0
ARCH+ news

Right Wing (Media) Spaces

December 6 2019, 7:30 PM, Doors at 7 PM
NAVEL, 1611 S Hope Street, Los Angeles, CA 90015

The United States as well as Europe have seen a return of right-wing tendencies in the political landscape. And this rise of a (new) political right has in turn infected our physical and digital landscapes as well. Philosopher and Thomas Mann Fellow Armen Avanessian invites to an evening of comparative spatial and political investigation: how do buildings, structures and monuments become sites for a political struggle for meaning, myth and hegemony? How did the ‘hinterland’ morph into an ideological fringe? Are new technologies neutral tools, equally wielded on both sides of the aisle, or are they themselves a cause for populism and polarization? Join Avanessian and his guests on December 6, when they will be hot on the heels of political extremists in Europe, the US, and online.

Stephan Trüby (Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture, Stuttgart) will present his research from the European context. The results of the project have been collected in the Rechte Räume edition of the Berlin-based ARCH+ magazine and aim to fundamentally re-politicize architectural discourse: “right-wing spaces” aren’t discussed with regard to “good” or “bad” architecture but with a view towards how politics claims spaces.

After his presentation, Armen Avanessian’s American guests are invited to take the conversation into the local context. Safiya Umoja Noble (UCLA) will discuss right-wing space creation and infrastructure online, as well as the inherent prejudices, injustices and racism of algorithmic architecture. Jason Luger (UC Berkeley) will take a look at the American urban and regional fringe and the suburbanization of the right.

With support from the Thomas Mann House

For further information, please visit navel.la

–––––

Armen Avanessian studied philosophy and political science in Vienna and Paris. He has taught at the Freie Universität Berlin, Columbia University, Yale University as well as various art academies in Europe and the US. In Berlin, Avanessian is the editor at large at Merve Verlag and in charge of the theory program at the internationally acclaimed theatre Volksbühne.

Jason Luger is an urban geographer and lecturer in the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. His research focuses on urban space: the politics of space, the networks of space, and the interface between digital space and place. In particular, he is interested in authoritarian urban space, offline and online.

Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at UCLA in Information Studies and the Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press).

Stephan Trüby is a professor and director of the Institute for Architecture and Cultural Theory (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart. His publications include Exit-Architecture. Design between War and Peace (2008), Germania, Venezia. The German Entries to the Venice Architecture Biennale since 1991 (2016, with Verena Hartbaum) and History of the Corridor (2018). He is a permanent contributor to the journal ARCH+.navel.la