On Architecture and Erasure: The Arctic Case 

This lecture examines the post-World War II history of resistance to displacement and forced relocation in the Arctic region. The focus is on the attempted erasure of land-care practices and landscape imageries that accompanied the militarization, modernization, and urbanization of the Arctic after the war. On one hand, the lecture analyzes the projects that promoted assimilation, curtailed free movement, and severed cultural ties and networks of kin relation. On the other hand, it investigates the role played by local and Indigenous voices, activists, and transnational solidarity in the fight against land separation. The shift of focus to collective memory, Indigenous testimonies, and tangible and intangible heritage challenges existing interpretations of post-war architectural history and historiography and it questions contemporary disciplinary ideas of authorship and canon.

Elisa Dainese is Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Holding a Ph.D. (architectural design) and M.Arch. (architecture and sustainability) from the IUAV University of Venice, Italy, she is a historian and theorist of architecture and urbanism who specializes in architectural knowledge, its production, and its transnational circulation. Her work expands on the current discourse surrounding architecture and its history by exposing the tensions between Western and non-Western modernisms. Her unique method focuses on ideas of epistemic reconstitution and combines investigations of cross-cultural exchange, decolonial ecologies, and the recovery of historically underrepresented voices, including ones in the Arctic and sub-Sahara. She has published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Journal of Architecture, and is the co-editor of War Diaries (University of Virginia Press, 2022) which examines the effects of violence on art, architecture, and cultural memory. She has received awards from the Mellon Foundation and the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians. Her research has been supported by the European Union and the Graham Foundation, and she has served in research and professional boards, among them that of the Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians in the US.

Accessibility: Accessibility to Bratti is good. Accessible toilets are on the same floor.