Chaired by Laura op de Beke
Hannah Kristine Lunde: The legendary timespace of Selja: interpretations of the Sunniva legend as multi-temporal narrations
How are stories referring to historical and legendary events applied as narrative framings for the present-day experience of cultural heritage sites? The presentation explores this question through the case of the contemporary “re-storying” of the island of Selja through the legend of St Sunniva, the saint whose martyrdom and shrine are associated with this island. The narrative events unfolding in the Sunniva legend take place in the late 10th and the 12th centuries. Furthermore, the reception history of the legend of St Sunniva, that is, the narrating events created by different agents in historical time, stretches from the 12th century to the present. The different temporalities in the storyworld and in the various timespaces this story is interpreted in, thus become multi-temporal and dialogical. To analyse such practiced approaches to time, Barbara Adam’s notion of “timespace” are combined with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s “chronotope”. The aim of the presentation is to shed light on ways in which these multi-temporal narrations provide notions of historical depth to geographical place, and to exemplify how this affect the experience of the historical shrine of St Sunniva in the context of the ongoing heritagisation of religious history and sacralisation of heritage.
Bio: Hannah Kristine Lunde (PhD) is a cultural historian affiliated with the University of Oslo. Her doctoral thesis, "Pilgrimage Matters: Administrative and Semiotic Landscapes of Contemporary Pilgrimage Realisations in Norway" (IKOS, UiO, 2022) explores the emergence of pilgrimage as a contemporary phenomenon in Norway, through the parallell processes of heritagisation of religion and sacralisation of heritage.
Robert Hume: Time, archives, and colonial (un)bordering on the Russia-Japan border, 1850s-1940s
This paper explores the temporalities of colonial development on the islands that straddle the historically contested Russia-Japan border from the 1850s until the 1940s (Sakhalin, Hokkaido, and the Kuril Islands). These were islands where imperial borders were drawn, re-drawn, and re-drawn again. They were also islands where the Russian empire, the Japanese empire, and the USSR articulated competing visions of the future – visions that often involved increasingly exploitative interventions into the natural world. Yet as nature grew to be ever more entangled with the material and rhetorical processes of imperial expansion and collapse, the Russia-Japan border came to be increasingly temporally fragmented. Existing timelines of imperial rule were fractured, multiple new times were created, and the border itself came to be permeated by multiple non-linear temporalities. This paper explores this history of overlapping colonial borders, environmental exploitation, and temporal fragmentation, while also considering the ways in which these myriad temporalities can be found in the archives today. In doing so, it argues that a focus on the temporally transient nature of colonial development narratives can illuminate the ways in which they were tied not only to colonial construction, but also colonial collapse.
Bio: Robert Hume is a PhD student in the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the history of empire-building and colonial development on the Russia-Japan border
Tone Huse: Active Past: Re-thinking Temporality in Studies of Postcolonising Land
Taking studies of the Arctic as its empirical starting point, the paper launches the concept of ‘active past’ as an intervention into social science studies of postcolonising land. Through an extensive review of published research, the paper shows that Arctic studies constitute a thematically, theoretically, and methodologically diverse research field. It is characterised by a shared concern for the pronounced effects that climate change is having on the Arctic, and how this will affect social, economic, political and/or cultural development. Only to a limited extent have studies considered how colonial histories play into current developments and intersect with ongoing efforts to increase and maintain Indigenous sovereignties. With ‘active past’ we draw attention to this gap in social science research, and to how the past is activated in and works upon the present. Rather than see the past as simply an object of history, a passive background, or neutral context, the active past concept encourages scholars to re-time their studies by shifting attention towards also considering the histories of the Arctic and how these continue to act in the present. Through an interdisciplinary reading of literatures on time and temporality, including contributions from Indigenous Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, STS, geography, and history, the paper begins to develop a framework for how to do so. Consequently, in putting forward the active past concept we seek not simply to make social scientists more aware of ‘history’, but to develop ways of engaging with the past and the present at the same time and with an eye to how the past is activated in, negotiated, and resettled in the present. The paper is co-authored by Tone Huse and Prashanti Mayfield.
