WORKSHOP 'Veiled Cities. Haunted Urban Realities in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries'
James Ensor, De Kathedraal, 1896, artinflanders.be
‘Veiled Cities – Haunted Urban Realities’ puts the spotlight on hidden histories and uncanny cultures of art, architecture and spaces of memory, making the 'Veiled City' a potent site of urban alterity, artistic and social re-imagining. Spanning the globe, papers explore a secret Paris, Bruges and Rome, a haunted Nancy and London, extending to a ludic New Jersey and Mexico City.
We shed light on how and in what ways these and other key veiled cities – Colmar, Cologne, Berlin and Portuguese Dui – have an autonomous existence, their own character, not subsumed into other identities of nation and class. Thus, our core concern is to shed light on how this character is expressed through the city’s own traditions and its interlinked spaces and identities, to discover its hidden narratives, legends, its rituals and their imaginaries in architecture, art, print and images.
Papers illuminate ways in which the city is material, tangible, and the past is made immanent in its stones, in its relics to bring to visibility, neglected identities of the city across Europe and in key global interactions, as richly layered, containing many portals to other worlds – the past, the divine, the uncanny.
Our ambition in this Conference is to question assumptions that the urban is a world of ‘anonymity’ predicated on social and community fragmentation. While lives may be hidden, in rooms and courtyards or glimpsed fleetingly through doorways and windows, we challenge conceptions that such lives may be seen as empty or dislocated to understand the city – and its hidden communities, actors and sites – as a patchwork of secrets, mysteries and possibilities.
Organised by Prof. Juliet Simpson (Coventry University) and Prof. David Hopkin (University of Oxford), in partnership with Maison Française d'Oxford.
Thursday 26th September 2024
9:00- 9:30AM, Registration and welcome by organisers Juliet Simpson and David Hopkin
9:30-11:00AM, 1st morning panel, ‘Uncanny Observers’:
-Vesna Elez, Who is the Old Man in Baudelaire’s “Les Sept Vieillards”?
-Raphaella Serfaty, The Construction of Illegible Urban Space in Honoré Daumier’s Caricatures
11:00-11:30AM, break
11:30-1:00PM, 2nd morning panel, ‘Haunted Cities, Urban Ecstasies’:
-Karl Bell, In Search of Urban Ecstasies: Mystical Desire in Arthur Machen’s London
-Elizabeth Benjamin, The Frosted Veil: Shifting Identities in the Haunted City of Nancy
1:00-2:00PM, lunch break
2:00-3:30PM, 1st afternoon panel, ‘Glimpsed Cities in Parables and Poets’:
-Elisabeth Rodini, Through Giggi’s Front Door: Searching for Rome in Parables and Poetry
-Dagmar Thielen, “Mon Coeur pleure d’autrefois…”: Bruges as a Centre for Cultural Memory and Identity in the Work of Fernand Khnopff and Grégoire Le Roy
3:30-4:00PM, break
4:00-5:30PM, 2nd afternoon panel, ‘Colonial Spirits, Entangled Sites’:
-Nuno Grancho, Diu Must Pray. Public and Private Rituals, Performance and Display
-Kavita Peterson, Filling in the Blanks: Excavating Colonial Berlin
5:30PM onwards, wine reception at the Maison Française d'Oxford
7:15PM, speakers’ dinner at Hertford College (Catte St, Oxford, OX1 3BW)
Friday 27th September 2024
9:30-11:00AM, 1st morning panel, ‘Visionary Spaces’:
-Dominik Lengyel and Catherine Toulouse, The Transitional State of Cologne Cathedral in the 19th Century
-Stacie Vos, 116 Cheyne Walk and 31 Bedford Street: Medieval Enclosures in 20th Century London
11:00-11:30AM, break
11:30-1:00PM, 2nd morning panel, ‘Resonating Cities’:
-Juliet Simpson, Uncanny Pilgrimages of Art - Colmar's Liminal Spaces
-Mira Claire Zadrozny, The Veiled City Observed: The Uncanny Temporality of Mid-19th-Century Paris in Adolphe Martial Potémonts Etchings
1:00-2:00PM, lunch break (speakers only)
2:00-3:3.00PM, 1st afternoon panel, ‘Lucid Cities’:
-Anca I. Lasc, Enchanted Views for Store Windows: The Visual and Material Culture of Prop Making in Turn-of-the Century US
3:00-3.30PM, final remarks by organisers David Hopkin and Juliet Simpson
