[ISEA2010] Paper: Siegfried Zielinski — Variantologia Latina

Abstract

The southern part of the two Americas was baptised Latin America in early modern times. By importing academic Europe’s Esperanto, Latin thus became the label to characterise South American culture. This culture was defined from the perspective of the Latin-Christian civilisation. Active in the centre of this intellectual colonising process were the elite troupes of the Vatican, i.e. the congregation of the Jesuits. They were sent away from Rome by the pope in order to universalise the world in a single faith. Even the great GWF Hegel still understood South America’s identity solely in relation to Christian Europe.

“Variantologia Latina“ as an experiment is working in an opposite direction. It proceeds from the assumption, that the different countries and regions of South America have developed their own knowledge and technology cultures as well as their own forms of linguistic expressions, their own music, machines and technical images long before and parallel to colonisation. The archaeology of South American media could carve out these developments from the deep-time developments of history and have them unfold within a new context. ISEA2010 RUHR is set to be the place for breaking the first ground.

  • Siegfried Zielinski (DE) holds the Media Theory chair at the Institute for time based media, University of Arts, Berlin, DE. He teaches at MECAD in Barcelona, ES, and at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas Fee, Switzerland, where he holds the Michel Foucault professorship. He is a member of the Academy of Arts Berlin and of the European Film Academy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Zielinski