Event

The Departments of Religious Studies, History and Sociology of Science, Slavic Studies, and the School of Nursing would like to invite you to a talk by Dr. Avery Gordon, Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. This talk is the year-end event of the “Penn Ghost Project,” a multi-disciplinary SAS faculty working group that investigates the pervasive scientific and cultural interest in ghosts.

Avery F. Gordon (UC Santa Barbara), "The remains of a prison: fugitive knowledge on the wings of red arrows"

How to tell the story of a very old place of confinement and punishment? What happens if all the pictures are wrong or missing and the people long gone? What traces and messages might they have left for us to find? Is it possible now, after such terrible treatment, to offer those confined in the prison a more hospitable welcome?  This is the hope.  In this lecture, Gordon will The Workhouse: Room 2, a collaboration with Berlin artist Ines Schaber produced for documenta(13), which engages with the history of the former monastery, workhouse, and prison Breitenau.

Over time, Breitenau has confined many persons considered extraneous and disposable, subjecting them to a regime of punishment and “correction.”  Consisting of photographs, curtain, text, and audio files, The Workhouse: Room 2 presents glimpses of fugitive knowledge that emerge in and around this prison in order to conjure historical alternatives that could have been taken but were not and to contribute to an ongoing archive of re-memory whose aims are not correction.