VUFC invites you to a research lecture by Postdoctoral Fellow Agiatis Benardou on Commemorating difficult heritage through immersive technologies: The case of Block 15 of the Haidari Concentration Camp. The lecture is the event of a seminar series on Contested heritage, memory, and identity practices: Eastern European and global contexts, organized by the Connective Digital Memory in the Borderlands project, supported by European Social Fund (project No. 09.3.3-LMT-K-712-17-0027) under grant agreement with the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT).
January 12, 2022, 4pm EET / 3 PM CET, online
Postdoctoral Fellow Agiatis Benardou, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business and DCU/ATHENA R.C.
Commemorating difficult heritage through immersive technologies: The case of Block 15 of the Haidari Concentration Camp
Reserve a seat and access the event link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/commemorating-heritage-the-case-of-block-15-of-haidari-concentration-camp-tickets-238696145597
About the lecture
In Europe immersive technologies have not been employed widely in historically-contested sites. At the same time, despite the fact that the German Occupation in Greece (1941-1944) has influenced public debates, and inspired artistic displays and performances, the sites of memory of the Second World War remain invisible.
The talk focuses on the infamous Block 15 of the Haidari Concentration Camp in Western Athens, the largest and most notorious German concentration camp in wartime Greece, as a showcase of a largely neglected site of difficult heritage, and attempt to make the building, currently an endangered one, accessible to audiences and communities of diverse backgrounds through the use of immersive technologies.
The project aims at creating an impact on many different levels:
- enhancing understanding of and engagement in the functions of the building and the historical context;
- renewing cultural identity of the region of Athens;
- fostering civic participation of diverse socio-cultural groups.
Through original scenarios based on primary and multimedia archival sources and digital storytelling, the interactive, immersive Virtual Reality experience (currently under development) brings back to life the actual monument that is Block 15. It also functions as a reminder of the horrors and torture inflicted by the Nazis on prisoners, in an attempt to reintroduce a historically and politically contested site to heterogeneous audiences, both in situ as well as in sites outside the Concentration Camp.
Speaker
Agiatis Benardou is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, and a Senior Researcher at the Digital Curation Unit, ATHENA R.C. She has held posts as Research Associate at the Departments of Information Science and Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, and Visiting Scholar at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of California Berkeley. Agiatis has served as Teaching Fellow in Digital Curation at the Department of Media and Culture, Panteion University, and she has coordinated a course on Applications of Digital Methods in the Humanities at the Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business. Agiatis holds a PhD in Ancient History and Classical Archaeology from King’s College London.