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Regular Talks
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Between 1952 and 1960, over twenty-five exhibitions of Brazilian architecture traveled to cities around the world, from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, passing through Bogota, Lisbon, London, Zurich, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, and beyond. Organized by Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or Itamaraty, the exhibitions were part of an ambitious program to promote a modern imaginary of Brazil abroad, in turn constructing a transnational network of public and private agents and institutions. These traveling architecture exhibitions became a key instrument of cultural diplomacy, especially within the national developmentalist project that marked the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961). Drawing from my ongoing dissertation, this paper investigates the international projection of Brazil’s modern architecture through a series of traveling exhibitions, shedding light on an orchestrated cultural, political, and aesthetic project of identity construction highly dependent on mechanisms of display.The investigation of these previously unstudied exhibitions suggests that architecture played a fundamental role in the cultural politics of Brazil, at home and abroad. Architecture exhibitions became a medium to construct and disseminate images and narratives aligned with the interests of the state. Based on extensive research primarily conducted in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the study of the exhibitions and the networks they established offers new readings of the intricate relationship between architecture, media, and politics at a time of geopolitical change during the Cold War. As a key player in Brazil’s modernization process, modern architecture was first mobilized as a tool for nation-building and, later, as part of a worldmaking project to reimagine the country’s position in the world. The display of architecture became a critical mechanism developed by the state apparatus to manifest Brazil’s anxiety to become modern, which would eventually materialize in 1960 with the construction of the country’s new capital, Brasília.

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Anna Switaj and Feysa Poetry explore the kitchen not as a fixed, domestic room but as a mobile, relational space open to interpretation. In this project kitchens move across geographies, through time, and between people to reimagine them in new intimate and cultural settings. Through two distinct approaches, We investigate how acts of care performed through cooking and travel shift when uprooted from their original contexts.
Anna Switaj moves her kitchen in an RV, travelling from the UK to Ukraine. Along the way, she cooks, exchanges recipes, and hosts meals with people met en route. Her kitchen becomes a nomadic archive, folding in new rituals, tools, and ingredients with each border crossed.
Feysa Poetry transports her kitchen through the post, mailing her familial recipe from Indonesia to participants with culturally diverse backgrounds across the UK. Each recipient reimagines the dish within the limitations (and possibilities) of their own domesticity and cultural familiarity, generating rich translations in taste, technique, and memory.
Together, these movements examine how food, memory, and care are carried, adapted, and kept alive through motion and relational exchange. In this session we are interested in the site of taste, resilience, and cultural continuity. We reinterpret the memory of domestic labour as a recipe-scape: a collection of co-authored documents adapted and collectively owned by many. We treat the kitchen as a shared, decentralised space of knowledge where cooking methods, stories and personal hacks are exchanged freely, creating a living archive rooted in everyday practice.Throughout the 1940s, U.S. mothers wrote to the National Children’s Bureau asking how to relieve their children’s allergy symptoms. While they were sometimes asking for medical advice or clarification, they were often asking where they could move their families to avoid the allergens that caused their children’s asthma. While experts at the Bureau would tentatively confirm the potential of relocating, they often cautioned that there was no way to know if a new environment would be beneficial. Despite its limitations, the dream of escaping environmental allergens, particularly ragweed, had a long history and was powerful enough to motivate the establishment of resort towns across the continent. In a 1925 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, Dr. Woods Hutchinson wrote about the safety of both the mountains and “barren islands out at sea,” encouraging readers to escape to locations outside the reach of ragweed pollens. In 1947, Russell Maloney noted that “ragweed, the doctors said, grows only around cleared land. For instance, beside highways and railroad tracks...” In their attempts to escape Ragweed, those who suffered from allergies wer encouraged to flee to inhospitable, uninhabited places.
I am interested in the enclaves and resort towns that grew around ragweed retreats. Bethlehem, New Hampshire, nestled in the White Mountains, exists between the constructed comfort and familiarity of hotels and the awe-inspiring, alien landscapes of the mountains. How did ideas of hospitality and habitability square with the need for barren landscapes? How did the constructed familiarity of the hotels affect how visiting allergenics imagined the mountains? By analyzing the promotional material produced by prominent Bethlehem hotels, I explore how promises of comfort and relief worked to domesticate the White Mountains and reframe longstanding notions of the mountains’ mythical status to fit more neatly into 20th-century ideas of treatment and consumerism.










The Wringin Anom Sugar Factory is one of the few remaining nineteenth-century sugar factories still operating in Java today. Originally built by a British sugar manufacturer in 1845, the factory compound once functioned not only as a centre of sugar production but also as a tool of colonial control over the surrounding population and plantation landscape. Today, the site is on the verge of ruin.
Java’s colonial sugar industry began to collapse in the 1930s and was nationalised by the Indonesian state in 1958. Once a leading global exporter of sugar, Java now imports sugar on a massive scale, with Indonesia ranking among the world’s largest importers. The physical infrastructure left behind by thecolonial sugar industry – comprising roads, housing, and plantations – has largely deteriorated, yet it continues to influence rural life and labour today. For instance, the socioeconomic systems and shifts in land ownership that were established during the colonial-industrial era of the nineteenth century  continue to exist. Additionally, housing facilities for sugar factory workers, built by sugar manufacturers that introduced modern construction methods, materials, and hygiene standards to the countryside, continue to influence domestic architecture in broader Javanese rural communities today.
In this presentation, I will showcase a work-in-progress paper examining the spatial, architectural, and social legacy of the Dutch colonial sugar industry in postcolonial Java through a case study of the Wringin Anom factory compound – a workers’ village designed around notions of hierarchy, efficiency, and control, which remains inhabited today. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a lengthy research stay in the factory’s workers’ housing facilities, the paper aims to present the spatial conditions of colonial-era housing in the postcolony. It brings to light how these environments reflect and reinforce labour hierarchies, shaping the lives and livelihoods of contemporary sugar workers in Java’s rural
landscape.

Global Ambitions, Planetary Forces: Drainage, Urban Planning, and the Making of Iskenderun, 1851

In 1851, the third failed canal project of Iskenderun, designed to drain its centuries-old marshes, was laid out and executed by the Hungarian engineer General Maximilian Stein, who served in the Ottoman army as Ferhat Pasha after fleeing the Habsburg Empire. A former Minister of War and Governor of Transylvania, Ferhat Pasha, also prepared Iskenderun’s first urban plan. Though the canal later overflooded and the urban plan was never implemented, both projects reveal the tension between planetary processes and global pressures which would define the making of mid-19th century Iskenderun.
Iskenderun was founded on land formed by sediments carried by the sea and by streams descending from the Amanus Mountains. These geological processes produced extensive marshes and continually pushed the coastline seaward. While these planetary processes sustained a dynamic marsh ecology that actively constrained human habitation, they also created a naturally sheltered anchorage that attracted maritime interest. Fueled by expanding international trade, British efforts to establish faster communication routes to India, and Ottoman ambitions to civilize both land and population, Iskenderun was repeatedly subjected to drainage schemes under global pressure across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was gradually forced into being a town despite persistent environmental resistance.
This article maps out physical imprints of the 1851 canal project on Iskenderun’s land, as well as the gradual growth of the town’s built environment and its population in the 1850s. While doing so it also seeks to trace the global and empire-wide dynamics that forced Iskenderun into being