Here’s an interview to Sarat Maharaj I’ve done in 2008 with my group Invernomuto for Check-in Architecture, a six months project dedicated to the exploration of contemporary european imaginary, on many levels. We took part of the project with a mission in Como (northern Italy) to interview Maharaj after a lecture at Fondazione Ratti, titled Conoscere l’altro e altri modi di conoscere, and introduced by Anna Detheridge.
This is the edited video, but I’d like to share here the complete interview.

You can download here the rules we received from the curators. These are the questions/suggestions prepared for Maharaj:

• You defined the ‘ethics of difference’ as a “struggle to construct meaning together, across the borders of cultural difference”. How to build the ethics of difference?

• We are now on a border, between open water of the lake and a very touristic town. Low cost flights, technological systems and global flux changes contemporary space/time boundaries. How do you define the concept of ‘border’ in today’s ethnoscape?

• Music critic Simon Reynolds asserts that “Dancehall and other genres of the ‘Black Atlantic’ diaspora have long entered into relations of fruitful mutual contamination”. Even Paul Gilroy – black-british theorist, who coined the idea of Black Atlantic – acknowledges dance music as one of the bastions of contemporary transculture. Would you like to comment on these phenomenas?

• We would like to ask you about the concept of xeno-sonics, making use of a soundtrack. This has produced by Burial, London based musician, one of the weirdest voice of the dubstep scene; this track brings together heavy kickdrum and bass lines, suburban noises and stretched soul vocal samples in a multi-layered path.

• In the end, a curiosity. Lake Como had recently been the set for the latest Star Wars episode. What do you think about the contemporary sci-fi and Hollywood divas & stars imagery of the lake?