ICS Seminar Series

Event Name
ICS Seminar Series
Date
30 May 2019
Time
11:30 am - 01:00 pm
Location
Parramatta Campus

Address (Room): EB.G.02, Parramatta South Campus, Western Sydney University

Description

Abstract When the young Paul Virilio stepped onto his first beach on the Normandy coast in 1945 he began a long term fascination with the sea, the littoral zone, and the system of WWII coastal bunkers that formed German’s Atlantikwall. Collapsed bunkers became the inspiration for an attempt, through his ‘oblique’ architecture, to make us conscious of the way our lives are ruled by the conventional architecture of horizontality and to provide a way of escaping it. Coastal reclamations can seem like a tide of land pushing out into the sea, as if we were experiencing a period of marine contraction rather than its opposite. The seawalls of our reclamations, like those WWII bunkers, draw an optimistic line in the sand against incursion from/of the sea. In presenting several different ways of viewing coastal reclamations, using examples from different times and places, my object is to help us know these entities better and to identify lines of escape. Biography Denis Byrne is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Among others things, his work blends archaeology, fictocritical writing, a concern with the ruins of modernity and a taste for marginal and transitional spaces. His publications include Surface Collection (Rowman & Littlefield 2007) and Counterheritage (Routledge 2014).

Speakers: Associate Professor Denis Byrne

Web page: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/events/seminars/ics_seminar_series

Contact
Name: Yinghua Yu

18277946@student.westernsydney.edu.au

Phone: 0402 528 006

School / Department: Institute for Culture and Society