Rupture, Continuity and Reassessment of Memory After Major Traumas Affecting The City: The Reconstruction of Skopje and Gibellina and a Scenography of the Uncanny

The research explores post-traumatic architecture and topographies of memory by investigating the reconstructions of Skopje (former Yugoslavia/North-Macedonia) and Gibellina (Sicily) at the intersection of concepts of memory, forms of coping with the incision and reflective artistic practices.

Approaches, attitudes, and modes of architectural reconstruction after earthquakes are examined by how architecture and the image of architecture interfere with the identity creation of diverging memory communities and their interrelation to the sense of place. The newly built cities, the architectures and the artistic interventions are to be regarded as sites and ensembles of memory within the urban cultural topography, whereby reconstructions establish spatial regimes that narrate memory. It is aimed to analyse both architectural interventions and artworks at these sites, as well as their subsequent portrayal in artistic practices. Hence, the overlapping of a double re-production will be detangled: the re-construction of lost urban fabric and lost architecture and the re-production of this reconstruction through artistic practice, such as in films, in photography or in literature.

The analysis is contextualised in the framework of the architectural uncanny, regarded as an inherent momentum of all architectural reconstructions. Beyond established rigid dichotomies, in our understanding even seemingly diverging reconstruction attitudes are two sides of the same coin: Architectural reconstructions are post-traumatic, as they are attempts to regain control and reason after major shocks, strategies for coping with trauma. While complete reconstructions veil the trauma by restoring the state before the rupture and hereby suppress the memory and the images of the trauma, ex-novo reconstructions pursue the trauma to be considered terminated, secluded – again, suppressed – into the past, which is unable the affect the present. In this sense both attitudes are affirmative of the rupture not being able to affect the present.