Mar 29th 2017

CLOUD TALK: Sonja Lebos

Sonja Lebos will deliver the SOM Architecture and Urbanism Cloud Talk on "Film & Architecture" at 2 p.m. on Mon., April 3 in S.R. Crown Hall.

Lebos is a cultural practitioner, living and working in Zagreb. Trained as an architect and set designer in Zagreb and Prague, and educator in arts and crafts in Stuttgart, she rounded out her formal studies with a Master's in Cultural Anthropology and Hispanic Languages and Cultures at Zagreb University. She is currently the chairwoman of Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research, Zagreb (AIIR). At AIIR, she initiated, produced and implemented various projects, including, "Cybercinematography – Semantics of Cities’ Retrodynamics"; "Return to the City (of Dubrovnik)," a documentary made in cooperation with CroatianTV, (2007); "Space of Identity, Space of Interaction, Space of Change," (2006-2008, ongoing); and numerous investigations into the representations of identity through spatial and filmic practices in Croatian cinema. 

Lebos' lecture will explore the ways of constructing identities mediated through the vantage point of a camera. From its inception, the eye of a camera has been an analytical and artistic tool. It has served to reveal the way we live in this world as well as to thoroughly and irreversibly change the way we perceive it. Gradually, the cinematic production of reality became not just another feature of globalization, but globalization itself. Today, our stratosphere is quite a different place than it was 150 years ago, as millions of images are intercepted every second of every day. On the visible side of the scope, images of a store in Manhattan are uploaded to Google maps, enabling us to see people happily shopping, while in the invisible territory, somewhere in Yemen, people are trying to reach "fortress" Europe, tracing the Balkan route.

From this perspective, the project of modernization that flooded the Western Balkans after WWII seems more than worth revisiting. Through architecture, film and urbanism, this lecture will give an insight in the spatio-cinematic production of the Croaitian capital, Zagreb.