The State of the Nation State at Dubai's World Expo by Martyn Smith

Physical

Map Handed Out to Visitors at Dubai Expo 2020

Israel

Al Wasl Plaza and Dome USA Pavilion Terra Sustainability Pavilion Kazakhstan Pavilion UK Pavilion Russia Pavilion UAE Pavilion Saudi Arabia Pavilion Pavilion India Pavilion China Pavilion Switzerland Pavilion Palestine Pavilion Metro Station

Arriving at Dubai Expo 2020 was a simple matter of taking the Metro. The Expo was the last stop on the line and then it was a straight walk from the station to the Expo entrance. The first stop for visitors was the massive Al Wasl Plaza (wasl means “connection” in Arabic). The pavilions and attractions fanned out from this central plaza. Past world expositions are famous for architectural wonders like the Crystal Palace or the Eiffel Tower, so Expo planners felt the need for a memorable centerpiece in Dubai. How could Dubai, a playground for wonder-structures, not have a marvel at its center? The Al Wasl Plaza Dome was the end result, setting into three dimensions the ring-like Expo 2020 logo. The dome was designed by a Chicago based architectural

firm in consultation with Emirati leaders. The abstract patterning of the circles and other geometric shapes reflects a basic inspiration from Islamic design. It would be possible to look at this dome and guess that the Expo was based in an Islamic country, although the exact country might not be clear. One design reference is more specific to Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. That central pairing of circles and diamond shapes was based on a gold ring said to have been discovered at an archaeological site in the desert of southern Dubai. This serves as an example of how elements dug up from the ancient past allow modern nation states to construct identities more specific than transnational religious identities. So the dome managed

to check the box for both a transnational religious identity and one more specific to the UAE. “The future” turned out to be a central word for the nations present at the Expo. Religions create stories about the future. But in the tech world of Silicon Valley the concept of the future has come to dominate all other concerns. The basic idea is that the past is a straitjacket of useless dogma, but grand possibilities open up if we leave all that behind and re-imagine every aspect of life. Dubai largely adopts this Silicon Valley ideology of the future, and this was written onto the walls that funneled visitors into the Al Wasl Plaza. If human beings harnessed their creativity, together we could create the future we want. A promotional video labeled the Al Wasl Dome

the “beating heart” of the Expo. In daytime the dome served as a welcome screen against the direct sunlight, but at night it was lit up with projections and became a living structure. The fine mesh within the geometric cells serve as a screen. Since this is Dubai the dome sets a world’s record for the “largest projection space.” On one promotional clip running horses were projected onto the dome, visible from far away. We didn’t see much in the way of projected horses or other animals on the dome, though it was beautiful at night with its ever shifting colors. On our final night at the Expo we came across a Nissan SUV on display at the center of the plaza. Corporate representatives were standing around talking up the car, and so converting this huge plaza

promotional video Expo2020

into an unavoidable Nissan advertisement. The vast dome had been transformed into a projection space for the corporate logo of Nissan. All across the firmament these logos blinked on and then faded out, like so many stars coming into existence. Of course the central Al Wasl Plaza wouldn’t remain a site for relaxation, but would host the most obvious advertising possible: selling cars. After our first morning arrival at the Al Wasl Plaza we headed to the left, I’m not sure why. We would have some days to explore the national pavilions that were the heart of a World Expo. The idea of coming to the Expo was to see how nation states presented themselves and their ideals in this era of planetary challenges (climate change, mass migration, inequality). I

hoped to find patterns in the way nations presented themselves as part of the global order. Would I be able to discern a workable vision for the future? The walkways between the pavilions were covered by various forms of shade-giving covers. This was December, so temperatures were mild, but the sunlight was direct and nonstop. We avoided the large weekend crowds by starting on Sunday, the first day of Dubai’s work week. (Less than a month after we left, Dubai decreed that it would adopt a standard Saturday/Sunday weekend.) The whole point of a World Expo is to give opportunity for nations to set up a pavilion representing their values and people. If we take away the nation state, there’d really be no point to an Expo. We first tried the

pavilion of the United Kingdom. On the outside it was a series of long planks seeming to extend from a central point. At the end of each plank was a small screen for the display of words. These words changed every few minutes, making it look like poetry was getting created on the spot. Poetry was the only way to understand a phrase like “a moment glazed by their brightness.”

It was nonsense in any literal reading. The pavilion was created by UK-based artist Es Devlin, who calls herself a creator of “large-scale performative sculptures.” All the large pavilions attempted to deliver a guided experience rather than be oldfashioned halls with objects kept pristinely behind glass cases. We walked up the switchbacking queue to arrive at the entrance

to the UK pavilion. There wasn’t much of a queue this early in the day, so we moved ahead quickly to the entrance. On the ground along the way were prompts to come up with a word about our mind. I took this to indicate a feeling word about internal experience: I’m empowered; I’m elated; I’m puzzled; I’m on edge; I’m imagining; I’m anxious. There wasn’t yet a place to enter words, but we were being prompted to think along lines that might prove useful fodder for the AI poetry creator that would produce the public poetry of this pavilion. The pavilion designers didn’t want us coming up to the prompt and just writing “pizza,” but words that could be part of a meaningful-sounding stream of words. The word above the entrance to the UK

pavilion was dream, though like all the words at the front, this one too changed periodically. If I had to guess one art form that will be the lasting contribution of the English nation to future civilization, it’d be poetry. The names come quickly to mind: Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Tennyson. But while poetry is a good enough theme for the English pavilion, the notion that an AI would create poetry out of crowd-sourced words seemed to deconstruct the human accomplishment of all those poets. Upon entering the UK pavilion I was pointed to a tablet that asked for a word. I typed in “king” but that was rejected. I typed in “green” and after a moment I received this computer generated couplet incorporating my word. I took a photo so as to ponder my

personal poem at a future time. Poetry commonly expresses an individual’s perception or feelings, and the words match or expand a reader’s sense of the world. But what can we say about these AI generated words? What could it mean to be “in the garden”? And why “remember it”? Why does it matter that “the bird was still”? The particularity that could make this meaningul is absent, and these are just words linked together as if they reflected a context. Nothing in those words reflected my experience of Dubai, and the only thing remarkable about the words was how quickly they would’ve disappeared into the universe if I hadn’t taken a photo. Looking up from my tablet I was in the midst of this curving interior space. On the exterior the pavilion

was composed of long horizontal planks, but visitors entered an unexpectedly hollow space fully defined by curves. Other words chosen by visitors were displayed up ahead, and these were the rough material out of which the longer poems on the pavilion’s exterior were constructed. Surprising phrases and thought alignments were bound to appear from a big jumble of positive words, but the human work of meaning creation had been forfeited. Visitors weren’t prompted to create, but to enjoy unique phrases. Underneath this was an implication that poetry was a matter of processing excellence and passive enjoyment, not active reflection on the meaning of human experience. Leaving the UK pavilion we wondered if Expo 2020 would be a bust.

My son could see a humorous angle and imagined the pitch for the UK pavilion being made to Boris Johnson, who in his daffy way would’ve pronounced it “brilliant! genius! Poetry is as English as whiff-whaff! Approved! Now on you go...” But the country pavilions got more insightful after this low bar. We spent two full days walking around the Expo, ducking into this or that national pavilion. We had no plan, just a lot of curiosity and time. The pathways connecting the pavilions were covered with creative sun shades, and it felt like an international design call had gone out for “best shade ideas.” The variety of responses was on display throughout the Expo. In this visual essay I’ve been writing “we did this” and “we went there.” This is as good a point

as any to note that the “we” stands for my son and I. Although I love to travel, I’m not some digital nomad, picking up and moving from place to place. I have a home and life in Wisconsin and if we learned anything during the Covid-19 pandemic it’s that my profession of teaching doesn’t work well across digital channels. Effective teaching is about being in person and in place with other human beings. A relatively small percentage of my time is spent traveling, but I enjoy throwing myself into trying to understand a new place, reading books before and after my visit, trying to answer the questions that I ask myself by taking photos. Travel is great when shared with others, and on this trip my son was an ideal conversation partner. Our next

pavilion was the one for Kazakhstan. We were about to walk right by it, but a Kazakh worker assured us we’d love this pavilion. The exterior was formed out of curving sheets of synthetic material. The gold-colored interior wall borrowed design motifs from ancient Kazakh art. At the Expo we never saw structures reflecting anything like classical architecture, with its columns and defined orders. The designers of all these pavilions were in thrall to a modern style. There was no end to bending and curving materials and designs, and though the particularity of a nation was marked by surface level detail (like these Kazakh design motifs), an underlying modern design sensibility was obvious. The adoption of this aesthetic was the initial point where

a nation signaled commitment to shared global values. The opening experience inside the Kazakhstan pavilion involved a walk through the steppe. The total area of this space was multiplied by mirrors (so you can see me taking this photo across the way).

The lights coming up from the grassland evoked fireflies at dusk. Grand mountains rose behind us and were projected everywhere by mirrored columns. There was a sense we were moving through magical land. Many pavilions made an effort to create an opening experience that communicated some inner core of national experience. Often nations turned to the natural world for this defining trait that was all their own. Nation states are voracious identity definers, and anything unique within

their physical borders will get taken up as fodder for national identity. Like other pavilions, Kazakhstan told a story about itself as a nation. When possible these national stories were lodged within the grand narrative of human history as constructed by modern anthropology. At the start of the Kazakhstan pavilion a screen animated the waves of migration as humans moved out of Africa and into Europe and Asia. One of these waves ended at the Great Steppe, and so the implication was that we should see the Kazakh people (and the nation itself) as deeply rooted in the grand human story. Connections to modern world religions (and their stories about the past) were always played down at the Expo. It was more important to anchor the nation in

this first story of global dispersal. Some pavilions relied on the general pool of foreign workers in Dubai, but the better ones had tour guides representing their own country, and this was the case with Kazakhstan. One stop in this pavilion was for a replica of the ancient “Golden Man,” a skeleton buried with a spectacular golden outfit. The Golden Man (who might have been a Scythian noble) was discovered in 1969 within a pristine mound dating back to the 3rd century BC. This figure shot up quickly in symbolic value after this discovery, to the extent that the national monument for Kazakh independence features a likeness of him at the top. In the Expo pavilion we heard a glowing introduction to the Golden Man from our guide. Tulips sprout up in

front yards all around my Wisconsin neighborhood as spring arrives. I receive bulb catalogs that advertise the varieties that can be delivered to my doorstep. It has crossed my mind in the past to learn about the origin of tulips. They must’ve grown wild somewhere before being diversified into so many varieties by horticulturists. So where was that? Thoughts like this come and go for many things in modern life, but only rarely do I chase down the answer. The Kazakhstan pavilion put a little spotlight on tulips and noted that this was the land that gave them to the world. In other words, this is where they once grew wild. The designers put a similar spotlight on apple trees, which were claimed as another Kazakh gift to the world. Kazakhstan gained

