Department Research Seminar - Tuesday 1 November

Department of History

Event details

Tuesday 1 November 2022
4:15pm
The Diamond, Workroom 1, The Diamond, The University of Sheffield, 32 Leavygreave Road, Sheffield, S3 7RD

Description

You are warmly invited to our department research seminar: 

Tuesday 1 November, 16:15

'Urban Exploration, or 'Urbex', of the former GDR - or: How can the ruins speak?'

Speaker: Nicolas Offenstadt (University of Paris 1)

"The starting point of my research on the former GDR is the notion of the 'gaze'. Walking through the urban landscape of East Germany I was struck by a kind of absence-presence of this socialist past. I transformed this impression into an academic inquiry into the material traces of the GDR. In doing so, I used among other more classical approaches, that of Urban Exploration (Urbex), that is the in-depth visit of abandoned or « lost » places which are so numerous in East Germany: plants, hospitals, Culture Houses (Kulturhaus), military barracks. The talk will explore the results of an Urban Exploration of the GDR and their relevance for the history and memory of this experiment in state socialism."

All welcome!

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