Academy EM 2021 – We were/are the Future
The third edition of the Exercising Modernity Academy, a Polish-German-Israeli cooperation fostering intellectual and artistic exchange, was devoted to the ways in which modernities across the world have envisioned the future – with its new man and woman, its society, new ways of life and a new everyday order.
By rejecting the burden of the past, modernity has often emphasized an openness to the future. The “new” was imagined to bring peace to society, and the idea of historical progress fueled the hope for the ever greater prosperity of ever greater parts of humanity. The ways in which societies might be organized and in which everyday life might be regulated were a subject of interest for many modernization strategies as well as for modernist projects across the globe. The crucial issues included physical health and hygiene, the upbringing of children, pedagogy and education, the division of labour and economy, and nation-building. These visions were translated within the scope of various ideological frameworks (e.g. the Zionist movement with its kibbutzim in Israel or Communism in East Central Europe) into specific strategies of organizing collective life with distinct spatial politics but also forms of social engineering. The struggles for new forms were closely linked with an idea to bridge the gap between technological progress and private life, as well as with a faith in the new political and social order. Housing and city planning played a key role in this process. The belief in their emancipatory potential and their role in changing the rhythms of every-day life created a growing interest in how objects became tools for building a state identity and how the constructed and designed environment became an expression of certain biopolitics.
This process can be seen though as taking place in an ambivalent way. The strive for something radically new could make way for hitherto unseen terror and decay. Engines of social and technical progress such as standardization, normalization and typization turned out to be a basis for totalitarian building plans and radical spatial segregation – apparent in the Stalinist terror and in the horrors of National Socialism, the darkest chapter in the history of modernity.
The critical experience of the First World War is often called the actual beginning of the 20th century and it has already been stated that 2020 might turn out to be the analogous beginning of the 21st century. Therefore, organized in the midst of a pandemic and in the context of the climate crisis, when questions of possible scenarios for the future were at the center of public debate, the third edition of the Exercising Modernity Academy proposed to look back on some of the ideas that fueled the belief in the future a century ago. Exploring the intersections of humanities, architecture, design, art history, social and political sciences, we invite our lecturers and participants to look at what modernisms and 20th century modernization practices have to offer us today. It will be reflected on contemporary life as a field which requires new action. What kind of a new world can art, design and architecture promise us today and help us to achieve? What can we learn from the 20th century experiments today? Can a critical revision of their ideas serve as an inspiration for the solutions we now urgently need? Is it possible to learn from their mistakes and further develop what they have left unfinished?
In these discussions we were guided by experts representing different perspectives and disciplines, including Zvi Efrat, Sharon Golan, Shira Levy-Binyamini, Marci Shore and Robert Jan van Pelt.
During the Academy, we encouraged reflection through lectures, seminars, workshops and, in the second part, traveling.
The first part in January and February 2021 comprised three main thematic sections.
Section I: New Ideas and Visions
In a first thematic section, New Ideas and Visions, we explored the philosophical and historiographical concept of modernity in its relation to the “new” and to the idea of progress towards a better future. Crucial to modernity is a revision of tradition, regarding several spheres of life such as technology and economics (the rise of capitalism), religion (secularization), and politics (development of nation-states). In the East and West, this process manifested itself in strikingly different arrangements, its temporality diverged in each concrete expression. The notions of future, past and their historical relationship to one another differed in respective cases.
Another sphere touched by modernity was the arts, bringing about modernism as an artistic style. This leads to the question of how modern futuristic ideas found a cultural materialization that we explored in a second thematic section.
Section II: New Art for a New Life
The early 20th century trans-national attempts to create a new (wo)man and to shape a new society also reached art, design, and architecture. From housing and kitchen reform, through urban planning and design, modernist visions explored the agency and potential of objects that could serve as a tool for identity-building, at the same time redefining the role of artists and architects in new communities. Modern art and architectural strategies embodied and mirrored many contradictions inherent in modernity, showing the ambivalent potential of modernist projects. The section New Art for a New Life focused on art, design and architecture as important fields of shaping daily life and as vehicles for implementing new ideas, but also as means for regulation, control and political propaganda.
