'Visualising Palimpsestic Memories of the Berlin Rosenstrasse Protest (1943) through the Medium of Photography', 25 February 2021
78th Anniversary Talk by Dr Hilary Potter, Teaching Fellow in German (Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Royal Holloway) and author of Remembering Rosenstrasse: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Germany (2018), followed by a Q+A with Dr Simone Gigliotti, Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies in the Department of History.
On 27 February 1943 thousands of German Jews were arrested and detained across Berlin including at the makeshift detention centre on Rosenstrasse, in the heart of the German capital. The men, women and children detained there were either married to non-Jewish Germans or were the children of intermarried parents. Over the course of that week a protest developed in which the spouses, predominantly wives, gathered to be close to their loved ones, and to demonstrate against their arrest and feared deportation. The protest ebbed and flowed over the course of the week. Unlike the majority of German Jews arrested at this time, almost all of the individuals detained in Rosenstrasse were released within seven days, with a lesser number released over a period of up to six weeks. The events of that week have become known as the Rosenstrasse Protest and have been remembered, forgotten and re-remembered in Germany over the decades since. Memories of the protest continue to be shaped and this talk takes the 78th anniversary as an occasion to look back over the history of the street, the events, the multiple ways in which they have been remembered, together with aspects that have been forgotten. This talk, followed by a Q&A, draws on the idea of the urban palimpsest (Andreas Huyssen) by using a mixture of archive photographs together with Hilary's own photographs of the street and its memorials and those of professional photographer Mark Epstein (Edge Hill University).
On November 8, Dr Xavier Bray, Director of the Wallace Collection, London, conducted a talk entitled : 'To change or not to change the Wallace Collection' (in association with the ' Making Space for Art' HARI project).
On 2 May, renowned photographer John Perivolaris and James Kent, a specialist in Cuban visual cultures, discussed the extraordinary iconic power and cultural legacy of Fidel Castro.
On 9 May, Dr Ben Thomas, Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Kent, discussed the exhibition of Raphael: The Drawings at the Ashmolean Museum in 2017, which shifted the ground from the linear and teleological consideration of drawings in reaction to paintings to an expolration of the gestural act of drawing and of the values inherent to disegno.
Dr Frances Guerin (Film Studies, University of Kent) in conversation with Prof. Ahuvia Kahane (Royal Holloway) explored the myriad tensions and provocations of Twombly’s painting, presenting differing approaches that offer new perspectives on the body of work.
The 2020 David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture by Prof Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London) at Royal Holloway, University of London, 10 November 2020.
This tenth anniversary David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture entitled ‘AI, Photography and I’ was delivered by Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was introduced by Prof Giuliana Pieri (Head of School of Humanities, RHUL) and the Vote of Thanks was offered by Dr Olga Goriunova (Dept of Media Arts, RHUL).
Writer, lecturer, artist and curator, Prof Zylinska is the author of (among others) Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2014), Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017), The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), and AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020).
On November 12 Professor Maria Delgado (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) delivered the David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture entitled ‘Memory, politics, performance and justice: the Garzón and la manada (the wolfpack) cases’ in the Picture Gallery.
On November 19 Professor Catherine Grant (Birkbeck, University of London) delivered the David Vilaseca Memorial Lecture entitled ‘Screen studies as device?: Working through the video essay’ in the Picture Gallery.
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