Ah, that damned transculturality! or the concept of transculturality versus transcultural places

Between academic fetishism and lived radicalism

Contemporary discourse in the humanities often suffers from the entrenched notion that merely naming a fluid phenomenon amounts to an emancipatory understanding of it. The contradiction inherent in the previous sentence proves fatal when we set the theoretical concept of transculturality against the physical and material reality of transcultural places. Whilst transculturality, as an academic construct, has a permanent tendency to settle within the safe confines of conference halls and lecture theatres, transcultural places, by their very nature, require a lived, often painful, physical anchoring. If transculturality is to be anything more than a mere intellectual exercise, it must leave the realm of pure abstraction and become a radical spatial practice that resists its own institutionalisation.

Photo credits:
Black-and-white photos: Radůz Dětinský
Color photos: Štěpán Čančík
Color group photo: Matěj Haták