerge amongst those individuals and communities who feel their sense of identity and community is most threatened and who seek to empower themselves to resist this process in some way. So where does this leave the role of heritage in post-conflict redevelopment? I'd argue that it's only in fully acknowledging this fundamental entanglement of heritage and conflict that further conflicts might be mediated or tempered. We cannot shy away from the fundamental role that heritage plays both in building community and in excluding certain parts of the population from that community. Perhaps the only way in which this issue might be addressed is by uncoupling the sense of threat or endangerment from the maintenance of heritage. In other words to begin to perceive the maintenance of heritage not as a process of salvaging or preserving threatened relics from the past but as an active creative negotiated process of seeking the basis of common humanity in all of the forms which are available to us in the present as fundamentally a work of designing futures. I give a small plug for a current research project that I'm working on called Heritage Futures and there's some postcards that are circulating which attempts precisely to frame heritage work across both natural and cultural heritage domains very broadly as precisely this precisely the work of designing futures. So the reason for this suggestion should be quite clear if both heritage and difference as the justification for violence against others are similarly formed as a result of a perception of risk or threat there seems little hope of uncoupling heritage in the forms of othering and differentiation of human populations on which racially and ethnically motivated violence depends. If on the other hand heritage is conceptualized as something which is constantly and actively made and remade in the present then the legacy of diversity comes to be conceptualized not as a burden from the past but instead as a sort of reserve or bank containing a series of practices and expressions of culture on which those who seek to negotiate the challenges of the future might draw. And this is another kind of bank, this is a seed bank far in the Arctic North this is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which is one of the 22 partner organizations that we're working with in the Heritage Futures Research Program and one of the things we're interested in doing in that project is to look at how different forms of heritage practice produce different value systems around them so here the framework in biobanking is very much on this idea of these places as banks, as places that things can be deposited in and then withdrawn from and to think about how these different frameworks, these different conceptual architectures might be redeployed in other fields of practice. So here we've got a bank. As Zigmund Bowman notes in his discussion of the potential for culture to unite a multicultural Europe quote, the recognition of such rights is nothing more or nothing less than an invitation to a dialogue in the course of which merits the defects of the differences under consideration can be discussed and with any luck and agreement on their recognition can be reached. Such an attitude is radically different from that of universal fundamentalism which rejects all other forms of being human whilst granting only one form the right to an uncontested existence but it's just as radically different from a specific kind of tolerance propagated by some strains of the so called politics of multiculturalism which assumes an essentialist character of difference thus refusing from the outset any negotiation between different lifestyles. So in conclusion I'd suggest that the relationship between heritage and post conflict reconstruction is in fact a very dangerous one and as such it needs to be managed critically and thoughtfully. Diversity and difference must be emphasised as inherited yes but not inherent or inevitable rather as a series of qualities which are constantly chosen recreated and renegotiated in the present. The current rise of far right organisations in Europe and their appeals to their own threatened heritage cautions against developing a cosmopolitan detachment or as a fair attitude towards the potential dangers inherent in this unholy trilogy of heritage, sense of endangerment and perception of difference. A notion of difference as inherent and inherited is almost always the basis for racism, conflict and prejudice. We must continue to critically examine any claims made for the potential of heritage in conflict prevention conflict resolution or post conflict reconstruction and acknowledge that such conflicts are not separate from heritage and should form a central part of it and require that heritage be managed accordingly. Thank you. We're going to move to a slightly different stage in this panel now with two individuals who are both engaged in making new kinds of works that are situation specific but outside or on the peripheries perhaps of the forms of architectural monumentalism that we've spoken of thus far The next speaker is And she's going to deliver a presentation entitled memory matrix. Hope everyone is still awake and fresh. This has been really an inspiring day and for me personally very enriching thinking about war and the future. Thank you for bringing us all together and thanks to our organizers for the excellent organization of everything. We live at the time when deliberate targeting of cultural heritage serves as an instrument of genocidal and territorial conquest. We also live at the time when new technologies can be used to document the erasure as it takes place to restore much faster than it has ever been possible before. Hardly any other historic site that was targeted in the past decade has generated more intense public debate about these two issues than Palmyra. An important center of the ancient world, UNESCO World Heritage Site also an important touristic destination. This great city developed at the crossroads of several civilizations and trade routes in Syrian desert and its meticulously preserved monuments embodied some of the region's finest trans-cultural heritage. Palmyra's arch of triumph was built in the 13th century during the reign of Roman emperor Septimus Severus and was destroyed by Isis in October 2015. The impetus to define, defy acts of violence notwithstanding the questions that immediately followed this