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INCA
Institute for Neo-Connotative Action, Detroit
750 Delaware St, Detroit, MI
Visiting Scholar Lecture Series
Curated by Hannah Kelley, Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.
Sunday, 29 September 2013 at 7pm
With Jochen Becker, Amir Husak and Kimberley Kinder. Introduced by Hannah Kelley.
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Jochen Becker (Berlin) works as an author, lecturer and curator. He is a founding member of metroZones ‚ Center for Urban Affairs. He has (co)edited several books, e.g. bignes? (2001); Kabul/Teheran 1979ff (2006); and Urban Prayers (2011), and (co)curated exhibitions such as the Urban Cultures of Global Prayers (2012/13, nGbK Berlin, Camera Austria, Graz) and Self Made Urbanism Rome (2013, nGbK Berlin, Teatro Valle Occupato Rome). He is artistic director of the Global Prayers project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and starts as director of the Art & Architecture program at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm in 2014.
Jochen Becker's talk will focus on his latest curatorial project "S.M.U.R. : Self Made Urbanism Rome". S.M.U.R. is an exhibition exploring the Via Casilina, an arterial road in Rome running south-east from the central Porta Maggiore to the city’s borders and beyond. The area fascinated Romantic artists who viewed this urban-rural landscape as complementing the historical and cultural densification with classical temples and inner city palazzi. The artists taking part in the S.M.U.R. project apply contemporary methods to investigate this historical terrain. In this process, they are continuing art history in a new way. In an exchange with scholars and city activists, they explore the self-built and self-organised city expanding here over the last hundred years.
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Amir Husak is a filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He moved around (a lot) before taking up residence in New York in 2006. The cross-cultural experiences triggered his interest in media making as means of overcoming communication barriers and other borders, real or imagined. Combining documentary, essay and experimental techniques, Husak's work explores documentary as social practice in emergent media technologies. His works have been shown at such diverse places as *South by Southwest* (US), *Sundance Film Festival* (US), *Sarajevo Film Festival* (Bosnia & Herzegovina), *Stadtmuseum Graz* (Austria), *P.O.V./PBS* (US), *Big Sky Documentary Film Festival *(US),* TV Cultura* (Brazil), and *Full Frame Film Festival *(US). He currently teaches as part-time faculty in the Media Studies & Film department at The New School in New York.
Amir Husak will speak about the Kreuzberg "Durchmischung" Misnomer: The Crisis and the Right to the City, a multimodal inquiry into community activism and the use of public space by migrants in Berlin, Germany. More specifically, the project examines the present housing crisis in the neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. As localities that recently turned into a hotbed of controversial investment strategies in the public housing market, both Kreuzberg and Neukölln are experiencing a steady rise in property prices. Although a great number of residents affected by these upheavals are foreign-born, the present disputes go beyond the question of migration and/or notions of cultural diversity in Germany; the situation raises grave concerns regarding urban policy, merits of citizenship and the right to the city.
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Kimberley Kinder is a postdoctoral fellow with the Michigan Society of Fellows. She holds a joint appointment in Urban & Regional Planning and Natural Resources & Environment. Beginning in 2014, she will be joining the planning department full time as the new Assistant Professor of Urban Studies. Kim is an urban political geographer with graduate degrees from Oxford (2005) and Berkeley (2011).
Kimberley Kinder will talk about her current research in Detroit that explores the household-scale practices residents employ to manage the challenges of living with government and market disinvestment. This work builds on Kim's previous work on social and spatial interconnections in Amsterdam and Pittsburgh, as well as on her previous architectural experience in waterfront restoration, community investment, historic preservation, and sustainable development.
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Co-curated and introduced by Hannah Kelley
Hannah "Hank" Kelley is a city planner based in Detroit. She works in the Community and Economic Development Department in Ferndale, Michigan, and previously worked at the Detroit Department of Transportation and Michigan
Suburbs Alliance. She is a Master of Urban Planning candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Her planning interests include socially just revitalization, public transportation systems, zoning/regulatory reform, free/libre/open source initiatives and community led research.
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Next INCA visiting scholar will be Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, in November 2013
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