independence at the breakup of the Soviet Union, and in 1997 its capital became Akmola, which was shortly after renamed Astana. In 2019 the capital was renamed (again) Nur-Sultan after an outgoing political leader. The name is confusing, but the city is a design marvel. Nur-Sultan was designed in the early 2000s by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa, and his plan was largely realized. Architectural marvels continue to be added to the city, and a screen in the pavilion portrayed the capital city of the future. Something about the Expo being in the wonder city of Dubai made other nations want to show off their own modern city plans. The city was being transformed into a site for the projection of national identity. At the end of the Kazakhstan

pavilion we watched a live performance. A man in an athletic outfit walked on stage and began to interact with a computerized arm. The performer didn’t speak, but the changing scenes in the background and the voice of a narrator interpreted what we were seeing. At first it seemed as if the point was to demonstrate a mechanical arm mirroring the motions of a performer. But quickly the choreography got so complex that it became clear that the actions of the arm were entirely pre-programmed. The voice spoke in World Expo bromides: “How we imagine our future today is the key to creating a better tomorrow.” Again, the concept of the Future served as a powerful tool for organizing our view of the world. Eventually the performer was sitting on

the mechanical hand and soaring through the sky. We were treated to a vision of a city floating in the sky (cue memories of Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back). The sunny message from the narrator was that humans will harness artificial intelligence to achieve a “harmonic symbiosis between mankind and planet Earth.” The path to the future will be to extend technology until we can build a sci-fi environment for humans. The natural world will run perfectly alongside this one. I could see no willingness to imagine that the fossil fuels being consumed in pursuit of this tech future could destroy civilization long before cloud cities were ever realized. This and other pavilions were sites for the projection of confidence in the global future,

nevermind the rumbles of this newly vocal planet Earth. Right next to the Kazakhstan pavilion was the one for the United States. Although the geographic and political position of Kazakhstan was light years from that of the US, their stories were in near alignment. I had a growing suspicion that there was one contemporary metanarrative shared by all nation states, but expressed in slightly different ways. Where the US diverged was the embarrassing (I write as a citizen) overload of national symbols. Nobody else had such a row of waving flags, and all visitors had to pass under the national seal. This uber-patriotic design was perhaps a remnant of the Trump administration, since presumably it was put together back in 2019. Just inside the

entrance to the US pavilion was this statement in English and Arabic: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of the Future.” Those words riff on the opening of the Declaration of Independence, which sets a baseline for human rights: all men are created equal with unalienable rights, among which are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The switch of “Happiness” to “Future” doesn’t sit well with me. Pursuit of the Future is a marker for participation in the global economy, and a hallmark of the futureideology, but it’s not a human right. The switch makes the phrase into a mindset to be achieved. My own pursuit of happiness might well mean rejecting the official orientation to the future and success. It might well mean a stubborn attachment to the

past! Inside the US Pavilion we stood on a moving walkway that took us through a series of displays. The first display featured this replica of the torch for the Statue of Liberty. The screen in the background portrayed a changing landscape, and the narrator described the US as founded by people who left home to chart a course for a better life and future. This colonial landscape was quickly transformed into a peaceful scene from the Early Republic. In this version of American history (set out here for global consumption) the words “future” and “liberty” neatly explained the nation. There was no mention of the grand counter narrative formed out of the search for justice for all and the progressive recognition of the value of all lives. The job of a national

pavilion wasn’t just to tell the story of a nation, but when possible to link the nation to the host country, which this year was the UAE in the heart of the Islamic Middle East. This connection could be accomplished through photos of the respective leaders

meeting together, but the US went further and made the striking gesture of allowing the Quran that had been in the library of Thomas Jefferson to be put on display. It hadn’t traveled outside the US since it was added to Jefferson’s collection. It was behind glass, but the object’s point was made: the US has a history of being interested in this part of the world. US political discourse is by no means free of hostility to Islam, but this was still a nice touch. The US pavilion told a version of US history

that every tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley would recognize. One by one pieces of the modern world that had their origin in the US were introduced on the screen. An old-fashioned rotary telephone was projected, and it was replaced by a map of the world with lines connecting distant places around the globe. This phone was accompanied by images of cars and airplanes and rockets. The US was positioning itself as the originator of globalization, and it’s true that many US inventions have amplified the ability of people to connect at a distance and contributed to the homogenization of global experience. The point of pride at the Expo was always the global, the links between human beings that had been made on the planet’s surface. The global was

visually marked by webs of lines spreading across the world. In 1893 Chicago hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition. This Expo marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus arriving in the New World (and just 100 years later few people were interested in celebrating Columbus). In the midst of this tech-heavy narration, the US pavilion displayed an image from the most famous Expo hosted within its borders. At first I couldn’t see how that past Expo fit into this national story, but it worked as a reminder that the US has always been a full participant in events of global connection. The expectation of being able to see and taste the world in one place was no doubt a contributor to the later imagining of the World Wide Web. It didn’t take long for the US

pavilion to come around to the tech story. A quotation from Steve Jobs led off. Now, Steve Jobs didn’t treat people well. There’s a substantial literature out there (films and books) about his abusiveness to workers and his own daughter. He had what an early employee described as a “reality distortion field” in which he bent the will and sense of possibility of those near him. What mattered was only the brilliant products—the Mac or iPhone. In 1997 he wrote the script for an ad celebrating “the crazy ones” who’d changed the world. Within this pavilion, the words of Steve Jobs were set on a wall and took on a scriptural quality: true Americans take up this future orientation and change the world. It is a hint of the new civil religion shaping our view of the

American past. There were a smattering of authentic objects within the US pavilion. As with all the pavilions at the Expo, the designers had little desire to build a museum of things, and more interest in presenting grand vistas via massive screens and voice narration. When actual objects were present, it was usually to make a specific point (the Quran from the library of Thomas Jefferson). So here in the section where Steve Jobs was canonized as a great American, we find a sacred object: the original iPhone. It’s set behind protective glass, and this small device with rounded corners is transformed into a symbol for the global connections created by this future-oriented nation. Still standing on the moving walkway that took us past images of American

innovation, and past the Steve Jobs display, we came to a section that put the spotlight on diversity. The screens were filled with a young woman of uncertain ethnic identity. She turned out to be Gitanjali Rao, an American of Indian descent. She was only 16, but a quotation from her was on the wall: “Anyone even remotely interested in creating social impact can be an innovator.” The designers liked that word “anyone” since it pointed away from the previous white men. The future of “the future” is (as presented here) that the role of innovator will be taken over by people from all backgrounds. Diverse people take their place in the US as they step forward as value-creating innovators. It felt then and now like a narrowing of the American vision. As has

been explored in books of environmental history, the United States constructed its national identity out of natural scenery. In a landscape devoid of Europe’s stone castles and scenic ruins, nature itself became the touchstone for identity. For anyone who didn’t think that the automobile and the iPhone quite summed up the American experience, it was refreshing to come across this display of natural scenes in the US pavilion, introduced by a sample gateway. But this concept of the national park was fully contained by the global system. Nature was a signifier for a particular nation, even as climate change is forcing us to think more intently on the scale of the planetary. We can no longer imagine the work of preserving nature as being a matter of setting aside

plots of land. Throughout the Expo I was surprised by the role of space exploration in these national pavilions. Any nation that could credibly claim space accomplishment made sure to do so. Nothing could be a greater cause for national pride than satellites and rockets. The US—as the leader in this general endeavor—added lots of reminders in its pavilion. The final room featured a Mars Exploration Rover set up on a mockup of the Martian landscape. This was the ultimate proof of national greatness: touching another planet. It was a nod toward some multiplanetary future. As the anticipation of climate catastrophe grows, odd hopes get pinned onto such inhospitable places. Just outside the US pavilion was a replica of the Falcon 9 rocket

made by SpaceX. These rockets are capable of lifting a satellite into orbit and then safely landing for re-use. That’s a big step for normalizing space flights. Elon Musk is the entrepreneur founder of SpaceX. Just two weeks before our visit to the Expo Musk responded to the criticism of a sitting senator with this Tweet: “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” Odd that the US would put

such a notable disrespecter of its system at the heart of its national pavilion. One of the best things about the Expo was the international food. Many national pavilions had a restaurant attached, and whole buildings featured multiple vendors from a single global region. The US pavilion went with a diner! The offerings centered on the old-fashioned cheeseburger or hot dog, with french fries on the side. When it came to drinks there was a fast-food dispenser giving a choice between Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, 7UP, and Mountain Dew. Could the US really not be more creative? Sure, fast food and these flavored soft drinks were an innovation, but is it really the best foot forward for American food? It’s the most widely known but also least interesting part of

food in America. Once visitors had bought their cheeseburger and fries, they could take a seat directly under the exhausts of the Falcon 9. Unfortunately, a rocket isn’t highly effective at giving shade. Even early in the day those red and white seats were overexposed in direct sunlight. Why seat people right under the exhausts of a rocket? Maybe someone thought it’d be humorous? Maybe it seemed like a way to impress visitors with American power? The one consolation I took was that this all had a peculiarly Trumpy feel (fast food, rockets, power). My guess was that the pavilion had been designed under Trump and then swerved a little to incorporate a video statement from new president Joe Biden. The pavilion might well look quite different if designed

under another administration. This “Pursuit of the Future” notebook from the giftshop of the US pavilion would’ve been a useful holder for my ongoing notes and observations on the Expo. My view of these Expos is that they are bad at giving a window for the future, but good at encapsulating the conceptual framework of the present. As country after country lined up to tell the same story about innovation and the future, they reported on a global consensus. But all this design work had taken place before the Covid-19 pandemic. Expo 2020 had been pushed back to 2021, but no nation that I knew of had re-designed their pavilion. The Expo as a whole was like a time capsule back to 2018, but now the concerns of the planet were swamping the

easy adulation of global connections. The China pavilion was fittingly ambitious, reflecting its role as a global power. The pavilion took up the look of the red lanterns hung on festive occasions in China, symbolizing prosperity. It acknowledged the contemporary design trends visible in all the pavilions, but at the same time avoided any hint of the playful or frivolous. The exterior of the pavilion gave the first impression for visitors. The first test for a national pavilion is whether it achieves an innovative design that both decisively leaves behind traditional architecture and yet through its creative design still calls to mind some typical feature bearing on national identity. In this respect the China pavilion succeeded. Upon walking through

the wide entrance of the pavilion, visitors came to a large screen that projected an address by Chinese president Xi Jinping. One of his first statements was to congratulate Dubai on this first Expo in the Middle East. On a nearby wall was a portrait of the Chinese president meeting with Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum. China’s theme for the Expo was “Build a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind – Innovation & Opportunity.” That wasn’t elegant, but it was crowded with ideas. China was laser focused (beginning with this speech) on promoting its hopes for partnerships with other nations and for “win-win” global outcomes. But the true theme of the pavilion was China’s modernity. As visitors moved further into the pavilion an argument

unfolded that China was reaching a level of smart urban infrastructure beyond what any other nation has accomplished. High speed trains run through the landscape; resources are seemlessly distributed. But at the entrance we encountered this grand tapestry pointing us back to a traditional Chinese landscape. It was a moment of stillness that reminded visitors of China’s history and prepared them for the gleaming vision of the future to be entered shortly. The United States called on its National Parks, and China similarly grounded itself within a vision of a harmonious natural past. Both portrayals of the natural world were anchored in the past, and appeared to offer little help for the environmental challenges of the present. In 2021 China had

reached Mars with an orbiter and landed its rover “Zhurong.” This marked the beginning of its interplanetary exploration, and the China pavilion began with this widescreen demonstration of its accomplishments in space. The global powers felt the need to showcase their space programs. Ignoring space meant a nation fell short of being a true global power, and was perhaps just another place trying to entice tourists to visit and spend money. Images of satelites and this (cute!) Mars rover made China a part of the Global+Space club of nations. The narrowness and predictability of all these national stories came as a surprise to me, but it shouldn’t have. The United States wanted to talk about inventions like the telephone, automobile, and iPhone, but

