12th of November at 17:00 Tbilisi time the project “Tbilisi as an Urban Assemblage” (Funded by the Rustaveli Foundation) and Doctoral Program of Anthropology invite to a talk by Francisco Martínez, Associate Professor, Tallin University.
Title: „Making Room for the Future? Endurance through the Demolition of Soviet Housing in Eastern Estonia“.
In this talk, I will discuss the pilot project initiated by the Estonian state to scale down the infrastructures and real estate of Kohtla-Järve, a town developed in relation to intensive mining and industrial activity. The pilot project assumes that the sacrifice of half-empty apartment buildings may positively transform the urban built environment and increase the value of what is left standing, thus changing the dwellers’ everyday lives and how the town is perceived. Different stakeholders present demolition as an experimental modality of urban planning and as political action, prototyping policy models geared towards endurance. Planning and financial efforts thus are no longer oriented towards expanding the town, but rather to reach socio-material stability in a context of negative capability. Demolition can, therefore, be considered as an activity that creates order and makes governance tangible and visible. I also investigate the epistemic dimensions of the half-empty phenomenon and how it affects the perception of this town (including fears of a potential loss of urbanity), as well as how the demolition plans are received by the local population (presenting Kohtla-Järve as a social laboratory).
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Currently, he works as Associate Professor at Tallinn University and convenes the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (EASA Network). Francisco has published two monographs – Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects (UCL Press, 2021) and Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018). He has also edited several books, includingPeripheral Methodologies (Routledge, 2021); Politics of Recuperation in Post-Crisis Portugal (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019), He has also curated different exhibitions – including ‘Objects of Attention’ (Estonian Museum of Applied Art & Design, 2019), and ‘Life in Decline’ (Estonian Mining Museum, 2021).
Format: Online Zoom, on the permanent link of research seminars or contact ketevan_gurchiani@iliauni.edu.ge