*
The idea of ‘dwelling’ or ‘home’ is generally considered to be precious, even sacred, despite the fact it may mean different things to different people. Amply romanticised in culture since the beginnings of history and intrinsically linked to the notions of belonging and identity, home indexes the embodied ideals of comfort, safety and bonhomie. Homes make us as much as we make them. While the entity of the house is possibly the most obvious transmitter of home, the environment which the house finds itself in — a neighbourhood, a locality, a village, a town, a city, a landscape — contributes equally, if not more, to the character and ambience of home. Hilly regions generously and evocatively lend themselves to this aspect, because the outside and inside are always in conversation with each other. Views from one’s windows matter as an essential part of the house itself, as does the last ray of the sun peeling away from the flank of a distant hill. In this way, the word pahaad (Hindi for mountains) routinely become synonymous with ghar (Hindi for home). India being a largely tropical country dominated by plains, heights continue to define a much-loved and often-revered ‘other’. Countless mountains and summits serve as homes of local gods and goddesses, and hill people themselves express great pride and satisfaction in the distinctiveness of their landscape. If the recent ‘Happiness Surveys’ of India’s best states are anything to go by, then the regions bagging the top spots would only prove the link between mountain living and well-being further, given that they are located in the Himalayas.[2] Two ideas frequently characterise the popular perception of mountain life. One is the idealised image of dwelling in a salubrious, scenic setting. The other points to a ‘toughness of spirit’, a hallmark of all mountain societies, given the undulating terrains and demanding weather conditions that must be navigated daily. From a critical viewpoint, it is tempting to align the first image with the tourist gaze and the second with the ‘actual life’ of hill people. But while there is some truth in this opinion, the binary doesn’t exist in absolute terms. Notwithstanding their hardships, hill people have long been aware of inhabiting a space that is vastly different from lowland cities, a space that invariably demands sensitive attunement towards nature, both aesthetically and work-wise. Such attunement doesn’t only include the staple professions of agriculture, horticulture and pastoralism, but also the practices of architecture and spatial planning, which have evolved over many centuries in concert with the natural surroundings.*
Among the most well-known traditional building techniques in the Himalayas are the Kath-Kuni, Koti Banal and Dhajji-Dewari styles of the Middle Himalayas, as well as the mud-brick, slate-roof style of the Lower Himalayas. Both the Kath-Kuni and the Koti-Banal methods are variations of the Cator-and-Cribbage template, which have evolved over hundreds of years in the upper reaches of the mountains. In Kath-Kuni, which literally translates as ‘wooden corner’, alternate horizontal layers of stone and wooden beams are stacked together without any cementing materials to create long-lasting walls, which often support intricately carved overhanging balconies to let sunshine in. Similar to the Kath-Kuni is the Koti-Banal style, which derives its name from a village in the state of Uttarakhand. The only major exception here is that we sometimes find several vertical timber beams passing through the horizontal wooden beams for added fortification. Tellingly, these templates were not only used for creating human dwellings but also shrines and shelters for gods, goddesses and cattle. And like most indigenous architecture, the buildings were made by the very people who lived in them or used them in some capacity. In both Kath-Kuni and Koti-Banal, the ground floor is reserved for cattle, the middle for fodder and the upper most for human habitation. Since it gets extremely cold during winters, the cattle can’t be left outside but are drawn into the folds of the walls, and their flatulence and belching helps keep the overall structure warm. The lack of cement and the use of sockets for fixing stone and wood horizontally also ensures superb seismic resistance, given that the whole of the Himalayas lies in an earthquake-prone region. In the lower and more sprawling valleys, we again witness a perfect synthesis of traditional human vision and environment. Here, the mud-bricked, slate-roofed building style evolves out of the rich presence of clay, slate and pine and bamboo trees. The whole process is contingent on natural forces. For instance, the bricks are made of a mixture of soil, sieved mud, water and straw, which is pugged with the help of an ox or cow over several days. Cow dung itself is a handy building material, as its ability to reduce the sun’s harmful radiation allows it to be converted into a coating that is plastered all over the floor and walls. Along with this, a layer of neem and clove oil is applied to keep the termites away. The building techniques used for cattle residences (often placed along the courtyard) are the same as those used for humans. In the past, the low-raised floors above the cattle pens (otherwise used only for storing fodder) would doubly serve as shelters for nomadic pastoralists during their seasonal migrations from the higher Himalayas to the lower valleys. Another building technique, Dhajji-Dewari, is a variation of the wattle-and-daub template widespread all over Europe, Africa and other parts of Asia. Consisting of an infill of clay, stone and pine needles that form ‘patched quilt walls’ on an overall timber-caged framework, Dhajji-Dewari was popularised during the colonial times. Owing to its resemblance to Victorian Neo-Tudor style of building, the British era architects birthed numerous kinds of hybrid designs at the intersection of Himalayan and European aesthetics, which were again a fine blend of sturdiness, elegance and seismic resistance. All these building styles appeared to stem from the earth, so that instead of seeming like an artificial outcrop, they gave the impression of growth and natural continuity.*