China was all about infrastructure. Visitors could step into the control room for a high speed train, and gaze at the hi-tech dashboard. Displays like this one showed seamless connections between petroleum sources and refineries, and the forward movement of energy to large manufacturing centers. The traditional Chinese landscape might be notionally present in those mountains on the left, but everything else has become productive. The screen right behind this display touted the tight integration of policy, infrastructure, trade, and finances. The good life was summed up by the phrase “smart life.” Smart technology would keep track of things and makes our connections easier. But this concept has been taken to another level in

China’s version, where every need is anticipated and watched. A nearby screen showed the case of a person walking out of an apartment and falling down the stairs. Outdoor sensors see this emergency and notify paramedics, who show up right away. The deeper message is that life will be convenient but always closely monitored. Like so many national pavilions, China presented an

image of a modern city. The skyscrapers appeared as impossibly sleek structures of twisting metal and glass. It would all be complex, but technology would get people around and make life work. This kind of shining city represented the end result of all that infrastructure and production. The US had connected its global products to the work of individuals, as if modernization was thanks to genius inventor-artists. China never mentioned an individual in its portrayal of this coming world. Its infrastructure, trains, and this city wouldn’t be the inventions of individuals like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, but the results of a superior system. National pavilions told the same basic story, but in this focus or lack-of-focus on individuals I discerned a real

difference in national systems. Switzerland provided a short-form version of the standard national story. It began with the pavilion design, which should feature a modern design sensibility, making little (if any!) reference to tradition. The Switzerland pavilion was a grand mirrored rectangle. “Switzerland” and its white cross were reflected off the ground onto the indented front. No fancy sunscreen shaded visitors, instead everyone was given an unbrella. The sight of these red umbrellas and red turf made for a surreal visual effect. Pavilions were meant to make visitors stop in their tracks and say: “Wow, that’s cool.” Inside visitors entered a thick fog. We could at first dimly make out people ahead of us, but before long we were just following the dim

light of a switchbacking mountain trail. The coolness of the fog came as a relief after the focused sun in front of the mirrored cube. The sensory deprivation reminded us of a disorienting experience designed by Olafur Eliasson for the Tate Modern in London. The Swiss were embedding their national story within the most avant garde design sensibility of our time. It’s not a framed painting that many contemporary artists work to present to museum-goers, but a total sensory experience. The pavilion incorporated that aesthetic and after the overload of the Expo grounds asked visitors to place themselves within a chamber of sensory deprivation. We were hiking through a cool mountain forest. Before long we had climbed out of the fog and looked out

on a spectacular landscape. Mountains upon mountains extended to the horizon. So far it was only this experience on offer, but it represented a successful nudge to imagine ourselves in another place. With the exception of some national pavilions that had no ambition other than to present themselves as tourist destinations, the national script called for saying something more. This experience of arriving at a mountaintop couldn’t be left alone, but had to be followed up with a lesson about globalization, and that move turned out to be the conceptual straitjacket for the pavilions. After the mountaintop we headed down, and had an easy escalator. What was the meaning of the fog and that view? We got the answer right there on the smooth wall of the

escalator: “the most innovative nation in the world.” The design work of the pavilion carried this implicit claim, but it was now stated explicitly. Every nation wanted to connect themselves to the abstract power of innovation (though no other made the claim of being “most innovative”). No alternative language exists for speaking about national aspirations than “innovation.”

No nation used their pavilion to speak about justice, faith, or even Democratic principles. National success came from plugging into the global institutions that unlock individual (or systemic) creativity. The Swiss landscape had raised our sights, and the claim about being the most innovative country in the world had raised our expectations, so it was a disappointment to arrive

on the ground floor and find small exhibits about recycling. Creative design in this pavilion had reached a peak, and it was easy to imagine the young designers having fun as they worked on this pavilion. But they had no “so what” to deliver at the end. They presented no overarching good toward which we were all working. The only large goal is “Hey, we’ll do better recycling and making sure our design concepts are carbon neutral.” This was the conceptual hollowness in all the pavilions when it came to the final “so what” point. If the end goal for all this design is better recycling, then why build anything at all? Why not just refuse to build a pavilion or skip the trip to Dubai? We needed something besides “less waste” as the reason for all this construction.

Leaving the pavilion we came to a straightforward advertisement for Switzerland. The ad presented tennis star Roger Federer (a Swiss national) standing contentedly in an alpine forest. We imagined Federer in his normal life on the tour beset with competition and other demands on his time, and Switzerland represented a place of natural peace, “without drama.” The global economy at the Expo appeared to be composed of nodes (Dubai) and edges (Switzerland). Nodes presented bold maps with lines radiating out to form connections, while edges strove to be an escape from that global drama. In this ad a global celebrity enacts the privileged movement from node to edge. If the national pavilions converged on a single story, the same can

be said about the Expo as a whole. The Expo included three themed pavilions, and here on the left is the Sustainability Pavilion, also known as Terra. The online guide for the Expo describes the theme of this pavilion: “The future of Earth hangs in the balance and there’s no planet B.” Every amazing thing visitors see in the UAE was built with massive profits from fossil fuels and vigorous participation in globalization (container shipping, air traffic). Would I discover a shade of difference between the national stories and the larger story of the Expo? The answer turned out to be a solid “No.” As with many of the national pavilions, the Terra Pavilion was designed by a European design firm. The UK based Grimshaw specializes in projects with

environmental themes, and the locations of their projects range from Doha, Qatar to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. The various project names give a sense of the ethos: Earthpark, The Eden Project, Watershed, etc. The Terra Pavilion gets the highest possible LEED certification for sustainable design. The nearby Energy Trees and the main structure carry at their top arrays of solar panels, and they shift through the day to follow the sun. This solar energy covers a large percentage of the pavilion’s energy needs. The winding path that served as an entrance to the Terra pavilion was surrounded by thriving desert plants, and along the way we passed a series of concrete statues of fauna that once inhabited the Arabian desert. It was hard to imagine

elephants here in Arabia, but with a Google search for “elephants Arabian peninsula” I came immediately to an article about a 2012 discovery at a site in the UAE of fossil footprints for a herd of extinct four-tusked elephant that had once tramped through here. These elephants were joined by similar statues of an ostrich, cheetah, and camel, and together these evoked an ancient un-global past for the region. In other words, the UAE had once been home to a specific and remarkable environmental niche.

Most of the Expo worked to connect the UAE to global storylines, but here there was a hint of a local story. But with the prospect of soaring temperatures throughout the Gulf region in coming decades, all this past life can only exist in the imagination. Along

the glass wall of the entrance upward trending lines charted global human development. The five lines traced growth in agriculture, energy usage, carbon emissions, population, and global GDP. The point is that after a long period of slow increase, these measurements take off with exponential growth before 1900. This is what has transformed the world and makes many believe we’ve entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene. The point of the Terra pavilion was supposedly to point out ways to live that are more friendly to the environment. That’s a tough message to deliver at a World Expo, since Expos are themselves tied to that rise of the Anthropocene. The first World Expo was held in London in 1851, and so Expos are directly associated

with the exponential growth in production that led to climate change. The genre of the World Expo is—to say the least—a poor vehicle for criticism of the global system. The Terra pavilion did manage to leave national stories behind and speak for nature.

It told the story of forests in a way that closely resembled the ideas of Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree had come out this same year. Most likely pavillion designers knew her earlier TED talk “How Trees Talk to Each Other.” She had argued that old growth forests don’t rely on competition but cooperation: “...underground there is this other world, a world of infinite biological pathways that connect trees and allow them to communicate and allow the forest to behave as though it’s a

single organism.” The Terra pavilion explained this by likening forests to our internet—the “wood wide web.” Like the national pavilions, the Terra pavilion couldn’t do without screens. The obvious design move was to animate on long screens the roots of trees linking up with fungal mycorrhizae. As I look back at my images from the Expo, I’m always surprised at how difficult it was to take a photo without someone being in the image taking a photo on their own personal screen. There was this endless dynamic of screens capturing images on screens. But the knowledge about forests gained by Suzanne Simard came from intimate and long presence in the forests of British Columbia. We don’t need better animations, but more willingness to just let

things be. At the heart of the Terra pavilion was this phantasmagorical “Hall of Consumption.” It was filled with bright signs and hands-on exhibits for kids. The stated idea was to challenge visitors, young and old, to reconsider their habits of consumption. This might have made sense wherever the exhibits were designed, but we experienced the hall with a feeling of irony regarding its location in Dubai. The name “Hall of Consumption” could well be applied to the entire city, which has staked its entire future on global consumer desire in the form of malls, tourism, and shipping. But any city with the global reach to be the setting of a World Expo will be a poor messenger for a Green gospel. One of the exhibits in the Hall of Consumption was this large

walk-in closet that contained a long line of men’s and women’s outfits. The floor was littered with boxes of fancy shoes. A nearby sign explained that 2,700 liters of water are used to produce cotton for just one t-shirt. A raging video image of a waterfall helped visitors imagine the fresh water that went into producing the clothes in this closet. The take-away was that we should buy less clothing and be content with a smaller closet. But how can that message be credibly preached in Dubai? If we were to name the sites that most forcefully presented consumption as a global good, we’d set Dubai high on that list. Every Expo visitor has already or will soon visit the Dubai Mall, since that’s just part of what one does in Dubai. It would be a toilsome task to go

through every national pavilion, not just because it’d take a long time, but because they quickly started to repeat themselves. Each national story was filtered through the cultural sensibility and values of its people, but the main points converged. We made an effort to visit the pavilions of countries that might possibly have a counter story—Cuba, for example. Maybe we’d find here an alternative story of the nation and globalization. Cuba had a modest pavilion, but the language was exactly what we’d expect if Silicon Valley cast-offs had colonized the island. Cuba had now become an “incubator of innovation” taking advantage of freedom and creativity. Dubai had underwritten the expenses for smaller and poorer countries like Sierra Leone, which

