FRANCESCO MARULLO: Project of Distance
UIC Art History Colloquium
November 22, 2019
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
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 paper 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.
Francesco Marullo is interested in the relationship between architecture, labor, and the spaces of production. He holds a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from TU Delft and currently teaches the UIC School of Architecture. He coedited The Architecture of Logistics (2018), coauthored Tehran: Life within Walls (2018), and contributed to recent volumes Aesthetics and Poetics of Logistics (2019) and Work, Body, Leisure (2018).
Date posted
Oct 1, 2019
Date updated
Nov 9, 2019