It was around three to four decades into Independence that hill societies first started experiencing a drastic change in their architectural ethos. Even as the inauguration of cement factories, high-rise structures and newer advancements in building technology ostensibly ushered in novel symbols of modern development, their indiscrete application across vastly varying geographies invariably augured trouble and imbalance. This was especially true for the Himalayan states, where no one had ever dwelled in buildings above a few stories high and devoid of local materials. After 1947, architecture and urban planning more than any other area of human concern couldn’t come up with a robust, sustainable and widescale creative vision for itself, the disastrous consequences of which are felt to this day. India’s foremost writer on architecture, Gautam Bhatia, observes that in the Independence era, ‘little has changed in Indian planning, urbanism, architecture or ways of thinking. No attempt has been made to define, in a common language, the kind of architecture we would like to live in’. He raises concern over ‘the civic disorder of places confounded by squalid government construction, extravagant private commerce and mounting slums’, and laments how, ‘in the absence of an institutional culture, architecture can only be a private inconsequential activity. People build on whim, day in and day out, adding personal appendages of construction to new or previous assemblies, adding to the jumbled mix’.[3] It is this ‘jumbled mix’ that overwhelmingly defines the built character of India, including the hills, where the majority of new buildings and city plans are indistinguishable from their lowland counterparts. Not only does this development quash the historical and visual sense of a mountainous terrain by contradicting its gradually-evolved ethos, it also fails in its promise of providing revolutionary alternatives to older ways of living. Most modern structures erected in hilly terrains hardly guard against any kind of natural calamities, whether earthquakes or floods. In late 2022, the popular pilgrimage town of Joshimath in Uttarakhand hit the national headlines for precisely these reasons, where almost all the houses developed cracks due to the sinking ground they stood on, which was itself constituted of loose landslip-mud. Joshimath now lies at the brink of complete collapse. More recently, in July 2023, the state of Himachal Pradesh witnessed its most calamitous flash floods in collective memory, and among the colossal damage were the houses, roads and other public infrastructure that had been recklessly constructed in the flood plains and along shaky, felled slopes, all within the last few decades. In another such example, many people complain of illnesses resulting out of the imprudent usage of cement and marble in the contemporary dwellings of the higher Himalayas, since they fail to insulate naturally against heat and cold earlier as do indigenously procured materials. In May 2022, Time Magazine carried a cover story that drew attention to this relationship between climate and health. Titled Western Architecture is Making India’s Heatwaves Worse, the piece shed light on how, after the economic liberalisation of the 1990s, a rapid shift away from climate-specific architecture started to define the Indian landscape, exacerbating the current climate crisis. The article rightly argued that the ‘shift was partly aesthetic; developers favored the glassy skyscrapers and straight lines deemed prestigious in the U.S. or Europe, and young architects brought home ideas they learned while studying abroad’.[4] But the title of the piece was partially disingenuous as well, since it cunningly put the entire onus of Indian architectural failure on the West. For one, the heading didn’t acknowledge that it was the Indian development model itself that approved of such ‘new’ ideas in the first place. Secondly, it also presented Western architecture through a monolithic lens, pitting it against the indigenously robust architecture of pre-Independent India, as if there was no indigenous architecture in the West. In truth, however, Western architectural templates have been mixed and merged with Indian styles for centuries, including within the Himalayas (the Dhajji-Dewari being one of many examples). Thus, instead of apportioning the blame solely to Western models, it is crucial to nuance our language of criticism. Bhatia is again instructive here, for while finding flaws in the implementation of Western models on a foreign landscape, he simultaneously draws attention to the quality and context in which this change started taking place. ‘Indian architecture’s moral dilemma’, he says, ‘is in fact all the more cruel for ensuring that any and all forms of carefully cultivated Indian practices are quietly buried under the debris of second rate foreign images’, the emphasis thus being on quality rather than inspiration. He adds that ‘unfortunately, whenever European Modernism was practiced in [independent] India, the architect was building in exile; mainstream architecture’s self-importance always fed on keeping the public in the dark’, highlighting therefore the lack of building ideology’s moral compunctions.[5] Put another way, an enabling, organic relationship between an independent public ethos and the practice of architecture never truly developed in independent India. This resulted in a strange skewing of creative and practical vision, to the extent that aggressive individualism became the order of the day. This is not to say that India hasn’t produced good architects in the postcolonial period. One has only to look at the inspiring works of world-renowned visionaries such as BV Doshi and Charles Correa, who have blended together a strong public sensibility with a sustainable Indian imagination. But given the largeness of the country, such examples are but a drop in the ocean, and Bhatia’s remarks thus hold true for India in general.*