might not otherwise have had the resources for a pavilion. Such nations were grouped together in subdivided buildings. The options for creative presentation were limited. We wondered how a small nation would relate to the dominant themes of the Expo. Sierra Leone presented itself as a place for investment. A display read: “Low operating costs and streamlined effective administrative process makes Sierra Leone an attractive destination for Foreign Direct Investment.” Investment was the appeal of left behind nations who were striving to build connections to the dominant global nodes. These countries worked to convince visitors that they were working hard to engage with the global economy, and if you invest now, you’ll possibly see great

dividends! It was clear from all the Saudi billboards in Dubai that the large kingdom to the south was fascinated by Dubai and its Expo. This first Expo in the Middle East offered the Saudis a chance to present themselves to a global public. Three Saudi flags waved above their pavilion entrance. Where the flag of the UAE features the Pan Arab colors white, green, red, and black (making it similar to the flags of Palestine and Jordan), the Saudi flag acknowledges no ethnicity. It’s green stands for Islam alone and the white Arabic lettering proclaims the central Muslim creed: “No God but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God.” An old-fashioned sword rests under those words. The Saudi pavilion represented movement toward a new national

identity, one not so completely defined by religion. The best known image from Saudi Arabia is without question the Kaaba in Mecca, a stable and solid black cube of religious devotion. At the Expo the Saudis presented a pavilion structure which was notable for its apparent instability. It was an alien shard angled into the landscape. This pavilion was designed by yet another European design studio (Boris Micka Associates in Seville, Spain). If its flag represents an identity defined by Islam, the Saudi pavilion represents another totalizing identity, now one of placeless modernity. The Saudi pavilion included a series of text crawls. One side was in English, the other in Arabic. The phrases (the same on both sides, just different languages) were as

anodyne as possible, though perhaps the global orientation caught many visitors by surprise. “make a change” visitors were urged, or “explore new wonders.” Most of the phrases made claims as to what the Saudis were up to these days: “working towards a better tomorrow,” or “preserving the future.” Some phrases presented a disembodied ideal: “sustainable cities.” These sentiments were hard to square with the reality of a kingdom based on and supported by global fossil fuel consumption, but the Saudis had sensed an opening for themselves in discourse about Innovation and the Future. The ease with which this fundamentalist kingdom can embrace this discourse makes me suspect a parallel fundamentalism at the heart

of modernity. At the entrance to the Saudi pavilion a circle marked out a dry space to stand and take a selfie. A thin screen of water encircled visitors without splashing them at all. The falling water hit a spongy material that simply soaked it up. It was easy to imagine the marching orders for the design studio: “We’d like our pavilion to be cutting edge and modern, but still fun.”

This selfie circle partially fulfilled the “fun” part. And it worked, there was a gaggle of young people in the middle of the water screen, smiling and holding up their phones. This was more about image than reality, as these teenage girls could never dress like this in publc inside the borders of conservative Saudi Arabia. Going up an escalator into the pavilion we passed an

assemblage of architectural landmarks from old Arabia. That tall house with the green window screens is the Noorwali House from Jeddah along the Red Sea. The lighter tan building to the left evokes a later palace in Najran, four hundred miles to the southeast of Jeddah. It was an assemblage that conveys the broad idea that Saudi Arabia has a past. Although there’s a rough mosque among these re-creations, the purpose in all this is to play down the religious side of Saudi Arabia, making the point that like every other nation there’s an actual culture here—even UNESCO World Heritage Sites! In the official guide to the Expo the Saudi pavilion is described as a “reflection of the Kingdom’s past, present and shared future.” The pavilion led off with the

past as we escalated through Saudi historical sites. Inert walls were animated by laser projections, giving some sense of life and movement. The first was a Bedouin man in front of a fire, a camel nearby. Another projection showed a group of Saudi men in traditional white thobes, with a man beating on a colorful drum over to the left. It was a silent projection, but the men moved in unison and raise their swords together. These structures and images moved the Saudi past decisively into the category of ethnicity. Travelers are comfortable with the notion that different places bring unique expressions of clothing, architecture, and music. Seeing such difference is the attraction of tourism, and Saudi Arabia now appears ready to step forward as one more

global culture to be visited. One of the most impressive sights in the whole Expo was this landscape screen. We walked out onto what felt like a bridge, and straight ahead were slowly shifting high resolution vistas. A map of Saudi Arabia off to the side marked the location of each scene. On the interior side of the bridge we looked straight down onto the same site. This all represented the “present” of the nation, and it was spectacular, as you can tell from all the people using their cell phones to take photos or videos of the projected scenes. The pavilion was pervaded by a sense of a nation “coming out” to the global tourist crowd. Since Saudi Arabia has been impossible to visit, these scenes did feel like a revelation. Watching the landscapes shift, I

was surprised to see Mecca come up on the screen. If all those grand natural landscapes came as a surprise to visitors, everyone was surely familiar with Mecca. This sacred site is the reason Saudi Arabia isn’t open for common tourism. One of the primary duties of the state is to oversee the Hajj, which draws over two million pilgrims. The legitimacy of the Saudi state has long been based on its overseeing of the Hajj. But now Mecca was being transformed into one out of many amazing scenes in Saudi Arabia. It was no longer the sacred landscape that defined the nation, but one more interesting site. Mecca is relegated here to the “present,” and so not clearly part of the future that the Kingdom is claiming. The city of the future was on their minds of the

Saudis, starting with the billboards for their new out-of-nothing city of NEOM that were plastering Dubai. The pavilion delivered this animated scene of a social gathering in their future city. The gathering was still sprinkled with men in white thobes and women in black abayas, but now there were many others. A boy seemed to gain mobility through leg braces and an older woman interacted with others from an advanced wheel chair. A black family in western clothes mixes easily here. In the back we see a robot holding forth with humans. The message was that Saudi Arabia would build the most progressive of modern societies—even down to the free robot. The future civilization would be built in Saudi Arabia. The final room of the Saudi

pavilion included this huge sphere onto which kaleidoscopic images were projected. The images shifted from undersea corals to roses to geometric shapes, but what caught my eye was this restless moment of city streets transformed into a pulsing pattern. I thought: what better symbol for the “globe” of globalization than this sphere knotted with human patterns? As an extracter of fossil fuels Saudi Arabia is at the center of global connection, but this globalization is the thinnest possible skin, and our environmental challenge is to better imagine the disruptive power of the planet on this surface patterning of human accomplishment. There’s excitement in a globe pulsing with energy, and the Expo catches some of that, but the deep planet is

largely erased from sight. The Palestine pavilion stood right next to the Saudi one. Crawling phrases like preserving the future on the Saudi exterior made for a strange juxtaposition with the Palestine pavilion, which made few concessions to the show-off aesthetic of the Expo. The exterior served as a curving canvas for an evocative line drawing of the Dome of the Rock and its Jerusalem environs. Even in its exterior design a signal was given that Palestine was not going to represent an escape from place, rather it would underline, highlight, and make bold its reality as an actual place. I’m not sure it was planned, but the Palestine pavilion offered a real contrast to the placeless future presented by the Saudi pavilion. Palestine didn’t turn to a

high-end European design company for the design of its pavilion. On its website Al Nasher describes itself as “a full-service advertising, public relations and marketing agency with offices in Ramallah, Amman and Dubai.” The pavilion exterior is rather plain, but conspicuous at its front is a double arched gateway. This looks like it could be any ancient arch, but the diamondshaped sun dial at its center proves that it’s meant to evoke a specific arched entrance to the platform of the Dome of the Rock.

At the Expo the arches are a reminder that Palestine isn’t composed of generic spaces (ancient ruins) but particular places (Dome of the Rock). The Palestine pavilion started us off with a darkened room. We didn’t face screens, rather a series of

glowing images, seemingly back-lit. A Palestinian guide interpreted the scenes, describing the religious diversity of Jerusalem’s old city. What caught me by surprise was her point that the floor on which we were standing was created out of the same stone as the street we were looking at in the old city. This wasn’t an appeal to the antiquity of the street or the stones, just an invitation to feel like participants as we visited the Palestine pavilion. The paving stone of the pavilion floor merged into the still image, and we had a sense of presence but also a counter sense of the limitation of our imagination. The actual Old City of Jerusalem is a kind of metaverse avant la lettre. A pilgrim enters it and starts to live in a parallel time. The Jerusalem that Jesus knew and

which witnessed his passion was obliterated by the Romans in 70 AD, but the city was wholly re-imagined by Christians in succeeding centuries. The Via Dolorosa was not in place in Jerusalem until the 15th century, but visitors who come to Jerusalem and follow the path of the suffering Christ can become overwhelmed with a sense of “being in the very place.” At various points there are cutouts on walls or along streets where visitors to Jerusalem are invited to see into the past, or even to touch the past.

This raises a question about designing a pavilion for the Expo: how could this tactile spiritual world ever be represented to visitors? The designers for the Palestine pavilion made the startling choice of connecting to history and the human senses. We

saw no images of future cities, but rather relics of the real Palestine. A label underneath this scrap of metal read: “An original aluminum piece from the old structure of the Dome of the Rock. Now you can touch a real part of the Dome.” This metal was attached to a stand by a thin wire (so visitors wouldn’t walk away with it). Underneath was a certificate of authenticity. The France pavilion gave visitors a “Notre Dame Experience,” featuring huge photos of the ongoing restoration process. But for Palestine the piece of metal was more important than any virtual tour of the Dome of the Rock. The Palestine pavilion gave no evidence of being entranced by the great city of the future. They shared no imagined hi-tech city with skyscrapers. The land and

its produce was a major theme, which set up another sensory display: a pot that gave off a wispy puff of scent when a visitor leaned over it. For example, the man on the right wearing a keffiyeh holds guava in his hand, and the small pot in front of him delivered the smell of guava. It was a display that was innovative in its own way, but which delivered a message quite at odds with other pavilions (like the Saudi one): Palestine isn’t a nation attempting to transcend place, but one striving to remain an actual place. Things produced by the land are one proof of being a real place. The project of presenting place through the five senses broke down when it came to taste. It wasn’t possible to present visitors with a delicious mezze platter of olives, hummus,

cheese, figs, and fresh fruit, but a large photo reminded us of the role of food in constructing regional identity. There was no claim here to the presence of anything innovative. This was no new style of hummus or olive or orange juice. It wouldn’t require an accomplished chef to create a spread like this. This was a vision of a common table with common foods. Like all other aspects of human life (clothing, music, art) food easily becomes a signifier for identity, and this photo delivered a clear message about the placed reality of the nation of Palestine. At the conclusion of the Palestine pavilion we entered a room in the clouds (at least with clouds painted on the walls). Five white stations had a VR headset, and we stepped up to the nearest one. Arthur

put on the headset and started looking around. I took a turn after him, not sure what to expect. Was this the point where we would be taken to the future city? The headsets instead took me to a quiet, peaceful scene, looking out on a small body of water, desert hills in the background. A bird was chirping, I remember too. Other headsets delivered immersive scenes from the streets of Jerusalem, or religious sites, but ours delivered the image of a quiet, non-techy future. Palestine was asking for nothing more than to be itself in its own place. I’m not saying there were no screens in the Palestine pavilion—there were. But in ways markedly different from other pavilions, Palestine turned away from science fiction and asked to be seen and touched and

tasted. At the end we came to this physical map, headed by the Arabic for “I am from here.” It invited Palestinian visitors to mark their homes on the map. It made no attempt to separate Palestinian land from Israel. The message was that this land as a whole is home, with no virtual alternatives possible. The primary mode for conveying information at the Expo was the screen.

