PAST TALKS 2021
9 November 2021
Host: Paul Bouet (École d’architecture
de la ville & des territoires, Paris-Est)
MOUSSA BELKACEM
École d’architecture
de la ville & des territoires
Paris-Est
Respondent: Rune Frandsen (LUS, ETH Zurich)
MARIABRUNA FABRIZI
SOCKS & École d’architecture
de la ville & des territoires
Paris-Est
Respondent: Merve Cigdem Talu (McGill University, Montreal)
Host: Paul Bouet (École d’architecture
de la ville & des territoires, Paris-Est)
Toward a global approach
on displaced villages
MOUSSA BELKACEM
École d’architecture
de la ville & des territoires
Paris-Est
Respondent: Rune Frandsen (LUS, ETH Zurich)
Ruins of the old village of Portomarín, photo from the fieldwork, July 2021. Credits: Moussa Belkacem, Claire Sarrazin.
Since 1945, dozens of villages in Europe have been displaced to allow for the installation of resource and energy infrastructures, mainly mines and dams. These villages were destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere, outside the exploitation zones. From an architectural and urbanistic standpoint, these situations raise many questions: how to articulate the destruction project and the construction project? How one can preserve the village identity through this displacement ? Despite the large number of similar situations, each displaced village seems to have been treated as an isolated and unique case. Strangely there were never any global studies on the subject. The state of the art shows how little is known about the extent and frequency of this phenomenon. Thus, I am currently carrying out the first inventory of all relevant cases. The connections between these cases will help me to reveal the dynamics and global trends of those relocations. The aim of this thesis is to develop a critical and theoretical approach to village displacements, and to offer a better understanding of these processes.
During this presentation, I will present both my corpus and my first hypotheses.
***Since 1945, dozens of villages in Europe have been displaced to allow for the installation of resource and energy infrastructures, mainly mines and dams. These villages were destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere, outside the exploitation zones. From an architectural and urbanistic standpoint, these situations raise many questions: how to articulate the destruction project and the construction project? How one can preserve the village identity through this displacement ? Despite the large number of similar situations, each displaced village seems to have been treated as an isolated and unique case. Strangely there were never any global studies on the subject. The state of the art shows how little is known about the extent and frequency of this phenomenon. Thus, I am currently carrying out the first inventory of all relevant cases. The connections between these cases will help me to reveal the dynamics and global trends of those relocations. The aim of this thesis is to develop a critical and theoretical approach to village displacements, and to offer a better understanding of these processes.
During this presentation, I will present both my corpus and my first hypotheses.
The Construction of Imagination
SOCKS & École d’architecture
de la ville & des territoires
Paris-Est
Respondent: Merve Cigdem Talu (McGill University, Montreal)
This Phd project analyses how architectural imagination is constructed. It focuses specifically on the topic of creative or productive imagination which is the mental process that organises (through a reproductive function) and even transforms (through a productive function) the images acquired throughout one’s life through perception and which is capable of extracting new meaning and even elaborate new content out of this process. For this presentation, I will focus on a draft chapter of the first part of the text which explores how contemporary research on imagination in the fields of cognition and mind studies provides similar definitions to those elaborated by the philosophers of imagination and specifically to Gilbert Durand’s imagination theory and Paul Ricœur’s role of metaphors. In the words of cognitive scientist Mark Johnson, “imagination is our capacity to organise mental representations (percepts, images, image schemata) into meaningful, coherent unities. It thus includes our ability to generate new order”.