Response by Ziad Jamaleddine

Emre Arolat and Zeynep Arolat are co-founders of the Istanbul- and New York-based Emre Arolat Architecture. They will reflect on the firm’s attempt to produce an architectural language that belongs to a specific place while simultaneously resonating with its time, including their recently inaugurated Museum Hotel Antakya—a hotel hovering over archeological remnants.

Columbia GSAPP faculty will present their work exhibited at design exhibitions around the world in 2019-20 followed by a discussion moderated by Andrés Jaque. The event will bring together some of the most relevant voices curating and contributing to biennales now to inspect the challenges and potential of biennales now.

Presentations by Laura Kurgan ‘88 MArch; Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon; Hilary Sample; Ziad Jamaleddine; Mark Wasiuta and Farzin Lotfi-Jam '12 MSAAD; Christopher Leong and Dominic Leong '03 MSAAD; Felicity Scott; Ignacio G. Galán; and Nikolaus Hirsch.

Cultural heritage and the emotions of nostalgia are closely entangled and both have become weaponised in populist national debates. From the nostalgic reflection explicit in the ‘make America great again’ election slogan, to the yearning for an empire long gone that underlies Brexit and the vilification and incarceration of migrants and refuges, heritage has, in some measure, been implicated.

This talk will theorise both the affective qualities of heritage and the processes through which heritage becomes a resource of political power.

Laurajane Smith is professor and director of the Centre of Heritage and Museum Studies, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, the Australian National University.