Lecture Mark Terkessidis – open to all the Piet Zwart Institute students

Date: November 01 2011
Time: 10:00  – 11:30 hrs including Q&A
Location: Piet Zwart Institute – Large project room
Address: Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam

Continental Europe never developed an original idea of cultural diversity. Diversity was introduced as a purely negative token, as rupture in the concept of the national. Diversity within societies was recognised either in terms of absence (post-holocaust) or as re-appearance (post-colonial).

But how can diversity be thought of as “post-migrational”? Cities have always been shaped by mobility and migration. So-called globalisation, however, has renewed and accelerated this process. Cities are no longer defined by dwelling but by movement. The city has hence become a vague entity, a “Parapolis”. What is the state of culture in the Parapolis? What is its position in space and time, its ethics and aesthetics, its legitimation and policies? Culture has become part of an urban environment that is defined a forced-upon, sometimes spooky historicity, coincidences and juxtapositions, arbitrariness of references and longing for new coherence.

For an ethics of culture in Parapolis, one may go back to founding texts of Western civilisation. In Homer’s Ulysses is typically seen as the bearer of the Western idea of individual freedom. But he is on a quest for home, which makes him a free human being and a citizen at the same time. The Ulysses of the “Ilias”, “at home” with his fellow Greeks and ready to expand their territory, is a brutal slaughterer. When he returns home at the end of the epic, he commits a massacre in order to be “at home” again and homogenise this territory. The quest for home therefore is the true state of civility.

In Parapolis, dwellers live a “Phililhellenism” of the kind described by Greek writer Mimika Cranaki during his emigration in Paris. The nation no longer works as a homeland, but is still there as an imaginary place. The search for home should therefore be no longer considered transitional, but the essence of civility. Culture has the potential of being the location for negotiating this search. Traditionally, aesthetics has close ties to the concept of emancipation – and its underbelly, the desire of nations and educated middle classes to set themselves apart from others. The aesthetics of culture in Parapolis needs to be more “conversational” and participatory along the lines of, for example, Grant H. Kester. In the aftermath of boding, there seems to be a need for more “banding”. It could therefore make sense to consider any utterance – whether art or not – culture, and focus on “atmospheres” rather than meaning. The culture of Parapolis is not just about diversity, but abundance.

On the basis of these considerations, this lecture will propose a programme of interculture, focusing on the individual with his/her diverse backgrounds and qualifications, and with the potential to open up a new space for negotiating community.

Mark Terkessidis is currently a guest researcher in the lectoraat Cultural Diversity within the research centre Creating 010 of the Rotterdam University.

From 1992 to 1994, he was an editor of the German pop culture magazine “Spex”. From 2003 to 2011 he worked as a host for the intercultural radio programme “Funkhaus Europa” of the West German public broadcasting service. Mark wrote numerous essays on youth and pop culture, migration and racism for German newspapers, magazines and public radio. Together with Tom Holert, he is the co-founder of the Cologne-based Institute for Studies in Visual Culture (isvc.org).