Apr 21 2023

Project of distance – Bertolt Brecht’s Chicago

April 21, 2023

12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Francesco Marullo

Assistant Professor, PhD

School of Architecture

University of Illinois at Chicago

Abstract: Despite having never set foot in the city, Bertolt Brecht was obsessed with Chicago. A jumble of mud and steel, elevated trains, towers, grain elevators, slaughterhouses, jazzmen and boxers, brokers and gangsters, Chicago embodied the most advanced traits of a modern capitalist metropolis. For Brecht — who believed that to stimulate the attention of an audience it was necessary to make the world (or everyday reality) strange, distant, and foreign — Chicago was remote enough to become a laboratory for analyzing the forces ruling life in the immediate present: an “analogous” Berlin. By aligning some of his early works as a montage of scenes, the presentation reconstructs Brecht’s project of distance, delving into the political economy of Chicago and its architecture of production at the onset of the 20th century.

Contact

Susanne Rott

Date posted

Feb 28, 2023

Date updated

Feb 28, 2023