What is perhaps most tragic in the context of the Himalayas is the sheer indifference that has characterised the reception of public pleas and protests against such unscrupulous development. Despite the many voices in the region that have strongly stood against the barrage of shoddy novel projects, such endeavours have brazenly proceeded ahead. In the case of Joshimath, for instance, residents had started noticing cracks in their houses more than a year ago, before the crisis became a national headline. But every citizen intervention fell on deaf ears.[6] And as if the Joshimath crisis or the destructive flash floods weren’t enough as cautionary events, the Supreme Court of India gave the greenlight in January 2024 to open all the formerly designated ‘green areas’ of Himachal Pradesh’s capital Shimla for new construction.[7] This was done as part of the proposed 2041 Shimla Development Plan, under the pressure from the builders’ lobby, which wields astonishing power over politicians, bureaucrats and the judiciary. When the highest judicial body of the country is unable to protect the last remaining forested land, what hope can we have from anyone else? To quote the Himalayan anthropologist-activist Lokesh Ohri,Between such frustration and acceptance arises a ‘disconnect’ in every aspect of mountain life, a disconnect embodied most forcefully by architecture.the [postcolonial] state itself suffers a deep entrenchment of corporate interests and contractor lobbies. Sane voices in the mountain states are in no position to voice their concern over ‘development’ policies doled out from the Centre, gratefully accepting, and implementing whatever is on offer. At the Centre, too, there is little effort to hear voices on the ground, the ones that could narrate the truth of the crumbling Himalayas. There is no realization that what works in the plain-based states of the country may not work in the mountains.[8]
*
In his well-regarded 2006 work The Architecture of Happiness, the philosopher Alain de Botton explores the many ways in which architecture is directly and indirectly related to the sphere of human emotions and nature, not just functionality. In a beautifully crafted moral statement, de Botton observes that ‘we owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness’.[9] Likewise, we owe it to the Himalayas that the human endeavours we subject them to do not evolve as cruel forms of domination but rather as sensitive dialogues between the desires of men and the destiny of mountains.When we think of monuments, we think of statues, memories and events from the past. They are site-specific, solid, immobile. How can they represent cultural and collective memories that are remembered by many, often very differently, and that over time experience new readings? How can monuments installed by institutions, organisations and states speak to and for everybody?
What bodies can do the creative work of memory? How can the actual labour of memory be foregrounded, its training, sharing and transmission?[1]
These questions are relevant to agents in the fields of memory studies and memory production, such as artists, cultural practitioners, institutions, governments and, most importantly, for various communities and people in their everyday lives.
[It] … is on the ‘act’ of memory, … inquiring into the processes of making, constructing, enacting, transforming, expressing, transmitting cultural memory through art and popular culture. … The notion of ‘performing memory’ thus presupposes agency.[2]
The Memory Person (they/them), ongoing since June 2023, by artist Franziska Windolf offers a common form of memory production. The Memory Person performed memory as ‘an embodied and localised practice’[3] and was conceptualised in Munich during an artist residency at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect and in partnership with the ERC-funded METROMOD research project (Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile at LMU Munich).
In their joint exploration, anthropologist Cathrine Bublatzky and artist Franziska Windolf explore how the Memory Person represented a striking tension between the concepts of memory, monument and performance.
The Memory Person strolled through the Giesing quarter, a former workers’ district in southeast Munich. The performance was enacted by different persons who embodied a variety of identities, genders and agencies. They were strikingly dressed, carrying several commemorative objects and memorabilia on their body. Each object has its own history, creators and memories. At the heart of the public artwork were ongoing and dynamic encounters between the Memory Person and passers-by, their lively and personal interactions, their shared stories and memories. The Memory Person was dedicated to creative people who have migrated or are living in exile, and anyone could participate.
Not only cast steel or chiselled stone; people can be monuments too.[4]
The Memory Person challenges the idea of ‘performing memory’.[5] As a performative monument, they work with what anthropologists call the agency of humans ‘to create and construct their own reality’ and to ‘collectively … shape themselves in their behaviours and beliefs’.[6] Performing the Memory Person entailed an uninterrupted metamorphosis in which their ‘form’ kept changing. Their performances merged practices of collecting, storing and re-narrating, all resulting in a changing monument.
The public artwork becomes and operates as a performance based on the material interaction and dialogue with people in the streets.
