Buildings as Living Archives:
B(ordering), othering and self-appropriation. The case of mass housing in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina
“If walls could talk, what could we hear? This workshop is a retrospective journey through the residential landscapes of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and an exploration of different stages of a lifecycle of local mass housing. Here, we discuss the walls that surround us as an embodiment of practices of (b)ordering, othering, and, finally, appropriation of space, shedding a light on how dwelling experience and life itself unfolded under the flag of the Yugoslav ideology of Brotherhood and Unity and mostly uniform built environment, as well as what nowadays, in the contemporary cultural era that preaches individualism, remains.
Through intimate portrayals of individual dwelling and residing histories, the workshop depicts then and now and, for the first time ever, brings to light one of the darkest periods of the local history – e.g. the 1993 amendments to the Law on Housing Relations and the newly introduced policy of rationalization – that malformed the mass housing through violent evictions and marked quite a perplexing ethno nationalist regime-initiated era of the rewriting of the local urban and cultural identity, by eliminating the different and the other by replacing them with those of a better fit and as ethnically clean as possible. Walls talk and we are here to listen.”
Date: Oct. 28th, 2020 at 13h30 – 14h30, Lisbon Time
It will be available on-line thru Zoom (ID: 873 2061 6101)
And in copresence: Iscte, Ala Autónoma, Sala AA3.24
In case you need further information please check here.
