Taking trans-European axes and routes as its point of departure, “Transitive Modernities” was launched by and Stamatina Dimakopoulou (NKUA), under the auspices of CIVIS, in 2021. This project aims to explore established and hitherto uncharted trajectories and connections across Europe, the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean, and Africa. While cultural transfers have often been explored as movements between the various peripheries and metropolitan European (and Euro-American) centres, this programme will also focus on movements across the cultures of what is problematically called peripheries or semi-peripheries. This methodology aims at examining and fostering novel conceptions of how such aesthetic, cultural and social interactions may challenge established trajectories of modernities on local and global levels.
We aim to examine international, transnational and trans-European trajectories through the study of various cultural forms and spaces, and focus on transnational connections and dialogues in conjunction with a recent reflection on borders, migration, mobility, collective memory, essential to understanding our current moment. Through a focus on cross-cultural movements and impacts, we will examine cultural practitioners, aesthetic objects and discourses that transgress national and disciplinary boundaries. The study of such circulations will afford new perspectives on modernist legacies and posterities. Transitive modernities focuses on cultural transfers across continents; aspires to reconfigure established conceptual vocabularies and generate new ones; complicate our perspective on European cultural values and practices, also related to regionality in terms of Northern and Southern, Eastern and Western Europe and attend to the imperative of redefinition.