here - CDH - EPFL

LAUSANNE SUMMER SCHOOL
CACS EPFL
Wednesday 24 July
Memory and Forgetting
09:00 >13:00 Memory and culture
Andrea Riemenschnitter
Navigating between national memory-places, which are encoded as the location of
a community’s political sublime, and the current revaluation of grass-roots’ place
attachment, which defies this ideological encryption, we will explore the cultural
semiotics of places in the PR China. How is China’s cultural production responding
to the assault on the collective forms of memory by first, history, and second, economic
development and the wholesale commodification of the planet? How do we
bridge the gap between globalized cultural consumption and cultural encodings of
the local, including the impact of the global on particular groups and locations? How
is the growing urban-rural divide reflected in the cultural production?
13:00 >14:00 Lunch
14:00 >16:00 Emerging creativities in urban China
Jeroen de Kloet and Andrea Riemenschnitter
How has the discourse of the creative industries travelled to China, with which implication
for cultural production, for the possibility of being critical, and how has
this affected the city? What different creativities are currently emerging, with which
socio-cultural and political implications. Is there any space left for criticality? And
how are these emerging creativities implicated in the global cultural industries,
such as an art world that consists of multiple biennales, and auctions in places like
Hong Kong and Paris?
17:00 >18:30 Optional movie: Fear and Trembling / Stupeurs et Tremblements
(movie by Alain Corneau, France, 2003, 107 min.)
Compulsory reading
Lee, Haiyan. (2012). “The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan: or, How to Enjoy a National Wound”. In Matten M.A.
(ed), Places of Memory in Modern China. History, Politics, and Identity, Chapter 7, Leiden: Brill, pp.
193-229.
Optional reading
Liu, Xinmin. (2009). “In the Face of Developmental Ruins: Place Attachment and Its Ethical Claims”. In
Sheldon, H. Lu and Jiayan Mi (eds), Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge, Chapitre
11, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press Scholarship, pp. 217-248.
Kong, L., Gibson C., Khoo L.-M., and Semple A.L. (2006). “Knowledges of the Creative Economy: Towards a
Relational Geography of Diffusion and Adaptation in Asia.” Asian Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 47, n° 2, pp. 173-94.
18