The event will be held in English and live streamed on Zachęta’s Facebook page and Youtube channel.

Engines of Development, another lecture accompanying the Cold Revolution exhibition, is devoted to the rural–urban relations in the 1950s, showcasing examples from Romania. Juliana Maxim discusses the transformation of the relationship to labor, both in the countryside and on the large construction sites of socialism. She discusses how the shift from traditional agriculture to modern industry, which changed peasants into workers, was accompanied, in that early decade, by an effort to reconcile the dehumanizing aspects of the machine –  such as the tractor and the crane – with the intimate experience of community. 

Juliana Maxim, PhD – Associate Professor of Architectural History at the University of San Diego, USA. Her area of expertise is 20th century art, architecture and urbanism in Eastern Europe. She writes on the history of aesthetic practices, from photography to urbanism, under Romania’s communist state, and more broadly on the historiography of socialism. Author of the book The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1947–1965.

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