Yesterday I happened to be in Cathedral Square, walking past An Origin Story's lovely hoardings around the convention centre site. As you can see in the image, from one angle the panel which states that 'the future is just around the corner' points right to Tūranga - the future of Ōtautahi is appearing right in front of our eyes. We cannot wait to share our new facility with you!
And yet, I've been thinking, the future is so terribly fragile, quickly becoming the present - for a flash - and then the past. The present of Tūranga still feels a long way off, but how long before it becomes a familiar, comforting and challenging place that we know and love and feel as if it has always been there?
Everything becomes superseded. This point has been brought home to me recently, when reading Ben Shephard's Headhunters: the search for a science of the mind. It looks at the lives and careers of four men (quelle surprise) who worked across the fields of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology and neurology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time, many of these scientific disciplines were new and emerging with exciting ideas being developed, tested and sometimes lauded. Looking back, we can see that some of those ideas were offensively racist.
They championed field work in anthropology and lead the way in defining and treating shell shocked and mentally wounded service personnel in the First World War. And yet and generation or two - or even less - of their deaths many of their theories and work was disproved or supplanted. What was once cutting edge is now old hat.
But that's what happens, doesn't it? We are all part of a continuing development and dialogue, and improved theories and ideas grow out of older ones. That's one of the many exciting things about Tūranga - how many ideas and thoughts etc etc will be developed and created there using exciting collections, programmes and other resources, before it too is superseded?
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