#educational complex

प्रधानमंत्री ने अहमदाबाद, गुजरात में मोदी शैक्षणिक संकुल के पहले चरण का उद्घाटन किया

प्रधानमंत्री श्री नरेन्द्र मोदी ने आज अहमदाबाद (गुजरात) में जरूरतमंद छात्रों के लिए शैक्षणिक परिसर, मोदी शैक्षणिक संकुल के पहले चरण का उद्घाटन किया। इस परियोजना से विद्यार्थियों के समग्र विकास की सुविधाएं उपलब्ध होंगी। भवन के उद्घाटन अवसर पर प्रधानमंत्री ने फीता काटा। इसके साथ ही श्री मोदी ने दीव प्रज्ज्वलित कर भवन का भ्रमण भी किया। सभा को संबोधित करते हुए, प्रधानमंत्री ने कहा कि उन्हें कल…

That’s artist John Miller exploring Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex (1995), a multi-layered, dynamic installation that found the artist examining school as a “legitimation” of his career success, while locating it rhetorically as a site of abuse. The author of a forthcoming book about the work, Miller discusses in depth on MOCAtv.

Some preliminary thoughts on shared sensibilities between Mike Kelley and W.G. Sebald: 

Both were interested in trauma as it relates to architecture. Here is Mike Kelley discussing his 1995 work, Educational Complex, which is currently on view in his retrospective at MoMA P.S.1: 

I decided to build a reconstruction of every school I ever went to with the all the parts I could not remember left out. And then these were combined to one super school. They were cut apart and reconfigured, in a kind of very formalized way that made it look more like a kind of modernist architecture. Educational Complex was done directly in response to the rising infatuation of the public with issues of Repressed Memory Syndrome and child abuse. It led to a rash of similar kinds of cases. The popularization of this certain kind of therapy which was predicated on the idea that certain traumatic events, that especially sexual abuse are repressed and only removed later through therapy. The implication is that anything that can’t be remembered is somehow the result of trauma. So the parts I could not remember of these buildings was the majority of them, probably like 80 percent. So that meant 80 percent of these buildings that I had been in for most of my life were the site of some kind of repressed trauma. No one’s going to think that when they look at it. It looks completely orderly. It doesn’t look dysfunctional at all. But seen through the theory of repressed memory syndrome, that’s what it means. Like why can’t Mike Kelley remember all these rooms in the schools he went to every day for, you know, most . . . half of his life. Well, nobody can. [From the Whitney's website.]

And here is an excerpt from W.G. Sebald's 2001 book, Austerlitz, in which the protagonist (Austerlitz) meditates on the potential for architecture to act as witness:

All I remember of Pilsen, where we stopped for some time, said Austerlitz, is that I went out on the platform to photograph the capital of a cast-iron column which had touched some chord of recognition in me. What made me uneasy at the sight of it, however, was not the question whether the complex form of the capital, now covered with a puce-tinged encrustation, had really impressed itself on my mind when I passed through Pilsen with the children's transport in the summer of 1939, but the idea, ridiculous in itself, that this cast-iron column, which with its scaly surface seemed almost to approach the nature of a living being, might remember me and was, if I may so put it, said Austerlitz, a witness to what I could no longer recollect for myself. [emphasis mine, p. 221 of the Modern Library edition.]

Both men died too young, at the same age, 57.