Manifold

Betreuung: Kathrin Aste

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”?