Matthew Worsnick

How do architectural, art, and engineering practices influence the ways that people understand borders and the ways that governments envision political boundaries? Can we uncover and explore the agency of the many unseen actors whose decisions and labor create the built environment, and in turn shape mental maps of borderlands? Deploying tools from art history, urban studies, and architectural theory, and drawing upon archival sources from five countries across thirty years, this study excavates the material culture of the contested Italo-Yugoslav border (1918-1948) to show how the built environment revised people’s perceptions of the border and was deployed to justify or challenge the border’s legitimacy in local, national, and international mindsets.

This project theorizes the politicized manipulation of historiography, public art, and urban planning that often goes unnoticed in our built worlds. It explores how certain types of commemoration, restoration, and exhibition are inherently convoluted in their temporality: memorials, ethnic villages, and curated excavations among them. Drawing on methods of art history, architectural theory, material studies, and historical archival research, this study analyzes how subtle markers such as obsolete typefaces, archaic fabrication technologies, restoration techniques, curatorial framing, and antiquated stylistic gestures can enable objects to masquerade as having been created decades or centuries earlier than they were. This project traces the contours of this phenomenon, which it calls polemical anachronism.