Section III: New State and Society
New visions of social structure and social order were accompanied by new institutions and new forms of collective life. The section New State and Society explored manifestations of modernist ideas in different parts of the world, focusing on their ideological and political backgrounds and their consequences for social life. During the Academy, we explored both the historical and socio-political contexts of modernisms as well as their legacy in our contemporary life and culture. Furthermore, we focused on the ambivalence of this legacy and ways in which it affected 20th century Europe. Through a critical examination of these issues, we also invited our lecturers and participants to reflect on those aspects of the modernist vision of society that can still inspire those looking for solutions to present-day challenges.
The Exercising Modernity Academy 2021 was divided into two stages: phase I, online, and phase II, taking place in stationary form in Gdynia, Poland (depend on the current restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic).
program
PDF of the program available here.
organization
organizer:
Pilecki Institute Berlin
partners:
Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Liebling Haus – The White City Center
Tutors
Agata Abramowicz
Alicja Bielawska
CENTRALA (Małgorzata Kuciewicz and Simone De Iacobis)
Anna Cymer
David Crowley
Zvi Efrat
Jacek Friedrich
Ralf Fücks
Sharon Golan-Yaron
Lucian Hölscher
Aleksandra Janus
Małgorzata Jędrzejczyk
Kacper Kępiński
Martin Kohlrausch
Joanna Kordjak
Wojciech Kotecki
Dorota Leśniak-Rychlak
Shira Levy-Benyemini
Michał Łuczewski
Łukasz Pancewicz
Robert Jan van Pelt
Marci Shore
Weronika Szerle
Ines Weizman
Karolina Wigura
Organization
Pilecki-Institut Berlin
Partners
Instytut Adama Mickiewicza
The Liebling Haus – White City Center
Academy EM 2022 – exercising [eastern] modernity
The fourth edition of the Exercising Modernity Academy was devoted to Eastern Europe and its historical and contemporary methods of understanding. We reflected on the concepts of East and West, had a closer look at the incoherencies between political, geographical, and cultural borders of Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries. We examined the issue of the role of culture and architecture in shaping the societies, cities and states in this region of the world.
Our ambition was to create a field for reflection on the common experience of the 20th century’s modernization movements of the states and peoples of Eastern Europe from the ideological foundations of modernity and its successful representations in art and architecture, through the difficult experience of totalitarianism and its legacy, to contemporary narratives and self-reflections.
Finally, our goal was to sketch a broader and comprehensive perspective on what Eastern Europe is and how we can better understand the events, changes and processes that have shaped the world in recent times.
The Academy took place in Berlin in October 2022, during which we encouraged a broader reflection on these issues through lectures, seminars and workshops.
The program of the Exercising Modernity Academy 2022 focused on four thematic sections:
Section I: Modernity(-ies) / Modernism(-s)
The first thematic section was devoted to the multi-layered relationship between what is modernity understood as a set of practices, forms, ideas and struggles of individuals and societies. Attention was also paid to the relation between modernity and the foundations of modernism manifested in architecture or urban planning, i.e. a relation based as much on compatibility as on inconsistencies between the cultural theory of modernity and its practice. The different dynamics characterising 20th-century aspirations to modernity were discussed, taking into account the cultural, social, or political specificities of these transformations in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Looking at the architecture of such cities as Gdynia or Kharkiv, or considering the oeuvre of Eastern European architects developing their careers in Tel Aviv or Beirut, it is not difficult to get the impression that Eastern Europe was also an extremely fertile ground for attempts to practice modernity. So fertile, in fact, that within a short time these ideas became part of official development plans, setting an unprecedented, but also peculiar pace of transformation in various centres of the region. Eventually, the grains of modernist assumptions were adopted both in countries striving to realise the utopia of socialism and those oriented towards capitalism, but in both cases this was connected with a kind of revolution in the perception of the role of architecture, which became an important field for the implementation of these plans. Finally, the last highly significant element of this thematic section was the experience of the individual in all these processes. As is so often the case in the systemic development of far-reaching, complex plans, individuals disappear from sight. Therefore, has modernity brought us closer to fulfil utopian assumptions or has it become a source of suffering?
