Introduction *research-in-progress 2010 Ana María León, Alla Vronskaya The general perception is that intellectual and creative production outside of major cultural centers necessarily defines itself in relationship to these centers. Moreover, the relative paucity of material resources and opportunities available in these remote areas seem to aggravate cultural dependence. However, this may not be the only possible perspective on the effects of this geographical and psychological remoteness. How and by whom are such notions as “periphery” and “province” constructed? How does the acceptance or denial of one’s own “provincialism” influence identity and culture in general? How do the edges affect dominant discourses? These were a few of the many questions posed by “In the Distance,” the 2010 *research-in-progress (*rip) conference, an annual graduate student conference organized by students of History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art at MIT. Nine of the presentations delivered at the conference found their way to this publication, spanning different geographical regions and disciplinary boundaries. New York’s Hart Island, a cemetery for those on the margins of capitalist social structure, is the focus of Deborah Buelow’s research. Azra Dawood finds a very different perspective on capitalism in the United States, exposing the process by which it symbolically appropriated Egyptian cultural heritage. Conversely, looking at the peripheral qualities of early twentieth century American architecture, James Graham uncovers notions of modernity behind the neoclassical façade of E.B. Green’s Lockwood Library at the University of Buffalo. Sara Stevens examines how real estate strategies deployed in suburbia found their way to the post-war architectural discourse and Chicago’s urban core. Another disciplinary shift—between technology and art—is analyzed by Ivan Rupnik, who looks at the work of Zagreb
artist Vjenceslav Richter in the 1960s. The political situation in Socialist Yugoslavia, mediating between two centers of power and equally distant from both, enabled Richter to subvert preconceived notions of art. More tragically, a political partitioning of Poland among Russia, Austria, and Prussia during the nineteenth century, provoked the consolidation of Polish culture and the construction of national architectural styles explored by Benjamin Matteson. In a double reversal, Matteson recounts how a Polish painter was presented as Russian while a Russian church was redressed as Polish. Considering the same time period, Delia Solomons looks at Catalan artist Isidre Nonell’s subversion of the Spanish gitana stereotype, in relation to his own experience as a Spanish artist in Paris. In contrast, Parisian clichés were translated abroad, as Josefina de la Maza Chevesich demonstrates in her paper on academic painter Raymond Q. Monvoisin, who in the mid-nineteenth century moved from France to Chile and reversed his fortune by becoming “the modernizer” of Chilean art. Finally, Joanna Hecker-Silva complicates the idea of intellectual appropriation by showing how the tropes of imperialist collecting on the one hand, and admiring and emulation on the other, coexisted in the work of a Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, who in 1537 was sent by King João III to Italy. Together, this set of historic and geographic narratives present a range of responses to the effects of colonial empires, diasporas of war, exile, migration, and mistranslation, repositioning the dependence generated by remoteness as sometimes stimulating, often productive, and at times even liberating.
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