Materiality, Temporality and Politics at Astana
Building the Future: Materiality, Temporality and Politics at Astana
I looks at Astana as a project. Astana is manufactured as a site set apart from the mundane reality of contemporary Kazakhstan by a double distinction of temporality and materiality. Astana is designed as a complex symbolic system with a fractal-like structure of reference and a particular optic. The emerging heterotopia exerts a certain charm upon people’s imaginations, setting in motion a self-reproducing and accumulative circuit of ‘the symbolic capital of the capital’. What the project offers is a sense of order and direction in the life of the society, a sense of a ‘greater whole’ as a response to the crisis of the socio-political order in the previous decade. Moreover, it promises material and moral improvement which should allow the Kazakhstanis to ‘catch-up’ with the world according to partly implicit normative notions of what a ‘modern’ society looks like.
I looks at Astana as a project. Astana is manufactured as a site set apart from the mundane reality of contemporary Kazakhstan by a double distinction of temporality and materiality. Astana is designed as a complex symbolic system with a fractal-like structure of reference and a particular optic. The emerging heterotopia exerts a certain charm upon people’s imaginations, setting in motion a self-reproducing and accumulative circuit of ‘the symbolic capital of the capital’. What the project offers is a sense of order and direction in the life of the society, a sense of a ‘greater whole’ as a response to the crisis of the socio-political order in the previous decade. Moreover, it promises material and moral improvement which should allow the Kazakhstanis to ‘catch-up’ with the world according to partly implicit normative notions of what a ‘modern’ society looks like.
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