The visual culture theorist will offer a reflection on the relationship between ruins, the politics of memory and the period of reconstruction.

Andrea Průchová Hrůzová will discuss the mid-20th century and the period of post-war reconstruction after WW2 and the present-day reconstruction of democratic tradition after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. She will use visual examples to present the medium of the postwar documentary film that portrayed Europe ruined by war as an active social force building a progressive future, and the medium of online-spread digital photography related to the phenomenon of ruin porn, a powerful tool for the construction of nostalgic past.

Andrea Průchová Hrůzová is a theoretician of visual culture, researcher and teacher. She is the founder and leader of the Platform for the Studies of Visual Culture, Fresh Eye (www.fresh-eye.cz). She is the editor of the Media Studies magazine. In 2019 she published the art book We Have Never Been Earth (in collaboration with T. Hrůza, VSW Press, NY) and contributed to several international publications, such as Palgrave Macmillan´s Handbook of Image Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Frames of Reconstruction (Amsterdam University Press, 2022). She published in magazines European Journal of Cultural Studies (2020) and Visual Studies (2021). She translated to Czech Ways of Seeing by John Berger (2016) and co-translated Picture Theory by W. J. T. Mitchell (2017) and How To See the World by Nicholase Mirzoeffa (2019).