Ines Weizman: Documentary Architecture: Navigating Global Bauhaus Modernism

This talk will reflect on the history of the Bauhaus as an entangled problem — the multiple historiographies of the Bauhaus and the story of a global architectural history of modernism within which it is located. The complex trajectories of Bauhaus migration — its architects, artists, documents, objects, and of course its ideas — have splintered across a fragmented world, leading to disputes and sometimes to legal challenges concerning authenticity, physical and intellectual ownership, and copyright. This talk will introduce the "documentary" mode as a historical method that would look at the materiality of Bauhaus objects as the molecular units of politics and history through which we can plot a complex circuit of circulations, migrations, and forms of connections to other modernisms contemporary to the Bauhaus.

Ines Weizman is a professor of architectural theory and director of the Bauhaus Institute for History and Theory of Architecture and Planning at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In 2015 she founded the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA). Among her numerous publications and exhibitions is the installation "Repeat Yourself." Loos, Law and the Culture of the Copy that was presented at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2019 she will publish the edited book Dust & Data. Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years with Spector Books. Currently, she is working on an exhibition for the CDA titled The Matter of Data. Tracing the Materiality of "Bauhaus Modernism" which will be shown in 2019 in Tel Aviv's "White City" at the Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv.