Doctoral Defense by PHD candidate Kim Phil lips. This study considers three temporary\, site-specific installations t hat for brief moments haunted such sites in Berlin during the first volatil e years after 1990.
Behind the mask of new architecture rapidly trans forming Berlin’s visage in the years following Germany’s reunification in 1 990 lie profound anxieties over the nature and implications of the city’s r econstruction in the face of an irresolvable past and an unclear future. A disenchanted and destabilized eastern population\, resurfacing questions ov er the definition of “Germanness” and the German nation\, and the sudden co llision of two incongruent narratives of the National Socialist and communi st pasts frustrate the city’s desire to present a unified identity in the f irst years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To access this terrain\, my d issertation departs from the focus of much of the published literature on t he post-unification city and looks not to Berlin’s urban regeneration itsel f but rather to the more unstable spaces between architecture: those more m arginal or unresolved sites and surfaces which\, in states of flux\, paraly sis\, or neglect\, are more vulnerable to (and revealing of) the possibilit ies of appropriation and disturbance.
This study considers three temp orary\, site-specific installations that for brief moments haunted such sit es in Berlin during the first volatile years after 1990:
Shimon Attie ’s 1991-1992 photographic projections entitled The Writing on the Wall\, th e 1993 simulation in canvas of Berlin’s demolished Stadtschloss\, and Chris to and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995. Visible only flee tingly amidst the solidity of the city’s built landscape\, it is the very i mpermanence of such representations\, I contend\, that afford them their cr itical power. Drawing upon theories of memory\, trauma\, and desire\, I arg ue that these installations can be brought to bear directly on the contenti ous politics of memory and identity that permeate Berlin’s social and spati al practice in the years following 1990\, exposing anxious edges of “German ness\,” desires to recuperate (and repress) certain historical narratives\, and ambivalent sites of fixation in a city negotiating its new role as onc e again capital of a unified German nation-state. In this way\, they provid e narrow windows through which we might glimpse the unquiet space that oper ates behind a redefining city’s scripted surface\, and the pasts that lie i n wait there. The task of this dissertation is to explore that space.
LOCATION:Graduate Student Centre GEO:49.268667;-123.256919 URL;VALUE=URI:https://ahva.ubc.ca/events/event/kim-phillips-doctoral-defens e-conjured-spaces-representation-and-the-recurring-past-in-post-unification -berlin/ END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20070311T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR