gently adapted from the original
published on Tafter Journal
July 4th, 2014
CURIOSITY AND CONTEMPLATION: A GEOGRAPHY OF CULTURE
Michele Trimarchi
Culture is certainly rooted in specific sites. Such a simple feature has been used, often ove-
rused or even abused in the attempt at drawing borderlines or highlighting local pride, em-
phasizing a sense of belonging based upon the refusal of strangers and – symmetrically –
the exploitation of foreigners. Despite its evident failure territorial marketing, more a label
than a tool, is still adopted as a sort of Troy horse aimed at attracting blockbuster visitors
rather than curious and non-prejudicial travellers.
A geography of culture can be drafted. Its ancestor is the inevitably eurocentric view that
convinced Napoleon to bring an army of archaeologists in Egypt: the aim was the enormous
collection of ancient manufacts to be hosted in the new cultural hub, Paris. In such a way
the newly born institution of nation state could show a powerful endorsement; while kings
were there by grace of God and will of he nation, the bourgeois democracies devoted at
keeping the manufacturing economy alive could only rely upon the past, even a stolen past.
The golden age needed the sacred authority of grandfathers.
After one century, just before the fall of the hundred-years peace in 1914, the ability of cul-
ture to define our ethical and political hyerarchy of values was drained by the exhaustion of
our creative language: creative artists started to steal signs from other vocabularies, from
the pentatonic javanese music to african sculptures, intuitions from the photographic tech-
nology, tribal metaphors. It was the chaos, the creative chaos. It destroyed the commonpla-
ces conventionally associated with culture: it represents beauty, it reproduces nature, it is
the product of original, unique crafting. Still in the Thirties the judge of the Brancusi vs.
United States trial fell into this romantic trap.
But then, after a dark period in which books were burnt, jews killed, ancestors resurrected
and life horribly theatralised, culture was absorbed by the industrial wave, and started to
uncomfortably navigate between elitist clubs and popular hordes, reactionary (often apoca-
lyptic) conservatives and leftish intellectuals. It was almost a religious war. The cultural sy-
stem still carries the wounds of such a dimensional obsession: ideas are evaluated through
their revenues, projects are compared through the width of their audience, objects, events
and even professionals are identified through their label. Conventions prevail upon substan-
ce, and the diffused stress of performance ends up to look for cheap solutions: impressioni-
sts’ exhibitions, three tenors’ concerts, and the like. Site-specificity disappears, and culture
adopts a superficially global orientation.
This self-referential framework managed to widen the gap between culture and society.
Still now much more than half of the world adult population has never been involved in any
cultural experience. The long conviction that culture is special and that only initiated indi-
viduals can enjoy it led to the geographic isolation of cultural buildings and areas from the
urban grid: ivory towers, rather than places for sharing emotions, intuitions and experien-
ces. At the end of the Twentieth Century a relevant part of creative language was no more
