Both projects were catalytic actions that created or revived public space for exchange and collective interaction. This informed and underpinned two subsequent public artworks, Cross Land and X-PO.
A body of work, Viscqueux, is a reflection upon my personal, psychological identification with the landscape of the region.
In their quest to break with colonialist exoticism and racism, moreover, the Grzimeks embraced a developmentalist paradigm that envisioned black Africans as immature Europeans doomed to recapitulate the West's pathological journey to modernity, thus reinforcing the belief that what ‘ought to be seen’ in Africa was the fauna, not the people.Ībstract Can a mode of trans-disciplinary visual inquiry, shifting and subjective, serve as an enquiry into location, an interrogation into the mechanics of belonging, and a reflection upon the relational connections between the local/rural and the national/global? This thesis provides a critical account of the role of a socially engaged ‘activist’ arts practice that seeks to address the tension between differing perspectives on place and space in the Burren, Co. In their award-winning films No Room for Wild Animals (1956) and Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959), the Grzimeks depicted Africa's national parks as untouched ‘gardens of Eden’, a framing of nature designed to appeal to war-weary European tourists that elided the crucial role of Maasai pastoralists in shaping wildlife ecology on the savanna and the colonialist violence that had partitioned the African landscape to ensure European hegemony. This article examines the documentary films, popular science books, and essays of former Frankfurt Zoo director and television star Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael as harbingers of a global conservation movement and an emerging tourist economy in East Africa, moulded by the unresolved longings of German imperialism, West German anxieties about decolonization and the Cold War, and the rise of West Germans as the ‘world champions of travel’. If religion is, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, a “recent invention” that, with a shift in structural relations, might “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” the elements that have made up this thing called religion will certainly persist in other forms, and it is the task of geographers of religion to trace the changing orchestrations of those significances across space and place.
Postmodernization exacerbates the individualization of religion but also destabilizes the boundary between the sacred and the profane. Rooted in modern distinctions of religious/secular and sacred/profane and in the Enlightenment urge to classify, constructs of religion are efforts to demarcate, purify, and territorialize. Rather than assuming there is a universal feature of human life called “religion,” the author argues that the religious and the sacred should be studied by geographers as ways of distributing particular kinds of significance across geographic spaces. This article argues that geographers of religion must take these deconstructive arguments to heart. Recent religious studies scholarship has examined the historical and cultural variability by which “religion” and “the sacred” have been constructed by scholars and by the public.
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