Those who encountered the Memory Person are diverse. Some have long lived in Munich, some have moved from another country, others have migrated or even fled war and other crises in their home countries. All have memories, often not shared with wider publics, as they are intimate and personal, sometimes even traumatic and frightening.
The Memory Person is a living monument that does not represent a particular memory or hegemonic narrative. They produced a host of memories of differently shared pasts in cities like Munich, shaped by migration and mobility.
The Memory Person is a practical invention. Due to the lack of publicly accessible knowledge about creative migrants, exiles and their work in greater Munich, memories and biographies must be actively sought out in order to become visible.
As a living monument, they stimulate an interplay of creative expressions and reflections. The collection of memories and memorabilia, and their endowment to people is open-ended.
The web of relationships between the memorabilia changed with each new contribution. The Memory Person decentralises and mediates whilst connecting shared memories with people. This flexible and responsive artistic form is open to renegotiation and emergent values. Their sharing and (re-)telling is on display, mediating memory culture as a lively, contested practice.
The Memory Person and their counterparts became ‘facilitators, knowledge producers, hosts and vision seekers’.[7]
The Memory Person as a performative monument is alive and constantly ‘becoming’.
But what is actually remembered in such unforeseen encounters?
Often, curiosity and eye contact sparked encounters with the Memory Person. Their colourful, unconventional appearance, which defies stereotypical assumptions about a carnival or the Oktoberfest, attracted attention and made people wonder what the Memory Person was all about. Once they grasped the goal of the performance, many started to talk about their connections to Giesing and other residents, artists and migrants. They referred to creative people and places. Upon a second, deeper encounter, they contributed personal commemorative objects as fragments of their memories.
The creativity of the monument is very broad and includes music, tinkering, crafting, knitting, cooking, graffiti, etc.
Thus, the Memory Person addressed as many people as possible. Their objective was to raise awareness of the lack of memorials for migrants and creative people in the neighbourhood. Everyone was invited to celebrate and honour the creativity and work of past and present exiles and migrants by participating.
The initial performances of the Memory Person in June and July 2023 were a curated city walk to sites of exile in Giesing, revealing their continued relevance with a pre-selected audience. The spectators accompanied the Memory Person and witnessed their encounters and interactions with passers-by. Participants were invited to carry the memorabilia with the Memory Person and to contribute a wish for a future monument, a memory or a memento of a creative migrant who once lived or moved to Giesing.
The performances in August and September 2023 were more frequent, focussing only on encounters with residents and passers-by. The route through the district was more improvised, with time and space to revisit people and businesses, play table tennis, etc. On these occasions, the Memory Person collected memorabilia and commemorative articles devoted to creative exiles and migrants from anyone who wanted to commemorate.
How the Memory Person embodies the monument and interactions with participants in the artwork is shaped by three elements:
All three registers played out in each Memory Person performance. But the performances in June/July 2023 were less dynamic and open, as the Memory Person held a fixed position as the ‘guide’ to explain and share knowledge during the curated walk. The material contributions to the performative monument were largely predetermined (written notes on textile/foam rubber prepared by the artist).
The evolution of the artwork is produced more ‘by’ than only ‘with’ the participants.
By contrast, the performances in August/September 2023 provided more space for give and take, including returning moments and memorabilia. Due to the spontaneity of the encounters, the Memory Person and the passers-by had more freedom to participate and exchange objects.
‘Commoning’ refers to art that is produced by, not only with, the participants. The Memory Person is the formation and interplay of relationships and their material effects that shape social space and animate memory cultures.
‘The wider challenge here is that of finding new ways of understanding forms of being-in-common that refuse or exceed the logic of identity, state, and subject. In other words: how to be in common without creating a community?’[8]
If ‘commoning’ is when people in a community or neighbourhood become equal in sharing their diverse memories, how does the prescribed content balance with individual conceptions of the monument?
The more reciprocal insights, the more equitable the dialogue and the more shared reflections and relationships can emerge.
Individual identities and property rights don’t apply, as is evident in the ‘materiality’ and ‘objecthood’ of the performative monument. The focus lies on togetherness and the common production of a new monument, whilst the particularities of each person involved gain space to express themselves.
‘The more reciprocal insights, the more equitable the dialogue and the more shared reflections and relationships can emerge.’[9]
The monument belongs to no one, though the objects the monument comprises signify belonging, which inheres in ‘commoning’.
All memorabilia engender the dialogues. They resemble amanat, which is a Persian word meaning something that one gives to another person as a custodian. This requires awareness and trust – a sense of the reciprocal capacity and will to build a meaningful relationship.
The object becomes a signifier of a shared moment of remembrance and a common (emotional) value that represents other things such as the conversation, a memory, a loss or a personal or communal journey.
