|
PLACE-HAMPI | augmented stereographic panoramas of Vijayanagara, India
[12.31.2006 | ]
Sarah Kenderdine
PLACE–HAMPI | augmented stereographic panoramas of Vijayanagara, India
Background: communities of interaction in a cultural landscape
PLACE-Hampi is highly significant for promoting dialogues of engagement with the imagery of a cultural landscape and activating the embedded knowledge contained there. Hampi today continues to be an active pilgrim site, not simply an historic and touristic place. Each day its landscape and temples are activated through various rituals and tapas specific to time, place and to discrete locations in the complex. As part of a living tradition, the interpretation of the site by pilgrims is in a constant state of re-definition within the broad tenants of (south Indian, Karnataka tradition) Hinduism. A conversation takes place between mythological characters and the sacred objects/sites/natural features permeated with the contemporary “folkloric imagination” of the pilgrims.2
Hindi priests and pilgrims are not the only ones to enliven these Hindu images and temples. Bringing with them different religious assumptions, political agendas and economic motivations, others may animate the same objects or sovereignty as polytheistic “idols”, as “devils” as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, as archaeological and historical relics. As Davies points out “the location of an object plays a constitutive role in the act of looking” and appropriation, relocation and redisplay of an object will dramatically alter its significance for new audiences.
The frame of reference designates the historically grounded and socially shared understandings of systems.
3 PLACE-Hampi reconstitutes the landscape for these interpretations of mythological narratives in the form of co-presence, enabling a new mode of interpretation accessible for diverse cultural audiences.
1 Robert Roberts, “Landscape Archaeology” in Landscape and Culture: Geographical and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. J. M. Wagstaff (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987): 83. 2 Nancy Adajania, Kapital and Karma, eds. Kunsthalle Wien, Angelika Fitz, 2002, p. 47. 3 Davis, R. H. 1997, Lives of Indian Images. Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Email this | del.icio.us
0 responses to: "PLACE-HAMPI | augmented stereographic panoramas of Vijayanagara, India"
Leave a comment:
|
