A Mestizo Planet - to mix or not to mix?
July 11, 2008 at 05:00PM An exhibition at the Musee du quai Branly, Paris FRANCE, from 18 March 2008 to 19 July 2009. " 'An honest man is a man of mixed origins,' wrote Michel de Montaigne. The worlds around us intersect, collide and blend together day after day, right before our eyes. What was once far away and unknown now lives among us, sometimes even within us, though we are often unaware of it. The mixing of human beings, ways of life, ways of believing and thinking has swept us up in an incessant movement that contemporary technologies have only accelerated. However, isn't every living society an ever-evolving organism, constantly transforming and mixing itself on contact with others? . . . The Planet metisse exhibition is centered on the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the dawn of the 21st century because this era demonstrates the progressive hesitant, but irreversible construction of the common environment in which we live today. Mestizo objects are inseparable from the globalization process and can only be understood in their multiple forms, if we place them in a setting of western expansion and domination. They are at the heart of that period of the planet's history, which began in the 15th century. Thus, with this idea of mixing [as a good, positive, capacity expanding, humanizing force] we must explore our history and our memories. Mestizo objects encourage us to think of the world and its cultures in terms of movement and links, and to go beyond a dualist or Manichean vision which imprisons and isolates "others" in a remote, outer sphere. They highlight flows and movements, communication and conflicts, clashes and blending, boundaries and crossing of boundaries. Finally, they invite us to place communication and confrontation at the heart of creative ability which has taken root in universality."
This concept of the goodness of the intractable, irreversible mixing and transforming at the heart of the human history and experience -- often invisible in the moments of conflict, survival, and domination that seem to be associated with much of the mixing -- is an important concept for effectively rising to the 21st century global sustainability challenge.
http://modules.quaibranly.fr/metis/
http://www.quaibranly.fr/uploads/media/CP_A_Mestizo_Planet.pdf
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