Paper short abstract:

Saturated by the past and pregnant with a future, the present remains the ground through which both are mediated. Inviting us to ask how memory work takes place, and how place makes memory work, Lisbon's Expo'98 offers key lessons in the imagined, discursive, and material work this mediation takes.

Paper long abstract:

Writing against Western society's faith in unlimited progress, Walter Benjamin stressed the contingent and open nature of the future amidst its multiple pasts. Yet, while the modern present is saturated by the past and pregnant with a future, it remains the ground through which both the past and future are mediated. Given that modern perception is as much an activity of exclusion as it is of inclusion, foregrounding the active making of meaning encourages us to look at how future horizons are being constituted and reconstituted today. That particular futures are highlighted and others are rendered seemingly impossible is often highly consequential.

World expositions have often been taken as paradigmatic sites of progress materializing a vision of tomorrow. However, their landscapes and visions are themselves sites of negotiation, struggle, and tension. The landscape may mean, but what it means and by what means is subject to revision. If meaning is made from and through, and is not simply found in or on landscapes, how memory work takes place (and how place makes memory work) in sketching out future horizons becomes highly relevant.

Celebrating the theme of "The Oceans, a Heritage for the Future" 500 years after Vasco da Gama placed Portugal at the height of the Western World, but occurring also 24 years after the revolution that ended a long dictatorship as well as the Portuguese Empire, and only 12 years after Portugal joined the EU (however now at the bottom of the European hierarchy), Lisbon's Expo'98 offers important lessons into the imagined, discursive, and material work that it takes to navigate the past enroute to making and managing the future. Expo'98 underscores how the temporal and spatial horizon of memory stretches both forwards and backwards as it selectively mediates the discursive, material, and embodied markers that make up the past, present, and future imagination of what it means to be Portuguese.