Mai / Juni 2023
Universität Innsbruck
MANIFOLD
Architecture beyond Stereotypes
Universität Innsbruck
Master
14.12.2022
Institut für experimentelle Architektur – Studio3 (Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Kathrin ASTE)
Theoretische Themen
Rhino, ZBrush
Culture and identity are two currently widely discussed terms. In debates about cultural appropriation or the cancelling of celebrities, artists or institutions, they are both being used to make politics.
What is Tyrolean identity really about? Is it the Lederhosen and Dirndl,
the Yodelling and Slap Dancing, the wooden farm houses with a cosy parlour,
idyllically located on the green grassy mountain slopes, or is all of that just
fabricated imagery, pretending to be? Isn’t our identity closer to Madonna
or Kim Kardashian? According to Edouard Glissant, a Francophone writer,
all of those assumptions are true, since our globalised world is in a state of
steady creolisation. Clashes, harmonies, deformations, withdrawals, rejections
and attractions between different cultures result in the unpredictable.
So, isn’t this understanding of identity the true reality we live in – also in the
region of Tyrol?
Is this rhizomatic concept of identity therefore useful to develop an
architectural methodology resulting in a hybrid aesthetics, questioning the
widespread conservative understanding of identity in the region of Tyrol?
If so, how can this hybrid aesthetic identify itself as an estrangement and
allusion of the manifold cultural elements and motifs it is based on? Can this
aesthetic, explored through an architecture in the city of Innsbruck, disrupt
the local and regional understanding of identity and offer a space for all
identities – would this move us towards an “architecture of the manifold”?
Text von Moritz Riedl.