Imaginative Mislocation: Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, Ground Zero of the Twentieth Century

The controversy that erupted in March over the publication of Charles Pellegrino’s account of the atomic bombings of Japan, The Last Train from Hiroshima, suggests that the historical legacy of the first military use of atomic weaponry is still fiercely contested in the USA. The spat is merely the latest conflict in a long war over the significance of the bombings, which resurfaces with each new book, exhibition or programme that appears. When the ruins of the Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome – formerly the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall – were nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995, the United States objected on the basis of concerns over a ‘lack of historical perspective’, arguing that the ‘events antecedent to the United States’ use of atomic weapons to end World War II are key to understanding the tragedy of Hiroshima’. The appeal to historical facts by both US diplomats and, more recently, military veterans contrasts with the dehistoricized emphasis of other Western cultural responses to Hiroshima. But what both kinds of reception share is an occlusion of the prehistory of capitalist liberalism, colonialism and imperialism which produces Japanese modernity,a prehistory which is itself built into the Genbaku Dome’s concrete structure, and an afterlife of nuclear pacification which produces the global context of terrorism as the continuation of war by other means.

The Turtle Garden: Tan Kah Kee’s last spiritual world

This paper explores the role of diasporic subjects in China’s heritage-making through a case study of the Turtle Garden built by Tan Kah Kee in Xiamen, China. Tan is the first person with Overseas Chinese background who built museums in the P.R. China and has been regarded as a symbol of Overseas Chinese patriotism. This paper argues that the Turtle Garden, conceptualised as a postcolonial ‘carnivalesque’ space, is more than a civic museum for public education. It reflects the owner’s highly complex and sometimes conflicting museum outlook embedded in his life experience as a migrant, his encounter with (British) colonialism in Malaya, and integrated with his desire and despair about the Chinese Communist Party’s nation-building project in the 1950s. Rather than a sign of devotion to the socialist motherland as simplistically depicted in China’s discourse, the garden symbolises Tan’s last ‘spiritual world’ where he simultaneously engaged with soul-searching as a returned Overseas Chinese and alternative diasporic imagining of Chinese identities and nation. It brings to light the value of heritage-making outside centralised heritage discourses, and offers an invaluable analytical lens to disentangle the contested and ever shifting relationship between diasporic subjects, cultural heritage and nation-(re)building in the Chinese context and beyond.

Design as Symbolic Violence. Design for Social Justice.

Design embeds ideas in communication and artefacts in subtle and psychologically powerful ways. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term ‘symbolic violence’ to describe how powerful ideologies, priorities, values and even sensibilities are constructed and reproduced through cultural institutions, processes and practices. Through symbolic violence, individuals learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive. Symbolic violence normalises structural violence and enables real violence to take place, often preceding it and later justifying it. Feminist, class, race and indigenous scholars and activists describe how oppressions (how patriarchy, racism, colonialism, etc.) exist within institutions and structures, and also within cultural practices that embed ideologies into everyday life. The theory of symbolic violence sheds light on how design can function to naturalise oppressions and then obfuscate power relations around this process. Through symbolic violence, design can function as an enabler for the exploitation of certain groups of people and the environment they (and ultimately ‘we’) depend on to live. Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, tools and processes that result in structural and other types of violence (including ecocide). Breaking symbolic violence involves discovering how it works and building capacities to challenge and transform dysfunctional ideologies, structures and institutions. This conversation will give participants an opportunity to discuss, critique and/or develop the theory of design as symbolic violence as a basis for the development of design strategies for social justice.

Kahvehane Kongresspark

“Kahvehane (Coffeehouse) Kongresspark”explores the question of transcultural relations and belonging through an artistic exploration of coffee and its cultural history. The project was commissioned as an urban art intervention by the 'Soho in Ottakring' Biennial in Vienna. Organic and fair-trade coffee, sponsored by Kaffee Alt Wien , was served free of charge to the public in specially designed cups and saucers, which were created at the Ceramics Research Centre at the University of Westminster. The designs reflect coffee’s shared multi-ethnic history and the globalization of coffee.The project includes an interactive lecture-performance exploring the many legends about the origins of coffee tracing its journey from Ethiopia, the Arabian peninsula through the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) to Vienna and across the entire globe. While adopting a humorous take on the globalization of coffee, the performance sheds light on the history of colonialism and question the conditions of contemporary trade. The performance was written and performed in collaboration with Bharatanatyam artist and actor Shane Shambhu.