We are pleased to announce that Ines Weizman will give the keynote lecture "Deep White and the Materialities of the Modern" at the symposium Deep White, 26 - 28 October.
Abstract
Deep White and the Materialities of the Modern
The plain surfaces of modernism are what lead it to its fascination with paint, but when we peel away these layers, an archaeology of modernism is forced to reveal the strata of a fossilized past. The depth of the wall is the building’s “unconscious.” As this lecture will aim to show, it is with this new sensibility of documentary architecture, and through a critical use of new technologies, that we can start to make sense of the pulverized molecular fragments of history and assemble them into data. Together with the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), Ines Weizman develops archival research projects that foreground new approaches to the material analysis of objects and buildings and chart the web of relations, connections and patterns in which these objects are nested.
In the context of the 'Deep White' conference, Weizman will revisit their film Deep White that was presented as an 8-screen video installation as part of the exhibition The Matter of Data. Architectural case studies – presented as “architectural biographies” – become key to understanding bureaucratic actions, abstract economic principles and political relations, while materials and residues of paint are explored on the spectrum of both microhistory and macrocartography.
Biography
Ines Weizman is an architectural historian and theorist. She teaches at the Royal College of Art in London and is a professor of architectural theory and design at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She also directs the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), an interdisciplinary research collective of architectural historians, filmmakers, and digital technologists. Her books include Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (London: Routledge, 2014); Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster, co-authored with Eyal Weizman (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014); Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019); and Documentary Architecture: Dissidence through Architecture (Santiago de Chile: ARQ Editiones, 2020). Weizman has also presented exhibitions and installations, such as Repeat Yourself: Loos, Law, and the Culture of the Copy (Venice Architecture Biennale 2012, New York 2013, Vienna 2013) and Celltexts: Books and Other Works Produced in Prison (Turin 2008, Berlin 2009, Dublin 2009, Venice 2012, Berlin 2019). With the Centre for Documentary Architecture, she curated the exhibition The Matter of Data: Tracing the Materiality of “Bauhaus Modernism”, which was shown from 2019 to 2022 with a varying thematic focus in Weimar, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Prague and Porto. Her short documentary films Three Hours by Car (2019), Bauhaus Beeline (2020) and A Short History of the Elevator Pitch (2021) have earned awards. She was the commissioner of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2023 Biennale Architettura in Venice. At the same Biennale, she presented an installation titled ‘“Of All the Gin Joints in All the Towns in All the World ...”: Joséphine Baker and Modern Architecture across the Colonised Arab World’. Her book Joséphine Baker across the Colonial Modern will be published by Sternberg Press, London in 2024.