4 . In the current context of the strengthening of nationalisms and the renationalisation of politics , how do artistic expressions linked to memory – such as those of William Kentridge or Doris Salcedo – open up an alternative horizon and teach us to be in the world in a non-Identitarian way ?
AH : Identity politics — sexual , political , ethnic , religious — has indeed become a plague today . The work of Kentridge , Salcedo and those other artists I discuss in my recent book Memory Art in the Contemporary World : Confronting Violence in the Global South is grounded in the memory politics of their countries , and thus national in this sense . But it stands against any and all nationalist phantasms , indeed against identitarianism of any kind , in the ways it opens up horizons of feeling and thinking that encourage cross-cultural connections and global solidarities . In the aesthetic forms , media and materials used , it makes us think differently about the world . While not activist in an agitprop sense of aesthetic production , it nevertheless confronts us with acts of memory that cut across cultural differences and are difficult to forget .
5 . After your famous work Present Pasts : Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory ( 2003 ), the concept of “ urban palimpsest ” was very well received . How did this concept come about ? What were its main ideas ? What role does it play nowadays in discussions concerning urban and architectural structures ?
AH : It was my visceral experience of Berlin in the years after the fall of the wall that made me think about city surfaces and structures as palimpsests , analogous to texts rewritten , erased , written over in light of political history and the demands of the present . With the disappearance of the GDR and the simultaneous obsolescence of West Berlin as an island in the midst of a communist country , the city had entered a phase of radical transformation in which the traces of the imperial city , of the Weimar Republic , the Third Reich and the divided Berlin of the post-45 period were all up for grabs . Intense debates swirled around preservation , renovation , destruction , and tabula rasa new construction for what would be the capital of a reunited Germany . That led me to the idea of built space as palimpsest .
It indeed seems to be the case that the idea of the urban palimpsest has caught on in architectural and urban discourse . But I never considered it as a particularly original idea . The idea of historical layers resonated with Freud ’ s analogy of the human mind to the different architectural and historical layers of the city of Rome . Of course , there was the post-structuralist imperialism of the textual at the time . But I drew on a whole history of thinking the urban from Simmel via Benjamin to David Harvey . Applying a term from the realm of writing to built structure , however , was not an attempt to reduce the materiality of cities to mere text . Rather the opposite , it expanded the notion of text as palimpsest into material reality that demands to be read with all its gaps and erasures . The notion of the urban palimpsest permits us to read the seemingly static city as process and subject to permanent change .
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