Dear SSJ members,

Greetings,
 
Polis Architecture Institute is pleased to invite you to participate in our third talk of a lecture series titled "Active Agents: Toward a Critical Archaeology of the Architecture Discipline." This initiative aims to facilitate a dialogue in the form of a roundtable discussion between architecture and other related disciplines. This talk series operates under the De-Discipline Program in collaboration with Waseda University (Keigo Kobayashi Lab) and Happy Hours (Institute of Science Tokyo) as a critical historiographical inquiry into the structural foundations of the architectural discipline.

TALK INFORMATION:

DESCRIPTION:
My current research project investigates the complicated encounters of Japanese and German colonialisms from the angle of architects, artists, and ethnologists, with a view to pave the way for future projects on other 'layered' colonialisms. Despite the affluent previous research on historical exchanges between Japan and the 'West,' their engagements in the broader contexts that exceeded each country's current geographical and political borders have been understudied. My case studies observe and question the entangled discourses of colonialism that were embedded and represented in architecture and living culture. Focusing on each actor's social background, physical moves, access to various media, and interactions with other colonisers and often-silenced Indigenous voices, I reveal that their engagements not only shaped the colonies materially but also created specific power structures in multiple directions. At this talk series, I would like to present one of the case studies and report from my fieldwork in Palau I visited this April. Through this talk, I invite the audience to the discussion of how the architects, artists, and ethnologists have been passively involved in and actively committed to the production of social, cultural, and political discourses, and how the current members of the architectural communities could bring in various voices of different volumes into our projects.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
Moe Omiya is an academic assistant and PhD candidate at Global History Chair at the University of Zurich. Growing up in Tokyo and Berlin, she did her undergraduate studies at the University of Tokyo (architectural theory and German studies) and at Bauhaus-University (architecture) in Weimar, Germany. Along with her B.A. dissertation on early Bauhaus and its experimental house, she translated a German book Was ist das Bauhaus? into Japanese, becoming one of the publisher's best-sellers in 2019. She received her master's degree from the University of Oxford, UK, in history of art and visual culture, with a dissertation on Isokon Flats in London.

We look forward to your participation.

Thank you.