In German: Permanente Renaissance - Meran und der Meridian 10

Time and again, humanity piles up its own achievements so high that people threaten to disappear beneath them: dogma, opulence of the artificial, mechanistic routine, institutional bureaucracy – and today, digital noise as well. And time and again, a counterforce emerges as soon as a threshold is crossed: renaissance – as a culture of creativity and a return to humanism.

The lecture does not understand the Renaissance as a one-off historical event, but as a recurring dynamic of civilisation: a Renaissance that always begins when societies threaten to lose their bearings.

Historically, a cultural north-south corridor can be identified: the 10th meridian, an Apollonian axis on which Merano is also located, along which waves of humanistic renewal have moved for centuries – from the Italian city-states across the Alps to Northern Europe; later in the opposite direction, during the Bauhaus phase, as a reaction to an industrial environment that had become overpowering.

Merano's location on this coordinate is not coincidental, but symbolic: as a place of transition, settlement, exchange, translation – between Italian urban intelligence and the Alpine threshold. The meridian thus becomes a passage line: not only north–south, but surface–horizon.