destruction of whether when and how to restore Palmyra remain controversial. This presentation will take on several issues related to these concerns to explore what contributions can art make and also educational institutions to unfold new prospects for the field and in the context of a world in which every fourth person is a refugee. I will explore these questions through this memory matrix project, a monument in the making referencing Palmyra's arch of triumph that I created last spring for the 100th anniversary of MIT's old campus and developing it and producing it with a help of 140 people, students and the diverse range of partners within the MIT community and beyond and also participants at the Cairo Make Affair. The matrix was made of chain link fencing carrying 20,000 small fluorescent plexiglass elements or pixels engaging new fabrication technologies and trans-cultural collaborations. This was the first iteration of a larger, multi-annual and multidimensional project that is still developing so some of the parts that I'll be showing today have been finished. The others are just starting ideas changing as I'm also learning from different sites in which I'm producing different versions and different images of the project. Locations that just happening, Manila, Aman and Ramallah for this year probably Dallas and New York next year. The matrix takes different forms in relation to local issues and also in collaboration with local partners. This presentation will focus on the memory make tricks at MIT. I would like to take you through a couple of issues of this project that I think could be relevant for our discussion later. The first issue regards the role of images in the global mediation of cultural warfare. When the photos of Palmyra's destruction were publicized in the news the whole world was in shock. It was precisely what these images were carefully constructed to do. In fact the whole process of placing the explosives, blowing up and then showing what happened afterwards was carefully choreographed with the purpose to provoke and demonstrate some form of power and eventually provoke some form of retaliation. To find out what happened we are dependent on the images that were produced by those who conducted the destruction. So shall we use them in these kinds of presentations? Was this destruction produced to cater our own consumption of images? For the historian Miriam Bruceus that is the link between archaeology and history of photography in this context this issue represents the subversion of western heritage paradigm. Historic images of Palmyra, whether the drawings of the 18th century French painter Louis Francois Casas or the 19th century photographs and cartography produced during the European expeditions in the Middle East, as Bruce notes, paved the ground for later European dominated designation Palmyra as western tourist destination. Without our own interest in these images, Eisel's demonstration of power in form of images of destruction would not have the same effect. Another aspect of this question refers to our selective interest in the images of destruction. The destruction of Palmyra received far more coverage in the west than the destruction of our other targeted sites including other cultural heritage sites. Within the catalogue of different types of shared heritage we seem to emphasize more with the loss of heritage that we consider our own than with the heritage signifying the identity of other cultures. The next issue regards the use of new technologies in recording and preserving what has been targeted. Digital technologies can be tremendously helpful tool in the context of preservation as we've seen from Laura's presentation and we are now able also to document what is being destroyed almost simultaneously to the process of erasure. But there is a big step and a sensitivity to the timing and especially when it comes to preservation in form of documenting and preservation in form of restoring or replacing lost heritage. And this leads me to my next question what is being preserved or restored to what end and how useful is technology in this context. I'm not really offering any answers. My role as an artist is just to ask questions and not answer them. Just a few weeks, a few days ago a smaller scale model of Palmyra's Arch of Triumph was unveiled in the city park in New York after its previous exhibition at London Strafalger Square. This project was created by the Institute for Digital Archaeology in Oxford and received both enthusiasm and also criticism throughout the preservationist community, the press and the broader public. While everyone is taking the expression of solidarity with the Syrian people as the starting point, one side of the argument views technology as preservationist tool to defy ISIL's power to erase and to say what ISIL has destroyed technology can help repair or replace. The countering arguments hold a different perspective on the authenticity of monuments based on the site and also biography, also the colonial, political and financial implications of preservation. What is implied when Palmyra's Triumphal Arch is unveiled in an imperial context of London's Strafalger Square in front of UK's National Gallery or contemporary centers of power such as New York or Dubai. For the critics this approach suggests that Western institutions are publicly mediated as the world's lead on preservation, regardless the local needs or expertise in Syria or Iraq. What is being restored and to ensure that it is restored? Given that Palmyra was a ruin before its most recent destruction by ISIL last year, we might ask what does it mean to restore a ruin to another state of ruin. Is this about defiance to ISIL? Is this about nostalgia for ruins or the reclaiming of the Western heritage paradigms? The other layer to be considered in this discussion is to rebuild Palmyra's Arch of Triumph. What state of its existence is selected to be recreated at present and reclaimed? Shall this be about recalling the time of the emperor Severus Septimus and celebration of Roman victories over the Partians? Or do we recall depictions of the colonial explorers or the arch-restorers from the 1930s? What about the layers of history before the third century and what about the layer of meaning that was inflicted on this arch through its destruction in 2015? What is being restored is really an important question and perhaps some lessons could be learned from someone now