Architecture & War: Loss, Heritage & Hope

Imagine a Europe without The Colosseum, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Família. We may be less familiar with the architectural heritage of Ukraine, from the modernist to the medieval, but it is irreplaceable and its future is presently uncertain.

Symbolic acts of war over centuries have damaged or completely destroyed places of civic pride & cultural meaning. Protection of human life is paramount but we also face the interrelated issue of losing an individual & collective sense of heritage, identity & humanity.

During times of adversity, how do we continue to engage, preserve cultural heritage, & tell stories of loss, hope and regeneration?

In this event we look to how sites & objects of Europe’s cultural heritage have vanished, are threatened – or, in some cases have been reconstructed. We take the long view on why destroying cultural heritage is an attack on humanity’s past & present.

We must safeguard this cultural heritage as a testimony of the past but also as a vector of peace for the future.

Unesco Director-General Audrey Azoulay

Ticket sales include a £5 donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS:

Owen Hatherley writes on culture and politics for various publications. He is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism (Zer0, 2009) Landscapes of Communism (Penguin, 2015) and Red Metropolis (Repeater, 2020). His most recent books are a collection of essays, Clean Living Under Difficult Circumstances (Verso 2021), and Modern Buildings in Britain: A Gazetteer (Penguin, 2022). He is a commissioning editor at Jacobin, the editor of The Alternative Guide to the London Boroughs (Open House, 2020), and the culture editor of Tribune.

Myroslava Hartmond is a British Ukrainian writer, curator, and creative consultant. Having graduated from the University of Oxford in 2014, she ran the Triptych gallery in Kyiv for 6 years. After 2 years in lockdown, 10 days of war, and 5 days on the road, she returned to Oxford again. Myroslava curates exhibitions on topics as diverse as Lenin’s cult of personality, Norwegian black metal, and traces of Ukraine’s Jewish heritage, and brought the first HR Giger retrospective to Ukraine in 2019. She has written on soft power, Soviet heritage, and various cultural topics, and co-hosts the Worst Date Movies Ever podcast.

Programmed in partnership with Arnolfini

Image: Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine