UNEARTHING TRACES - BOOKLAUNCH 22.02.2023
© 2023 Unearthing Traces
UNEARTHING TRACES. Dismantling imperialist entanglements of archives, landscapes and the built environment, is a publication with a wide range of contributors from a transdisciplinary background between architecture, history, art and post-/decolonial studies edited by Denise Bertschi, Julien Lafontaine Carboni and Nitin Bathla. It was carefully designed by Melina Wilson & Martin Stoecklin, and published by EPFL PRESS.
Archival power, silences, and absences profoundly shape and structure postcolonial landscapes, spaces, and urban environments by controlling bodies, histories, and interactions. This book explores pathways to dismantle these imperial entanglements by developing methodologies and plural epistemologies through an interdisciplinary dialogue between the fields of history, memory politics, critical theory, and archival practice together with the fields of the built environment, landscape, urban studies, architecture, and the arts. Unearthing traces catalyzes critical discussions that not only challenge the objectivity and dismantle the neutrality surrounding current archival practices and archival institutions, but also questions what constitutes as the archive itself. The book unearths potential histories and minor narratives buried by the imperial production of pasts and silences. The diverse range of contributions in the book offer original research, discussions, positions, and tools and provides a critical resource for scholars, architects, artists, activists, and archivists who want to engage with landscapes and built environments in a critical and postcolonial perspective in relation to archival materials and practices.
The book will be launched at ETHZ, in the HIL Foyer on the 22.02.2023 at 17.00. The editors Denise Bertschi, Julien Lafontaine Carboni and Nitin Bathla will celebrate this collaborative book project together with Prof. Mariam Issoufou Kamara, Hollyamber Kennedy and Nolan Oswald Dennis. This booklaunch is organized in collaboration with „GTA exhibitions“ and „KIOSK Madame ETH.“
Editors:
Denise Bertschi, Julien Lafontaine Carboni, Nitin Bathla
Contributors (Lecturers of the Unearthing Traces conference):
Denise Bertschi
Nolan Oswald Dennis
Abdessamad El Montassir and Julien Lafontaine Carboni
Rohit Jain
Hollyamber Kennedy
Léopold Lambert
Françoise Vergès
Anna Karla de Almeida Santos
Lena Stina Andersson
Mari Bastashevski
Jasmine Benhaida
Mathilde Chénin
VOLUMES and Decolonize Zurich
Fares Damien
Atiya Hussain and Stéphanie Savio
George Jepson and Lukas Pauer
Sila Karatas
Nagy Makhlouf
Estefanía Mompean Botias
Rebecca J. Squires
Safiya El Ghmari and Tafrata Bouchra
Lea Marie Nienhoff
Alina Volynskaya
Marlene Wagner
The publication was published by EPFL Press, le Centre d’Art de Neuchâtel, and generously supported by the Institute and the Section of Architecture, EDAR and SwissUniversities.
