Event Title

Panel II: "The Space That Remains. Bleda y Rosa's Monumental Photography"

Presenter Information

Patricia Keller, Cornell University

Abstract

I read the paired notions of monumentality and loss in the work of Spanish photographers Bleda y Rosa, which predominantly depicts what we might call the spectral textures of places: former battlefields, as in their "campos de batalla" series, the natural yet uninhabited edges of cities, as in their "ciudades" project, or the vacant, intimate interiors of once great palaces and royal halls, in "estancias." In detailing the ghostly layers of select individual physical/geographical places, their works also, and perhaps more importantly, engage with the temporality and historicity of these places — places where great, even monumental things are known to have once happened, yet now remain as empty, desolate spaces of ruin. In their more recent "memoriales" collection, Bleda y Rosa visit three cities — Washington DC, Jerusalem, and Berlin — in which they document distinct memorials not in the form of monuments, edifices, and other architectural constructions labeled as such, but rather memorial sites that emerge in and through quotidian urban spaces — walls, streets, fences, etc. — in order to articulate what they call the "monumentalization of memory," or the way in which memory persists even in the absence of recognizable monuments and memorials that testify to the past, the way memory seeps into the fabric of a place and lingers there, resisting time. This paper will be divided into two sections: the first will give a brief introduction/overview to their work from the past decade; the second will concentrate on close readings of select photographs from the "arquitecturas/memoriales" (2005-2010) series, drawing on critical, theoretical, and philosophical works by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Geoffery Batchen, Eduardo Cadava, Wendy Brown, John Berger, David Levi-Strauss, and Peter Eisenman.

Presenter Bio(s)

Patricia Keller is an Assistant Professor in Cornell University’s Department of Romance Studies. She works on modern and contemporary Spanish literature, film and cultural studies. In her book manuscript, “Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture,” she explores the phenomenon and ideology of haunting in Spanish visual culture as representations of the country’s unresolved past.

Location

Mount Holyoke College, Mary Woolley Hall, New York Room

Start Date

14-10-2011 2:00 PM

End Date

14-10-2011 2:45 PM

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Oct 14th, 2:00 PM Oct 14th, 2:45 PM

Panel II: "The Space That Remains. Bleda y Rosa's Monumental Photography"

Mount Holyoke College, Mary Woolley Hall, New York Room

I read the paired notions of monumentality and loss in the work of Spanish photographers Bleda y Rosa, which predominantly depicts what we might call the spectral textures of places: former battlefields, as in their "campos de batalla" series, the natural yet uninhabited edges of cities, as in their "ciudades" project, or the vacant, intimate interiors of once great palaces and royal halls, in "estancias." In detailing the ghostly layers of select individual physical/geographical places, their works also, and perhaps more importantly, engage with the temporality and historicity of these places — places where great, even monumental things are known to have once happened, yet now remain as empty, desolate spaces of ruin. In their more recent "memoriales" collection, Bleda y Rosa visit three cities — Washington DC, Jerusalem, and Berlin — in which they document distinct memorials not in the form of monuments, edifices, and other architectural constructions labeled as such, but rather memorial sites that emerge in and through quotidian urban spaces — walls, streets, fences, etc. — in order to articulate what they call the "monumentalization of memory," or the way in which memory persists even in the absence of recognizable monuments and memorials that testify to the past, the way memory seeps into the fabric of a place and lingers there, resisting time. This paper will be divided into two sections: the first will give a brief introduction/overview to their work from the past decade; the second will concentrate on close readings of select photographs from the "arquitecturas/memoriales" (2005-2010) series, drawing on critical, theoretical, and philosophical works by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Geoffery Batchen, Eduardo Cadava, Wendy Brown, John Berger, David Levi-Strauss, and Peter Eisenman.