European Public Space Workshop
On Spaces of MemorySEMINAR
Judit Carrera / Kathrin Golda-Pongratz
“By means of a constant process of reconstruction,
memory wrings an interpretation of the past out of the present:
in the form of collective memory,
it strengthens the cohesion of the group in question,
it is an integral part of its essence,
it is transformed as the group evolves.
The same thing happens with space…”
Maurice Halbwachs
The
European Public Space Workshop focuses
On Spaces of Memory and aims at setting up new frameworks of analysis and suggesting forms of (re) construction, (re) creation, narration and interpretation of memory in public spaces in a
pan-European context.
Having at hand the CCCB’s physical and digital
European Archive of Urban Public Space (http://www.publicspace.org), it will serve as a working and research background, point of reference and archival space to register and exhibit the
workshop's outcomes.
A first settling of ideas at the beginning of the workshop introduces relevant theoretical sources and discourses and discusses concepts such as ideological, political and nation-related contexts, cultural, linguistic and social expressions and spatial,
territorial, urbanistic and architectural dimensions.
Three lines of work address contemporary questions and approaches of interpreting, assessing and designing public spaces on various scales, related both to the immediate physical and the collective urban memory: first, relevant European projects that form
part of the
European Archive of Urban Public Space and have gained international attention, are discussed and set into a larger framework in terms of discourse and documentation; second, analytical visits to specific
Spaces of Memory
and
Spaces of No-Memory within the city of Barcelona shall enhance a discourse and illustrate how a city with its specific historic and political background celebrates and emphasizes or deliberately extinguishes aspects of the urban memory; and,
third, a focus onto non-designed, maybe forgotten or invisible spaces and territories, where the memory has been transformed or eliminated, aims at discussing and suggesting methods of mapping and documentation and also at proposing narratives, performance or
intervention strategies and imagined or fictitious projects.
A framework of terms of analysis guides the workshop’s course and might also serve for setting up new categories of archival classification and documentation. Both, conceptual terms such as
representation,
translation or
appropriation
and transcend terms such as
transgression,
containment or
taboo shall open up new perspectives on
Spaces of Memory, broaden the understanding of their identity and contribute to widen and enrich the debate on public space.
