Jelena Stankovic

Memory and City

Email: JStankovic@dundee.ac.uk

Synopsis

By making different combinations of the words - memory, experience, and space, the aim of my research is to explain and bring closer the fact that imaginary and the real world cannot work without each other. The authors including Sigmund Freud, Patrick Geddes, Frances A. Yates, Robert Fludd and Italo Calvino who consider the importance of this unbreakable relationship between imaginary and the real world are the subject of my observations. Freud's interpretations of unconsciousness and consciousness through his theories of dreams, distortion of dreams (substitute names), screen memory, a sense of uncanny and his first encounter with Acropolis confirm his efforts to make a relationship between these two worlds. In comparison to Freud, Patrick Geddes uses two forms of human life - individuals and city in order to examine the abiding relationship of these worlds. He adds…“material arrangements embodying in outward and visible form are the trains of ideas which have passed through human minds.” In order to explain the art of memory as “invisible art” Yates emphasises how memory was enormously essential to orators because of delivering of long speeches with complete accuracy. For her, the “art of memory was a creator of imagery which must surely have flowed out into creative works of art and literature.”  This quotation illustrates that spoken or written text (the real world) is created from the art of memory (imagination) where striking images guide a reader through a web of interconnected spaces. Robert Fludd emphasises that the relationship between “round arts” - heavens (the celestial world) as a base for ideas or imagination and “square arts”- theatre (earthly world) created by corporeal images is established from the art of memory. Italo Calvino shows us through different descriptions of Venice how Venice also exists in our minds.

Biography

PhD student, University of Dundee, College of Arts and Social Sciences, School of The Environment (Architecture 2012-2015). Master degree in Architecture: University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering (2003-2009). Work experience: STO, (2009/03-2011/12). International student experience: International Passive House Summer School; CUAS, Austria, 2009. Foreign language: English, IELTS certificate. Publications: translation of English book called 101 Things I Learned in Architecture school, Matthew Frederick into Serbian language; Architecture sense, installation and sustainable design; Energy sustainable design in modern practice of Banja Luka," Kastel " new paradigm-one step to success; " Kastel "targeted benchmark of integration process in Banja Luka. 

Supervisors 

Lorens Holm
Charles Rattray