distanced but yet still closed and ongoing conflict in Bosnia where I come from, where centuries of coexistence embodied in culturally rich and hybrid heritage fell under the attack of nationalist extremists It was the aspect of hybridity and diversity that was not suitable for nationalists' vision of Bosnian multi-ethnic identity and hence collective memory was surgically altered to suit nationalist divisions along ethnic lines by removals of people, their monuments, places of worship, records of the history and their art. And you see here the moment of destruction of the famous Ottoman 16th century pearl of Ottoman architecture being targeted and it was really a symbolic gesture of breaking the coexistence. Now the bridge has been restored but the coexistence not yet and here I ask you also to think about, you know, is it enough to restore the symbol? We have a new bridge now but it has no reference in the society when the bridge was freshly restored and the people were to walk over to the other side people would throw stones at you and students in Mosque are still to learn two different types of versions of the same history. So ancient hatreds we were told were the reason for the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and therefore, you know, religious buildings where these wild Balkan people were throwing bombs at each other. But these churches mosques and synagogues that stood side by side for centuries were embodiments of a counter argument that coexistence was not only possible but indeed prevalent in the Balkans and this was a kind of planned revision of that history by not only removing the traces of other people's existence but also a kind of planning into the future. So in my academic side of work I examined the kind of sadism conducted on architecture in the Balkan war where it was not about removal of symbols and kind of recreating landscape and recreating territories but it was also about making sure that people don't want to live together anymore into the future and for this reason people and architecture were tortured in quite similar ways sometimes buried under the same pile and also garbage heaps humiliations and symbolic violence was used to forever extinguish one's desire to live together. And when the Dayton peace agreement was signed in 1995 this peace agreement brought an end to combat but a war perpetuated itself into the other sphere into the cultural sphere because the way this peace agreement and a kind of legal framework was set was to on the one hand acknowledge the genocide. You guys conquered this territory well done you get your piece of land at the same time granted people the right to go back to places where they were kicked out and this kind of situation of unacknowledged genocide only in the case of Srebrenica but all the other massacres are still waiting to be acknowledged and at the same time the kind of idea that is based on ancient hatreds why don't you guys live together again looks like this now you have the same city of Mostar in the you know Franciscan monastery that was just easily damaged the Campanile was tipped down people there hurried up to triple the height of the Campanile and visually dominate the skyline over the city and in response to that Muslims built a kind of new concrete megalomonic structure to reference their Ottoman imperial roots supposing connections referencing also sultanic patronage which of course in this case is not clear not true. So you know massive destruction and this is very different than destruction of symbols like Palmyra or the Mostar bridge we have cities that were completely erased and where people have to rebuild but they are rebuilding also too fast and without reflection and this is what is happening. So rebuilding without the kind of thinking about legal frameworks and also implications in society these things need to go hand in hand. Instead of the architecture of defiance I think we can also learn from these other examples where culture can have agency the kind of tenacity if you want instead of defiance where people at war use art to signal that they are different from those who destroy them, that they are human and also as a form of hope. There are some interesting movements now in European landscape Berlin museums just open their doors and are engaging refugees to act as museum guides this could be potentially something interesting I think where voice is given to those who are marginalized and not welcomed. At the same time you know the question is really will there be kind of critical reflection on also the origin of the artifacts and what it means that these people are guiding them. The other maybe encouraging route is to think about the therapeutic role of art this is an image from the refugee camp where Zaatari or more than 90,000 people live in Jordan where artists have grouped themselves together and they make these models of Palmyra out of mud and wooden sticks materials that is available to them. So when the 100th anniversary of MIT came up it was about celebration of our campus or celebration of architecture I'm working in the department of architecture and at the same time you have these other things going on in other part of the world and for me the question was what shall we be saying how are we celebrating ourselves and to what end. I came up with this idea to create this kind of physical digital screen that references Palmyra in our arch of triumph so you see here this is T M I and T and it reads from both sides of the building this is in the center of the campus which is also a military and real estate corporation at the same time the building itself is named after Jeremy Beesner the MIT's 13th president who is also been influential figure in American the weapon in nuclear policy so there's a reference to that and then this digital image becomes this kind of temporary structure quite megalomonic fitting this our arch for three weeks using chain link fencing and these pixels I engage purposely the spectacle of images but distorting the image so you can never really see the arch except when you are just looking straight at it you always see fragmentary images through the anamorphic projection and then also the image disappears into a minute the light changes and this kind of light cancels itself out the idea here is also to kind of merge and reflect actually really on ourselves on the campus by merging this three-dimensional two-dimensional thing with visually