Migration, Justice and Architecture

Prof. Esra Akcan

Cornell University

Wednesday, 19 October 2022, 5.30 pm (BST)

ONLINE Lecture, hosted by the Warburg Institute.

Free and open to all via Zoom; please book a place via the Warburg Institute website here.

Living in Cappadocia. Photograph by Esra Akcan.

After an overview of the presenter’s previously published work on the relation between migration and architecture, this lecture will explore the right-to-heal after massive mass migrations during nation-state formations as a topic of transitional justice. It will concentrate on the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, including the “Exchange of Populations” treaty (1923) that divided the communities residing in thousands of villages and towns into two purified categories between Greece and Turkey, assuming the alignment of religion, nation and territory, regardless of the actual diversity of peoples, and whether there were hostile or peaceful relations on the ground. The lecture will expose the contrast between the declarations of state agents and international law diplomats on the one hand, and the experiences of those involved on both sides of the Aegean Sea on the other hand. It will discuss the residues of this historical wound today, by studying the practice of a handful architects, residents and stonemasons as a struggle toward healing through architecture. 

The Bilderfahrzeuge Lecture series 2022/23 – Border Regimes

From the reality of geopolitical boundaries to arguments over national styles and disciplinary limitations, border regimes are a pervasive part of academic work and our everyday world. But what kinds of associations can be made between divisions of scholarship, divisions of artistic production, and divisions of nation states? It is a commonplace to note that knowledge and art transcend boundaries and bring politics with them; but are some forms of knowledge and some forms of art more nationalistically constrained than others?  Today, art historians are prone to celebrate Aby Warburg’s warning against the biases of disciplinary border guards (grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit), yet scholarly boundaries can also help establish academic rigor and Warburg’s ideal of breaking down boundaries could well be correlated with his distinctly German milieu and its holistic ideal of Bildung. This lecture series brings together art historians working on “border regimes” in every sense of the phrase, querying the positive, negative, and ambiguous dimensions to this ubiquitous concept.  How does this issue apply to different historical and geographic periods of artistic production and how do those differences relate to art historiography both past and present?


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