“Method, artefact, the exception: The architecture of destruction, and memory”
Lebanese thinker Jalal Toufic describes the ruins of the post-traumatic amnesia with the following words: “...The physical destruction of severely damaged buildings to construct others in their place is sacrilegious not because they are eliminated as ruins: a ruin cannot be intentionally eliminated since even when it is reconstructed or demolished and replaced by a new building, it is actually still a ruin, that is contains a labyrinthine space and time, this becoming manifest at least in flashes.” Talking about urban ruins and demolished buildings, Toufic ironically refers to them as “places haunted by the living who inhabit them.” This talk aims to discuss architecture and memory, through post-war city, threshold spaces and neighbourhoods of ruins, in a framework established by the concepts of Toufic’s “ruins”, Reza Negarestani’s the building process of “decay and forms”, and architect Eyal Weizman’s “architecture of destruction”.
Pelin Tan graduated from the Department of Sociology of Ankara University in 1996. She completed her doctoral thesis at the Department of Art History of Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and pursued postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning. Assoc. Prof. Pelin Tan worked at the Faculty of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University. Tan was involved in various field studies on the subjects of contemporary architecture and spatial research, urban justice and alternative pedagogy with research scholarships from The Japan Foundation, Hong Kong Design Trust, the MIT, and the DAAD. Tan, whose research focuses on space and Levinas, has various works published internationally, on theories of architecture and art: Towards an Urban Society (IPSP, Ed. S.Sassen & E.Pieterse, Cambridge Press, 2018), 2000+: Urgencies of Architectural Theories (GSAPP, Columbia Univ. 2015), The Silent University: Toward Transversal Pedagogy (Sternberg Press, 2016), Autonomous Archiving (Artıkİşler Kollektifi, 2016), Camp as Trans-local Practice (Refugee Heritage, e-flux architecture, 2017). Tan is a visiting researcher at BAK - foundation for contemporary art (Utrecht, 2017 - 2018) and at MIT (Cambridge, 2018). Tan continues to pursue her fieldwork in and around Mardin, and in Palestine and China.
The event is free of charge.
Invitations available from the Akbank Sanat ticket office on the event day, one hour before the event begins.