ABSTRACT

Creative dialogues between cultures, secret and intricate yet revelatory of affinities as well as differences, material and spiritual alike, were spurred in early modernity by European colonialism. After the triumphs and horrors of the 20th century, they are thriving today all over the globe, carried out by talented artists, bureaucrats and lay people alike. But these dialogues are now framed by ominous spatialities of deprivation and fear which hold their own version of past, present and future. Intricate memory webs of cultural manners and accomplishments feed all that went and all that is about to happen. What really matters at this moment is the spirit that ingrains these dialogues, since, as things stand right now, if we are not already there, then we are moving quickly towards a disempowering situation built and buttressed by the new spatialities which are not openly represented or monitored. Certainly, there is already reaction to the prospect of this nightmarish world. Besides theoreticians of culture and space, polemical architects, informed by disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, environmental sciences and architectural theory, are interested in a spatial imagery that addresses the senses and looks for the advancement of technologies towards a sensory paradigm. The question now becomes what kind of social powers and processes can support us by disentangling such a deeply menacing secrecy and how to launch some kind of social control over it by articulating the unspoken and by dispelling the negative vagueness.