21.06.2022

Crossmappings

Architecture, Conversation, Online

H18:00
‘I pomeriggi series 2021/2022’

Dates
21.06.2022
Location
Online
Category
Architecture, Conversation
Information

H18:00
‘I pomeriggi series 2021/2022’

The event will be held in English at H18:00 online on Zoom.
Participate here.

I pomeriggi series 2021/2022
I pomeriggi 2021/2022 at Istituto Svizzero is a series dedicated to our fellows. It is an opportunity for the public to learn more about the projects they are working on during this year’s residency.

The event is curated by Gerlinde Verhaeghe (Fellow Milano Calling 2021/2022, History and theory of architecture).

Crossmappings
On Gender Representations in Architectural and Visual Culture

In his well-known Mnemosyne or ‘Bilderatlas’, Aby Warburg sets out to map travelling image formulas across times, cultures and mediums. Warburg’s Mnemosyne illustrated how past image formulas have a cultural afterlife and together construct a cultural imaginary. Taking its cue from Warburg’s project, Crossmappings proposes visual readings as a critical intervention in a shared cultural imaginary. Crossmappings aims to instigate an active conversation and engagement with images from the past, questioning the ways they ‘haunt’ today’s image production and reception through affective, associative and situated readings. Interested in cultural codes of gender and sexuality inscribed in interior space, Crossmappings opens a dialogue between architectural and visual culture. 

Crossmappings is an online conversation in images and words between literary and cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen (University of Zurich) and architecture historian Gerlinde Verhaeghe (ETH Zurich). Starting from the subject of Gerlinde’s doctoral research, Turinese architect Carlo Mollino, the two speakers will discuss his highly suggestive design titled Bedroom for a Farmhouse in the Rice Fields (1943), and his self-representation in it, while opening a visual dialogue moving between themes, tropes and figures such as boudoir and cabinet, marginality, vanitas, female figments and male creative identity. The practice of Crossmappings was introduced in 2018 by Elisabeth Bronfen in her like-named book.

Biographies:

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at the New York University. She did her PhD at the University of Munich, on literary space in Dorothy M. Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage, as well as her habilitation, five years later, on representations of femininity and death published as Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester UP). In 2017, she was awarded the Martin Warnke Medal by the Aby Warburg Foundation, and in 2018, she was appointed as an Ambassador of the Friedrich-Alexander University. A specialist in the 19th and 20th century literature, she has also written articles in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture. Current research projects include a monograph on appropriations of Shakespeare in contemporary TV drama, Shakespeare and reading for seriality, seriality and 21st century DVD-novels, and the gender of political sovereignty.

Gerlinde Verhaeghe received an MA in History of Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and an MA in Architecture from KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, where she also worked as a research assistant. She has worked as an architect for various architectural firms in Europe and has written articles for the Belgian architecture magazine A+. Since 2018 she has conducted doctoral research at the Institute of History and Theory of Architecture of ETH, Zurich. In Milan she worked on her research on the Turin architect Carlo Mollino.
Find out more about Gerlinde Verhaeghe’ project, read her contribution on the blog of Istituto Svizzero on the website of the Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps.