Nostalgia and Place

Monday, January 20th, 2025

2:30 PM (CET) - Katharina Niemeyer (Université du Quebec à Montreal)

"When media become home"

Historically, nostalgia and space have always been connected in the form of homesickness. The latter could be healed or at least attenuated under certain circumstances: the promise to go home, communicating with people from the same region or country who also left or listening to music of the missed place. As theoretically conceptualized and empirically analyzed by scholars in media and communication studies, media (taken in a broad sense) are spaces where nostalgia can be triggered, expressed, and be experienced in the form of nostalgizing. Media texts and media technologies have the potential to become the physical and mental space where one can feel (at) home.

"Mallstalgia: a Phenomenological Foray"

How does a place supposedly devoid of memorable qualities become a focal centre of nostalgia? The question is critical because it not only concerns how we conceive of the embodied experience of the world, but also how phenomenology, as a method often deployed to study the relation between memory and materiality, sets about its investigations without determining its results in advance. In this talk, I pursue this question through the case study of a nostalgia for shopping malls. To unpack this, the talk unfolds in three stages. First, I outline how the urban landscape has been characterised in evaluative terms within the history of phenomenology, not least in terms of place and placelessness. Contesting the divisions employed in this evaluation, I then turn pursue a phenomenological analysis of a nostalgia for a shopping mall in a state of partial dereliction. Finally, I consider how the concept of atmosphere can best capture the nostalgic transformation of place, in the process issuing a challenge to the idea that the character of place can be determined in advance.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 21st, 2025

"The Nostalgic Horizons of Music in the Long Nineteenth Century"

How is nostalgia experienced, transmitted or explained in musical terms? In this workshop I would like to reflect on the multiple faces that nostalgia took in the long nineteenth century in Europe —a century of revolution and profound changes in the perception of time-space arising from industrialization and capitalism— and its musical expression. The different movements of this period enabled a different kind of return. A return to antiquity in the case of classicism, to the folk in romanticism, to a better and shared past in nationalism or a journey to the East in the case of orientalism. All of these displacements opened up the possibility of enjoying newly revisited horizons that may be called nostalgic musical landscapes. I will discuss how the music of this period afforded opportunities to reflect on issues related to the notions of space and place, and illustrate my talk with examples of music that functioned as a memory tool and as a spatial signifier.

3:30 PM (CET) - Mario Panico (Universiteit van Amsterdam)

"For Nostalgia: Using Space to go back in Time"

After pointing out how space can be considered a language of cultural and collective memory, in my talk, I will specifically focus on the characteristics of what I define as the ‘space for nostalgia’. Employing a few examples from literature, cinema and cultural heritage, I will dwell on how space can take on a consoling function for a temporal nostalgic yearning, that is, the desire to return to a past time. I argue in this paper that space can act as an emotional connecting structure, indulging romantic memories of the past with pseudo-indexical connections.

When explaining how the space for nostalgia works, I will address what in my book I termed ‘spatial consolation’, understood simultaneously as (i) the comfort and illusion used to satisfy desires for an impossible temporal return and (ii) as a strategy for working through, or getting over, the ontological finitude of a lost temporality.