Hauntology and nostalgia in the touristed landscapes of Sarajevo

A post by Marta Roriz

Introduction

Tourism has today a significant impact on cities and urban lives around the world. Urban tourism and the exploration of local topographies as tourist destinations have led to a complex co-production and co-consumption of urban spaces by tourists and local residents. The significative increase of tourism following the Second World War, in both developed and developing countries, is the result of various economic, technological, social and political changes (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010; Graburn 1989; Urry 2002), leading Crick (1989: 310) to describe it as “the largest movement of human populations outside wartime”. People travel for pleasure, but also to experience new places as well as to return to the familiar and the known. Some are motivated to learn about other people and cultures, while others seek to gain insights into the self through travel (Wearing, Stevenson and Young 2010).

Motherhood : on haunting and failure

A PhD thesis with reflections from Anna Johnson

Link to thesis, Motherhood: on haunting and failure

https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/56830/

The Synthetic Landscape

A post by Ian Chamberlain

In the following paper ‘The Synthetic Landscape,’ I will highlight and examine some of the core values at the heart of my practice. These will include my approaches to making, the themes and concepts I explore, and most importantly how I see these connections. I will overview some of my past works and focus on three bodies of work that I see as pivotal in the development of my practice, bringing together process and core conceptual concerns.

Empty echoes of empty dishes

A post by Hilary Tsui, contributing to the Shadows under the mistletoe theme

I grew up celebrating the Winter Solstice

A day to mark the longest day in winter

But also a time where we feel closest to each other and home

Home is my grandparents’ cooking

Food so delicious that we joked they are a restaurant powerhouse

Tong-Hing Restaurant, we called it

Home is my grandfather’s stash of biscuits and toffee

The dining table forever adorned with his favourite Danish butter cookies

Accompanied by the crinkle of candy wrappers

Stories wanted: Shadows under the mistletoe

The Chiaroscuro is a blog that dances with the spectres of memory—a place where the past is never truly gone but lingers like an elusive shadow, slipping between moments of our everyday lives. Here, we’re fascinated by those fleeting glimmers of memory, the eerie remnants of what once was but somehow never left. Each story, reflection, and image we feature weaves nostalgia together with the uncanny, exploring how the echoes of yesterday reach out to touch the present, haunting us in unexpected ways. This season, as festive lights twinkle and winter settles in, we’re gathering short, evocative pieces on the theme Shadows under the mistletoe.

Towards a Hauntology of Life and Death

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

Philosophically questioning the relation between life and death is usually considered to be the proper territory of movements such as existentialism and Lebensphilosophie. This belief is instigated by the explicit treatment of the life-death relation by authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre who, each in their own way, exposed and examined the presence of death in our daily lives. With the rise of poststructuralism – undermining the existentialist ideal of a free and autonomous individual – subjects such as life and death also lose their central importance, as they are replaced with historical, linguistic, and textual concerns. Or so one thinks, because the case of Jacques Derrida provides us with a vivid counterexample in this regard.

Doing Justice to Poetry: Gadamer and Derrida on Reading Paul Celan

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to do justice to a text, be it philosophical, literary, or poetic? In this regard, what is the task of philosophical hermeneutics, the discipline traditionally concerned with explanation and interpretation? This is the question at stake in the ‘Gadamer-Derrida encounter’, an intellectual debate that retains its relevance, not only because it has ‘animated contemporary philosophy’ (Di Cesare 2004, 74), but also because the practice of reading and interpreting texts makes up a large part of research and education in the humanities as such. By revisiting the diverging hermeneutical strategies of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, this paper seeks to determine how we can engage in the practice of reading and interpreting in a righteous and just manner.