Keynote: Ines Weizman

Video Documentation

Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years

Photomontage Gropius chair in the director’s office at the Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar, 1924 with Photogrammetrie of the chair.
Courtesy Ines Weizman, 2019.

In this keynote talk, architect and theorist Ines Weizman reflects on the history of the Bauhaus and the complex trajectories of Bauhaus migration — its architects, artists, documents, objects, and of course its ideas — have splintered across a fragmented world.

The talk is framed by two material concepts: dust and data. While dust foregrounds new approaches to the material analysis of objects and ruins, data designates new approaches to managing the enormous amount of information accumulated about the subject over the years.

Weizman’s latest edited book with the same title collects essays that unearth new details about the history of the school and do so from unprecedented viewpoints: uncovering the perspective of marginalized, dislocated, silenced, dispersed voices. These include the voices of queer architects, of the (too) few women practitioners, of those in the global South who studied at the Bauhaus or were influenced by its ideas, and the perception of the school beyond the Iron Curtain of the Cold War.

Introduced and moderated by Didem Ekici.

Ines Weizman is director of the Bauhaus Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and Planning and a professor of architectural theory at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She is founding director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA). In 2014, her edited book Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence was published by Routledge. The book Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster, co-written with Eyal Weizman, was published in the same year by Strelka Press. Her latest book Dust & Data. Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years will be published in 2019 with Spector Books. The installation ‘Repeat Yourself': Loos, Law and the Culture of the Copy was shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, and in 2013 as solo-shows in the Architecture Centre Vienna and the Buell Architecture Gallery at Columbia University, New York. Earlier research and exhibition projects include Celltexts. In 2019 she curated the exhibition The Matter of Data: Tracing the Materiality of ‘Bauhaus Modernism’ at the Bauhaus-Museum Weimar and the Liebling House in Tel Aviv.

Didem Ekici is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham. She received her PhD in United States from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and has held research fellowships from The Wellcome Trust, The German Academic Exchange Service, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, and The University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. She is the co-editor of Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body (Routledge, 2017) as well as the author of numerous articles on modern architecture, the healthy body culture, hygiene, asceticism, orientalism, and urban memory in the German speaking world. She is currently working on a book manuscript The Body, Clothing, and Dwelling.

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