SEMINAR 5.
NORA STERNFELD AND IRIT ROGOFF

with guests Mike Berlin and Eva Rowson on Radical Hospitality
5.12.2015

The fifth infrastructure seminar was structured around the topic of ‘Radical Hospitality’.

London-based historian Mike Berlin gave insights into the history of ‘The Partisan Coffee House’. His presentation explores the little known history of a key institution in the creation of the British New Left. Founded in Soho, London in 1958, the Partisan Coffee House only lasted some four years but in its brief life it was the nexus of a post war generation of engaged intellectuals who helped to create a new oppositional culture, bringing together the art, music, and literature of the late 50s in resistance to the political orthodoxies of the Cold War, and creating a space out of which alternative visions of the second half of the twentieth century were forged.

Following this presentation, Nora Sternfeld and Irit Rogoff of freethought with curator Eva Rowson contextualised and actualised the topic in relation to histories and economies of collective projects and infrastructures of hospitality.

SUGGESTED READING

Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (extracts), 1962.

Charles Esche, What’s the Point of Art Centres Anyway? – Possibility, Art and Democratic Deviance, 2004.

FOOD, exhibition catalogue from White Columns, New York, 2000.

ABOUT MIKE BERLIN

Mike Berlin is a specialist in the social history of early modern London and teaches at Birkbeck University, London. Before joining Birkbeck, he was a research officer at the Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research. His most recent work has been on twentieth-century social history, including a history of the RMT transport union and he has published extensively on the history of London’s guilds. He is currently researching into the history of the British New Left.

ABOUT EVA ROWSON

Eva Rowson is an artist, curator and organiser based in London. Together with artist Andrea Francke she runs Wish you’d been here (2013 – on going), a collaboration that uses and investigates parties and hosting to develop a new framework to think about social practices. Eva is the Project Coordinator for freethought.