Broad, flat walls and three dimensional objects were made to pulse with moving images. Books were almost entirely absent. One exception was the gift shop of the Palestine pavilion, where we came across a selection of bilingual books by the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who is something like the national poet of Palestine. His poems take up themes of exile and loss. The pavilions kept well clear of politics, but with these books it was possible to add a deeper note to the pavilion experience. The value of books as holders for private thoughts difficult to express on public screens became clear. No public screen could represent a personal perspective and voice in the way that could be realized by these small books (though few people picked

them up). The Palestine pavilion had an attached cafe offering falafel wraps. The cook fulfilled his orders, but at the same time tried to catch the eyes of people exiting the pavilion. He smiled and motioned for us to approach, then handed us each a piece of warm falafel. Seeing my camera he made it clear I should snap a photo, and gave a friendly thumbs up. It’s long seemed to me that there’s a central Palestinian faith in the idea that if people could meet them and hear their voices, they’d think differently about their political tragedy. I fear there aren’t many places now where personal outreach manages to break through the dense onslaught of mass media representations. In 2020 the UAE and Israel had normalized relations with each other. This was the

first such political agreement between Israel and an Arab nation. Israel was present at the Expo with a small but thoughtful pavilion. The exterior was in the form of an open box. The colored panels on each side were LED screens that allowed any number of displays from within the box. Visitors could walk up the sandy trail, and along the way they passed the flags of Israel and the UAE, standing together. At the top were places to sit and relax, as if it was some desert resting place after a long hike. At the center—and visible to all who walked by the pavilion—was a nine-branched Hanukkah menorah, a religious symbol reminding visitors of the centrality of Judaism to the nation of Israel. At the back of the Israel pavilion was this glowing sign in

Google Earth image

Israeli blue. I first guessed it was some sort of paleo-Semitic script pointing toward common Arab-Jewish roots. That turned out to be wrong—but on the right track. It was an example of the “Aravrit” script, a hybrid of modern Hebrew and Arabic. Knowing that, I could see that Arabic ran along the top, with Hebrew filling in the lower half. The Arabic read nahu al-ghad or “toward tomorrow.” The Hebrew ha-machar repeats “tomorrow.” This served as still another example of the dominant future orientation of the Expo, and as usual it stands—in contrast to the past—as the path toward some sort of peace. The script embodied hope that Israeli and Arab hopes for the future could be harmoniously combined, but friendship among nation states would be cold

comfort for Palestinians. From the Israel pavilion we looked back on a corner of the Expo. The SpaceX rocket stood on the left, and next to it was the pavilion for the global shipping corporation DP World. The linked screens within the Israel pavilion had now changed to highlight areas in which Israel was contributing to the global economy. Israeli researchers were applying Artificial Intelligence to diagnosis, so health outcomes would improve. It was a tableau of globalization and its promises, but it was also tired: more containers, more space, more AI, more promises about the future. We had entered a tomorrow trap in which the past was left behind as a matter of concern, and the present too barely registered. As we waited to enter the theater

on the lower level of the Israel pavilion, we were stuck watching a faux game show where a tuxedoed host asked the captive audience a series of questions about Israel. The idea was to convince us that Israel was different than expected. One question was about the number of Israeli companies considered “unicorns.” A unicorn is a tech startup valued at over $1 billion. We were shown two possible answers, and of course the correct one turned out to be the higher (though 95 seemed impossibly high). This kicked off a longer attempt to present Israel not as an exclusive nation state, but as a Silicon Valley-style innovation region. Once we had entered the small theater (no seats, everyone standing), the lights went dark and a woman stepped

forward (on screen). She began by explaining that her father’s family was Arab and her mother’s family Jewish; and her name is Lucy. So from the start we knew she was presented as an emobodiment of the cultural mixing and creative flow that marks an innovation region. She snapped her fingers and said, “At this very moment somewhere around the world a new idea was born.” She snapped her fingers again, “And another one, on the other side of the world.” These ideas will take us into the future, and they will form the content of the future as they gain form and reality. The screens dissolved into scenes showing the openness and diversity of life in Israel. The theater had one live actor, though he had no elaborate dance routine. He played the

part of a DJ behind a console of screens. The on-screen Lucy had asked the audience at the start: “Can’t find the right tone?” Her appeal was to young people who lacked a firm identity, who felt out of place. Lucy came round to another idea, “Forget about the right tone, people, follow the beat.” At that moment the DJ acted like he’d let loose a torrent of electronic dance beats, and we were in some club (though actually this was all just part of a choreographed show). These beats weren’t the property of any nation, but of young people everywhere, and the beats represented a kind of ethos of the future that anyone could join. By the end of the video presentation we were surrounded by young people on the screen adding their unique voice or instrument

to the music. We got it: Israel is a place where creative young people can express themselves and so create the future. The presentation represented an open hand reached out to other creatives in the region. The sociologist Richard Florida has written about the rise of an educated “creative class” in the United States, which has taken up residence in prosperous cities. This pavilion posited a global version of this creative class, living in nations that nurture their presence (if not providing actual citizenship). The trick is to be able to forget the past and merge with the placeless global beat of modernity. There are financial and personal rewards for commiting oneself to the future, but there is also a cost. The Israeli flag took up the entire surround

screen briefly at the end of the program. It was a reminder that this was the pavilion of a nation state. But all this content was hard to distinguish from what we’d seen in the Saudi pavilion. This program had been set on a smaller scale, but it reached for the same keywords (innovation, diversity), and it was oriented around the concept of the Future. The Israeli national project was clearly coming into alignment with other states in the region. The point wasn’t democracy or citizenship, but rather in creating the conditions that allowed for the prospering and at least temporary residence of young people who knew themselves to be the creative class, and who would in turn find and refine the ideas on which the Future would be built. The Expo wasn’t

an occasion for staking out a unique national ideologies, rather it was a chance to plug into the global consensus, to show you were on board. This was evident in the embrace of what I’ve called the Future Ideology, orienting value in the Self and what is to come. The ideology can be expressed in a graph:

Self Past Future Nation Religion Spirituality Diversity (Success) Happiness Development Arts/Sciences Technology

At the Wisconsin college where I teach I found an oversized photo book about the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. The book contains photos of that Expo’s pavilions and landscapes, but focuses on the public art and architecture. It was published in 1894, and inscribed on its opening page to “Barbara” from “Grandpa” (who no doubt had visited the expo). The 1893 exposition attracted over 25 millions visitors, and by most accounts was a truly successful example of this signature type of global event.

I’ve used this book to imagine what it would’ve been like to walk around another expo 130 years ago, and as an aid to ponder shifts in concepts like Self, Nation, and Global. Visitors who arrived at the Expo by steamer entered behind this peristyle, which

had at its center a grand arch that vied in size with the Arc de Triomphe of Paris. With that massive Statue of the Republic in the foreground, this became an iconic scene for the Expo (and one often reproduced). There’s no better place than here to start thinking about shifts in meaning between this 1893 World Expo and the one in our own time in Dubai. We could begin with the fact that the architecture in 1893 represented an effort to perfect past classical styles. There was nothing “modern” about the design efforts. Another point is that while the statues reached for abstract meaning, they never ventured away from a realistic style. That statue group on top of the arch portrayed Christopher Columbus in triumph. Today the reputation of Columbus is

in tatters and he’d couldn’t headline a building (let alone a global event!). At the other end of this main basin, facing the Statue of the Republic, was this Columbian Fountain. The group was an allegory of the New World figuratively opened up by Columbus. The design of the underlying ship was drawn from the Spanish caravels on which Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492. Father Time steers the ship at the rear, while Fame stands in the bow publishing far and wide this accomplishment. Sitting at the top, on a kind of uneasy pedestal, is the maiden Columbia. She generically represents the advancing and triumphant spirit of the New World, and those maidens with oars represent propulsion by the arts and sciences. The Midway Plaisance was the

long corridor that ended with the world’s first Ferris Wheel. The wheel was designed by an engineer with the last name of Ferris, who from Pittsburgh answered a call to develop a novel structure that could equal in the public imagination the Eiffel Tower of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The Dubai Eye wasn’t constructed on the Expo grounds, but it clearly evoked expos of the past. This idea of designing a novel structure that could stand as a symbol for a place continues to our time. We could even say that over the past 130 years this special goal of the World Expo to find a unique and iconic structure has been generalized until it is the goal of all cities. The global city has become an ongoing World Expo, though somehow the format of

the World Expo continues! The World Expo had come to the United States to celebrate the quadricentennial of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. Statues on the grounds took up this theme, but there were other ways Columbus was made vivid to the imagination of visitors. Replicas of the authentic caravels were built in Spain and transported to Chicago over the Atlantic and through the Great Lakes (towed by US Navy ships). Above is the Pinta and the Niña, moored to the agricultural building.

The ships drew crowds, who must’ve marveled at how a momentous cultural encounter was driven by these small wooden ships. The boats remained in Chicago after the Expo, but deteriorated over time. One peculiar structure was tucked away on the

grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition, facing Lake Michigan. It was a replica of La Rábida in southern Spain, the monastery to which Christopher Columbus made a retreat after being turned down by the Spanish crown for his proposed voyage. The structure had an austerity that made it distinct from the wonderland of architecture at this Expo. The souvenir book noted that Columbus came to La Rábida in his “hour of darkest trouble.” The structure’s austerity thus functioned as the backstory for the wealth and design exuberance of the Expo: an austere faith had engendered the success of the New World. The structures and pavilions of the Expo in Dubai rejected traditional design elements, but moving back 130 years a wholly

different design philosophy reigned. Walking in this colonnade, for example, a visitor was surrounded by motifs adapted straight out of the Classical past, including fluted columns with Corinthian capitals and a coffered ceiling with rosettes. Photos like this give a permanent appearance to the temporary and destructible white staff out of which all these Expo structures were made. This classical design didn’t reflect the actual past of Chicago or the United States (or the Spain of Columbus), it’s the past that had become the standard symbol for “civilization.” It is evident that in 1893 the Future had not yet wholly banished the Past. The central Expo structures gave expression to Neoclassical or Beaux Arts design values, but the national pavilions drew

from older regional styles. The German pavilion was designed by a German architect and mixed together a variety of styles to create a dream vision of a traditional German town hall, or rathaus. The statue beside it (with lamp held aloft) portrays Venus rising from the ocean. It’s here to show off German metal work, which was of course expressed in the shared language of

classicism. The Expo in Dubai had 191 national pavilions (an almost exact match for the 193 nation states in the UN). Moving back to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, we find ourselves in a global world with a quite different organizing principle.

