PPV #23: VKhUTEMAS. With Anna Bokov and Ines Weizman

23.11.2021

5pm GMT.

Book Launch: Anna Bokov's Avant Garde as Method: VKhUTEMAS and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930. Ft Anna Bokov and Ines Weizman.

Location: Common Ground, IAS, UCL.

Please note: This event will be held IRL (In Real Life). Hybrid online participation via Zoom will be enabled. Registration is required

Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, the Higher Art and Technical Studios in Moscow, more commonly known as Vkhutemas, adopted what it called the “objective method” to facilitate instruction on a mass scale. The school was the first to implement mass art and technology education, which was seen as essential to the Soviet Union’s dominant modernist paradigm.

With Avant-Garde as Method, architect and historian Anna Bokov explores the nature of art and technology education in the Soviet Union. The pedagogical program at Vkhutemas, she shows, combined longstanding academic ideas and practices with more nascent industrial era ones to initiate a new type of pedagogy that took an explorative approach and drew its strength from continuous feedback and exchange between students and educators. Elaborating on the ways the Vkhutemas curriculum challenged established canons of academic tradition by replacing it with open-ended inquiry, Bokov then shows how this came to be articulated in architectural and urban projects within the school’s advanced studios.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

Anna Bokov is an architect, historian, and educator. She is a faculty member at the Cooper Union and the City College in New York. She has taught at Parsons, Cornell University, Yale School of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Moscow Architectural Institute. Anna is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture at the ETH Zurich. She was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; a recipient of the Mellon Fellowship, the Beinecke Research Grant at Yale, and the Graham Foundation Grant. Her book Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930 (Park Books, 2020) is dedicated to the Russian counterpart of the Bauhaus.

Ines Weizman is Head of the PhD Programme at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art. She is the founding director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), an interdisciplinary research collective of architectural historians, filmmakers, and digital technologists. Ines recently published Documentary Architecture/ Dissidence through Architecture, Arquitectura Documental/ Disidencia a Través de la Arquitectura, Santiago de Chile: ARQ Editiones (2020). In 2019 she published the edited anthology of essays on Bauhaus history as Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years, Leizpig: Spector Books (2019). In 2014, she was editor of Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, published by Routledge. Her book Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster, co-written with Eyal Weizman, was published in the same year by Strelka Press. Ines has also worked on exhibitions and installations such as Repeat Yourself: Loos, Law, and the Culture of the Copy, exhibited at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as solo shows at the Architecture Centre in Vienna and the Buell Center at Columbia University, New York (2013).

PPV #22: The Aesthetics of Revolution: Broadcasts from Accra

28.10.2021

5pm GMT. Room TBC.

Trans-media lecture with video by Jesse Weaver Shipley (John D. Willard Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory, Dartmouth College). Comments by Hélène Neveu-Kringelbach, Associate Professor of African Anthropology, UCL.

Location: Common Ground, IAS, UCL.

Please note: This event will be held IRL (In Real Life). Hybrid online participation via Zoom will be enabled. Registration is required

Mohammed Ben Abdallah in *Anatomy of a Revolution*, a film by Jesse Weaver Shipley

In the mid 20th century, the coup d’état became a seemingly common form of political action around the world. Theorists on both the left and the right argued about how to defend the state from, as well as instigate, various types of coups. While purportedly illegitimate, the coup was central to state craft and the practices of international relations. It had a recognizable ritual order and aesthetic. With end of the Cold War and the growing hegemony of a global neoliberal capitalist order, the coup d’état seemingly became a relic of an older political-economic moment. But recently there has been a new wave of both failed and successful coups from Washington to Conakry. I ask why the coup has returned to prominence as a form of political discourse. Its reappearance as a mode of legitimate action reveals the imperialist origins of the modern nation-state and the growing recent pressure on national borders and techniques of rule. I argue that while the coup d’état is signified as an outdated nightmare and relic of state disfunction it is, in fact, the apotheosis of the nation-state. Its organization and violence mimic and invert the order and bureaucracy of state rule. Rebels attempt to inhabit the trappings of the state to claim that their use of violence is moral and legitimate.

