Recording of the talk available at: https://youtu.be/HMgH2ewE4Uo

 

Talk description:
The aim of this talk is to propose an aesthetic analysis of the collision between public and private space in contemporary post-Soviet cities. By examining the case of streets, courtyards, buildings and public art in Kyiv, I suggest that Kyiv cityscape suffers from a form of fragmentation, which results exactly from this collision. This can be seen in the facades of buildings, the composition of signboards, the cluttered sidewalks, the numbers of cars, the mania of shopping malls, the visual and sound pollution of the city, and the presence of ‘private art’ in public spaces. 

In the talk, different approaches to the aesthetic and interdisciplinary investigation of these phenomena will be considered, including strategies coming from environmental aesthetics (such as the cognitive approach proposed by A. Carlson, P. von Bonsdorff, et al., the so-called engagement approach advocated by A. Berleant, N. Blanc, et al., the somaesthetic approach supported by R. Shusterman, D. Macauley, et al.); the concept of heterotopia and its aesthetic interpretation within ‘post-civil societies’ (for example in Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Lieven de Cauter, Michiel Dehaene, Clement Orillard, et al.); and the phenomenology of urban places (as one can find in M. Heidegger, E. Relph, V. Vihanninjoki, et al.).

I will focus particularly on the engagement approach by relying on the notions of urban landscape as a socio-spatial structure; the experience of the city as an aesthetic environment in its continuity, interaction and diversity; and the theme of bodily engagement as regards specifically the practice of walking in the city. Special attention will be paid to the historical and cultural references fo this discussion such as for example the concepts of public and private in political philosophy (Aristotle and H. Arendt) and the cultural and political legacy of urbanism and the ideology of the USSR.