From necrotopias to thalasso(to)pias: designing spatial (dis)continuities in Calatrava’s Museum of Tomorrow

Conference Presentation

MOBILE UTOPIA: PASTS, PRESENTS, FUTURES

2-5 Nov 2017, Lancaster

From necrotopias to thalassopias: designing spatial (dis)continuities in Calatrava’s Museum of Tomorrow

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The Museum of Tomorrow is a neo-futurist architectural creation and an educational-touristic landmark erected in an abandoned and crime-infested port (Porto Maravilha) of Rio de Janeiro before Rio 2016. Situated in a heritage site that brings together the city’s past and future legacies, it was intended as a problematisation of humanity’s survival in the context of climate change and unrestrained capitalist development. Its principal conception by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, and completion with audio-visual installations by an international artistic contingent, including American artists and Brazilian filmmaker and ceremonial director Fernando Meirelles, showcase the complexities of global imaginaries of mobility.

As a multi-scalar initiative featuring local, state and international partners, the Museum showcases the ways concerns over ecosystemic erosion are addressed in performative/artistic ways. I argue that its artistic/architectural creators call into being a dual utopic method: as an artistic practice and a form of recreation of life from death. First, I speculate how, by enrooting the Museum in Rio’s built maritime environment, local heritage conservation and spatialized social inequalities, they enact a ‘choreotopographic tour’, a ritualistic journey through cultural sites for global visitors. Second, I examine how its installations produce dark travel through the mobilisation of technology: a haphazard esoteric audio-visual journey that concludes with a potential return to humanity’s roots, Nature. Combining embodied (walking around the Museum’s heritage environs) and cognitive mobilities (speculating humanity/earth’s end and potential ‘beginnings’ in the Museum’s interior, through its audio-visual installations/artefacts), the Museum produces utopian meta-movement. With industrial modernism as its core, this meta-movement compels visitors to oscillate physically, emotionally and cognitively between necrotopic scenarios (environmental erosion, slum pollution, Brazil’s submerged slave heritage) and thalasso(to)pic[1] fluidity (tourism, the possibility to attain good life, hope).

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[1] From Greek thalassa=sea and topos=place rooted in heritage.

New Monograph: Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination

Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination

Creating Atmospheres for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020

By Rodanthi Tzanelli

© 2018 – Routledge

Atmosphere, the elusive ambiance of a place, enables or hinders its mobility in global consumption contexts. Atmosphere connects to social imaginaries, utopian representational frames producing the culture of a city or country. But who resolves atmospheric contradictions in a place’s social and cultural rhythms, when the eyes of the world are turned on it?

Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination examines ephemeral and solidified atmospheres in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and the handover ceremony to Tokyo for the 2020 Games. Indeed, highlighting the various social and cultural implications upon these Olympic Games hosts, Tzanelli argues that the ‘Olympic City’ is produced by aesthetic "imagineers", mobile groups of architects, artists and entrepreneurs, who aesthetically ‘engineer’ native cultures as utopias. Thus, it is explored as to how Rio and Tokyo’s "imagineers" problematize notions of creativity, cosmopolitan togetherness and belonging.

Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination will appeal to postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and professionals interested in fields such as: Globalization Studies, Mobility Theory, Cultural Sociology, International Political Economy, Conference and Event Management, Tourism Studies and Migration Studies.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1 -- Staging the mega-event: Militourist imaginaries in an Olympic city

CHAPTER 2 -- Globalising utopias: Imagineering the Olympic event, making the world

CHAPTER 3 -- Tomorrow never comes: Rio’s museum of our futures

CHAPTER 4 -- Choreomobility and artistic worldmaking: Retrieving Rio’s submerged centre

CHAPTER 5 -- The Opening and Closing Ceremonies: Migration, nostalgia and the making of tourism mobilities

CHAPTER 6 -- Tokyo 2020: Urban amnesia and the techno-romantic spirit of capitalism

CHAPTER 7 -- The Handover Ceremony: Digital gift economies in a global city

CHAPTER 8 -- Conclusion: Dark journeys and hopeful futures

REVIEWS

Once again, Rodanthi Tzanelli offers a high-quality and promising book, where she theorizes on the cultural borders of the Olympic City in the ceremonials of Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020. With delightful prose, her development exhibits a fertile ground to understand media events as the juxtaposition of two economic forms: the artificial economy, which focuses on the doctrine of security; and the economy of imagination, more oriented to the production of architectural legacies as artificially fabricated and externally imposed.

Korstanje Maximiliano, University of Palermo, Argentina

This book makes a major contribution to understanding mega-events through a cultural sociological analysis. Grounded in a multi-disciplinary literature, it will appeal to readers coming from a wide range of perspectives. The central theme of Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination provides an innovative and compelling lens through which to understand and explore mega-events.

