Hélène Sybille Thomé
The subject of the thesis is the design of a Museum of Migration for Vienna. The aim is to represent migration of all kinds – such as the migration of forms, colours, language, technology, ideas and of course people between cultures, countries or disciplines – and to promote cultural awareness. The work is divided into three sections. The first theoretical section deals with the thesis “The Modernism in Europe and America could only take place because Japan opened up”. By analysing certain buildings and arts – based on Wilhelm Worringer, who in “Abstraction and Empathy” (1908) assesses Japanese culture as the saviour of European art – the aim is to show the mutual influence of these two very different cultures and their effect on Modernism. The second theoretical section will examine how cultures react to the foreign and how migration can create social change. It will be clarified which mechanisms occur when cultures are confronted with the foreign, and how the foreign is processed and even assimilated. To do so, certain events from Japanese cultural history and that of the Habsburg Empire, or Vienna, will be selected and compared. Based on this research, a concept for a “Museum of Migration” is elaborated in the third part of the work. The intention is to make the foreign less foreign. The comparison of one’s own culture with a foreign one makes it possible to recognise what is foreign in one’s own or what is one’s own in the foreign, to build up a cultural awareness and ideally to reduce prejudices.
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