Opening Ceremonies

Magellan opened a new connecting link between Europe, Asia, and America, paving the way for the formation of a global world. But it was also a point of arrival of a long process that went back to Antiquity. For many centuries, Europe and Asia had a fragmentary and distorted image of each other. In Europe, confusing notions of “East," “Asia,” or “India” crossed Antiquity and the Middle Ages and mixed fabulous tales with real data about what was beyond the Persian Empire or, later, the Muslim World. The information circulated mainly through land trade routes. In the fifteenth century, Iberian geopolitics determined a new approach: to reach Asia directly by sea. It was the Portuguese who successfully achieved this goal, sailing eastward around Africa and reaching, not Marco Polo’s mysterious “Cathay,” but the real Maritime Asia, putting a wide range of goods, trade routes, peoples, cultures and civilizations within their range. In 1521, Magellan crossed an unknown Ocean and reached Asia sailing westward. The final dot of a secular process was finally connected. As the Italian Francesco Carletti noticed later, “We never heard of anyone sailing around the world in the Ancient times as we do today, thanks to the value and virtue of the two crowns of Castile and Portugal (…): one, sailing east, allows us to reach China and Japan; through the other, to the west, we reach the Philippine Islands (…). With these two ways, the two Crowns have drawn a circle around the world (…).”

Part 1: Legacies of the Encounter in Seafaring & Trade — June 24 to 29, 2021

This sub-theme revisits cartography, navigation, maritime trade, infrastructure, transportation, technology transfer, the rise of cities, and establishment of trade routes. It  also takes a look at aspects of environmental history, or human interaction with the natural world be it through the use of meteorological knowledge in seafaring or the dissemination of plants and products through tropical commodity chains.

Part 2: Legacies of the Encounter in Ideas & Identity Formation — June 30 to July 6, 2021

In what ways have Asian and European encounters brought about new kinds of thinking? This sub-theme examines aspects of culture in the symbolic sphere of existence in domains such as religion and ideology, language and discourse, science and cosmology. It traces how new concepts, norms, values, beliefs and subjectivities came into being, particularly in relation to gender, class, race, and ethnicity.

Part 3: Legacies of the Encounter in Institutions — July 7 to 13, 2021

How have social structures been transformed by Asian-European encounters? This sub-theme takes a look at the evolution of forms of government, laws, schools and education, systems, as well as at religious and other social institutions.

Part 4: Legacies of the Encounter in Forms of Expression — July 14 to July 22, 2021

How have Asian-European encounters left their mark on our cultural forms and cultural expressions? What traces of contact and negotiation between Asia and Europe can we find in the  arts, literature, music, dance, theater, festivals, performances, food, architecture, sport, fashion, and popular culture and so on? How do these demonstrate hybridity and complex cultural flows?