The Medium is the Metissage
2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/hwj/dbt019
ISSN1477-4569
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Tourism and Spaces
ResumoWhat kind of phenomena are international exhibitions (or, as they are also called, world’s fairs, expositions or expos)? Are they a form of urban development, to be filed with parks or suburbs? Are they testing grounds for new technologies? Instruments for public enlightenment and world peace? Training camps in national and regional identities? ‘Places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’? 1 Potemkin villages that help claim an élite world status while screening off domestic disorder? Or, like the Olympics, seemingly never-ending circuses in which the participants are either corporately sponsored or surrogates for international rivalries? Or perhaps they are, as Alexander Geppert in his authoritative Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (2010) suggests, a fantastical medium: ‘the most spectacular mass medium of the urban imagination in fin-de-siècle Europe’ (p. 1). Fleeting Cities is a detailed study of five international exhibitions across more than three decades and three countries. It covers the large trade exhibition in Berlin (1896), the universal exposition in Paris (1900), London’s Franco-British (1908) and British Empire (1924) exhibitions, and the colonial exposition in Paris (1931). Each of its five main chapters is concerned with space, in both its temporal dimensions and human aspects, which is explored in relation to matters of site and layout, but also with regard to issues of patronage, politics, and legacies. International exhibitions are here not the straightforward products of their makers’ intentions but a medium through which societies are represented in a condensed, or prismatic, manner.
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