Understanding Emptiness, understanding Modernity

The aim of this presentation is to argue and explore how a set of epistemological binary dualisms of Western modernity are associated to the notion of emptiness, and how the latter is a critical aspect in the underrepresentation of alternative modernities. More broadly, this contribution is an attempt to add further elements to the Cape Town Document by looking at how the society/nature divide spatialises in a specific border geography, and how this might relate to heritage. The talk is therefore structured into three sections. In the first, we will be looking at emptiness in the northwesternmost corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina; in the second, we will examine the differences between ruins and emptiness, which in the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, we think, bring to the fore those between the notions of heritage and legacy; in the third section we will discuss how reframing emptiness has implications for the project of architecture and thus heritage.