The City: Labyrinth & Library: The Agonism of the Public-Space

• • 
  • Presentation speakers
    • Leander Gussmann, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria

  Abstract:

  The prospective paper aims to understand public-space through the complementary metaphors of the labyrinth and the library. It surveys urban topologies of order and disorder. The paper asks about the spaces available for the Other within contemporary cityscapes. It is describing places that materialize cosmopolitics through antagonistic and agonistic practices in the urban space. Starting with a shared notion of a loose ontology, the theoretical framework fuses Latour’s cosmopolitcs (2004) with Laclau’s and Mouffe’s conception of agonistic relationships (2001). The public libraries of Vienna and Franco Maria Ricci’s Maze in Parma set the empirical field from which metaphors are developed. This complementary set of metaphors is then cross-mappped onto the case study of Vienna.

 

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