OCCUPY PPV #03: (Anti)fascist Architecture

Fascist architecture has long been propped up and fetishized in the Global West. Architecture has always been a brutal weapon, so maybe it can be reframed as Antifascist? Who are the Antifascist architects history books have erased?

The indoctrination of a contemporary architect in a globalised educational environment relies on consuming and recuperating any radical alternative to capitalism and regurgitating it as a design problem and not an ethical one. 

Focusing on issues such as power dynamics, antifascism, language recuperation, representation, identity, contested heritage, public space, and ownership of memory, the speakers will offer tools to rethink architecture and heritage and allow some space for exchange. 

In order to join the event online, please use the following link:

https://ucl.zoom.us/j/93056022683

Meeting ID: 930 5602 2683

Speakers:

Anela Dumonjić

(University of Graz)

Anela Dumonjić is a Bosnian activist, architecture photographer, artist and researcher. Dumonjić has obtained her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the Technical University of Munich, and she is currently enrolled in the Joint Master’s Programme for Southeastern European Studies in track of Politics and Law, at the University of Graz in Austria.

Her work currently aims at interweaving ex-Yugoslavian socialist material heritage with current oppressive societal and political structures. Other fields of her research are memory, trauma, transnational, gender and decolonial studies, as well as identity politics, which in contemporary culture pose the central core for any action, and resonate with diasporic difficulties of self-contextualisation.

Daniel Jonas-Roche

(Kean University School of Public Architecture)

Daniel Jonas-Roche is an adjunct professor of architecture, curator, and writer in New York City. Originally from Boston, his research focuses included socialist art and architecture, and U.S. labor history. His forthcoming book is entitled, ‘The Sloanist City: Alfred Sloan, Post-Fordism, and American Apartheid’ (DOM publishers, Berlin). His academic writings have been published by Princeton University, Rice University, and include forthcoming publications with the University of Puerto Rico and the MIT School of Architecture. He contributes to the Architects Newspaper and New York Review of Architecture, and is currently a lecturer at Kean University School of Public Architecture.

Andrew Santa Lucia

(Office Andorus/ Portland State University School of Architecture)

Andrew Santa Lucia is a Cuban American designer, educator, and prison abolitionist based in Portland, Oregon. He is Assistant Professor of Practice at Portland State University’s School of Architecture, where he teaches design studio, history/theory/criticism seminars, and is graduate thesis coordinator. He has lectured and exhibited internationally, including Art Basel, the Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Andrew’s writing can be found in a broad range of media from academic journals to DIY zines. He runs Office Andorus, which designs architecture for activists, public institutions and private clients with the goal of influencing public perceptions through works of architecture. His work is a hybrid of bold colors, graphics, and shapes used to translate and amplify contemporary issues of social justice through aesthetics.

Chaired by the OCCUPY PPV: Politics and Aesthetics convenors Vlad(a) Vazheyevskyy (Goldsmiths) and Daša Anosova (SSEES UCL)

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Visual credit: Andrew Santa Lucia’s ALANAR (Altar to Antifascist Architecture)*

*This installation seeks to spark conversation around this question by reframing narratives around architecture’s relationship to power and examining the white supremacist and fascist roots of several important works of architecture.