Vortrag von Aleksandra Barjaktarevic

In the organizer's words:

"Stockpiling demolition" - fragility of architecture, history and memories

In Germany, around 14,000 buildings are demolished every year. While this drastic intervention in the materiality of residential buildings is usually associated with the idea of new construction and gentrification processes in large cities, the demolition of representative buildings is also a powerful political signal. It marks the change of styles, ideas, history and memories and goes hand in hand with the destruction of material substance. The lecture deals with the fragility of architecture and uses visual sociology to discuss the possibility of understanding emptiness as politically motivated design - an emptiness that competes with history and memories in material, stylistic and ideational terms.

Aleksandra Barjaktarević is a sociologist and art historian specializing in classical and contemporary sociological theories, cultural sociology, sociology of the arts and architecture, with a focus on artistic methods of social research. She has been working as an academic assistant at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology in Heidelberg since 2021 and has been a Research Affiliate at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University since August 2024. Her current PhD project focuses on the interpretation and localization of Max Weber's unwritten theory of the arts. Her most recent publication deals with the institutional analysis of documenta. In her teaching work, she frequently collaborates with art institutions, festivals and artists. Together with Berlin rapper PTK and photographer Zara Pfeifer, she was awarded the prize for the most innovative teaching achievement for this interdisciplinary collaboration.