Workshop organised by John Sutton (Macquarie University, Australia, and Paris IAS)

Presentation

If remembering and feeling, designing and decision-making are situated as well as embodied processes, then cognition can have material and ecological components. Our mental lives may be partly constituted by places – landscapes, built environments, neighbourhoods – and by artifacts. This workshop examines relations between memory, place, and material culture. Our topics include maps and spatial cognition, tools and devices in wayfinding and memory, mental health and the city, difficult places and historically burdened heritage, and spatial disruptions of memory. Speakers draw on evidence from archaeology, architecture, art, neuroscience, performance, philosophy, and sociology, opening up new questions about the nature of bodily and affective orientation as people navigate places and the past together.

Videos of the workshop:

Erik RIETVELD, Landscapes of transformation

Valeria GIARDINO, We are geometric beings: how we use space to think

Sarah GENSBURGER, The memorialization of terrorism in Paris public space, 1974-2023

Mark EDMONDS, Building and belonging: architecture and memory in Neolithic Orkney

Andy CLARK, Predictive processing and the materially entangled mind

Madeleine ACCARAIN, The coldness of the stone and the lightness of the bird: a memorial garden for the victims of November 13, 2015

Paula REAVEY, Spatial markings and memory: mental health and institutional space

Roberto CASATI, The cognitive life of maps

Evelyn TRIBBLE, Affective atmospheres: place and memory on the early modern stage

Mike WHEELER, The invisible and the visible: building, dwelling, and authenticity