Section II: Between totalitarianisms
In the second thematic block we directed the attention of the participants to a range of issues connected with the experience of two totalitarianisms, which happened to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The oppressive systems – both Nazism and Communism – had a significant impact on the life of European societies for many decades. They also gave rise to many ethical dilemmas: what choice did the individual have to preserve their identity and survive at the same time? Is it possible to regain trust after decades of manipulation? How – during and after the Second World War – were narratives about the past, present and future produced? How does the legacy of both totalitarianisms shape the present of our cities, the surrounding infrastructure and landscape, and Central and Eastern European collective memory?
With these questions and issues in mind, our aim was also to look at selected cities in Central and Eastern Europe as a kind of palimpsest, where successive layers overlap, sometimes deliberately attempting to falsify the original, covering up selected elements, and sometimes completing it and building it in – sometimes significantly – empty places
Section III: World in motion – defining East and West
This block was focused on the ways of defining Central and Eastern Europe and the (in)coherences inherent in these definitions with respect to political, geographical and cultural borders. We looked at how, over the past century and in recent years, the imagined and experienced divisions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ have been shaped and how they have manifested themselves in common spaces, including architecture or the spatial organisation of cities, towns, suburbs or villages. We considered the political conditions of the (re)production of the boundaries and imaginaries associated with the East. We also examined how the East can be understood in the context of the architectural legacy of socialist modernism, and to what extent modernism developed under socialism differs from modernism formed under capitalist system. We tried to outline the conceptual framework and to trace its evolution, also in the context of contemporary events, which force us to reflect anew on the – physical and imaginary – borders.
Section IV: Deconstruction / Reconstruction
Public space of many cities, towns and villages in Central and Eastern Europe is still marked by numerous sculptural, architectural or urban elements, which are material traces of foreign domination and presence of totalitarian systems in these territories. A particular group of such places and objects are monuments, erected in order to perpetuate the propaganda narrative, free of historical distortions and manipulations. Another category of this – sometimes perceived as dissonant – heritage is formed by various types of architecture: from the architecture of oppression and extermination, such as former labour and concentration camps, through residential and administrative buildings erected for the occupation authorities, to huge blocks of flats or even entire city districts, creating residential spaces in line with the dominant ideology. Some of them, apart from the symbolic layer, also have their still important utilitarian, as well as aesthetic or cognitive function, which makes any decisions concerning the further fate of this type of legacy arouse conflicting emotions.
Starting from the reflection on the role of aesthetics in politics, we wanted to take a broader look at the issue of constructing forms of commemoration as an element in creating common identity (national, ethnic, political, etc.). We wanted to question to what extent this kind of legacy constitutes a troublesome legacy today and what commemorative strategies, translated into architectural realisations or spatial policy, can be found in various countries of the former “Eastern Bloc”.
Through these topics, we were guided by experts representing different perspectives and disciplines from all over the Europe.
LOCATION AND DATES
The Exercising Modernity Academy 2022 took place on 17.10–23.10.2022 in Berlin
programme
Programme of the Exercising Modernity Academy 2022 can be found here.
tutors
Prof. Jan C. Behrends
Andrij Bojarov
Sabrina Cegla
Prof. Przemysław Czapliński
Sofia Dyak
Eran Eizenhamer
Nikita Kadan
Anna Karpenko
Kaja Klimek
Kateryna Kobchenko
Prof. Martin Kohlrausch
Kinga Nettmann-Multanowska
Dorota Monkiewicz
Natalia Mysak
Grzegorz Piątek
Agnieszka Pindera
Tatiana Portnov
Margaret Tali
Dmitri Zadorin
organisaton
Pilecki Institute Berlin
partners
Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Liebling Haus – The White City Center
