Architecture of Territory: Care and Repair as Practices of Remembering

Off the coast of Istria, Brijuni Archipelago is one of the most significant sites of the Yugoslav federation, and of non-aligned socialism. It has also been a private island of an Austro-Hungarian industrialist, a playground of European elites around 1900, and a negotiation stage of world leaders in the mid-twentieth century, a defense zone on the European frontier, and a heritage location whose traces go back to the Romans. In the 1980s, amid the dissolution of the Yugoslav project, the highly designed and constructed landscape of Brijuni was declared a nature park, as if in a recognition that its contentious histories should be depoliticized and left aside, undisturbed, like a memory capsule to be opened in a different future.

In this course, we will engage with the few who still inhabit and care for Brijuni today: for its planted gardens and bathing areas, for exotic animals, tarnished hotels, exclusion zones, and for secluded monuments along overgrown paths. Which artefacts are worth our care and repair? Which objects are symbolic and which ideas should be preserved? What is the depth and value of personal memories compared to official histories?

The course is a collaboration with TU Graz, Institute of Contemporary Art, Prof. Milica Tomić and TU Wien, Institute of Architecture and Design, Prof. Wilfried Kühn. During a joint field trip to Brijuni we will all meet and exchange on all the angles our projects might take.

Field Trip

During an investigative journey from the 11.04. – 15.04. we will visit the Archipellago and meet the simultaneous courses from Vienna and Graz. In place we will calibrate our research on the reality of the landscape, the people, we speak to, the objects we find and the memories that are connected to them. We will complete, re-do or discard our reserachmaps, gather filmic material and each identify an object, a thing, a building, an animal or a plant as starting and ending point of our research.

PROCESS AND RESULTS

Although everybody will be starting from the same point of departure of a map and a research statement, the works will develop independently and follow their own path on their investigative journey. In the final exhibition all pieces will join to more than the sum of their part, they will draw the image of a momentary scene of Brijuni, a fragment of the contemporary.

Media

We will work with video, narrative cartography, and digital sculpture. Inputs on mapping and filmographic and cutting techniques will be joint by reading sessions and insights on investigative journalism.

The endeavor will require strong curiosity, sensitivity in approaching a context into which we will enter as outsiders. It equally will ask for braveness and initiative, to enter in conversations, to ask again, to listen. Experts, guests, and memory specialists will inform and guide us. We will write and map, film and screen and eventually also deal with the question of representation; of how to show, screen and exhibit the work done.

Credits

The focus work offers a total of 6 credit points.

Application

To apply, write us with a personal 100-word letter/image/film to majer@arch.ethz.ch until the 29.02.2024.