In Search of EUROPA - Vocal Local Global/Local Global

Vocal-Local-Global/Local-Global

 

 

Speaking about where we are, valuing where we are, enables us to become universal, helps us to find out about our orientation to the wider world, and to make a real difference if what we want to do is to make the world a better place.

This Cargo of Questions page identifies a significant problem with this process that is so Laugh Out Loud obvious, and, precisely because it is obvious, it requires analysis, consideration and the effort to reflect on methods and methodology.

 

 

 

Speaking about where we are, Liverpool or Rotterdam or anywhere (or Hull) and then locating this position in Europe leads to the obvious point that in every identified location, within and without the boundaries of Europe, perception is governed to a greater or lesser extent by "being in the bubble" of that specific location, that particular environment.

 

 

 

For the LODE project in 1992, and for Re:LODE in 2017, the impact of European actions, be they economic or political, and enabled through a violent militancy, military conquest and colonisation, was evident along the whole of the LODE Line and zone.

The LODE Line pathway runs east and west across northern Europe, leading the project to India, where traffic on the road is supposed to keep to the left, a consequence of British colonial rule. The LODE Line crosses the Indonesian island of Java, where traffic on the road keeps to the left, a convention brought to Java and imposed by Dutch adventurers in establishing a colonial administration, before Napoleonic conquest of the Netherlands imposed the general rule in Europe - to drive on the right! Napoleon never reached Java, so the convention remained. The LODE Line runs across Australia, where colonisation by the British of an "empty land", resulted in the destruction of indigenous people and their cultures, and also the convention that Australians drive on the left. In Colombia, they drive on the right, a post-Napoleonic convention imported from the colonial power, Spain. In Eire the LODE Line crosses an island that was the first English colony, so the Irish drive on the left, both sides of a border, a border that will change the course of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Recognizing the European character of "globalisation" requires recognizing that it is actually existing capitalism that is shaping the modern past, present and future, NOT people!

This project begins in Europe, in England, and so understanding "our" "Eurocentrism and Culturalism", is essential if the project can truly enable audiences to see things as they really are. The project aims to be an example of a realist art for people across the world. NOW!

This is a backstory to questions connected to the LODE cargo. And, furthermore:

Because Re:LODE is an art work instigated in an English context, it is English, and not Welsh, not Irish, not German, not Polish and not Ukrainian! 

 

But Re:LODE is European!  

"Modernity arose in Europe, beginning in the Renaissance, as a break with the traditional culture . . . "

So, Samir Amin writes in his preface to the re-publication of his seminal work Eurocentrism (2009), originally published as L'eurocentisme: Critique d'une idéologie (1988).

He continues:

"Modernity is constructed on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively (i.e., societies), make their own history."

Furthermore, he says: Up until that time, in Europe and elsewhere, responsibility for history was attributed to God or supernatural forces. From that point on, reason is combined with emancipation under modernity, thus opening the way to democracy (which is modern by definition). The latter implies secularism, the separation of religion and the state, and on that basis, politics is formed.

Today, modernity is in crisis because the contradictions of globalized capitalism, unfolding in real societies, have become such that capitalism puts human civilization itself in danger.

Capitalism has had its day.

The destructive dimension that its development always included now prevails by far over the constructive one that characterized the progressive role it fulfilled in history.

The crisis of modernity is itself the sign of the obsolescence of the system. 

Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the post-modernist discourse of irreducible "cultural specificities" (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures).  

He says, furthermore:

As opposed to this discourse, I suggest that we begin with a view of modernity as a still incomplete process, which will only be able to go beyond the mortal crisis it is now undergoing through the reinvention of universal values. 

This implies the economic, social and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.

How is Europe part of our locality? 

 

 

   

 

 

 

To find an answer, or more questions, Re:LODE is in search of Europa!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first recorded usage of Eurṓpē as a geographic term is in the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, referring, it seems to the western shore of the Aegean Sea:

Then you went towards Telphusa: and there the pleasant place seemed fit for [245] making a temple and wooded grove. You came very near and spoke to her: “Telphusa, here I am minded to make a glorious temple, an oracle for men, and hither they will always bring perfect hecatombs, [250] both those who live in rich Peloponnesus and those of Europe and all the wave-washed isles, coming to seek oracles. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, giving answer in my rich temple.”

Further yet you went, far-shooting Apollo, until you came to the town of the presumptuous Phlegyae who dwell on this earth [280] in a lovely glade near the Cephisian lake, caring not for Zeus. And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. [285] There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said: “In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect hecatombs, [290] both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.”