with the campus architecture when you zoom into the so the larger picture is this spectacular image when you zoom in they are most of the pixels a laser cut with outlines of buildings that were destroyed in different parts of the world and this is how they look actually have a couple of pixels here hung on the chain these were designed by project participants in various locations so this is the whole point to actually use technology and the project to gather stories and start a conversation and there was my class that worked on this kind of make affair where 200 people participated and different stories are coming out that are quite touching so Aleppo Citadel for example brought by someone at kind of make affair and then you know Tutankhamun's mask that fell in the museum and the beard fell off and they stuck it in with super glue but also a lot of noise like someone because I asked people different questions here I asked okay what is the heritage that you live through being destroyed and someone drew a Titanic at MIT I had more time to work with students students were writing also larger stories so this is a student whose family survived the Holocaust and was depicting the synagogue of Munich another student is reflecting on our complicity in the world's destruction of rainforests and the indigenous kind of immaterial heritage related to that most recently I was in Ramallah and Aman where new iterations of the projects are being designed where these workshops also connect generations also students and really interesting reflections from the local heritage for example someone here drew a coordinates of villages and cities that were disappeared or made disappear in Palestine in Jordan we got also quite an international crowd so some of these I cannot yet read but I have a team also of people there who will help me digitize these stories so you see the Ishtag Gate also someone from New York was there and this I think is the Dead Sea and now these images get there is a really a kind of awful process of then digitizing them laser cutting them and you see in these images this little link here this is a link to the bitcoin chain link so the idea is that each of these represents a kind of keys of people who became homeless but also it's a key to the bitcoin technology and this is something that my husband who has the information design program at Northeastern University came up with which is to use bitcoin transactions to kind of use them as a notary system to preserve stories told here in a kind of two hundreds and hundreds of charts that you are entering when you are doing bitcoin transactions and the information becomes indestructible by multiplying these fences that are referring to borders the border becomes a gate you can go through it and this is also a solidarity building enterprise as I said earlier 142 people made this happen together students from MIT seven different departments and also you know hundreds of funders the cutouts themselves become jewelry, embodiments of memory to engage also younger viewers of the piece so there are different levels in which the piece operates and then you know finally the whole thing distracts itself because the pixels are designed in a way that they don't really stick on the fence when the wind blows and in the lovely Massachusetts weather this was happening all the time so you know there's this adaptive side of these images but in reality a lot of the days looked like this where these pixels were falling from 10 meters height to the point where I had to kind of take down the installation because it was just you know people were getting scared of it so this is designed to kind of self distract but what was then interesting is how people deal with it so when things were falling on the ground at night it was a kind of magical rain on the floor and also steel loot but also many people were repairing it so you had to go through this this is the main gate of the campus even if you're ignoring it you are participant now the next step of this and maybe I could also get your help or I would like to invite you to participate and help this further is to basically open up so if you use this spectacle to then do something with it so how does it feedback into the world is I'm using this project to open up my classes also get my students into the refugee camps for education like exchanges and also you know to share stories and to basically share our privilege because the conditions there are really so touching and devastating that we all can consider ourselves just very very lucky that we live here thank you and our last speaker today before we join for conversation is Clifendenburg who's flown all the way from Johannesburg yesterday he is founder of Trace a major preservation and museum design company and visual artist and he is going to speak about a pile of stones an additional monument for Palmyra it's a pleasure to be at Columbia thank you men have been thrown from rooftops in Syria accused by ISIS of being gay they are blindfolded bound and then pitched to the streets below where crowds of men and some boys wait with piles of stones the killers photograph and sometimes video these murders from the buildings and pavements these images are then published by ISIS and form part of a visualized ideology skillfully disseminated through their own and other publications the dissemination of these images is an act of calculated aggression for those such as me they re-inscribe the dread that survives the gains of protective legislation for those who harbor prejudice the images are encouragement and indeed for some they serve as recruiting bait ISIS was sparkly proud to claim the Orlando killings as their work and Omar Martin as their soldier right wing Christian groups have aided ISIS by publishing these images on their sites and by endorsing their methods seeing these images leaves one feeling diminished diminished because the extreme visceral violence depicted is not answerable by any direct action my immediate impulse is redemptive to make good these killings and of course that is impossible but the impulse remains and so my primary purpose is to invert the spectacle of censure that ISIS intended for these men I use the same photographs that ISIS put out to demean these men as the source material for a slow sculptural process of remaking the narrative I carve these figures it is an act of some intimacy chiseling away at a piece of wood to make a human