Ute Günkel-Maschek Mag. phil. - Dissertation project
Images of space - life of images. The construction of lifeworld in the Aegean Bronze Age.
Images and spaces are essential parts of every culture’s reality of life. They are created to surround and determine the social and cultural life taking place with and within them according to culture-specific conceptions and ideologies, traditions and practices. The Minoan culture of Bronze Age Crete has left fascinating remains of such a system of spaces and images. In the ‘neopalatial’ period, ‘palaces’, town houses and rural ‘villas’ as well as visual representations of different sorts of objects show a common spatial and visual ‘concept’. The prevailing ideas and ideologies of this culture or of its ‘elite’ were ubiquitously realised within social, political, economic and religious actions.
On the one hand, space is understood as the inner and outer spaces formed by architectural structures or by nature. On the other hand, space more generally comprises all sorts of ritual and religious, economic and agricultural, social and socio-hierarchical spaces and spatial relationships within which the social and cultural life took place. The images of Minoan culture act in a close interdependency with space and, being depicted on the walls of different rooms in the ‘palaces’, town houses and rural ‘villas’ as well as on many other media, they give an idea of how space was penetrated by the images and by the inherent symbolic, narrative and normative meanings.
Through the creation of spaces and images the Minoans designed an adequate environment and significant means of communication for their social and cultural actions. The doctoral project „Raumbilder – Bilderleben. Zur Konstruktion von Lebenswelten in der minoischen Bronzezeit“ will analyse the system of images and spaces of Minoan culture and trace it back to the basic cultural and social forms of life. The aim is to understand the cultural and social ‘concept’ on which this system is based. For only the understanding of this ‘concept’ may allow an understanding of the nature and character of Minoan culture in general.