The amanat contributes and ‘transforms’ the world, memories, exile and identification.
The emerging performative monument becomes a common gift to creative exiles and society from all participants.
The different materialities of the performative monument speak for the coexistence of different voices and situations to which the artwork responds or is created within.
The silver brooches, for example, are given away, so they should be as durable as possible. The Memory Person provides a platform for (re)composing and (re)evaluating the objects. Objects converse with each other and provide a ‘language’ for often ineffable stories. There is no definite way of ‘reading’ them.
Diversity is the core of the performative monument, representing an anti-hierarchical, even decolonising understanding of what the Memory Person as a ‘living monument’ embodies.
The actual labour that needs to be done when underrepresented/invisible knowledge is sought out emerges. Contrasting the glorious surfaces of conventional monuments, the Memory Person allows for the contradictions, detours and failures that occur when people are building relationships. The Memory Person responds to recent decolonial debates and demands for monuments and statues of a contested, colonial past to fall.
The past is created by and about participants’ voices. The Memory Person performs it without repeating it.
[1] Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2013), 2ff.
[2] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 3.
[3] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 5.
[4] Sebastian Adler, Spectator of the performance, 24 June 2023.
[5] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 7.
[6] Plate and Smelik, Performing Memory, 7.
[7] Vera Hofmann et al., Commoning Art — Die transformativen Potenziale von Commons in der Kunst (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022), 34. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/f2/e6/9e/oa9783839464045.pdf. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by the authors.
[8] Harry Walker, ‘Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, no. 1 (2020): 148, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13183.
[9] Walker, ‘Equality without equivalence’, 147.
Hofmann, Vera, Johannes Euler, Linus Zurmühlen and Silke Helfrich. Commoning Art — Die transformativen Potenziale von Commons in der Kunst. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/f2/e6/9e/oa9783839464045.pdf.
‘global dis:connect’. Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, 2023, www.globaldisconnect.org.
Plate, Liedeke and Anneke Smelik. Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2013.
‘Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD)’. METROMOD, 2023, www.metromod.net.
Walker, Harry. ‘Equality without equivalence: an anthropology of the common’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, no. 1 (2020): 146-66. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13183.
The regular, linear and monumental pattern of grand avenues and boulevards and monumental squares do not in fact serve any identifiable use or have a clear meaning for the majority of our population. But they are still being designed and built. [A] productive use of land […] balanced with a regular distribution of market and service centres minimizing transport needs and providing employment could […] create a new […] urban environment. […] With our negative, stagnant or barely positive rates of economic growth against the explosive demographic growth it is vital to find alternatives to classic development strategies. The people of our cities are finding those alternatives by themselves and it is our responsibility as planners and architects to understand their ways and to help them resolve better the spatial problems that they face.[17]The opposition to imported technocratic expertise and directives of international donor agencies and the preference for local solutions had a distinctly disconnective, isolationist component. And yet, as an epistemological project, it was embedded in global discussions. In architecture, site-specific ways of life, architectural styles and building materials received increasing international attention by the 1970s. With the end of the great modernisation narratives, corresponding tendencies found expression in other fields too, first and foremost in social science. Paralleling postcolonial construction research at the FAPF, Mozambique saw the emergence of public intellectuals such as Aquino de Bragança, who viewed the anti-colonial liberation struggle as an incubator for new, practical knowledge about social dynamics. The rediscovery of these specifically Mozambican approaches was essential to the ‘epistemology of the South’, which sparked international interest in the social sciences.[18] Mozambique, however, not only contributed to a global discourse on local knowledge but also made use of geopolitically surprising models. For the editors at FAPF, Tanizaki had apparently raised questions in 1930s Japan that seemed significant for the future of architecture in postcolonial Mozambique.