Keynote 1: Gerard Delanty - the model of dialogue
Keynote Cosmopolitan Hinterlands between ancient and present cities
B2 Historic and Cosmopolitan Landscapes
I went to Egypt with a tight tendon on my left shoulder. Just before, I had the most uninhibited weekend. Danced at OIL to ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U. Woke up to 廣式腸粉, downed two glass bottles of 維他奶. Cairo is a dust storm of energy. Crumbling under my fingertips, I was drawn into a new dryness unlike any other. Loud, unrelenting, the reconstructed histories of the city fall upon one another, with hanging Coptic churches, to Masjids, and Synagogues in the same place. It spoke of a cosmopolitanism, a condition of both unity and diversity. It holds multitudes but speaks to encounters with one another. Concurrently, there is a resistance to globalisation, a resistance to a flattened capital-driven condition. Instead, it infers the reflexivity of the self. Notes I took from the keynote on ‘What is a Tradition? Cosmopolitanism as a Living Tradition’ by Gerard Delanty “fusion of horizons - the tradition of context, the horizon is the range of vision, everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. The movement of human life, is not bound by one point, it is something that moves, & moves with us. The horizon of the present is being continuously formed. It cannot be formed by the past. It encounters with the self, and another.” We climbed to the top of an old Masjid minaret, which became a madrasa, in another lifetime. I saw history in constant renovation, revision and the debris of palimpsest layered upon the city. I presented a paper that posed the question the circulation of reclaimed Southeast Asian hard timber, posed for the Instagram effect reinforce the image of sustainability? This is juxtaposed against forms of collective practice using generic building material distributed on a global scale, plywood, concrete and steel sections. What is our material tradition? Is it imbued in the materiality of place, action of collective labour to cultivate place memory? I also presented a paper on behalf of Adam Jasper, on the theoretical underpinnings of Balinese cybernetic traditions first documented by Stephen Lansing. We had a great conversation about vernacular traditions and how we ponder about the validity as infrastructure today.