Art History: Nicola Pezolet - Universities Art Association of Canada: Utopia, Territory, and Media Cultures

N. Pezolet will chair a panel at the UAAC conference with C. Contandriopoulos.

Building on recent scholarship in art and architectural history, as well as in utopian and media studies, our session groups innovative contributions that analyze critically the relationship between utopia, territory and media cultures. Presentations will range from the 19th to the 21st century. The panel welcomes various approaches, including transnational, interdisciplinary and postcolonial perspectives.

Ralph Ghoche from Barnard College, Columbia University, will attempt “to re-situate the utopian narratives that formed the worldview of 'Romantic' architects in mid-19th century France, detailing their effects on the newly colonized Algerian landscape.”

Irina Lyubchenko, a doctoral candidate at Ryerson and York, will challenge the view of utopias as primarily secular, and present on a "unique period of utopian thinking in Russian history – the product of the intermingling of science, religion and philosophy that found expression in Malevich’s designs of space dwellings.”

Michael Windower, from Carleton University, will focus on “the era following the Second World War that witnessed the development of media theory by the likes of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, who, in different ways, emphasized the spatial implications of mass media.”

Sinisha Brdar, from UQAM, will focus on the Italian collective Superstudio and the Dutch architectural firm OMA, and how they developed "a form of criticality that exploits the visual rhetoric of utopia as a critique of utopia itself.”

Finally, our own Johanne Sloan, from Concordia University, will presents on Julian Rosefeldt’s recent multi-screen film installation Manifesto (2015) to reflect on how utopian, avant-garde manifestos "that otherwise lay dormant in the archive are re-performed and remediated” and once again come to "serve, in the words of Fredric Jameson, as 'hallucinatory visions in desperate times.’”