A Photographic Approach to a Vanishing Architecture

Guest production

The (De)visualization of Robin Hood Gardens Social Housing in London: Annette Kisling‘s Photographic Approach to a Vanishing Architecture.

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In her photographic work, Annette Kisling deals with how architecture not only shapes planned spaces, but also determines them. She focuses on the visible fronts that buildings turn towards the outside world.
In 2015, it was decided that Robin Hood Gardens, a large housing development in London, would be demolished. Designed in the early 1970s by Alison and Peter Smithson, Robin Hood Gardens was an innovative and prestigious social housing project at the time. Numerous efforts to preserve and redevelop this unique housing complex failed. The planning and execution of a new development took place in a very short time.

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Since 2015, Annette Kisling has been visiting Robin Hood Gardens. She has photographically recorded the continuous transformation of the housing complex and the gradual disappearance of various sections. Each visit confronts the photographer with a changed situation that is part of the process that has been transforming the site. Through her images, she aims to make her view of the Smithsons' remarkable architecture and the specifics of the planning process comprehensible. At the same time, her work in recent years has been shaped by the demolition and disappearance of one of the two large residential buildings that still faced each other when she first began working on Robin Hood Gardens.
As of 2023, newly constructed buildings, ready for new residents, have occupied the location of one of the demolished apartment complexes from the 1970s. Opposite the new buildings, the still preserved but vacant second residential complex from the 1970s remains. A very special situation, an unusual counterpart.

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How does architecture work as a medium? How does photography as a medium constitute meaning? What does architecture represent, and how can photographs represent architecture? How does a photographer decide what is not visibly present but implicit in the image? How are photographs shown and received? How do different manners of reception reflect on the themes touched upon and what do they say about the contexts in which architecture and photography are viewed and interpreted?
These and other questions will be addressed during this event. We are happy to announce that Annette Kisling will first present her photographic work Robin Hood Gardens and will subsequently engage in conversation with the panelists. The latter will raise questions and contemplate approaches from the perspectives of curation and scholarly engagement with photography as well as investigate the subject of photography’s presentation from the vantage points of cultural studies and cultural anthropology.

Annette Kisling lives in Berlin and Leipzig. She studied at the art academies in Kassel, Offenbach and Hamburg. This was followed by longer working stays in Zurich, Rotterdam, Paris, Marfa, Venice, Bangalore, Ahmedabad. Since 2009 Annette Kisling is professor for photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. In photographic series Annette Kisling describes her experiences with the architecture that surrounds her. One focus is the modernism of the 20th century. In the case of the series Robin Hood Gardens, she deals with the demolition of the eponymous social housing complex of the 1970s and the unmistakable structural redefinition of the site in the 2020s.

A Photographic Approach to a Vanishing Architecture

Image: (c) Annette Kisling Section Urbanity & Space

Panel Participants

A Photographic Approach to a Vanishing Architecture

A Photographic Approach to a Vanishing Architecture. Panelists: Judith Laister, Klaus Rieser, Margit Peterfy, Christina Töpfer. Chair: Nassim Balestrini

Judith Laister is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Graz. She holds degrees in European Ethnology, Art History, and Art Education. In addition to teaching and researching at the university, she collaborates with secondary schools and art-related educational contexts, and she is actively involved in projects and associations focused on the politics of arts and culture. Her research areas include urban anthropology, aesthetic and visual anthropology, relations between art and scholarship, art in the public realm, participatory and relational art, critique of representation, and anthropology in the Anthropocene.

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Margit Peterfy teaches U.S. literature and culture at the Department of English at Heidelberg University and at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. At the same time, she is Principal Investigator and supervisor of doctoral theses in the Research Training Group "Authority and Trust in American Culture, Society, History, and Politics," which is funded by the German Research Foundation. Her specialization within the college is on "The Urban Dimension of Authority and Trust." In this context, she is currently working on a monograph on the representation of "trust" in U.S. urban literature. Her other research interests, primarily historically oriented, range from American poetry to performative and intermedial aspects in literature.

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Christina Töpfer is an editor, author and cultural worker with a background in American Studies, Communication and Media Studies and Visual Studies. Since 2018, she has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Camera Austria International, for which she worked as an editor from 2013. Until 2017, she also worked for the Graz Museum, where she was responsible for the museum's publishing activities and co-curated various exhibitions on contemporary urban themes. She is a co-founder of Street Cinema Graz, which has been regularly hosting short film walks in public spaces since 2013, sometimes in cooperation with other cultural institutions.

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Klaus Rieser is ao. Univ.-Prof. for American Studies at the University of Graz, where he researches and teaches in the field of cultural studies and visual cultures. He directed the Institute for American Studies from 2007 to 2013 and from 2016 to 2017. His research areas include U.S. film, representations of family, social gender (masculinity) and ethnicity, and visual cultural studies. His books have focused on migration in film, experimental films, and masculinity in film. Several articles and co-edited books address iconic figures and cultural contact spaces, among other topics. He is co-editor of the book series "American Studies in Austria" and the open access journal JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, which began publication in 2019.

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Presenter:
Annette Kisling lives in Berlin and Leipzig. She studied at the art academies in Kassel, Offenbach and Hamburg. This was followed by longer working stays in Zurich, Rotterdam, Paris, Marfa, Venice, Bangalore, Ahmedabad. Since 2009 Annette Kisling is professor for photography at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. In photographic series Annette Kisling describes her experiences with the architecture that surrounds her. One focus is the modernism of the 20th century. In the case of the series Robin Hood Gardens, she deals with the demolition of the eponymous social housing complex of the 1970s and the unmistakable structural redefinition of the site in the 2020s.

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Panel chair:
Nassim Balestrini is Professor of American Studies and Intermediality and heads both the Institute for American Studies and the Center for Intermediality at the University of Graz. Her research interests are in American literature and culture from the 18th century to the present. She enjoys working on topics that deal with the comparative investigation of different media, genres, cultures, and languages and which lend themselves well to asking questions about crossing various types of aesthetic and semiotic boundaries. Her research in recent years has been informed by her engagement with dramatic works on climate change, contemporary poetry by non-white and bi-cultural writers, hip-hop lyricists of indigenous descent, and intermediality as a theoretical and methodological approach. The dialogue between artists and scholars is especially close to her heart.