Michela Bassanelli

Linnaeus University, Kalmar 28-30 September 2011

Session: PLACES TO FORGET? LANDSCAPES AND MOMENTS OF VIOLENCE

Landscapes, like history, exist in the long duree, and yet some landscapes acquire salient, obtrusive, and important symbolic weight not through long-term usage by a local community but in a singular, short-lived moment in history, a violent moment. Battlefields are perhaps the clearest example of this, but place-names commemorating individuals who met untimely deaths also demonstrate that landscapes can become associated with a single moment in time. Through storytelling—either as oral tales, works of literature, or communally enacted narratives—these landscapes become places with a radical potential to redefine history and identity. This session looks at these places not only as lieux de memoire (P. Nora), essential in the construction of communal memory and identity, but also as highly personal anecdotes that the larger historical, national, and official narratives sometimes attempt to erase and forget. Indicative of a psychological reaction to trauma, but at a communal level, the various papers in this session are about tracing efforts at institutionalized forgetting, and at the measures— both contemporary and historical—to resist such forgetting. Examples of institutionalized forgetting of trauma include medieval sagas, celebratory objects, landscapes allowed to pass into disuse, architectural sites closed to visitors, and bodies buried under the soil. But efforts at recouping these forgotten, contested, controversial, “difficult heritages” (Macdonald 2009), or “dissonant heritages” (Ashworth and Turnbridg 1995) are also widespread. This session showcases the work of folklorists, local historians, museum professionals, archaeologists, art historians and literary scholars to recoup these forgotten narratives about places of violence. Such recuperation is by necessity part of reimagining identity both historically and contemporarily.

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Paper accepted!

by Michela Bassanelli e Gennaro Postiglione

Politecnico di Milano

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Paper Accepted!

“DIFFICULT HERITAGE IN CONFLICT ARCHAEOLOGICAL LANDSCAPE”

Gennaro Postiglione e Michela Bassanelli

Politecnico di Milano

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http://www.corocimavezzena.it/festival/Conflitto%20e%20castigo.htm

Kalmar, Sweden | Linnaeus University

This conference investigates the relations between people and places, focusing on the role of stories in constructing meaning and affecting human emotions. Both rural and urban landscapes contain numerous locations that become meaningful places through their association with stories. These stories may be told orally by narrators or by material design; they may be permanent or temporary. The stories may be linked, for example, to the vegetation, the geology, the wild life, the cultural heritage, the mundane built environment, or metaphysical creatures. Whether such stories are historically accurate, purposefully invented or created entirely in residents’ or visitors’ minds is however less important than their potential to touch human beings.

Main aims of the conference
1.to explore the relations between people, places, and stories in the context of notable trends in the Experience Society such as the role of affect, emotion, and sensual stimulation.
2.to investigate how the visual and performative arts can complement academic research by generating both new questions and new kinds of responses to topics at the interface between places, people and stories.
Although the conference is open for all contributions that fall within the realm of our topic, we wish to investigate the following questions in particular:
•What are the roles of stories in understanding place in our society? To what extent are these stories place-specific or audience-specific rather than generic? Are there places without stories?
•What are the aims and purposes of different kinds of stories about place? Which places and stories exert power over people? Which empower people? How are intersecting values and stakeholder interests contested in stories about place?
•What are the relationships between material and immaterial contexts of stories about places? How do both dimensions affect embodied human beings emotionally and intellectually?
•What is the significance of the tensions between enduring and ephemeral phenomena in stories about places? How do changes over time affect places, stories, and the human audiences appreciating them?
•Which stories are being told by the way a place is delimited from its surroundings? How significant is an opportunity to enter a place, whether in VR or RW?

Promoted by:
Linnaeus University

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