The central international buildings were built by European nations with colonial holdings, and these were supplemented by nations (like the Ottoman Empire in this case) striving to be seen as peers. The Turkish building was a recreation in wood of a Fountain near the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. On the interior it featured a sixteen foot long torpedo, demonstrating industry and military power at one and the same time. Guidebooks to the World’s Columbian Exposition explained that the the Turkish

building was a re-creation of the fountain of Ahmed III in Istanbul. This 18th century fountain stands at the entrance to the Topkapi Palace, and looks like an inset jewel with its marble details and tiling. It’s a “fountain” in the sense that it served as a dispensary of drinking water. The Turkish building at the 1893 expo, with its wooden sides and Arabic banners, was a very loose replica of this original fountain. This path of representing the nation through the reproduction of traditional architecture had been wholly dropped 130 years later in Dubai, where nations presented themselves in traditionless but innovative designs. It was no longer a virtue to mimic the past. The India building was crowded with goods from India. In 1893 India was ruled by the

British, but in 1885 the Indian National Congress had been formed, so there was a growing view that the subcontinent was a nation in its own right. A group of Indian merchants funded this building. The one sign I can read (on the left) labels a “Budhist Idol,” so there was a religious statue on display there. Small frames appear to present images of temples and religious structures. The interior is crowded with textiles and other goods (likely for sale). Visitors wandering into this space from Chicago or smaller cities in the Midwest must’ve felt a thrill to walk into this crowded foreign space. It’s impossible for me to look at photos of the 1893 Chicago Expo and not think back to our experience at Expo 2020. The India pavilion in Dubai (after an opening about

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space exploration, naturally) focused on ancient religious structures. Religion sits at the heart of the national identity of modern India, something that isn’t true for other great powers. This self-conception was present even in 1893, but in 2020 that ancient past is displayed by means of cutting edge digital technology. Screens do most of the work and signal modernity. Walls are illumined (and then multiplied by mirrors). In the photo it’s possible to make out a model of an ancient temple behind a glass display box. An informational tablet stands ready for visitors to swipe with their fingers and get facts about the temple. The screens and tablets have entirely replaced the framed prints and sample manufactured goods that dominated in 1893. Along

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the horizon the great White City of the 1893 Chicago Expo stretches out. Its domes and massive exposition halls take on a dreamlike grandiosity. That was the place for the leading nations and industrial exhibits. On the way to that White City many visitors walked down the Midway Plaisance, a wide street that contained some of the most popular parts of the Expo. On the right we glimpse the Turkish Exhibit, which included a model mosque. Beyond that is the drum of the Alps Panorama. On the left is the German Village and the Javanese Village. At the end was a “Beauty Show” where a large sign enticed visitors with the promise of “40 Ladies from 40 Nations.” These attractions from the Midway Plaisance haven’t aged well, and are as impossible

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to imagine today as a glorious statue in praise of Columbus. The previous photo of the Midway Plaisance was taken from the Ferris Wheel. This one is a look back at the Ferris Wheel from the wide Plaisance. From the street level we easily feel its popular appeal, offering a faux experience of global cultures. Disney’s Epcot could be seen as a cleaned up (no sex, no religion) version of this experience. Culture, people were learning, could be a show. The following is a description from the photo book: “In one and the same minute the visitor meets the fair-haired Laplander or Scandinavian from the north and the black-eyed and swarthy-faced descendant of Latin stock or native of South Africa.” On this street it wasn’t nations on display, but cultures. The

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Streets of Cairo along the Midway Plaisance featured a colorful Bridal Procession every day. The bridal procession had received about twelve pages of close description in Edward William Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, published in 1836. This book turned public attention toward the theatrical street life of this central city of the Middle East. Men from Cairo were brought to Chicago, and they put together something of a pastiche version of the bridal procession (emphasis on camels). In 1893 the Middle East was an object of deep cultural curiosity for Europeans and Americans, and this helps to explain the pride with which the hosting of the Expo in Dubai was met. The Middle East was now host, not exotic other.

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Wooden mashrabiyyas once gave privacy to Cairo residents, and this style of latticed window cover was described and illustrated by Lane. These were a notable feature of the fake Cairo street at the 1893 Expo. The photo book notes that a “spirit of the Arabian Nights pervades the place,” which seems to admit that this was cultural fantasy. It’s clear now that this was a textbook “Orientalist”

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version of Cairo, fully controlled and objectified. These men (and a boy) had come to the World’s Columbian Exposition as merchants of goods from the Middle East. The photo book notes how their Eastern clothing lent a “pleasing touch of color” to the Midway Plaisance. It’s possible they had “returned home laden with American dollars,” but it’d be a mistake to see that as the true reason for their presence. This wasn’t a statement of capitalist goodwill for international merchants. These men sold things, but the clothes and their appearance were the real point. They were present to serve as visual props for the Expo’s theater of global hierarchy. The Midway was the display ground for all societies that fell short of industrial progress. No nation

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of Indonesia existed in 1893 since the archipelago was a colony of the Netherlands. People from the island of Java weren’t present in the formal and grand White City, but rather in the “Javanese Village” along the Midway Plaisance. Young people wearing batik clothing mixed with other natives. The book’s caption notes how these two Javanese youth met each other at the Expo, and developed a romantic attachment. Their romance became widely known, and the bride became “a universal favorite.”

The photo book assumed a continuation of the tourist gaze at exotic peoples, but our imagination today rushes instead to fill in the experience of these people who are looking back at the camera. What was their view of this city of broad shoulders rising

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from the central US prairie? If the Midway was where visitors could gaze at the colorful clothing of colonized peoples, the White City was an unending expanse of modern dress. The 1890s was a decade of change with respect to clothing and the arts, as fixed Victorian styles were beginning to change. The clothing of both men and women was dominated by black, gray, beige, and white. Everyone wore a hat. There were differences of cost and prestige, but to the eye of a person living 130 years later, the conformity is what stands out. Participation in the global industrial world brought a bland typical uniform, demonstrating that the unique and creative Self hadn’t yet become the anchor point of identity. The real value of these Expos is the way they

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summarize in physical form a specific global order. They are snapshots of a consensus, but it’s a consensus that doesn’t hold for long.

Rather than being a glimpse of the future, they reflect a way of relating to Self and Nation that’s already passing away. The Manufactures and

whiteness

City)

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Civilization Past Sciences Arts Classics Christianity Self Nation (Modern) Religious Colonizing

Patriotic Industrial (White

Liberal Arts Building was the largest and costliest building of the 1893 Expo. It wasn’t one of the domed buildings that caught a visitor’s eye from a distance, instead it had a humped roof that covered an astounding area (more than five football fields in length). It contained a maze of displays, making it impossible for visitors to see everything. This was the display for the manufactured goods of Italy. Statues lined the entrance, but inside were silken fabrics, glassware, marbles, and woodwork (among many other things). It was a browsers paradise. The larger point is that this display was made up entirely of physical things that originated in Italy. 130 years later in Dubai this emphasis on actual things would be completely gone, replaced by

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omnipresent screens. Less than 25 years after the Meiji Restoration ended its isolation, Japan was fully present at the World’s Columbian Exposition. This was the entrance to its display in the arts building. (Japan had exhibits in the other theme buildings too.) It demonstrates again the extent to which objects were the sole way of mediating knowledge about a nation. What else could be put on display in this era before digital screens? Bronze statues demonstrated technical excellence and models of existing buildings provided samples of architecture. That star over the entrance was made from red and white satin, echoing the colors of its flag. Nations entered the “global” through their finely manufactured objects. That was the ticket to the club, so

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to speak. Mexico also had an exhibit in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. The photo book notes that this exhibit “was a surprise to many citizens... who were unaware of the artistic and manufacturing accomplishments of the people of our sister republic.” There couldn’t be a better example of how nations relied physical objects to establish themselves in the hierarchy of the global order. These exhibit rooms were a place to “surprise” visitors with the technical and industrial prowess that had grown within the borders of a nation, and thus the nation would rise in the general esteem. For nations like Japan or Mexico, this was the place to catch the eye of opinion makers. The interior of the Art Palace featured dense walls of paintings, and the

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floor was crowded with sculpture. The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building testified to industrial accomplishment, but the Arts Palace was a witness to the inner spirit of nations. Artistic creation by gifted individuals was displayed as proof of internal “civilization.” This is the fine “civilization” that set off moderns from “savages” (speaking from within the values system of the time). These paintings couldn’t fill the role that screens had in Expo 2020 since they weren’t windows onto national scenes and life, but expressions of the fine spiritual sensibility produced by industrial nations. The photo book contained dozens of photographs of individual paintings that had been put on display at the Art Palace. It’s difficult to imagine a grander collection

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of art that contained so few memorable paintings! What we remember from the late 19th century (and what major museums display today) are Impressionists like Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and proto-Modernists like Gauguin and Van Gogh. It was an exceedingly rich era for painting, but there also existed an academic style of painting that held great prestige at the time. Those forgotten academic works filled the Art Palace. They didn’t function as genuine windows to other places, but represent in their conventional style a world of spirit and emotion. Visitors to the Columbian World’s Exposition had opportunities to witness German industrial prowess. Their fine metal work and glassware (not to mention heavy weapons in the Krupp Gun Pavilion)

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were visible for all to see. In the Art Palace visitors came across German paintings such as this one by artist Ludwig Knaus, who held many international distinctions, such as the grand medal of honor at the Paris Exposition of 1867. This scene of boys fighting strikes a popular note, and takes us behind the screen of industrial Germany. The subject here is the spirit of youth, which connects Germany to universal memories of growing up and scrappy struggles. It’s remarkable that no hint of criticism breaks into this depiction of fighting boys. Such fighting and violent contestation was understood as natural for boys, and perhaps also characteristic of industrial nations as they jostled for power amongst each other. Another painting came to

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Chicago from Russia, painted by Henryk Siemiradzki. It hangs today in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. (Note that it isn’t on display in the more famous Hermitage Museum, but falls instead into the category of memorable national art.) The painting is suffused with a gentle Mediterranean light. Ancient olive trees stand in the background and pink roses blossom next to Mary, the sister of Lazarus. This is presumably the point where Mary fell at the feet of Jesus in distress at the death of her brother, and Jesus wept. It’s hardly an image of Evangelical fervor, but a gently spiritual take on death and resurrection. The portrait of Jesus was another example of the thoroughgoing Orientalist perspective we’ve already seen on the Midway Plaisance.

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Paintings, like this “Two Gazelles” amplified this omnipresent Orientalist theme. One of those “gazelles” was a Tunisian young woman. Her skin color, her flowing clothes, and that rustic simplicity pointed to her lower place in the Expo’s hierarchy.

