Existential Territories: The Lenticular Condition
1 April 2019 | 5pm 7.30pm
Kensington and DAR 612
Free, but booking required
Professor Hages summarises his abstract as:
'The idea of co-existing realities, and multi or pluri-realism has become a key theme in the critical anthropological current thought known as ‘the ontological turn’. This anthropology offers a critical comparative standpoint to western modernity’s obsession with mono-existence, from monogamy to monotheism to mono-ethno-nationalism. The western idea of one reality and many perspectives on it is relativised by examining Amazonian multi-perspectivist ontology which sees the multiplicity of perspectives as a multiplicity of realities, as an entanglement of a multiplicity of realities or ecologies.
This has proven helpful to me in thinking the nature of diasporic existence that I have theorised as taking a lenticular form. A lenticular is an image that appears differently depending on how you look at it. Think of the granulated postcards that change images depending on the angle from which they are seen: smiling clown/frowning clown, Jesus/Mary. In contrast to the single image/reality captured in the common photograph the lenticular surface contains a multiplicity of images/realities that reveal themselves perspectively and are continuously flickering and speaking to each other. I will use this to reflect on what it means to think of diasporic dwelling as a lenticular process involving oscillation between a multiplicity of realities.'
Schedule
- Welcome by Dr Godofredo Pereira, architect and researcher
Dr Godofredo Pereira is a Senior Tutor and Course Leader on MA Environmental Architecture and ADS7 Ecologies of Existence in the School of Architecture. - Talk by Ghassan Hage, Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Ghassan has published widely in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, racism and migration. Ghassan is the author of, amongst others, White Nation (1998), Against ParaÂnoid NationÂalÂism (2003), Alter-Politics: Critical anthropology and the Radical Imagination (2015) and Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2018). - Q&A session
This event has been organised by the Environmental Architecture Programme in the School of Architecture. For more information please contact Dieudonnee Burrows.