Lecture 

Revolution, war, pandemic. The 1920s were beset with uncertainty. Amid the iterative collapse of the financial sector in Belgium and Mexico, representations of banking and social infrastructure attempted to heighten an emerging global subject’s ability to conjure unseen futures. Uncovering a latent yearning to sense inter-connection with others in these projects, this talk offers genealogical insight into our own globalized and increasingly uncertain present.

Shiben Banerji is an associate professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy, and co-editor along with Rubén Casas of In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric Beyond Rhetorical Studies both of which will be available later in 2023.

Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, Beautiful Middle Harbour, gif of excerpt extracted from a 16mm film produced by the Greater Sydney Development Association Limited, circa 1928