Whole cultures and peoples were assigned roles in the global hierarchy, and paintings like this held out a private domain of

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spirit and faith. The Chicago Art Institute was opened the same year as the 1893 Expo, but it doesn’t house any of the hundreds of paintings that won the day at the famous 1893 Expo. The 19th century collection of the Art Institute now features “Paris Street, Rainy Day” (1877) by Gustave Caillebotte. This is a popular painting today, but it was subpar for the 19th century academics on display back in 1893. Caillebotte sidesteps any hint at the mythical in favor of a flat view of a Paris street. His painting represents no retreat to private realms of spirit, but an engagement with a public landscape. He saw the blankness of the modern, and in effect took the ground of the modern as his subject. The Chicago Art Institute is today rich with paintings

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Claude

Monet,

and among these is “Houses of Parliament” (1900-1). It seems at first like an Impressionist painting would’ve been a good fit for the 1893 Expo and its embrace of inner spiritual experience, but that misses the meaning of a painting like this. Monet’s work is better understood within the Future Ideology on display at Dubai’s Expo 2020, at which time the Self had taken its place at the center of the value system. The creative Self sees what others can’t, and such rare vision reaps Success. A painting by Monet gives expression to this creative Self, and so functions as an allegory for the Future Ideology. So it wouldn’t have been out of place in Dubai. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a cultural phenomenon. There was no end to

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the souvenir photo books and practical guidebooks published around that time. I’ve presented the Expo through one oversized photo book, selecting images that bring up points of comparison between 1893 and 2020. Both Expos attempted to set the “global” into a physical form that could be wandered at will by visitors. This oversized photo book was a typical product of the 1893 Expo. That wasn’t the case with Expo 2020, which though photographed extensively, would be captured on Instagram rather than in souvenir books. Professional photographers had been used to produce sleek YouTube videos rather than big photo books (that few visitors would buy). In retrospect the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 was a global moment of

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peak “thingness.” That’s not to claim it had the most things, because the mass production of the 20th century would bury it in quantity, but the result of that later mass production was to give “things” the assumed adjective of “throwaway.” A large number of physical things were on sale at the 1893 Expo, and they’ve maintained their value, which is to say they became collectible things. The official pavilions were filled with things from distant places, and visitors felt the desire to signify this experience to people back home by bringing back—what else?—physical things. Even today it’s easy to search on a website like eBay and find dozens of knickknacks and medals and books that were purchased at the 1893 Expo. No such page will ever exist for the Dubai

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Expo 130 years later. At the end of the Saudi pavilion we—like others—stood rapt gazing at the three dimensional globe with pulsing patterns projected onto it. Electronic music made it feel like some internal rave. The globe loomed above like an impersonal idol and the correct response was to stare silently. It was captivating to see the complex patterns playing across the

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surface. This stood in for the experience of the Expo as a whole. At the center of the Russia pavilion was a massive brain, upon which was projected images of connection. It struck me as yet another version of the globe. This mirroring of the macrocosmos and microcosmos runs deep in human thought, and shouldn’t be dismissed as an oddity of Neoplatonism. Even as the Expo presented the Globe as a surface for devoted attention, the human mind remained as a thing of parallel complexity. If we were to inquire about the cause of global patterns, we’d have to look to the human mind as the generator, the imaginer of this mesh of societies. As with the globe, the mind here is all surface, and we are given little leeway to think about the reality of our actual

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brains. An opening in the Morocco pavilion framed the curious pavilion of the UAE, host country for the Expo. It had the umistakable look of a structure by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, and a Google search confirmed this suspicion.

Calatrava is best known in the US for his white ribbed and luminous Oculus at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City. Nearer to my home is his earlier Milwaukee Art Museum on Lake Michigan. That lyrical form is present here too. Calatrava is one of a handful of architects whose work is instantly recognizable, and while most of the national pavilions are temporary, this star-designed one will have a permanent place on these grounds. The UAE pavilion was designed to mimic the wings of a

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falcon in flight. The graceful points open up to the sun, revealing solar panels to collect the sun’s energy, and the effect is something like tail feathers tousled by a stiff wind. Calatrava has made various statements interpreting the pavilion, all with a notably positive tone: “We hope visitors see it as a testament to the passion and dedication of the people of the UAE.” As attractive as this architecture can be, such projects offer no opening for meaningful criticism of a social system or the global hierarchy. We are left with static if eye-catching design. We should look for architecture that fits more awkwardly within an autocratic state. It didn’t take too much expertise in the UAE to come up with the falcon as a symbol for the nation. Every piece

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of its currency is plastered with falcons. The city of Abu Dhabi features an actual Falcon Hospital, a popular tourist attraction. It is the largest falcon hospital in the world and its website carries the serious banner “Health Care Services Exclusively for Falcons.” Falcons are a serious preoccupation of the rulers of the UAE, and the internet has many images of Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammad practicing the ancient craft of falconry. It could be argued that the UAE pavilion by Calatrava didn’t capture the movement of a natural creature so much as the fixed-wing ideology of a state. When nature is taken up by a nation state it doesn’t remain “nature.” In essence these natural creatures are divorced from the planet, at least for the human imagination.

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The Ghaf is the national tree of the UAE, and it was planted all around the white pavilion designed by Calatrava. Signs identified the Ghaf for visitors, and explained how it “played an essential role in traditional life, providing food, shade, and wood for fire, while its bark was used to treat snake and scorpion bites.” This was no different than the use of the falcon as inspiration for the pavilion itself. The natural world was again raided for symbols to prop up the nation state. What masquerades as a nod to nature is actually a path to underlining the unique story of a modern state. The words on the sign called to mind the fundamentals of desert life and prepare us to see Dubai’s “miracle.” As visitors entered the UAE pavilion they found themselves walking

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amidst dunes of fine red sand. Kazakhstan might have its endless steppe, but the UAE had neverending deserts. This replication of a landscape established a kind of baseline to the experience. Physical sand was somehow better than just a large panoramic image of endless dunes, though I couldn’t explain just how. It seemed more authentic, more creative, more engaging to be walking on this path between dunes of real sand. The sand subtly flowed onto the path, making it feel grainy, but if you watched carefully you saw invisible workers moving in to sweep up the moving sand and keep the experience clean. These interior dunes couldn’t be left alone, but became screens upon which concepts were cast. Images of a long gone time showed up, men

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in flowing robes tending to camels or old cars. A sentence on the sand reminded us of the main point: “Fifty years ago, this was all just a dream.” That word “this” carries with it all our prior experience of Dubai. Visitors have likely already been wowed by the skyscrapers and hotels, and now we should remember that none of “this” existed: it was all built upon emptiness. This desert sand disappoints the nature lover. The desert isn’t invoked as a landscape of beauty, but as a sample patch of the total nihil from which Dubai arose. As nations develop they look to the past with a sense of wistfulness. Poet William Wordsworth considered the natural passion of his early years with his feeling in later years and asked “Was it for this?” Such self-questioning

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appears in nations as well, as they look back on economic growth and social transformation, and wonder if something wasn’t lost along the way. This questioning is the very essence of Romanticism, but it isn’t present in the UAE so far as I could see. The sand and empty roads are visually present, making clear the absolute miracle of this modern state. Dubai is a medieval marvel tale from the Arabian Nights rather than a site of Wordsworthian doubt. After walking through the free dunes whose sand threatened to slide onto the pathway, we entered an area in which the sand was contained by standing glass boxes. Looking inside these boxes we could see the same red sand, but now its limits had been defined. One or two sides of these large boxes

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allowed a view of this sand, but the other sides became screens for projecting video clips of the UAE past and present. The boxes became symbols for how the shifting desert needed to be controlled to give rise to the global. Throughout the experience of Dubai a questions hangs out there about its existence. Is this place really here? Will it last? A visitor can’t help asking. Even in

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the national pavilion of the UAE that question isn’t fully put to rest. We arrived at a giant screen with a plasma-like waves of colors that coalesced now and then into an image of modern life, and just as we began to make sense of it, that image fragmented into abstraction. the ultra-modern was just out of reach, wanting to become real, longing to become real. But perhaps it’s only a mirage? This emphasis on the future and dreams must lead to a pattern of emphasizing the non-substantial, the things-yetto-be. It’s a risky representational strategy for nations, and for that reason nation states have typically spent more time inventing a past. But after starting with sand, the UAE wants us to feel the miracle of this place. The workers in the UAE pavilion wore

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these khaki shirts that read on the back “Land of Dreamers Who Do.” No doubt that was a flash of wisdom and insight that leaped to the mind of Sheikh Mohammed. The words again take us up to the question of existence: dreams characterize this place, but these are dreams turned into reality. That assertion gains weight from our assumed experience of Dubai (visitors have already taken an elevator to the observation deck of the tallest skyscraper). This insistence on not just dreaming, but also doing, is odd. Another nation might echo the “dreaming” but see no need to follow up with “and by the way we also achieve these dreams.” It appears to be the intention of designers to push back on insubstantiality at every opportunity. The UAE

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pavilion presented a series of glowing posters portraying resident families. The families appeared to come from all around the world, which was no doubt the point. This family (coffee bags in the background) appears to be from Ethiopia or somewhere in the Horn of Africa. Superficially this makes the UAE similar to Western democracies that have (at times) welcomed new citizens within their borders. But while the UAE might boast of their presence, these families are definitely not citizens. At best they have a so-called “golden visa” allowing them hassle-free permanent residency. However happy they may feel with their business success, they will never have a right to participate as citizens in this state. Another glowing poster showed what could

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be an American family. The man at the center had binoculars around his neck, and I guessed they were out on a hike, perhaps birding. Taking a closer look at those trees, it seems they are standing on productive land. Everyone appears happy, like they are fine trading in the responsibilities of citizenship for this economic prosperity. While every signal is being sent that this is a “modern” family, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Dubai only understands residents through the lens of the heterosexual family. Where people come from is no problem, but they should present themselves in this recognizable familial format.

Whatever the progressive modernity embraced by Dubai, there remains a social conservatism just under the surface. An

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animated short played in the small theater at the heart of the pavilion, giving visual form to the myth of building Dubai out of sand. At each transition in the short we saw an example of desert simplicity giving way to economic production. Palm trees rise from the sand, and suddenly young men climb the trunks to collect dates. A small pool of water is discovered and then a line drawn in the sand becomes a canal and houses appear. Another transition and we are on the sea in boats, a group of traditional Arab dhows, and young men dive to harvest pearls. Now and again we watch the sheikhs, sometimes battling the sand, other times embracing one another, but always constructing a nation. One theme in this animated short was the prominent role

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given to females. We saw a woman driving some sort of large vehicle as she whizzes past a pickup truck carrying a camel on its bed. In another brief scene we were taken inside a classroom with a female teacher in front of her students, pointing to places on a map of the world. At various points the sheikhs interacted in a kindly manner with a long-haired and high-spirited young girl. The subtext is that the UAE is building a society that differs from the Saudis next door. The Saudis have been notoriously resistant to letting women drive or allowing them a public role. This animated short could have been replaced with a flashing message: “We are not the Saudis.” I’ve written about how common it was at the Expo in Dubai to find nations setting out their

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space exploration accomplishments, and noted how this appeared to be the central divide between mid-level nations that hoped to attract a few more tourists and the nations making a claim for global leadership. The UAE Space Agency was formed in 2014, and it currently runs Al Ain, a Space Research Centre. It has embarked on two missions, one with the aim of orbiting Mars and another to explore the moon. I wasn’t surprised to learn that space tourism is imagined further down the line. In the final room of the pavilion we came to a gold-foiled full-scale satellite model that demonstrated the UAE’s ambitions for space.

