Euroacademia Conferences
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (9th Edition)April 24 - 25, 2020
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (9th Edition)June 12 - 13, 2020
8th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions AgainJanuary 24 - 25, 2020
Re-Inventing Eastern Europe (7th Edition)December 13 - 14, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (8th Edition)October 25 - 26, 2019
Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (8th Edition)June 28 - 29, 2019
The European Union and the Politicization of Europe (7th Edition)January 25 - 26, 2019- 7th Forum of Critical Studies: Asking Big Questions AgainNovember 23 - 24, 2018
Europe Inside-Out: Europe and Europeanness Exposed to Plural Observers (8th Edition)September 28 - 30, 2018- Identities and Identifications: Politicized Uses of Collective Identities (7th Edition)June 14 - 15, 2018
Ugliness, Kitsch and Value in Shaping Contemporary Urban Spaces
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Presentation speakers
- Anastasiya Halauniova, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract:
While cultural and urban scholarship is preoccupied with the concepts of ‘valuation’ and ‘beauty’, and city practitioners invest in beautification of cities as the sources for identity-building processes, as well as commodification of urban experiences, subversive potential of both ‘devaluing’ and ‘ugliness’ seem underdeveloped. This paper seeks to extend the understanding and use of the concepts of ‘devaluing’ and ‘detachment’, by building on the case of Wroclaw, Poland. This city was annexed from Germany after the WWII and partially rebuilt in the socialist modernist style afterwards that has experienced a re-evaluation since the 1990s. This process brought to a sharp relief the politics of valuation and taste. This paper focuses on how aesthetic detachment from and devaluing of socialist architecture in the city is being ‘curated’: what practices aim at translating the ‘ugly socialist’ architecture into the ‘beautiful modernist’ one, and how maintenance practices of architecture can turn into ‘doing ugly’ rather than beautifying. Contrary to Latour’s understanding of detachment as ‘poor attachment’ to a good (1999), it shows that detachment and devaluation requires an enormous amount of work. By asking the question of how the shift in taste happens and how the skill of seeing ‘beauty’ in something that is commonly evaluated as ‘ugly’ is crafted and learned, I problematise the role of aesthetic detachment and attachment as the ‘politics by other means’(Mukerji, 2012). I aim to argue for the subversive practice of devaluing and ‘doing ugly’ architecture by turning the aesthetic practice into political and moral one.
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