The present appears as fast-paced and fleeting. Patterns of thought, once offering stability, quickly lose their grip. Familiar places shimmer with uncertainty; whatever used to feel like comfort, dissipates into becoming alien. We live in a certain place, yet be scattered across the world — connected, entangled, and simultaneously nowhere at home. Everyday life increasingly turns into heterotopy, whereas our thought unfolds in pluriversal approaches to an ever to be found reality.
How does the space of experience take shape where everything is placed on stage? Does the stage persist as such? Are there empty spaces waiting to be activated? What defines local rootedness? What roles do landscape and the climate play in dwelling? Are geographical categories also in a flux? This conference is an attempt to reflect on spatial configurations — islands and non-places of passage — but also to explore the socio-cultural dimensions of space at the intersection of living environments and communities, between spatial opening and entropy, in the tension between possibility and emerging constraint.
We struggle with concepts in order to grasp what eludes us. And yet, to shape a life, one needs — even if only temporarily — to take a position amidst uncertainty; to persist in difference, to accept the defining indeterminate, to find some center in the fleeting. From this, perhaps, the specificity of a place as a living space emerges.
Multilingual Sibiu is proposed as an exemplary site for exploring new and old spatial configurations — of majorities and minorities, newcomers, locals, visitors, and those in transit — for a life shaped by difference.
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