The past is a dead country

Nilly R. Harag

doi:10.6092/issn.2036-1602/6082

Authors

Nilly R. Harag Architecture Department at Bezalel
Is a senior lecturer at the Architecture Department at Bezalel and a co-founder of Arctic Architects in Jerusalem. She chairs the research unit Liminal Architecture and coordinates the diploma units. MArch University of Pennsylvania with honors; BDes Bezalel Academy with honors. Recipient of research grants from the TU WIEN Faculty of Architecture and Planning, the Freud Institute Vienna, the Oslo School of Architecture and Granada University. Visiting professor at Carleton University, the Architecture Department of Braunschweig University, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Malaquais, and the Architecture School of the University of Nicosia.

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

Mahmoud Darwish, [trans. Ibrahim Nuhawi] Memory for Forgetfulness, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1982

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

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion. Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. Verso, New York 2002

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

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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

The past is a dead country

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