Opening Address
Wednesday 29 November - 9:00
Building 9, Room A1
Where Difficult Stories Live
- Elena Isayev
University of Exeter
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What makes a site – a collection of streets, buildings, trees, landscapes – become place. Some are sought out, others avoided. Every place is a multiplicity of rhythms that pulse across various time scales: historically, generationally, annually, weekly and through daily habits. Festivals, markets, seasonal picnics, encounters with neighbours, or children transforming a street into a hockey rink or another galaxy – all make for rich tapestries within which to live. The weaving together of rhythms allow stories to build and environments to take on moods and character. In moments of conflict, of leavings, absence and destruction of structures and lives, rhythms too are disrupted and silenced. A kind of de-placement takes hold – making what was once a place into site – no longer familiar or recognisable. How can stories re-emerge and intertwine with those beyond the present moment of rupture? What tools exist for memorializing difficult pasts, which prevent overwriting and erasure, but allow for reconciliation alongside voluntary overcoming and forgetting? By way of response, we turn to artists who have confronted such sites through architecture, walking, performance, storytelling in paint, wood and script – in Palestine, Lenapehokink, Sheffield, Ukraine and among the Blackfoot. They do not seek to solve or find answer, but ways of moving beyond meaning, back into place.
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Elena Isayev is a historian and archaeologist focusing on migration, hospitality, and displacement. Key writings include Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy, “Between hospitality and asylum,” for the Red Cross, and Displacement and the Humanities, co-edited with Evan Jewell. She works with colleagues in Palestine, under the banners of Campus in Camps, and Decolonising Architecture, and as co-founder of Al Maeisha, to understand and move beyond the cracks in the nation-state regime, exposing the role of culture, heritage and mobility. A member of UNDRR/ICCROM expert panel on the role of traditional knowledge systems in disaster risk reduction, Elena’s current collaborations include Knowledges in Transit, with Staffan Müller-Wille, and The Tricks of Belonging, with Paul Magee, and she is leading the team of Imagining Futures through Un/Archived Pasts (AHRC/UKRI). She teaches on themes in ancient history, material culture and mobilities at the University of Exeter (UK), as Professor of Ancient History and Place.