form from a flat blurred image is a slow process requiring a considerable degree of identification with the subject the I must act as an intuitive and empathetic instrument filling in detail where there is little and thus the slow intense process of making these artworks is an essential part of their meaning they have to be made by hand the bodily control necessary to carve small scale naturalistic figures is a literal and symbolic enactment of care for these sculptures I was forced to adopt the perspective of the perpetrators they after all had made the only known records of these events usually perspective is a system of optics that places the subject in relation to the object thus registering the relationship between the two we absorb angle of vision distance gesture light and a myriad other signs compute the amalgam and then compare it to our own visual and spatial grammars of comfort to use an obvious example when we go into a museum and we look at objects which are hung at a median height of 1.5 meters that is done in order for us to feel bodily comfort we don't alter our eyes we don't bend our head we don't bend our knees we look at it as an act of equality the question is how does one take this perspective and invert it and we're all familiar with the linguistic inversions which gay communities and other communities have adopted the word faggot or queer or in South Africa Morphy being inverted as a term of identification rather than of separation and this was my challenge and aim in part the process and the materials do that for the new killing series which are these works over here I angled the figures to the position of the cameraman the fall is not arrested but its pause allows us the viewers the possibility of an empathetic gaze the air through the through which the body falls has been materialized and folded in symbolic swaddling simultaneously I have been following the destruction of ancient monuments and artefacts in Palmera and other sites these destroyed or mutilated objects have shaped the language of the sculpture that I am making I am particularly drawn to the ruined fragment as the means of inserting a last or an unspoken narrative as if sentences or paragraphs had been dislodged from order the functions of the works that I am making is commemorative in the mode of narrative columns, arches or panels I have chosen to work in this way in part because monuments have shattered my work for some decades the colonial and apartheid monuments in South Africa have been marked to the allegiance of history as much to specific moments of commemoration but in addition to my own continuing interest in the monumental form it is of particular pertinence here due to the lack of a commemorative vocabulary for the mourning of these people the column has long been used as a commemorative object by artists and architects the circular form and its height allows the narrative to develop vertically and simultaneously in the round the viewer moves around the object in time looking up and down and into it in a manner that requires the body to change position and focus our point of view as fluid and rhymes to the craning of our necks and bend of hip as we adjust our focus to position scale and episodic detail I have chosen to work with the form of a fluted column combined with the narrative function of something like Trajan's column confident models both but I am interested in the provisional rather than in permanence so my object is a porous one I have opened the flutes to complicate the unity of surface and where the eye can rest indeed what we see literally and from what point of view is a central concern of the object it is a palimpsest with echoes of classical culture objects of war, grave memorials decorative embellishments quotes from folk traditions and of course markings of the present tense it is episodic both in the arrangement of narrative detail and in its fluctuations between the text subtexts, temporality interior, exterior and representations of the living and the dead the object is black which both absorbs and reflects light dependent on the treatment of the surface the color has a memorial function but one of its mechanics is to slow the process of apprehension some parts of the object of the work are difficult to see and the circular form of the work means that the full comprehension for a full comprehension of it is never possible from any one position memory is thus integral to the act of looking I am laboring the mechanics of looking here the to and fro of viewing position alterations of bodily posture the constant requirement to change focus as surface is voided into blackness or light voice as a detail and I do this because it seems to me that the ebb and flow of empathy is in part contingent on the mechanics of bodily scene it is not easy work though we know for sure that the killers and their deeds are evil but we also know that this evil is sustained these are just slides which show the movement of the viewer's body around the object but we also know that this evil is sustained by a cruelly coercive masculinity the masculinity that is enforced by instructive spectacle which these events are within this mass there are any number of positions some proximate others opposed and probably a great deal muddled between the demands of body and ideology negotiating the disparities of space scale detail and reference in the sculpture is a process parallel to negotiating the bridges of empathetic identification look at this crowd some of these men or boys are gay in the sculpture I have carved a spectator who has positioned the last order there anyway in the sculpture I have carved a spectator who has positioned to gaze at a blindfolded figure at the top of the work I will show you this again once we look at the sculpture he is based on a lone figure in the crowd I am alert to him for his separation the slight bend of knee that suggests in decision and the body is slant to the spectacle and what of these men who wait with stones for the bodies to fall they have to be represented not to reinforce the obvious cruelty of their individual actions but as the markers of an echo in trope the restoration of the ruins of Palmera is also motivated in part by redemptive impulse technologically this is becoming ever easier but with its own issues of taste and competitive politics leaving me and other questions aside for now I am more concerned with marking the intersection of