Enchanted Architecture

Is our built environment disenchanted? Parts of buildings and artefacts that once were part of religious practices and rituals are exhibited in museums. Are these objects still inhabited by spirits or are they just inanimate matter? What does an Abelam cult house have in common with the Basler Münster?

During this tour of the Museum der Kulturen Basel (occasional peaks out of its windows included), these questions will be discussed with anthropologists, historians and architects.

In his final work, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe (2023), anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reminded us of the distinction between transcendental cultures, in which the divine resides in a distant, other world, and immanent ones, where divinity, or rather divinities are present in the everyday life and immediate surroundings of people. Immanence, Sahlins emphasized, renders obsolete any distinction between the natural and the supernatural. In this enchanted, animist world, all things are alive – they are meta-persons with whom we have to communicate and negotiate.

We draw inspiration from Sahlins’ work, but also from the new permanent exhibition of the Museum der Kulturen Basel, titled “external page Alive – more than human worlds”. Both works instigate an anthropological undoing of the divide between material and the spiritual world, which calls for a revision of how we look at buildings: In a secular, disenchanted world, we see architecture as inert matter, but has that always been the case? And is it the same for all cultures?

The Museum der Kulturen Basel is the ideal location to ask such questions: The Abelam cult house that is exhibited in it – a ceremonial house from Papua New Guinea, normally used for ritual purposes, but in this case built to be exhibited – will be our starting point. This and several other artifacts in the museum’s “Alive” exhibition – objects and things that are, according to the cultures that made them, vessels for spirits and other meta-persons – will be juxtaposed with an architectural monument that lays near the museum: the Basel Münster, whose numerous statues were destroyed in 1529, as part of the Protestant Reformation’s urge to abolish what is saw as idolatry.

The proximity of the Münster to the Abelam cult house in the center of Basel prompts a series of questions: Are there commonalities between how these different religions and cultures imbue their constructions with meaning and spiritual content? How does this meaning and content change over time, or as buildings themselves move over great distances? What is the relation between magical and architectural thinking? Can architecture ever be disenchanted?

To answer these questions, we invite three leading experts from different fields:

Lucas Burkart, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at the University of Basel; Zainabu Jallo, anthropologist and post-doc researcher at the Universities of Bern and Basel, and expert for material culture of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora; and Michael Hirschbichler, Professor for design and experimental creation at HafenCity University Hamburg, whose work focuses on the material and immaterial aspects of Abelam architecture and cosmology.

The event will be a tour of the Museum der Kulturen Basel with inputs by the three experts, ending with a discussion with the audience. It will be hosted by the Museum der Kulturen Basel, and by Anneke Abhelakh and Nikos Magouliotis.

The event is co-organized by the Museum der Kulturen Basel and the Chair for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich. It is sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation project ‘Building Identity: Character in Architectural Debate and Design, 1750-1850

Speaker biographies:

Lucas Burkart is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at the University of Basel. His research interests include the cultural history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, their global interconnectedness, and the history of historiography. He is currently supervising the critical edition of the works of Jacob Burckhardt. Furthermore, he runs the ongoing research project "Economies of Space. Practices, Discourses and Actors in the Basel Real Estate Market (1400-1700)". Finally, with the initiative "Digitales Schaudepot" he drives his vision of open cultural heritage in the digital age. Among many publications, he is co-editor of the volume Materialized Identities in Early Modern Culture, 1450-1750: Objects, Affects, Effects (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).

Zainabu Jallo is a post-doctoral researcher, working between the Institutes for Social Anthropology at the Universities of Basel and Bern, Switzerland. Zainabu`s academic and creative work have been conveyed through Fellowships at the Sundance Theater Institute, The Institute for World Literature, Harvard University, The Mellon School of Theater and Performance at Harvard (Migrations session), the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, Residenztheater Munich, Chateau de Lavigny, House of Writers in Switzerland. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts England, and UNESCO Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa. She also has an advanced Diploma from the Center for Global Studies, Walter Benjamin Kolleg, Bern, Switzerland. Zainabu is one of the Principal Investigators of the Sacral Architecture Africa project. Her scholarly interests include the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora, Iconic criticism, and Material Culture. Zainabu is currently a research fellow working on the history of Criminal Anthropology in the Afro Atlantic. She is currently based in Turin, where she is conducting research in the archives of Museo Antropologia Criminale Cesaro Lombroso".

Michael Hirschbichler works across the disciplines of art, architecture and anthropology. He is the director of Atelier Hirschbichler and a professor for design and experimental creation at HafenCity University Hamburg. His work focuses on spatial constructions in the Anthropocene/Kaiaimunucene, with a particular emphasis on the interrelationship between their material and immaterial aspects (narratives, memories, ideologies, beliefs), between facts and cultural fictions. Michael Hirschbichler studied at ETH Zurich and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and completed his doctoral dissertation on “Mythical Constructions” at Berlin University of the Arts. He was a lecturer at ETH Zurich, postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft, Goldsmiths and Aarhus University, visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and director of the Architecture Program at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize by the German Academy Villa Massimo.

Nikos Magouliotis is an architectural historian and post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) of ETH Zurich, working for the chair of Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke. His research focuses on the history and historiography of architecture in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a particular focus on the vernacular, both as a theoretical construct and as a historical reality. His current research – in the context of the SNSF-funded project ‘Building Identity: Character in Architectural Debate and Design, 1750-1850’, led by Sigrid de Jong and Maarten Delbeke – focuses on Swiss vernacular architecture in the 18th century, oscillating between the pastoral fantasies of traveling intellectuals and the actual lives, mentalities and living environments of the local peasants. Nikos has presented his work in numerous international conferences and colloquia. He has published articles and papers in magazines such as San Rocco, ARCH+ and Cartha, as well as academic journals: Architectural Histories, Future Anterior, The Journal of Architecture, and Architecture Beyond Europe.