[19] Tanizaki discusses domains in which Japanese products, techniques and cultural practices are superior to Western innovations, from the quality of writing paper to optimising the interior climate of living spaces and the haptic quality of lacquerware crockery. However, he is not only concerned with nostalgia for a past universe. Rather, conservative Tanizaki is concerned about the disappearance of a material culture in which formal design and social practice meaningfully interpenetrate. The motif of shadows that characterises his description of architecture with semi-transparent paper walls and dark alcoves recurs consistently in other miniatures on Japanese society, especially when he declares particular technical and cultural imports from the West to be simply unsuitable to local needs. For example, he accuses the phonograph of cementing a Western understanding of music and sound that underrates pauses (the acoustic equivalent of shadows) in Japanese oral and musical culture. If modern medicine had originated in Japan, he suspects, the bedrooms of hospitals would not be white, but sand-coloured, and thus more beneficial to recovery processes. ‘Here again we have to come off the loser for having borrowed’,[20] he writes. Similarly, Forjaz fears that the ‘systematic adoption of values and forms imported from other cultures and societies’[21] might dramatically worsen the living conditions in Mozambican cities. What Tanizaki and Forjaz have in common is the concern about technological globalisation, which standardises uniform, often unsuitable solutions. But while Tanizaki nostalgically bids farewell to local idiosyncrasies, Forjaz thinks of the local more hopefully as a laboratory for future innovation:
Our role as architects and planners in the Third World is, primarily, to deepen the understanding of the economic, social and cultural characteristics of our society, and their dynamics of change in order to find adequate and necessarily new solutions to our spatial and building problems.[22]Compared to Tanizaki, Forjaz is clearly anti-traditionalist. Genuine and contemporary Mozambican architecture is yet to come:
Traditional societies in our region did not have to answer this scale of problems […]. We have to create now an architecture that expresses our new social order, and there is not much we can take from our architectural traditions. […] Like the cities of Europe […] need their cathedrals and their castles, their walls and great squares; like the typical American city needs its courthouse square and church, we need our tangible signs of an order superior to the tribal and different from the colonial.[23]In Mozambique, the international disconnect caused by extreme economic and political circumstances even invigorated participation in global academic discourses and prompted contributions to global transfers of theory. A particularly unusual publication, this Mozambican edition also highlights the obstacles that continue to exclude African universities from global academic publishing. At the time, the decision to publish Tanizaki fit the search for a genuine path in the field of architecture, and it again relates to current discussions in South Africa and Great Britain about decolonising architectural education. [1] This text was facilitated by a research grant from the German Historical Institute in Rome. [2] See Faculdade de Arquitectura e Planeamento Físico, Publicações FAPF (Maputo: Edições FAPF, ca. 2005). [3] See Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Em Louvor às sombras, trans. Margarida David e Silva (Maputo: Edições FAPF, 1999). [4] In the year of the translation, Mozambique ranked third to last in the UNDP’s Human Development Index, see ‘Human Development Index’, ed. UNDP (2023). https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI.. [5] See José Forjaz, ‘Research Needs and Priorities in Housing and Construction in Mozambique’, Habitat Intl. 9, no. 2 (1985). [6] That is, Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. [7] See Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper (Stony Creek: Leet's Island Books, 1977), 42.. [8] For an attempt in this direction, see Mark Olweny, ‘Architectural Education in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Investigation into Pedagogical Positions and Knowledge Frameworks’, Journal of Architecture 25, no. 6 (2022). [9] See Aquino de Bragança, ‘Independência sem descolonização: A transferência do poder em Moçambique, 1974 – 1975’, Estudos Moçambicanos 5-6 (1985). [10] See Marina Ottaway, ‘Afrocommunism Ten Years after: Crippled but Alive’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 16, no. 1 (1987). [11] José Forjaz, Por uma escola de arquitectura não ortodoxa, ca. 1983, handwritten manuscript, FAPF archive, Maputo. [12] Some of these publications were pioneering works on Mozambican architectural history. [13] See Nikolai Brandes, ‘Developing the Late Colonial City: Strategies of a Middle Class Housing Cooperative in Mozambique, 1951–1975’, Cities 130, 103935 (2022), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103935. [14] See Udo Kultermann, New Directions in African Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1969). [15] Nikolai Brandes, ‘“Das Ziel waren Wohnungen für die ganze Bevölkerung.” Ein Gespräch mit dem mosambikanischen Architekten Mário do Rosário, der in Maputo die Umsetzung eines der letzten Wohnungsbauprojekte der DDR im Ausland begleitete’, in Architekturexport DDR. Zwischen Sansibar und Halensee, ed. Andreas Butter and Thomas Flierl (Berlin: Lukas, 2023). [16] The essay first appeared in Arquitrave, the FAPF's student magazine, in 1990; in English translation in an exhibition catalogue in 1999; and finally on the website of Forjaz's architecture firm. I follow the online publication: ‘Between Adobe and Stainless Steel’, José Forjaz Arquitectos, 2021, accessed 6 September, 2023, https://www.joseforjazarquitectos.com/textosen/%E2%80%9C...between-adobe-and-stainless-steel%E2%80%9D. [17] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’. [18] See Boaventura Santos, ‘Aquino de Bragança: criador de futuros, mestre de heterodoxias, pioneiro das epistemologias do Su’, in Como fazer ciências sociais e humanas em África. Questões epistemológicas, metodológicas, teóricas e políticas, ed. Teresa Cruz e Silva, João Paulo Borges Coelho, and Amélia Neves de Souto (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2012). [19] This transfer of ideas is ironic in that Japan itself was aggressively building an empire at the time of Tanizaki's stance against Western cultural influence. [20] Tanizaki, In Praise, 12. [21] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’. [22] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’. [23] Forjaz, ‘Between Adobe’.
