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KULVER-Kulturell verdsetting

Ruin Memories: Materiality, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past.

Awarded: NOK 5.4 mill.

More than any other historical epoch modernity has produced ruins and never have so many things, yesterday's novelties, been made redundant and outdated. The outcome is a growing ruin landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunke rs and industrial waste areas. However, compared to classical ruins and antiquities the attention and care for the leftovers of modernity are modest. Neither are these ruined things and places considered significant as sites of remembrance of those proces ses and societies that both created and ruined them. Haunted by a recent past too grim or uncanny to be embraced as heritage they are mostly categorized as unpleasant and contaminating waste, as a threat to the environment, and thus as something to be era dicated by increasingly more effective systems of disposal and recycling. In this international research project we explore the ruins of modernity through a number of case studies carried out in Spain, Iceland, Estonia, Norway, USA and Russia. Focusing on three themes - the aesthetics of waste and heritage, the materiality of memory, and the significance of things - our aim is to understand why the derelict materiality of the modern to such an extent has been devalued and marginalized, but also to suggest possible means for reaffirming its cultural and historic significance.

Publications from Cristin

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Funding scheme:

KULVER-Kulturell verdsetting