Books and the City

Activity: Participating in or organising an event Organisation and participation in conference

Description

This lecture presented a research on the book Fin de Copenhague by the Danish Cobra artist Asger Jorn and the French philosopher Guy Debord, which is the first in a series of two and was published in 1957, shortly before the authors founded the Situationist International. Fin de Copenhague is usually presented as a psychogeography, not least because Guy Debord is officially named as a “technical adviser in détournement.” This research approaches the book from a different angle, by making a comparable analysis with the actual development of the city of Copenhagen. The fact that Copenhagen´s center underwent an enormous depopulation since the implementation of the fingerplan in 1948 and the increasing appropriation of the urban space by commerce hint at Jorn´s critique on the functionalist city from the 1940s and anticipates some of the issues that Debord will raise more than a decade later in Society of the Spectacle.
Period23 May 2016
Event typeConference
LocationMaastricht, NetherlandsShow on map

Keywords

  • Situationst International
  • Situationist Urbanism
  • Asger Jorn
  • Guy Debord
  • Psychogeography