Workshop: Dwelling on the everyday: Architecture, Ghosts, Ellipses

About the event

These two workshops bring together artists, writers and scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to examine relationships between everyday architecture where people lived and what is left behind, salvaged, celebrated, or overlooked, but may sometimes be reactivated in powerful and unpredictable ways by those who come later. The reach of the papers extends into Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. The workshops are free and open to all, but numbers are extremely limited in the interest of generating real discussion.

Current scholarship on artist-homes and most museum presentations tend to collapse house into the artist’s biography and / or the artist’s work. These workshops explore approaches which avoid reducing the artist and their work simply to what is projected onto (what remains of) their home and vice versa.

We are particularly interested in the ways in which the past resonates in places of dwelling, how it leaves its mark on places and how people leave their mark on their dwellings. What traces are left and how are they celebrated, fetishized, banished or ignored? What do the places inhabited reveal about those who inhabited them? How are these connections assumed or traced or made by visitors or scholars or those who come later? What role does temporality play in these relations? How might the power of a place to conjure up the apparently vivid presence of its past be traced or accounted for? How is it triggered, enhanced, or suppressed? What role does such haunting have in academic writing, or in autobiographical or biographical pursuits? In what ways is it useful to seek such connections – or is it they which, in some way, rather seek one out?

We want real discussion. We want the event to be lively, informal and engaged, with everyone feeling free to speak. To those ends we are limiting numbers in the audience to 30. We hope all participants will attend both parts of the workshop (Friday 8th and Friday 29th July). Each day requires separate registration however, so please sign up for both parts. If you sign up and then cannot join, please be sure to cancel your registration early to allow someone else to take the valuable place.

Book your free ticket on Eventbrite

The relevant Zoom links for the workshops will be sent to participants by email.

If you have any questions about the workshops, please contact Helen Hills and Alice Sanger.

Provisional Programme

Day 1 – Friday 8 July

1330-1340 Intro: Alice Sanger & Helen Hills
Session I: Contestations: Whose House is it Anyway?
1340-1350 Chair: Helen Hills: Intro
1345-1405 Sheila Nadimi: Eagle Village: Into a labyrinth of closed forms 1405-1425 Elizabeth Chew: Achieving structural parity with descendants of the enslaved in the governance of a historic site
1425-1435 Break
1435-1445 Maggie Freeman: ‘The Visitor’s Traditions’: Reading T.E. Lawrence and locating Bedouin history in the cultural heritage of Jordan
1445-1455 Rasha Saffarini: If, I Would / House in Tulkarem
1455-1530 DISCUSSION
1530-1545 Break
Session 2: Staying Overlooked Proximities
1545-1550 Chair: Helen Hills: Intro
1550-1610 Emma Cheatle: Simone de Beauvoir’s house
1610-1620 Sonakshi Srivastava: Time and mourning in Intizar Husain’s Basti
1620-1635 Isabelle Doucet & Janina Gosseye: Architects’ houses between experimenting, dwelling and creative resistance
1635-1650 DISCUSSION
1650-1700 Pause
1700-1745 Film screening: My Socialist Home, Iulia Statica and Adrian Catu
1745 DISCUSSION

Day 2 – Friday 29 July

Session 3: Paying Homage, Seeking Grace
1330-1335 Chair: Alice Sanger: Intro
1335-1355 Edoardo Piccoli: The fragile agency of the draftsman’s house
1355-1415 Alessandra Pompili: Living faith at home and on the road: private and public altarini from modern and contemporary Italy
1415-1430 DISCUSSION
1430-1450 Imogen Hart: Displaying the art of domestic life in the Arts and Crafts house/museum
1450-1505 Helen Hills: Why visit a writer’s house?
1505-1515 DISCUSSION
1515-1525 Break
Session 4: Homes for Memory
1525-1530 Chair: Edoardo Piccoli: Intro
1530-1540 Alice Sanger: Dwelling on the everyday at Loreto
1540-1550 Puja Basu: When guarding the dead was a customary right: Taj Mahal and the protectors of the tombs
1550-1605 Abhishek Bhutoria: Past Resonances: a reconstructed family house in the Himalayan village of Barpak, Nepal
1605-1625: DISCUSSION
1625-1635: Break
1635-1640: Chair: Alice Sanger: Intro
1640-1700: Isabelle Priest: Le Corbusier's Artists' Houses: machine/s for more than artists to live in
1700-1720: DISCUSSION
1720 Closing discussion: Chairs: Helen Hills & Alice Sanger