Welcome and Keynote Forum

Tim Winter –– ‘Reimagining the past through the sea: the unfolding futures of architectural history and heritage’

What if we were able to rethink the typologies, chronologies, and geographies of architectural histories? What if we fundamentally rethought conventional ideas about centre and periphery in the flows of culture, expertise and technology? And what if we upended the relationship between architecture, land and the nation in the politics of heritage? Could such questions help us rethink the ways in which architecture histories and heritage are taught and conceptualised?

This presentation poses such questions against the backdrop of fast changing geopolitical developments in our region. It does so by jumping in the water. It considers what happens when we turn to oceans and seas to understand architectural pasts and their heritage discourses today. Strategic and commercial forces are driving funds and interest in the maritime across Eurasia and Africa. Such developments pose fascinating questions about the future of architectural histories and the place they might find in today’s shifting tides of connectivity.

Tim Winter is an Australian Research Council Professorial Future Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is the former President of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and has conducted research across a number of countries, primarily in Asia. An interdisciplinary scholar, his work addresses how the past comes to be mobilized in the present for political and economic purposes. He is author of Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty First Century (University of Chicago Press 2019) and silkroadfutures.net. His forthcoming book is on the Silk Road as a geocultural, geostrategic concept.