these two narratives of destruction simply put there has been a rush to restore the ruins there is little rush to mark the murders of these men the ruin in whatever state of restoration is a prompt for narrative but it is not in itself narrative unless we mark the specificity of the damage human as well as cultural and link it to the politics surrounding it we risk a generalized and escapist nostalgia a nostalgia that allows us never to name the full damage and its causes being specific about time seems to me to be critical here if we are restoring to 2014 or 2015 or 2016 whatever it is these are years with multiple under toes of narrative baggage that baggage needs to be named in full it is unlikely that it is going to be named in the foreseeable future in Syria but I've made these provisional memorials in a gesture to naming but a fraction of the baggage the images that ISIS has published of these men acknowledge their bodies but also their position within a social and familial fabric they are unnamed and unnameable their bodies cannot be claimed and nothing about who they were can be celebrated or commemorated how do we memorialize those whose lives are unremembered except as examples of unredeemable sin under ISIS connection and memory cannot comfort the living through the process of grieving the living indeed are threatened by any association to these men and thus connection is not spoken and who knows what form grief can take in these circumstances there was a time which lingers in which I identified love with HIV in order to assert connection in the face of a viral threat and it might be that in this instance I identified love with ruins if only to point out that gay love exists and though its protagonist cannot yet be named their actions can thank you to join us here at the front of the room for for a discussion and for common questions for each other for you to have an opportunity to speak with them I'm sort of looking for our chief timekeeper to know just what the parameters are you we've got 20 minutes great I think it would be impossible for us to stitch together these very different presentations under a single rubric but it's notable to me extremely notable to me that there are indeed threads that cross them all it's difficult we're sort of going to take a second to gather our affective selves perhaps because running through all of these papers I think is an enormous suspicion about a form of preservationist discourse an understanding of cultural heritage that would be in the service of nationalist projects in which various kinds of other differences are effaced and that cannot not help or that cannot not also participate in the agendas that lead to various forms of socialized nationalized violence and so forth so one has on the one hand in very different iterations suspicion whether it's a question of the triple double and triple effacements in the case of the Frank Hirsch or the or the effacements of those forms of difference that can't be figured within discourses of national or religious identity we have a question or a series of questions about monumentality as being in and of itself incapable of generating narratives critical or critical forms of new community production the restoration of a bridge does not in and of itself generate bridging in the social sphere but also I think in different ways and maybe in spite of some of your yourselves inventive explorations of what one does in any case the forms of design that might be pursued to enable connection the forms of aesthetic intervention that generate connections across very disparate spaces collaborative projects forms of memorialization and lamentation that do not presume identity that is in every case or critical forms of museology in which the that which is represented is not merely ethno-national difference or cultural origin but rather possible futures in each of these cases there was enormous suspicion about cultural preservation about monumentality and also as I said efforts to imagine other kinds of relation to past and I'm reminded of a kind of structuralist anthropological distinction that might be of use in this context that is the old Levy-Straussian distinction between heritability and inheritance and the very different forms within which those are negotiated seems to me that that was the tension in all of these different papers but I would like to pause for a minute before I try and stitch everything together to ask each of you if you have questions for each other and then we'll do as we've done before and take questions from the floor and let you comment, respond and perhaps bring forth as well questions that arose in earlier panels as well. I mean clearly preservation is a discourse that emerges only on the condition or only in conditions of loss and many of you spoke as well about the anticipation of future loss as one of the fundamental motivators of cultural preservation as an anticipatory and not merely a retrospective practice and yet the task of grieving of mourning loss both in advance and after the fact seems to be one of the projects that you put on the table for us as part of necessary forms of liberation as part of how one escapes all those all those structures of prejudice and so forth that are complicit with the structures that make that grieving possible so go ahead. Let's find something positive because I don't know we are in creative fields and I feel like it is also obligation to inspire future generations and also in this context of crisis really find some sense of agency this is what I think when you are going through the war and you are looking at your war I mean I've been through this with Bosnia you just don't know what can you do and you are outside of it but how can you intervene and I think there are ways in which education connections which you have brought this up I found your last sentence so beautiful that proximity and kind of connecting is the preservation at war just the fact that we have this dialogue here across disciplines and generations is another layer I think that gives a sense of you see but then there is also I think we do need to keep ourselves this critical mirror still that's why my presentation was suspicious more to what are we doing and how can we reach out and open up just to have that also lens to yourself without just blindly accepting okay we have to preserve because ultimately we have to come to the terms that we live we are little