Guest Lecture: Sonja Lakić

Heteropolitanisation Now: on the Nature of the post-Yugoslav Urban Bricolage

Sonja Lakić, architect, urban designer and planner, is currently Marie Skłodowska-Curie / EUTOPIA-SIF post doctoral fellow at CY Cergy Paris Université, invited by laboratory PLACES.

How to approach the post-socialist urban transformation without evoking the label of the post-socialist? What happens when the process of dismantling the socialist legacy is portrayed through the eyes of privatised apartments? How to interview people without actually asking questions? What does it mean to curate a city? What can one learn from a seemingly banal process of a rearrangement of furniture?

This lecture portrays the post-Yugoslav everydayness of cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro through the lense of "heteropolitanization" (Gentile et al., 2012). Altering between different scales and introducing a wide variety of rather controversial practices of appropriation and production of space, Dr Sonja Lakić visits the lives of places and those that (re)shape, (re)make, contest and appropriate them on daily basis. In this testimonial on the contemporary practice of everyday life, Dr Lakić shares her thus-far personal research journey and sheds the light on the non-conventional research methods, while briefly reflecting on her Marie Skłodowska-Curie / EUTOPIA-SIF postdoctoral experience.

This is a research; a visual diary; an exhibition in the making; a book in progress; a travelogue. This is an ode to an accidental ethnography and an investigation of a city as a collection that is (to be) curated, and a celebration of the lived forms of buildings, for life itself cannot be tamed.

References:
Gentile, Michael et al. (2012) “Heteropolitanization: Social and spatial change in Central and East European Cities”. Cities 29, 291-299.

Date: 27th September 2022 from 12:30 to 14:00

The hybrid guest elcture is organised in person at the Auditorium of MIR in Neuville-sur-Oise and remotely on Zoom.

The video will be online on the CY AS YouTube channel