Slow time can lead to more meaningful work
– Ananya Mishra, workshop attendee
Global dis:connect was honoured to host Ecology, aesthetics and everyday cultures of modernity, a fascinating workshop held on 10-11 July 2023 and conceived by our fellow Siddharth Pandey. The event brought together scholars from various fields to discuss linkages between ecology, everydayness and aesthetics by looking at the modern period from the 19th century to the present. The participants shed light on several topics related to aesthetics by looking at art — movies, paintings and literature — that confront humanities’ relationship with the environment. The sound of crickets chirping fills the air, which is heavy with the smell of freshly mowed grass and smoke from burning larch. I inhale the air and look over my laptop into green trees, moving in the wind of an approaching thunderstorm that’s already rumbling among the mountains. It’s a picturesque setting, inspiring surroundings for writing, reading and thinking. It is an aesthetic environment, a place that clearly collapses the illusory dichotomy between nature and culture. Somewhere in the Austrian mountains I can to write about culture in nature, and I do so using cultural practices and materials in an environment that feels wild and untouched but is designed by humans. This aesthetic place is the Anthropocene in microcosm, perfectly suited to write this reflection. The word Anthropocene, like the geological epoch, is charging ahead, having become a buzzword evoking dystopian images of environmental degradation, global human-caused pollution and mega-cities expanding in formerly wild environments. The world in the Anthropocene isn´t aesthetic, but what counts as aesthetic changes. Most people would consider winter in general and especially snow in the Alps beautiful, but prior to the rise of tourism and winter sports in the second half of the 19th century, winter in the mountains signified danger and death, not beauty and joy.[1] What is aesthetic? Siddharth Pandey claims reception through our physical senses provides the best access to the concept of aesthetics, which was later connected with evolving conceptions of beauty. Today, aesthetic and beautiful are practically synonyms. When reflecting on aesthetics, one starts see them everywhere — our aesthetic environment, the beautiful library of on the ground floor of our gd:c building, the alpine setting where I wrote this article. Aesthetics influence our thinking and our work as researchers. Even so, the Anthropocene was indelibly inscribed in the workshop’s topic and influenced the discussions of artworks showcasing the interplay between humans and the environment. But aesthetics offered an alternative to the stereotypically dystopian view of the Anthropocene. We noticed this already in the early stages of preparing the workshop when Siddharth Pandey, Daniel Bucher (another student assistant) and I met for the first time to discuss how to design the posters and flyers. The first drafts visualised a dystopic environment, but Siddharth Pandey wanted to reconceive the design. Using motifs by the British craftsperson, polymath and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, we combined the ideas of everyday culture, aesthetics and the intertwining of nature and culture. On two scorching days in July, the participants gathered in the gd:c library, where we discussed many topics. We listened to Salu Majhi’s poetry, saw photographs of sled dogs towing a sled through a shallow, crystal-blue lake on still-frozen sea ice, recalled our childhood memories with an analysis of the visual language Bambi, learned about Chile saltpetre in artworks and as a medium, virtually visited the Time Landscape project in lower Manhattan, and more. As a historian, I was unfamiliar with art historians’ and literary critics’ approaches, but all the panels were inspiring despite (or because of) that, relating easily to my own field and interests. Each presentation touched aspects of everyday life in some way. Our reliance on synthetic fertilisers to produce food, firsthand experiences of the effects of climate change and a childhood encounter with Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic paintings are just some examples. The workshop opened with David Whitley´s keynote on how the textual descriptions in the 1928 novel Bambi. A Life in the Woods by the hunter Felix Salten had been translated into visual forms in Disney´s Bambi movie. His analysis of a movie most of us recall from our childhood was fascinating, because the visual language is typically absorbed unconsciously. Whitely’s exposition of such aesthetic commonplaces set the tone for the following presentations. In the first panel on the language of plants, Sarah Moore spoke about Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape project, in which he and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation represented the ecological loss in Manhattan over the last 400 years with a slow-growing forest on a quarter-acre of land that was no longer maintained as a park. Moore connected this project with works of the 19th century that were already dealing with human-induced environmental degradation, like Thomas Cole’s works and contemporary seed banks. Moore presented Time Landscape as a place where trees bring us a message from the past, a message that recurred in other presentations. Next, Vera-Simone Schulz discussed images of plants, analysed how ecology and aesthetics influence these depictions, and why depictions of tropical plants can be intentionally misleading. The floral decorations at lunch were a glaring coincidence. Geopolitical aesthetics were the topic of the second panel treating mineral resources, their exploitation and related artworks. Nicolas Holt’s