people in a long trade of history things are we going to really manage to preserve things for 2,000 years maybe that plastic that I use as well but you know these heritage helps us maybe come to terms with our own mortality and something in your work that kind of has a tool also for you I'm sure okay I don't know I was just nutty I'm going to get in trouble the it's sort of is it possible I'm thinking of David post human challenge you know in other words one could say well we've gone from not human so we're not yet human I mean in other words we sort of have in some sense co-opted a category which we call human quite irresponsibly over the last century for sure and filled it with sort of strange things and then when we filled it with culture which was in a way to sort of offset its abstraction and offset the pathologies that came before it but added only sort of tremendous burdens you know onto the little shoulder of this sort of human and then these burdens get heightened and heightened and the raw material is less and less right now we're talking about stones from thousands of years ago that sort of supposed to mean something and sort of the archaeological evidence is intensified and the burdens are greater and the wars and conflicts are ever greater so you know I mean you could sort of say if you put all that together that the fraudulent project of the human reinforced by the overburdened culture project right which preservation in some sense has sort of in a good sense produced but now overproduced it's collapsing you know I mean we're in the death rows of a certain sort of abstraction project coming out of enlightenment right and it's time I think it is time to sort of look ahead you know to a type of post human project where the culture as we know it might be one of the things that's going to get put it back into the garbage can anyway I don't know just sort of saying there is a future where the human is going to have to get seriously as a philosophical project that we've so warm you know we try to make it warm but in some sense we're weirder to seeing it in an extremely cold way and I think you know we're just haunted by the inhumanity okay can I pick up on that with another half forming thought which is about it's very striking to me that natural heritage has never formed the same kind of target in times of war that cultural heritage has and I think this tells us something about the enormous weight that we put on culture and cultural heritage and natural heritage does the same sort of work as nation building but it's not it doesn't form the same target no one's going and bombing national parks to get back at somebody else right so there's something which is inherently burdensome about the weight that we put upon these monuments as part of this project of making culture and making the human and the kind of absence of nature as a target I think says something really striking about that and we made these things targets this is an artifact of our own heavy loading of these monuments with a whole bunch of other moral weight and the weight of signification which is another kind of weight which they don't really need so it seems to me a sort of inevitable outcome of that process don't these well I agree there isn't these objects these cultural products there's a kind of it's overburdened totally at the same time I think there's a way to not to pay justice or to be absolutely true to them but I think this whole discussion also reminds me a bit of a different field which is a documentary which you have the same problem what is a documentary does anybody actually expect you to that this would deliver the truth about something an event or about people no I think in documentary theory it's very clear that there's an authorial voice interpretation and I think this to me is also a certain key maybe to an understanding of preservation that also there's still a burden but I think to introduce an authorial voice might also free a little bit from the burden without turning it into art like free art and the same might happen actually with nature I think the whole discussion about the anthropocene I think will probably also change the understanding of the environment we probably make it a target because we turn it into a cultural object it will happen I think this has already happened this has happened in many ways but it's also the case that the poor use of the environment is an alibi for various kinds of interventions and so forth and there are many instances in which the destruction of people's lived environment whether it's their fields their fishing areas where that has been a mode of warfare I mean colonialism is full of such instances the slaughter of herds in excessive and sadistic ways this is not new I would worry a little bit if we began treating these things these objects these built worlds just symbolically mediated worlds that might be nature or what have you and recognize that they are destroyed precisely because they are the visible instantiations of people's efforts of self valorization self exteriorization investment to the transcendental to make things that exceed people of course they are valuable why should we shy away from the recognition that one of the forms of violence is to violate that which people have labored to externalize themselves in or to touch something that exceeds them it's the form of their relation with each other I don't think we need to go all the way to some kind of post humanist breaking rocks in front of each other which we are doing but we are not just breaking rocks we are assaulting the labor to be human or whatever it is that people are doing I mean this sounds so retrograde now but I mean it's interesting and it's perhaps wrong in some ways but it is not usable that we can grieve over other people's loss of what matters to them yes in lots of ways we grieve way more over the things that matter to us you know if Palmyra wasn't a figure that rhymed with the Octetouillon from Paris you know whatever all that but I mean it seems to me that part of what one is doing here is looking for points of entry in which to escape the vulgar complicity between preservation, heritage nationalist cultural discourse and war and make use of these broken discourses and tools so that one could produce slightly better relations one of those one of those modes would be the forms of grieving that allows for one to recognize differences that weren't codable as cultural