In May, Assistant Professor Andrew Herscher co-directed a symposium, “Cultural Politics of Preservation,” in Prishtina, Kosovo. The symposium, sponsored by Columbia University, consisted of an international group of historians, theoreticians and artists concerned with the conceptualization of historic preservation in terms of contemporary political issues. He also held a public conversation on memorialization and subjugated knowledge with the Omarska Working Group at the Center for Cultural Decontamination in Belgrade, Serbia. The Omarska Working Group is a protagonist in the ongoing project to design a memorial at the site of the Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia, which returned to its pre-war status as part of an active mining complex.
In June, Herscher will give talks on Kosovo’s post-conflict reconstruction at the conference, “Cities in Conflict,” at the Institute for Contemporary Arts hosted by Unit for Global Justice at Goldsmiths, University of London, and on counter-memory in post-Yugoslavia, also hosted by the Unit for Global Justice at Goldsmiths. For more on the conference, visit the Goldsmiths Center for Urban and Community Research website.