Bio: Tone Huse is an associate professor at the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Science and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Her current research focuses on the geographies and materialities of urban politics, economies, and planning in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat. Her work spans historical as well as contemporary research, is radically interdisciplinary, and committed to experimenting with new means for interacting with broad publics. Huse is the author of Everyday Life in the Gentrifying City. On Displacement, Ethnic Privileging and the Right to Stay Put (Ashgate 2014), and co-author (with Kristin Asdal) of Nature Made Economy: Cod, Capital and the Great Economization of the Ocean (MIT Press 2023).
Zeynep Irem San & Sevgi Türkkan: A state of becoming: Dalyan and its spatial potentials
Dalyan is a delicate but durable structural typology of the traditional Mediterranean fishing culture which is built on the sea and connected to the coast to hunt migratory fish. Dalyan structures are formed by the entangled and dynamic interactions between geography, surface and submarine topography, climatic conditions, wind, wave intensity, roaming of fish species, fishing culture and logistic needs of fisherman. Such intertwined and continuous relationship between these agents renders its construction a never-ending act of space-making, as they are constantly assembled and dis-assembled in temporal and seasonal cycles. These local traditional fishing structures are strong typological examples of the spatiotemporal change, dynamism, entanglement as well as continuity that characterize space as a state of becoming.
The question of how to decipher and work with the dynamic notion of time-space variability, as in the case of dalyan, is an issue that this article aims to address. The article argues that the production of the dalyan structure, by establishing a dynamic spatiotemporal relationship with human and non-human actors and the place being in a continuous state of becoming, has potentials worth exploring in terms of liberating architectural design from its static, disconnected and isolated norms.
In order to discuss the spatial potentials of the dalyan typology as a state of becoming, the article resorts mainly to two theoretical frameworks: new materialism (Bennett, Cheah, Orlie, & Grosz 2010) and assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2006, Robbins & Marks, 2010, Anderson & McFarlane 2011, Tsing 2015). The study of the new materialism in terms of change, causality, agency, time, and place relations through the disentanglement of matter from its fixed, static, and predictable patterns provides a methodological guidance for the study of dalyans. Meanwhile, the theory of assemblage is instrumentalized to consider dalyan in an intertwined environment of flow, like the water that contains various moving bodies and the air that shapes atmospheric events and creates entangled temporalities through time. In addition to the literature review, the study aims to create and discuss representations of the spatial condition of becoming through on-site observations and interviews of the dalyan of Uçmakdere in Tekirdag, Turkey supported by various architectural representation tools such as collage, photography, drawings and model. Keywords: dalyan, becoming, assemblage, new materialism, representation.
Bio: Sevgi Türkkan, PhD, architect and researcher, completed her dissertation in 2017 entitled “Making and Breaking Authorship, Potentials in Architectural Design Studio” in Istanbul Technical University, Architectural Design Program. She has been teaching architectural design studio and theory courses in ITU Faculty of Architecture since 2004. Her published works in international books, journals and conferences, as well as research and curatorial projects mainly dwell on architectural theory, architectural design education, questions of authorship and use in architecture. In 2009-2010 she was granted Fulbright visiting scholarship to attend Columbia GSAPP in New York. Completed her Post-Doctoral Research on the ”Pedagogy of the Loge” in 2018-2019 at Research laboratory IPRAUS UMR3329 in Paris. She has been invited to international conferences as keynote speaker, lectures and attended jury reviews in universities such as Columbia GSAPP, ENSA Belleville, ENSA Val de Seine, University of Cambridge. She has also contributed to EAAE Education Academy’s Scientific and Organization committee as a member.
Zeynep rem an, architect, completed her bachelor's degree in architecture at Istanbul Technical University and spent an academic semester studying at the Universidade Fernando Pessoa in Porto, Portugal, on an Erasmus scholarship. After her education, she participated in an independent research center called Aura Istanbul and conducted an architectural study for four months. She is currently studying for her Master's degree at ITU in Architectural Design.