Paul Lynch, Professor of Critical Hospitality and Tourism, The Business School, Edinburgh Napier University, UK

The planning of Olympic mega-events for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 involved not just pragmatic aspects of logistics and engineering, but also what Rodanthi Tzanelli describes as imagineering. This fascinating study of global mega-events brings together recent theoretical approaches to atmospheres, aesthetics, technologies, economic development, infrastructural urbanism, hypermobility, and dark tourism to give us new insights into the staging of "mobile situations" and their symbolic "choreomobilities." It is an intriguing contribution to the literature on mobilities, global urbanism, and the performative arts.

Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology, Drexel University, USA

Ways of seeing: Bauman on strangerhood & the aesthetics of urban research

RC21 Leeds : September 11-13, 2017

Rethinking Urban Global Justice: An international academic conference for critical urban studies

Image: Rodanthi Tzanelli 2014 

Open Session 11:15 – 12:45 / Exhibition Hall:

Liquid Cities? Exploring Zygmunt Bauman’s Contribution to Urban Studies.

Distinguished social theorist and longtime Professor of Sociology at University of Leeds, Zygmunt Bauman passed away aged 91 earlier this year.

The founding director of University of Leeds Bauman Institute, Mark Davis leads a discussion with colleagues (Adrian Favell, Thomas Campbell, Dariusz Brzeziński and Rodanthi Tzanelli) from the School of Sociology and Social Policy about Bauman’s legacy to the field.

Link to presentation by Rodanthi Tzanelli

Ways of seeing: Bauman on strangerhood & the aesthetics of urban research

13 September 2017

Abstract

Bauman’s legacy in urban studies has a distinctive political flair that connects to his critique of the ways urban strangers (tourists, migrants, vagabonds and pilgrims) become socially positioned, ‘interpellated’ or represented by various constituencies and groups (including researchers).

I argue that his reference to ways of seeing as political tools does not compromise his analysis of liquid urbanism as an aesthetic project, but works politics and aesthetics into a distinctive proposition on the ‘right to the city’ for all. This proposition forms (in the tradition of Simmel’s sociology), a moral basis for which cognitive and affective ambivalences function as epistemological tools. 

Seminar Presentation, Edinburgh Napier University: The Economies of Mega-Events

Business School, Graiglockhart Campus

14 June 2017

The economies of mega-events: Decolonising the Olympic norm of hospitality in social science scholarship 

Rodanthi Tzanelli, University of Leeds, UK

r.tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk  

READ PTT HERE

My presentation considers mega-events as capitalist ventures, promoting re-organisations of time and space in host cultures to enable them to respond to various mobilities of business, technological and infrastructural development, tourism and professional migration, and cultural representation. I specifically examine the Olympic Games as a ‘hospitality enterprise’ still connected to the Olympic values of reciprocity and fair competition. However, contra Marxist and Foucaultian scholarship in the field, I argue that we should split this enterprise into two forms of economy that organise mega-event labour to ensure the provision of hospitality: the ‘artificial economy’ looks after surveillance, security and the control of leisure in the Olympic city; the ‘economy of imagination’ looks after the mega-event as a creative venture, thus producing architectural legacies and ceremonial art to enhance and circulate (broadcast) the host’s cultural atmospheres. 

The current scholarly focus on the ‘artificial economy’ as an economy of guest and heritage protection, and the progressive displacement of the ‘imaginative economy’ to the fields of tourism, popular culture, leisure studies and so forth, are normative through and through. They introduce a symbolically gendered division of labour that we also encounter in tourism and hospitality business, moralising economic flows and demoting mega-event leisure regimes (associated with the mega-event’s architectural and ceremonial art, or tourism imaginaries connected to the host’s cultural atmosphere) to superficial, ‘cosmetic’ pursuits. Such arguments reproduce old political discourses that valorise (masculinise) nationalism and feminise national culture that do (should) not belong to contemporary globalised environments of economic transaction, cross-cultural fertilisation and international policy exchange.  

Biographical note

Rodanthi Tzanelli is Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research is on globalisation, cosmopolitanism and mobilities theory. Rodanthi previously held visiting fellowships at CEMORE (Lancaster University) and Oxford University. She is currently serving on the international advisory board of the Global Studies Community (University of Urbana-Champaign, USA), the Centre for the Study of Hospitality (University of Caxias do Sul, Brazil), the Ikarian Centre for Social and Political Research (Ikaria, Greece) and the EUMEDNET (Universidad de Málaga, Spain). She is also on the editorial board of international journals such as Cultural Sociology (BSA, UK), Athens Journal of Social Sciences (Greece) and Anuario de Turismo y Sociedad (Colombia). Rodanthi is author of numerous articles, book chapters and electronic essays, and 10 monographs. Her latest book, Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination: Creating Atmospheres for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 will be published with Routledge.