The past is a dead country

Authors

  • Nilly R. Harag Architecture Department at Bezalel

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-1602/6082

Keywords:

Famadihana, Histography, Amendment, Narrative, Memory

Abstract

Most cultures use the past for stability and risk seeing not the other there but itself. One has to be able to see and sense a situation rather than be drawn into the reality depicted by formal historiography and national narratives. Departing from acute memories of conflict, enlisted for barricading identity, we can develop the capacity to contain an event and simultaneously progress towards a new beginning. I aim to question mapped boundaries through a biographical lens; to this end I observe onsite/insightfully the remains of village and its neighbour in northern Israel. The art of mapping debris can introduce new practices into the architecture of conflict.

References

Meron Benvenisti, [trans. Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta] Sacred Landscape – The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 2000

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Peter Eisenman, “En Terror Firma–In trails of Grotexts”, in Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 1996

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Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London 1992

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David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985

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Antony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press, Cambridge/London 1992

Yona Weitz, “Memory in the Shadow of Genocide: The Memory of the Armenian Genocide in the Armenian Community of Jerusalem”, Ph.D. Thesis; The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 2010

W.J.T. Mitchell, “Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine and the American Wilderness”, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.) Landscape and Power. “Cristo’s Gates and Gilo’s Wall” in W.J.T. Mitchell, Critical Inquiry, n. 32 (June 1, 2006). University of Chicago Press, pp. 261-290

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Published

2015-12-29

How to Cite

Harag, N. R. (2015). The past is a dead country. IN_BO. Ricerche E Progetti Per Il Territorio, La Città E l’architettura, 6(8), 125–131. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-1602/6082