Studies in History of Architecture (470-0-1)

Topic

Land as Archive: The Aesthetics of Depletion and R

Instructors

Hollyamber Kennedy

Meeting Info

Kresge 4354 Art Hist. Sem. Rm.: Fri 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Activated by the urgency of planetary climate crisis, the status of the ruin, and by extension the fragment, have gained new significance as "sites that condense alternative senses of history." This seminar turns to the refiguration of these artifacts as potent mechanisms to reflect upon the ways in which land, and the contest over land, have been written into and out of histories of the built environment. Recent critical movements in scholarship have called forward a vital notion of the land as an archive of forcibly obscured stories, demanding new aesthetic and ethical engagements with the residual, the fragmentary, and the weathered spaces modernity. Through a series of readings and case studies drawn from across the globe, that cut across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the present, that track what might broadly be called infrastructures of extraction, this seminar will explore how aesthetic media forms—architecture, sculpture, photography, print, film, and even computational media, have contributed to material and imaginative processes of depletion (and dispossession). It explores, in turn, how scholarly attention to these relations create radical spaces of care that provide grounds for naming new possibilities for equitable planetary futures.

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Art History MA and PhD Graduate Students Only