Michal Murawski - Situating Architecture Lecture Series

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Late Putinist Hellenism? Zombie Monumentality, from Palmyra to Moscow

What room is there for grand monuments, ancient ruins and triumphal arches in the architectural 21st century? And what does the current explosion of global fascination with the ruins of ancient Palmyra - following their re-ruination by ISIS and recapture by the Russian-backed Syrian army - tell us about contemporary attitudes to monumentality? This talk is pivoted around Palmyra, but digresses into London, Moscow, Warsaw and elsewhere. It explores some ways in which new, old, disavowed and undead forms of monumentality continue to hold sway over the political-aesthetic imaginations of the post-monumental world.

Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of architecture and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of Russian, Queen Mary, University of London. He was previously Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, and completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2014. He is currently completing his book manuscript, Palace Complex: The Social Life of a Stalinist Skyscraper in Capitalist Warsaw, under contract with Indiana University Press. His new project focuses on architectural aesthetics and municipal politics in Putin-era Moscow.

Situating Architecture lectures are free and open to members of the public on a first come, first seated basis.