difference forms of sexual difference and so forth that don't you know conform to what everyone wants self reproducing culture to be or I mean I think to recognize the complexity of the aspirations for the new that turned into very vicious forms of violence in East German or whatever or when you're talking about the moment of crisis when there's no living person left to tell that story and nonetheless one wants some repository of the experience, knowledge I mean we don't have to dismiss those things I think when you took that as a design challenge are you just gonna put those videos in a bank somewhere or whatever I mean this is why I raised the question of cultural preservation or heritage as maybe the institutionalization of heritability i.e. future willings of the past to use the Nietzschean formula possible future willings of the past which would take the form of something other than result I mean that seems to me an important task you know I'm not like I'm just going all anthropology on you but that seems one of the potentialities of cultural preservation in its mode as design and building and architecture and theorizing and mourning not just I don't I I'm I think like the rush to post-human abandonment of these previous enlightenment sentimentalities is worthy of questioning I'm not David I should stop I'm just sort of saying that maybe the rush is partially because the human is so miserably I mean in some sense that the attempt to rethink it is in some sense on the table and maybe the rethinking can happen in different ways I think the post-human is one way to think the disaster of the human from the philosophical point of view but there may be other ways I think that the role of the historian is to sort of expose the contaminational realities that are at play I think that's sort of the first project in a way because it's not clean it's a messy, weird, terrible terrible world and just getting just that little separation from the reality of how it's out there to in some sense some performative history whether you're an artist or doing you're trying to get some separation in which the art production is itself a type of separational project the historian I think has the task of being there but just in a different medium working in a different way that sort of separation is huge and it's not just sort of saying we're doing our job to be the critic there's a philosophical gap of tremendous importance in that place that's what I'm saying that is a yawning sort of maw of problem the maw of the problem you're the only panelist who hasn't yet spoken do you want to add a few words let's get some questions from the floor I don't want it to sound like I hope it didn't sound like I'm against preservation because I'm certainly not a beautiful rocks and I do think they should be preserved but I think there's a danger of the preservation of them assuaging us and making us blind or making us dumb or deaf to the responsibilities of speaking narratives which preservation can't speak which is left out of physical preservation and it is those narratives which I think need to form part of our practice I'm not a preservationist but many of you are but I think that in fact I see you are expanding the definitions of what preservation is and others here I think this expansion is very necessary so that we don't ignore these other responsibilities which as is clear from my interest, moaning and grieving the ungrievable is one of them I've got a one minute message right in front of me I've told everyone else to look but I'm ignoring it just for a second are there questions? Yes, there's a question right here I guess I'm thinking that the extent to which the future as a word that is mentioned as an agenda is necessarily conceived to be part of this culturalization project is differs for the historian and the designer and the museum and the artist and that I mean I don't know what the future as a agenda I suppose I would say that historic preservation is a discipline where that question has to be asked because it seems like in certain cases to say the future is necessarily to assume that a kind of cultural flattening will occur in other places maybe not Well we make the future and we make different futures so the framework for this heritage future project is precisely that different forms of conservation practices because there's lots of different forms of conservation practices they design quite different futures from one another and often those features come into conflict with one another so there are lots of potential futures and one of the jobs of this project that I have is about helping people who are involved in different fields of preservation or conservation practice to understand precisely the implications of what it is that they're doing because I think a lot of the time people just things are so morally loaded and things just seem naturally right of course we want to save gorillas and save cultural heritage that's a good thing to do so we hope people to think about what are the implications of those things that you do every day that you think are good things to do and how do they come into conflict or align with other sorts of practices so there's not just one future but lots of different potential futures and parallel futures Future and Tierra we are becoming future anterior in this very moment because Jorge is standing up there with a hook with a nod toward the future and possibly future iterations of the Fitch colloquium I guess I will call this session to a close and thank our panelists and thank you A word of thanks, I don't know if this is working but I just wanted to say how how supercharged I feel and I hope many of you in the audience feel after having listened to all of you and really just deep appreciation for the time you took to take time out of your lives to come over here and share what you work on and your knowledge we're all much richer for it it was very clear in the course of the day and every sort of conflagration is a moment in which preservation has been rethought and I thought it was very opportune that in this last panel the question of the future came up that we are living in a moment in which war is of a different kind and it is forcing us to think of preservation in a different way that is a great contribution and a great way to end the day and a better way to end the day with lots of wine and goodies and please join us in celebrating our speakers thank you