Paul Virilio Goes to the Beach: An archaeology of Coastal Reclamations - Denis Byrne

Date: Thursday 30 May 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EB.G.02 Parramatta campus (South), Western Sydney University

Paul Virilio Goes to the Beach: An archaeology of Coastal Reclamations

Presenter: Associate Professor Denis Byrne

Discussant: Dr Andrea Connor

Abstract

When the young Paul Virilio stepped onto his first beach on the Normandy coast in 1945 he began a long term fascination with the sea, the littoral zone, and the system of WWII coastal bunkers that formed German’s Atlantikwall. Collapsed bunkers became the inspiration for an attempt, through his ‘oblique’ architecture, to make us conscious of the way our lives are ruled by the conventional architecture of horizontality and to provide a way of escaping it.

Coastal reclamations can seem like a tide of land pushing out into the sea, as if we were experiencing a period of marine contraction rather than its opposite. The seawalls of our reclamations, like those WWII bunkers, draw an optimistic line in the sand against incursion from/of the sea. In presenting several different ways of viewing coastal reclamations, using examples from different times and places, my object is to help us know these entities better and to identify lines of escape.

Biography

Denis Byrne is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Among others things, his work blends archaeology, fictocritical writing, a concern with the ruins of modernity and a taste for marginal and transitional spaces. His publications include Surface Collection (Rowman & Littlefield 2007) and Counterheritage (Routledge 2014).

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