[ecrea] 'Big Ruins' Conference – Manchester, May 14

CIDRAL CONFERENCE: 'Big Ruins: The Aesthetics and Politics of Supersized Decay'

14 May, 2014

We are pleased to announce that due to high demand for the 'Big Ruins' conference in Manchester, we have increased capacity and released a limited number of  additional places for attendees. If you previously missed out, now is your chance to grab a ticket!

Tickets are free for all attendees, and available via Eventbrite:http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/big-ruins-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-supersized-decay-tickets-10733583437?aff=eorg

Event details:

As global capitalism intensifies its hold on the planet, so its ruins are scaling up in size: from vast junkyards of jumbo-jets in Nevada to entire empty cities in China waiting to be inhabited. Meanwhile the urban ruins of the Cold War era continue to resist appropriation, whether because of their toxicity, ideological misplacedness, or as a consequence of intractable ethnic conflicts. Coupled with a recent plethora of (post)apocalyptic visions of ruined cities in cinema and computer games, the links between real and imagined ruination are becoming increasingly blurred. If we are to imagine large-scales sites of decay, how might their possible ruin be represented in a way that helps us adequately respond to that very possibility?

This event will address that question by focusing on the wider significance of big ruins in an age of global capitalism. Drawing from a wide range of sites - both real and imagined - this conference aims to create a dialogue between big ruins and the culturally-prescient theme of the imagination of disaster and to open up an emancipatory space that, following Slavoj Žižek, accepts the universal inevitability of ruin in order to break its ideological grasp and thus to suggest liberating alternatives.

Confirmed speakers include:

Keynote - Tim Edensor: ‘Ruins are everywhere’
Luke Bennett: ‘The ruins of ruins’
Michael Crang: 'Mired but alive': the aesthetic taming of toxicity
Mark Sanderson: ‘Derelict utopias’
Matthew Philpotts: ‘Rocket-fuelled ruin: Re-territorialising the traces of German dictatorship’
Emma Fraser: ‘Reading the ruins of Detroit: poetic, dialectical and phenomenological approaches’
Clare O’Dowd: ‘Gregor Schneider and the ghost towns’
Paul Dobraszczyk: ‘40 years later: ruin gazing in Varosha’
Camilla Røstvik: ‘Like sleeping dragons: an exploration of the ruins of CERN’
Carl Lavery&  Lee Hassall: ‘Return to Battleship Island: Future of Ruins’
William Viney: ‘Futures in ruin’

All welcome. Tickets for the conference can be booked via Eventbrite:http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/big-ruins-the-aesthetics-and-politics-of-supersized-decay-tickets-10733583437?aff=eorg

Other upcoming ruin-related events from CIDRAL are listed on the 2014 programme:http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/cidral/events/


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