presentation focused on minerals, especially Chilean saltpetre, a powerful natural fertiliser that is less harmful than synthetic fertilisers gained by the Haber-Bosch-Method, as a medium in art history. The next presentation by Ananya Mishra focused on the translation Salu Majhi’s songs and analysed how local forms of protest against mining companies are expressed in his poetry, showing that Majhi considered his poetry as a form of protest as well as part of his everyday life. Beyond the topic itself, Mishra’s multidimensional presentation was intriguing. Not only did she show and discuss translations of the poems on a screen, she combined this with audio recordings of Salu Majhi singing the poems as ambient sound. Together with a video of her journey to Salu Majhi documenting her research, this blended the object of research, the act of research, the past, the present and the presentation. Hence we return to the quote opens starts this report. ‘Slow time leads to more meaningful work’. This is a concept I cherish in my own work: not working slowly in terms of pace and productivity, but taking and investing time for the best possible, most meaningful result is valuable and necessary. Of form and feeling was the topic of the third panel. Nathalie Kerschen opened the panel with her talk on expressing nature in architectural design and how the experience of nature, termed eco-phenomenology, influences design. She also touched on the importance for scholars not to lose their connection with everyday experiences. Touch grass. Following up was Jane Boddy with her presentation on form-feeling and the aesthetics of nature around 1900. She asked whether form-feeling was a general collective experience and about the role of nature in that experience. Boddy demonstrated the importance of looking at feelings and emotions. In her words ‘the feeling of a form (Formgefühl) is source and intuition of style’. The last panel on the first day was titled Between the known and unknown and dealt with experimental prehistory and Bermuda oceanographic expeditions. Jutta Teutenberg started her talk about experimental prehistoric research with a focus on recreating the conditions under which prehistoric artists created art and crafts by referring to the ethnographer Frank Hamilton. This again invoked positionality and the importance of considering feelings, as an experimental prehistoric researcher who feels like an artist will experience different things and produce different results than a researcher who does not.[2] Magdalena Grüner analysed three of Else Bostelmann’s 1934 paintings capturing fishes with watercolours as seen by oceanographic expeditions to Bermuda in their natural environment and by taking into account how the colour spectrum changed with the depth. She used taxidermically stuffed animals as models and descriptions by the deep-sea researcher William Beebe because Bostelmann hadn’t ever seen the real thing. Bostelmann therefore worked with her imagination and artistic methods, diverging from the aim of the expedition, which was to gain scientific knowledge. The fifth panel, titled The limits and edges of perception, opened with Jessie Alperin’s presentation about the imagination of the Earth from above in Odilon Redon’s Le paravent rouge, a folding screen made for André Bonger. She analysed this artwork as an everyday, aesthetic object, which made it possible to view the impossible: the Earth imagined from above visualised inside a home. The sixth panel on the prism of the pastoral began with Mihir Kumar Jha, who talked about spatialisation in colonial literature and the pastoral as a genre that deals with man’s interaction with nature. He analysed the pastoral landscape with a view to the surroundings of Hazaribagh as an ecological space between wilderness and civilisation, between nature and culture. From the pastoral in colonial literature, we moved to the pastoral in paintings by the Belgian artist Roger Raveel and his attempts to develop an aesthetics of complexity, as presented by Senne Schraeyen’s. This talk also focused on the nature-culture nexus and how the environment changed through the rapid economic change in the second half of the 20th century. Recalling how the Alps also changed radically in the last century and the ensuing sense of ecological loss, I felt compelled to ask whether the loss and damage, the pollution and the destruction are necessary to prompt new aesthetic perceptions of formerly inaccessible landscapes and our environment in general. The final panel was titled Ice tales and offered a stark contrast to the 34-degree temperatures that afternoon. Oliver Aas opened the last panel on the Artic Sea ice by analysing art that depicts melting sea ice and questioning how our view of the Artic changes in light of the effects of climate change. From the ice of the present, we moved to Kaila Howell’s close reading of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice and its historic depiction of ice of the past. She combined her analysis of the painting with Kant’s philosophy and the concept of scale in art history. After seven closely connected and very diverse panels with fascinating and inspiring presentations and discussions, Camille Serchuk’s concluding remarks were the grand finale. Serchuk wonderfully summarised the diverse presentations and related them to her own work on medieval maps, which demonstrated the relevance of the topic beyond its chosen modern period. Still, the end had to be aesthetic. Therefore, we enjoyed a walking tour through the English Garden in the sweltering heat, but it made for a perfectly aesthetic ending thanks to a field of wild flowers, a part of the English Garden uncultivated and untouched by landscapers, bringing us back full circle to the Time Landscape project.