VISITING SCHOLAR SERIES

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INCA Institute for Neo-Connotative Action,
Detroit 750 Delaware St, Detroit, MI , 48202
Curated by Hank Kelley, Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.

29 SEPTEMBER 2013

With Jochen Becker and Amir Husak. Introduced by Hank Kelley.

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Jochen Becker (Berlin) works as an author, lecturer and curator. He is a founding member of metroZones ‚ Center for Urban Affairs. He has (co)edited several books, e.g. bignes? (2001); Kabul/Teheran 1979ff (2006); and Urban Prayers (2011), and (co)curated exhibitions such as the Urban Cultures of Global Prayers (2012/13, nGbK Berlin, Camera Austria, Graz) and Self Made Urbanism Rome (2013, nGbK Berlin, Teatro Valle Occupato Rome). He is artistic director of the Global Prayers project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and starts as director of the Art & Architecture program at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm in 2014.

Jochen Becker’s talk will focus on his latest curatorial project “S.M.U.R. : Self Made Urbanism Rome”. S.M.U.R. is an exhibition exploring the Via Casilina, an arterial road in Rome running south-east from the central Porta Maggiore to the city‚ borders and beyond. The area fascinated Romantic artists who viewed this urban-rural landscape as complementing the historical and cultural densification with classical temples and inner city palazzi. The artists taking part in the S.M.U.R. project apply contemporary methods to investigate this historical terrain. In this process, they are continuing art history in a new way. In an exchange with scholars and city activists, they explore the self-built and self-organised city expanding here over the last hundred years.

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Amir Husak is a filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He moved around (a lot) before taking up residence in New York in 2006. The cross-cultural experiences triggered his interest in media making as means of overcoming communication barriers and other borders, real or imagined. Combining documentary, essay and experimental techniques, Husak’s work explores documentary as social practice in emergent media technologies. His works have been shown at such diverse places as *South by Southwest* (US), *Sundance Film Festival* (US), *Sarajevo Film Festival* (Bosnia & Herzegovina), *Stadtmuseum Graz* (Austria), *P.O.V./PBS* (US), *Big Sky Documentary Film Festival *(US),* TV Cultura* (Brazil), and *Full Frame Film Festival *(US). He currently teaches as part-time faculty in the Media Studies & Film department at The New School in New York.

Amir Husak will speak about the Kreuzberg “Durchmischung” Misnomer: The Crisis and the Right to the City, a multimodal inquiry into community activism and the use of public space by migrants in Berlin, Germany. More specifically, the project examines the present housing crisis in the neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. As localities that recently turned into a hotbed of controversial investment strategies in the public housing market, both Kreuzberg and Neukölln are experiencing a steady rise in property prices. Although a great number of residents affected by these upheavals are foreign-born, the present disputes go beyond the question of migration and/or notions of cultural diversity in Germany; the situation raises grave concerns regarding urban policy, merits of citizenship and the right to the city.

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Co-curated and introduced by Hank Kelley

Hank Kelley is a city planner living in Detroit. They work in the Community and Economic Development Department in Ferndale, Michigan, and previously worked at the Detroit Department of Transportation and Michigan Suburbs Alliance. They earned a Master of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Their planning interests include socially just revitalization, public transportation systems, zoning/regulatory reform, free/libre/open source initiatives and community led research.

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