Rethinking architectural heritage with Hélène Cixous’s ‘Promised Cities’

During this seminar we will travel to Hélène Cixous’s promised cities, to cities past and present, cities of exile, post-colonial cities, and return to her city of Oran in Algeria. We will ask how Cixous’s embodied and situated writing, together with her sense of ‘doubly open belonging’, might help us rethink architectural heritage in post-colonial and post-conflict cities. In the second part of the seminar, we will turn to the importance of writing with others in Cixous’s lifelong work: writing with other writers, from Montaigne to Clarice Lispector and Mireille Calle-Gruber, and writing with other artists, from Ariane Mnouchkine to Adel Abdessemed and Maria Chevska in Ex-Cities.