symposium explores design responses to political trauma"Making Home in Wounded Places: Memory, Design, and the Spatial" will be held March 3 and 4, 2017, at Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue. |
NEW YORK, February 21, 2017 – The New School presents Making Home in Wounded Places: Memory, Design, and the Spatial, an international symposium exploring how the built environment can be used to mitigate human suffering. Scholars, designers, and activists will discuss more than 30 case studies, including the ad hoc construction of temporary shelters in Calais, France for people fleeing oppression, the conversion of former prisons into shopping malls in Latin America, and approaches to memorializing the past in a former Warsaw ghetto. The symposium, which takes place March 3 and 4 at Parsons School of Design’s Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, will feature a keynote address from Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian-American architect, writer, and activist from Aleppo. Attar is the CEO of the Haram Foundation, Attar works with children in refugee camps on the border of Turkey and Syria. For a full schedule of events, visit the symposium website. “This symposium brings together scholars, activists, design practitioners, and artists at this critical moment to explore the possibilities for meaningful engagement in conditions of instability and displacement,” says Susan Yelavich, Director of the MA Design Studies program at The New School’s Parsons School of Design. “As members of the New School community, we consider it our responsibility to contribute to the growing global conversation about actions needed in our increasingly volatile world.” Yelavich organized the symposium with Małgorzata Bakalarz Duverger, a PhD candidate in sociology at the New School for Social Research. The two-day gathering addresses politically fraught territories that the organizers refer to as “wounded places” — from sites of conflict and natural disasters, to places marked by layers of turmoil and conquests, to impromptu refugee encampments that all too often become permanent. “Making home in these places, seldom a choice, becomes simultaneously a material and symbolic endeavor, involving both design and memory practices,” Bakalarz Duverger says. Making Home in Wounded Places: Memory, Design, and the Spatial symposium is co-sponsored by MA Design Studies Program, Parsons School of Art and Design History and Theory, The Global Studies Program at the New School, and The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, New School for Social Research. The symposium is organized in collaboration with Adam Mickiewicz Institute as a part of the Campus Project.The symposium enjoys the generous support of the Armenian General Benevolent Union and ArteEast. |
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Parsons School of Design is one of the leading institutions for art and design education in the world. Based in New York but active around the world, the school offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the full spectrum of art and design disciplines, as well as online courses, degree and certificate programs. Critical thinking and collaboration are at the heart of a Parsons education. Parsons graduates are leaders in their respective fields, with a shared commitment to creatively and critically addressing the complexities of life in the 21st century. Sheila C. Johnson Design Center is an award-winning campus center for Parsons School of Design that combines learning and public spaces with exhibition galleries to provide an important new downtown destination for art and design programming. The mission of the Center is to generate an active dialogue on the role of innovative art and design in responding to the contemporary world. Its programming encourages an interdisciplinary examination of possibility and process, linking the university to local and global debates. The center is named in honor of its primary benefactor, New School Trustee and Parsons Board of Governors Member Sheila C. Johnson. The design by Rice+Lipka Architects is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects. |
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Media Contacts: Scott Gargan, |
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