ausblenden:
Schlagwörter:
Semiotics, countenance, image, urban life, revolution, trace, Ethiopian history
Zusammenfassung:
For Benjamin, the trace is the face of culture which gets presented, a cultural countenance so often separated from trunk, or body. In the Paris of the nineteenth century there was a desire to ‘shell’ or encase the paraphernalia of bourgeois life. The ultimate form of dwelling for human beings became the apartment. Inside the apartment, itself a shell, it was the ringing of the doorbell which signified the potential crossing of a magic threshold. The ringing was a spell sound which no one could escape. In twenty-first-century Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, the urban youth dwell in revolutionary images, shelled on their mobile phones. The threshold magic was the dream of a different state, a glorious future with the past Emperor Tēwodros II.
