Lesvos Broadcast PT1

Our cultural, political and physical geographies proliferate with wounded places: sites of conflict and natural disasters; places marked by layers of turmoil and conquests; impromptu refuge locations that become permanent. “Making home” in these places, seldom a choice, becomes simultaneously a material and symbolic endeavor, involving both design and memory practices.Wounded places are scarred with collective memory of what had happened: they contain markers of the past, which may or may not be legible to those who make home there. Mnemonic activities, whether vernacular (informal) or officially imposed, can either facilitate or constrain the making of home in wounded places. This international symposium “Making Home in Wounded Places: Memory, Design, and the Spatial” is conceived as a polyphonic intervention engaging the realms of design studies, art, and the social sciences. We propose the following questions to inform our discussions: How to make home in wounded places? What is the role of memory tensions in this process? How does the (re)design of wounded places impact their users? How are wounded places appropriated by the politics of memory? What are the strategies for navigating through wounded places — as individuals, as communities, as societies? An international symposium co-sponsored by: MA Design Studies, Parsons School of Art and Design History and Theory, The Global Studies Program at the New School,The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, New School for Social Research