Violante Torre

Violante Torre is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant within the M3 team. Her research interests lie between urban and cultural geography, urban governance, and memory studies.

Her doctoral research project focuses on conflictive landmark buildings and particularly on Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, converted in 2020 from a museum into a mosque. Her research engages with global urbanism as a political call to advance a decentered and relational vision of landmark buildings. One that focuses on everyday practices in and within such urban spaces and their surroundings, while challenging the predominant Western paradigm on culture and the city in studies on landmark buildings.

In dialogue with more-than-human geographical approaches and feminist geography, her project investigates the relationship between the materiality of these buildings, the everyday practices, and affective experiences of city dwellers relating to such big and conflictive infrastructure.

Previously, she studied the culture-led regeneration projects commemorating the Colombian conflict in Bogotá, exploring how redevelopment plans and the 'politics of memory' confront themselves with everyday uses and practices in space.

She also worked as a policy officer for a Creative Europe project, focusing on urban commons and cultural spaces across Europe.