How could a nation build the world’s tallest skyscraper and not harbor ambitions to move to outer space or at least low Earth

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orbit? At the top of the UAE pavilion is the abstract Expo 2020 logo (echoing the design of the Al Wasl dome). The design was inspired by a gold ring discovered at an Iron Age archaeological site in the desert of Dubai. The site where the ring and other objects were found was discovered by Sheikh Mohammed, who supposedly spotted the site from above while flying his helicopter over the desert. This site gave up a set of unusual objects (gold jewelry, swords, cedar wood from Lebanon, and objects from India). It’s remarkable how the site that produced the perfect symbols for an ancient, globally interconnected version of the UAE was discovered by the Sheikh who would know how to expertly deploy these objects in our modern era.

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Leaving the UAE pavilion we found ourselves pointed back toward the central Al Wasl dome. The white “feathers” of the pavilion physically enclosed us, like a protective shell. We’d just walked through an extended presentation of a nation state.

More than a set of dates and facts, the goal for the pavilion had been to communicate a set of images and metaphors. It was more important for visitors to see the actual satellite than to know about specific space missions undertaken by the UAE. At the exit I began to wonder whether this view of the nation was a special Expo version, or whether this pavilion was telling a story repeated elsewhere, and that was in fact the public story of this nation. The oldest buildings in each of the emirates that make

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up the UAE are forts. Qasr al-Hosn sits in the middle of Abu Dhabi and sections of it date back to the 18th century, though it was expanded and re-worked many times, even up to the 1930s. A fort like this was the residence of the sheikh, and these sheikhs with their territories became the seed for small city states (which banded together as the United Arab Emirates in 1971). Two levels of history exist throughout the UAE, the traditional and the modern. Forts and other signs of the traditional world (dhows, wind towers, communal feasts, falconry) are maintained as physical signs for the distance traversed by the modern nation. Qasr al-Hosn has a long history, but that watchtower is its historic centerpiece, going back to 1761. This

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watchtower is such an important symbol for the nation that it shows up on the 1000 Dirham note. Some careful thought has gone into its presentation. Original stone walls are uncovered (the rest plastered with new stucco). The exterior stairs are lined with glass for the safety of modern visitors. Strange how a rude and not-so-old structure could gain such symbolic care in a city

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whose aesthetic is unceasingly modern or even postmodern. The images on display in Qasr al-Hosn gave a sense of this fort in times past. The original photographer probably thought he was taking a photo of the fort, but what holds our interest now isn’t the fort but that great emptiness surrounding it. My eyes drift to the left and the sparse palm trees and structures sitting on desert ground. Just a bit further must be the sea. In 1948 the English traveler Wilfred Thesiger came through Abu Dhabi and described what he saw: “A large castle dominated the small dilapidated town which stretched along the shore. There were a few palms and near them was a well where we watered our camels while some Arabs eyed us curiously...” The Qasr al-Hosn was a

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preserved as a relic of the old ways. Abu Dhabi and Dubai may have been utterly transformed by oil and gas, but there was this remembered past of desert simplicity and tribal custom. This never quite verges into nostalgia. The social world that Thesiger witnessed in 1948 surives as a baseline, and his book Arabian Sands was recently republished in a deluxe illustrated edition by Abu Dhabi. Thesiger knew he’d seen an Arabia that no one would see again. He described people he met in the village of Dubai: “These people still valued leisure and courtesy and conversation. They did not live their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless.” In various rooms of the Qasr al-Hosn I came upon images of the British who arrived to explore for oil.

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They did so with the permission of Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan, ruler of Abu Dhabi from 1928-66. It was presented as a warm relationship. Wilfred Thesiger, an adventurer at heart, resented the presence of these oil profiteers, who were already arriving. He saw them as the destroyers of culture. The Emiratis do not look back on this meeting of cultures as colonial in nature. The friendly relationship between Sheikh and British oil men was the foundation for the prosperity of the modern UAE. Here in the castle a bridge was built to this future. Through the photos and displays the dominant story of Qasr al-Hosn became clear: this was the starting point in its march to becoming a global city. The leader that Wilfred Thesiger met in Dubai was Sheikh Shakhbut

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bin Sultan Al Nahyan, but after his death in 1966 the younger brother Sheikh Zayed took over (and in 1971 became the first president of the UAE). The above sign in Qasr al-Hosn points to a transformation already begun in the middle of the twentieth century, and the text continued: “As Abu Dhabi entered the second half of the twentieth century, the pace of change accelerated. Roads reached out across the desert and new buildings sprang up...” The old fort told the same positive, future-oriented story as the UAE pavilion. I was encountering a well-entrenched story, told in every public space (and likely in every textbook!) in the UAE. The central highway of the UAE was lined with glowing “50” signs, marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the

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nation. The highway was as smooth and well laid out as any in the US, and our Pakistani driver explained how speed was monitored by an automated system. Speeding was punished by tickets sent by mail to the registered drivers. Thesiger is beloved for his detailed portrait of the Arabs before the nation existed, but his sensibility is impossible to square with present reality:

“Today the desert where I travelled is scarred with the tracks of lorries and littered with discarded junk imported from Europe and America. But this material desecration is unimportant compared with the demoralization which has resulted among the Bedouin...” The process of modernization was barely underway, but Thesiger decried it. Directly behind the UAE pavilion was

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a Peace Memorial dedicated to those who’d given their lives for the nation. The memorial was a semicircle of marble. The only words were Arabic from the Quran: “Don’t consider those killed in the path of God to be dead/ rather alive with their Lord and prospering.” These words were transferred from a religious context and applied to the directly to the nation. It’s one thing to look for comfort from religious texts, but another to imply that fighting for a nation is the same as being “killed in the path of God.” Perhaps that’s what nations want most from their dominant religious traditions: the stirring words to stir up sacrifice of the self for the body of the nation. But on the other hand it skirted heresy to so tightly connect the work of God with the work of

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any nation state. The memorial included these posts with phrases like “Your sacrifice is our medal of honor” and “You will always remain in our hearts.” A worker approached us with a clipboard plus paper and sharpie, and asked us to write a note of thanks for the UAE’s martyrs. It struck us as strange to leave a note for these martyrs since we knew nothing about them or their struggle. The worker was insistent, but we declined—maybe tomorrow! Later I Googled UAE martyrs and found that one officer at the UAE’s independence in 1971 had been killed by Iranian forces. The date of his death has become the annual Martyrs’ Day of the UAE. A far larger number of dead come from the UAE’s participation in the brutal war against Yemen led by the Saudis.

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The Form of the Visual Essay

This is one in a series of visual essays that interprets places in the US and around the world. Except for some historical images included for comparison, the photos were all taken by me in the process of travel. My goal as a photographer isn’t to capture a site from the perfect time of day and just the right angle, but rather to see the world from the common point of view of an embodied person. The typical look of a place is my starting point for critical interpretation (not a professional image as one might see in an architectural book). No photos in this collection have been gotten by guiding a drone up in the sky or making use of a telephoto lens for a close-up. This is the common world that presents itself to every eye. For the past years I’ve worked to discipline my mind by demanding that thought be generated by things I can see. In his essay “Nature” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about becoming a transparent eyeball. I’ve long been drawn to that idea of becoming a pure perceiver, an interpreter. I like the feeling of arriving at a place and trying to empty my mind of expectations and becoming alert. Landscapes speak. They speak of the collective values of those who inhabit the space. They reveal more clearly than any written constitution the power structure of a society.

Group identities that give meaning to individual lives find external expression in landscapes. This can all be read if we become attentive. That’s not to say that landscapes speak with one voice. They are alive with competing values and identities. When I become most still in a place, most emptied of my Self, it feels like there’s a conversation that I can hear going on. The voices come from not only built structures but the natural features too. With time the voices of a place gain clarity. There are the insistent voices of the present, as well as the fragmented and fading voices of past ways of being. And the camera is my tool for taking note of these conversations.

I’ve called these collections of words and images “visual essays,” but together they become a photographic documentary. What I don’t like about film documentaries is that they are so often composed around the voices of individuals. Documentaries need talking heads to hold the interest of a mass audience. I was drawn to a different kind of documentary project: what if places were allowed to speak? That’s the project here. Landscapes are ultimately a human creation, but they speak a collective, not an individual, story.

One detail that will help to explain my approach to place is Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion: “A system

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of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long lasting moods and motivations, etc...” It’s the first phrase of that definition that I’d like to highlight— the “system of symbols.” The implication is that the study of religion isn’t about getting inside the consciousness of people, but about interpreting the external symbolic world created by each and every culture. Everything about the human landscape is part of this system of symbols, from the architecture of buildings, to the monuments, to the clothes people are wearing, to the signs and graffiti and murals. These are ways that people express a collective story about who they are. One further inspiration I’ve taken from Geertz is his view that the essay is the form that can best hold the work of interpretation.

I hasten to add that this is by no means a work of anthropology. The strong preference in academic work is to develop a single point of specialization. The goal is to burrow into a specific place and then report back to the wider community. A wealth of ethnographies and historical monographs have flowed from this system. One thing academics don’t often do is write travel narratives, which by definition means setting aside specialization and becoming a conduit for serial impressions about a place. Such writing is the opposite of focused expertise,

but it nevertheless represents a type of expertise. It requires a feel for history and change, and a willingness to look not just at the postcard vistas, but at the signs and ephemeral things that build meaning into that vista. It means looking at what other visitors take for granted. Our global world needs academics who are skillful perceivers and connecters. We underestimate the insight of travelers. We are grateful for the descriptions of a medieval traveller like Ibn Jubayr as he passes through the Islamic world on his way to complete the Hajj, but we forget that our own places need patient describers like him.

Technology ought to bring about a shakeup in academic forms, especially in the Humanities. Experimentation has marked other fields. 20th century poets struggled to find the literary forms that best expressed their thought. A.R. Ammons typed out poems on narrow strips of paper, finding that form of limitation helpful. I claim that same range of experimentation for my own work. After a season of visual experimentation I arrived at this system of using paired photos with running commentary to present the story of places where I’ve spent time. As these essays accumulate they will become an extended study of global places in a time when landscapes and cities are threatened around the world.

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The State of the Nation State at Dubai's World Expo