“Welcome home” and “Goodbye”
By Junaid Kajee
“Welcome home” — I was greeted by these words having returned to the Schloss to develop an idea initially conceived here. The familiar nature of the surroundings were hardly wasted on me — a timelessly beautiful eclectic palace juxtaposed against the serenity of a peaceful lake, nestled in a majestic mountain silhouette dotted by forests and ice caps. A welcome home like no other.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but find myself once again reflecting upon Salzburg’s founders and the ideals they espoused in bringing this intervention to fruition in the first instance. How would they feel about the challenges faced by society today? What potential solutions might they propose to the myriad dilemmas facing humanity?
Given the instability, polarization and conflict exemplified by recent events in the post-pandemic era, it would be remiss of us not to acknowledge the need for the work we undertake to scale and to embrace greater inclusivity. A home should not be taken for granted or left to languish in the mediocrity of complacency, whether that be by choice or by design.
Should the seminar challenge itself, reconsider and perhaps reinvent itself with a view to yielding more impactful initiatives, interventions and partnerships? Having personally contended with this question over the duration of the program, I can say that the definitions certainly matter. Ideas represent powerful catalysts for change. But how do we scale such ideas among an absent audience? How do we even begin to consider empowering a message when the very language used to codify it has been politically hamstrung and rendered moot?
Prof Chris Harris posed a thought-provoking question to me during one of our casual conversations around halfway through the media academy, “if the program ended today and you said goodbye and left, what would you take away from the experience?”
This began my reflection on what I hoped the legacy of the program would be for me. We arrived in Salzburg as strangers to a distant land, unfamiliar with each other and with the surroundings we had since learned to call home. The resources at our disposal serving a singular purpose of forging a greater sense of community. There is not a single element of the media academy designed to be undertaken in isolation. During sessions, iterated game theoretic interactions greet you at every corner, inherently built on trust and reciprocity. In much the same way, the overall media academy experience works because the intentional experimentation and creative elements rest on a robust foundation of community and trust. I thus move forward from the experience looking to understand how trust can be scaled, with a view to mitigating against (or solving) the challenges mentioned previously.
“Goodbye” — Endings are never easy. Just as the sun sets over the lake at the Schloss, so too has our time at the media academy come to a close. We learned of shame, biases, living libraries, fugitive spaces, overcrowding, and an abundance of interesting ideas. Together, we worked, laughed, danced, cried. The community life exemplified by gatherings at Fellows Hall, the palace banquet tables, and City Beats nightclub may have drawn to an end — but established and earned through our joint pursuits, a shared narrative of trust lives on in the hearts and minds… of the lovers, lunatics, and poets.