I focus on a largely forgotten radical period in Ghanaian history beginning with a successful coup 1979 and ending with a failed coup in 1983. For a brief period, radical soldiers and intellectuals ruled, seeking to tear down society and rebuild it anew. But they were divided, seduced, and killed as their government embraced a free-market oriented security state. The sudden rise and fall of revolutionary Ghana—and its erasure from historical discourse—reveals both the possibility of alternative modes of political power in Africa and how these forms have been contained through both violence and representational practices. Indeed, if we think historically and geographically through a coup d’état in 1979 Accra—rather than 1968 Paris for example—it reorients our understanding of sovereignty and revolution in the 20th century by showing how young revolutionaries sought an African-grounded independent sovereignty, a future now forgotten. Excavating Ghana’s lost revolution—and numerous other radical movements around Africa in that moment—changes how we calibrate historical change, geographic continuities and gaps, and the flow of power. The return of the coup as a technique of statecraft raises renewed questions about the relationship of the radical left and right and the viability of the nation-state as a sustainable political form.

Jesse Weaver Shipley is a writer, ethnographer, and artist whose work explores the links between aesthetics and politics. He focuses on how performance genres are shaped by political-economic regimes while at the same time providing tools for people to create new relationships to power. His first book Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music explores the rise of African hip-hop and its political-economic significance. His second book Trickster Theatre: Poetics of Freedom in Urban Africa examines how modern pan-African theatre is crucial to the struggle for decolonization and independence. His films and multimedia art works experiment with forms of storytelling, portraiture, and theory to tie mundane details and spectacular events to broader principles of power, aesthetics, desire, and trauma.

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach is Associate Professor of African Anthropology at University College London. She has carried out fieldwork in Senegal, France and the UK. Her study of social mobility in Dakar, as seen through the lives and work of dancers and musicians, was published in 2013 as a prize-winning monograph, Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal. She is currently working on an ethnographic study of binational and transnational families between Senegal and Europe.

PPV #21: Commoning the Post-Socialist Ruins with Dimitra Gkitsa and Marko Ilić

26.10.2021

5pm GMT. Masaryk Room, SSEES, 16 Taviton Street.

Lecture by Dimitra Gkitsa: Commoning the Post-Socialist Ruins. Response by Marko Ilić

Please note: This event will be held IRL (In Real Life). Hybrid online participation via Zoom will be enabled. Registration is required

What are the aesthetic and political articulations inscribed in the materiality of abandoned post-socialist sites? How can we common anew such spaces of contested histories? More crucially, what is to be done with the modern post-socialist ruins?

With the collapse of the communist regime what remained from the communist past – monuments, factories, unfinished housing buildings, memorials – were abandoned and decayed, as resembling an era that was left once and for all in the past. Here, abandonment is not something momentary that occurred in a specific temporal framework, but rather, an ongoing process, a modern ruin always in the making. While official sites of collective memory are articulated around pre-defined rhetorics, abandoned sites can become an active mode for negotiating the very process of decline and for understanding the transformation of public spaces in the post-socialist reality.

Drawing on the concept of the commons, the seminar will explore the aesthetic and political trajectories that are brought forward with artistic practices that re-inhabit and re-claim sites of modern ruination in the post-socialist space.

Dr Dimitra Gkitsa is a curator, cultural manager, and researcher based in London and Athens. She is currently the Alexander Nash Fellow at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Holding postgraduate degrees in Curating (Goldsmiths, UoL) and Cultural Management (Panteion University of Social & Political Sciences, Athens), she completed a PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London where she worked under the supervision of Dr Jean-Paul Martinon. Her doctoral research on curatorial collectives and forms of self-organised art initiatives in the Balkans was funded by the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation.

Dimitra’s curatorial practice and further research interests include issues concerning the production of normativity and public/common space, the relation between the personal and the political, memory and affect theories, collectivity and self-organisation in relation to contemporary art and curatorial practice, with a particular focus on the former East.

Marko Ilić is a Teaching Associate in Art History at Cambridge University. His new book, A Slow Burning Fire: The Rise of the New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, was published by the MIT Press in February 2021.