Free Time and Emancipatory Space in Eastern European Art and Architecture, 1960s-1980s

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Forecasts of growing automation and subsequently reduced work time were part of the official doctrine in the Socialist bloc, finding its way to planning documents and spatial design. On the other hand, the negation of previous ways of life and the search for alternatives that followed the resistance movements in 1968, and attempts to reform state socialism, impacted also on architecture and art. Democracy, broader freedom and changes in lifestyle needed a different kind of environment. From the critique of rational and strictly functional planning there developed ideas for a dynamic social program in architecture and investigations of the balance of work and leisure in art. Its ideals were in non-hierarchical communities and forms of user involvement in decision-making and creative processes. Collective work thus became the preferred approach for the numerous architects and artists who gathered into groups and collectively played out various scenarios in the urban environment and in nature.

This panel brings together case studies from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia and the Soviet Union, investigating the role of free time and leisure in architecture and planning practices, and the production of emancipatory space in art.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Chair

• Andres Kurg, Estonian Academy of Arts (Estonia)

Papers

• Spatial Planning and Infrastructures of Leisure in Estonia and the Soviet Union, 1960s-1980s - Epp Lankots, Estonian Academy of Arts (Estonia)

• Playing Along and Playing Against: On the Uses of 'Leisure' for the Production of Architecture in Liberec circa 1968 - Ana Miljacki, MIT

• Leisure and Learning in the Works of the Dvizhenie Group from the Late 1960s - Mari Laanemets, Estonian Academy of Arts (Estonia); Andres Kurg, Estonian Academy of Arts (Estonia)

• KwieKulik: Art as Activation of Everyday Life and Space - Ksenya Gurshtein, Independent Scholar

Discussant

• Magdalena Moskalewicz, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln