Elena Isayev Inaugural Lecture - The Sky is Hidden: on the Opening of Language and Borders

As visionaries have recognised, any place is the story so far. How do we tell that story of past and future intersections? How do we find it in the movement and not only in the soil over which it flows? Where found stones, pots, chariots, spindle-whorls, swords, beads, transform into the treasure chests of journeys to unlock: by Plautus’s comic heroes of love, or Homer’s epic antiheroes of war; of homes returned to, abandoned or found. We need a new language: to capture paradoxes, to expose lived impossibilities, to convey intangible imaginaries.