DC+CMI

This course explores the processes through which culture becomes an object of representation and management by institutions and laypeople and it investigates the political implications and effects of these processes in shaping notions of the past, as well as understandings of community, temporality and the nation.

How do particular societies remember the past and what are the political implications of turning a site or an event into an exhibit or a public image? What kind of tensions emerge due to the tourist expectation for spatial conservation in the lives of local communities? What is the role of institutional archaeology in shaping understandings of the past and the future and how is that role subject to clashes and contestations? How is the scope of colonialism useful in exploring the history of Modern Greece? How is the museum implicated in the re-organization of time, place and the nation? What happens when the object of heritage and conservation involves ethically difficult subjects such as war, displacement and violence?

These are some of the questions explored by this course. Students will have the chance to examine the political and aesthetic processes that underline the representation of culture by commercial, educational and unofficial mechanisms in and through different media (images, texts, installations, architecture).

Syllabus