Professor Beth Weinstein Promotes Book in Europe
Professor of Architecture Beth Weinstein has been in Europe promoting her new book and delivering a series of lectures that explore the intersections of movement, memory and the built environment.
Her book, “Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time,” was published in May 2024. It discusses the field of “archi-choreographic experiments” – unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers.
While on sabbatical from CAPLA, she has been speaking in Helsinki, London, Paris and Nicosia while advancing her research on the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV), a former internment site in Paris.
“The book specifically focuses on collaborations between architects and choreographers – designers working with space, time and bodies from very different perspectives and disciplinary forms of knowledge – and it asks what motivates the projects, concepts and methods that are explored, how the works evolve into some kind of performance and what the after-effects of the projects are,” she said.
Weinstein said that themes emerging from the book extend far beyond performance and touch on how public spaces shape agency. The work has resonated strongly in Europe, particularly in France, where there is a long tradition of support for culture and audiences are knowledgeable and eager for new ideas.
“People are familiar with, if not hungry for new, experimental cultural productions, and within architecture, theater, dance and art contexts, in particular, one can expect to find a well informed public,” Weinstein said.
Her lecture stops have drawn diverse crowds. Graduate students in scenography and dance attended her talk at Uniarts Helsinki, while architecture students joined her online lecture for the University of Cyprus. At the Confluence Institute in Paris, the audience included urbanists, filmmakers, choreographers and designers, leading to dynamic discussions.
“I’ve been impressed by their thoughtful questions and comments in the post-lecture discussions, which have, on occasion, lasted a full hour, making it more seminar-like and participatory,” she said.
Throughout her travels, Weinstein has also taken time to deliver copies of her book to contributors, including the offices of Zaha Hadid Architects, Tsuyoshi Tane and Didier Faustino, and has found it on shelves in Paris, something she describes as especially meaningful.
“I must also note that it has been exciting to see my book on the shelves of the mediatheque of the CND (National Dance Center) and selling at one of my favorite architecture book stores in Paris,” Weinstein said.
Her lectures also draw on her research related to sites, examining how location-specific performance projects reveal hidden histories and challenge creative methods. She said this work is closely tied to her research on the CIV, where she analyzes a landscape that shows no visible trace of the former internment camp.
“To date, my research on the CIV has largely employed archival and forensic architectural methods, informed by those developed by Eyal Weizman’s lab, to construct evidence,” she said.
In Paris, Weinstein has also been meeting with people involved in memory work connected to the Algerian War, inviting researchers, historians and artists to walk with her to the CIV site. These shared walks have become a way to build community and collective understanding.
“This is a very different kind of building activity – one of building trust, building knowledge and building a community,” she said.
Her sabbatical began with the third international symposium of Remembering Spaces of Internment (ReSI) at the Memorial of the Rivesaltes Camp, an experience that deepened her growing understanding of memory-sites. The symposium included travel to other memorial sites in France and Spain, and she has continued engaging with discussions about memory, archives, photography and other forms of evidence through seminars and conferences in Paris.
“Sites, spaces and places are often protagonists in photographs of events,” she said. “Thus, tools we use to analyze and assemble images change them from isolated fragments to elements within an ‘image complex’ – part of the process of constructing and corroborating evidence.”
She has also been doing extensive hands-on research, balancing quiet archival work with active field-based methods. Over the summer, she documented letters related to the CIV and began building a database from them, later turning parts of that data into maps that serve as “scores” for guided walks through affected neighborhoods.
“These mobile conversations in the city jog the memory; they are occasions for storytelling,” Weinstein said. “They are urban adventures and social occasions for relationship building.”
Looking ahead, Weinstein said her work will continue to focus on dissemination and community engagement. She has submitted a French-language article about the CIV for publication and created a zine summarizing her findings to share during site walks. Once the article is published, she said, the CIV’s history will become more accessible to French-speaking audiences and support future collaborations with community groups.
“One goal of this network is to organize efforts towards the gathering and archiving of oral histories about the CIV, to raise awareness about this place and what occurred there,” she said. “A second goal is to gather in situ at the next anniversary of the October 17, 1961, massacre.”
She anticipates returning to both archival and in-situ research as the project grows. Her long-term aim is recognition of the CIV as an official memory site in France.
“I will say that the next phases of research, ultimately and collectively, work towards the recognition of the site of the CIV by the state as a lieu de memoire,” Weinstein said.
