1 The Choreography of Time Cultural Differences and Temporality at 19th Century World Exhibitions 1 Maria Grever Lecture at the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness Vancouver, May 23 2002 Last year a photograph in a Dutch newspaper caught my eye. 2 There was something odd about it. Against a background of windmills, a man and a woman were looking straight at the camera lens. Their clothes and hair seemed to be from the sixties. I asked myself whether they were Japanese tourists, somewhere in the Netherlands. But somehow, the whole scene looked more like a decor for a theatre production. Who were these people? When and where was this picture taken? The photograph turned out to be part of a series that played an ingenious trick with time. The man and woman were Belgian actors in Nagasaki in the year 2001. They were posing as Dutch people imitating Japanese tourists. Photographer Barbara Visser had placed these imitation tourists against the backdrop of Dutch architectural replicas in a Japanese theme park called Huis Ten Bosch City. 3 The real Huis Ten Bosch is a royal palace in The Hague. It was built in the seventeenth century and it belongs to the Dutch queen. Ten years ago the real estate developer Yoshikuni Kamichika decided to build Huis Ten Bosch City so that Japanese people could catch a glimpse of historical Holland without having to travel to the West. The park has several life-size replicas of existing Dutch buildings and cityscapes. They are positioned with no regard for their actual geographical proximity back in the Netherlands; in the theme park, windmills and dykes stand next to a cathedral and a castle. This reality is more perfect than the real one. There is no litter in the streets, and none of the buildings are defaced by graffiti. The garden at the real Huis Ten Bosch is unfinished, but the Japanese one has been completed. Barbara Visser believes this perfect construct of the Netherlands illustrates the Japanese view of history and culture. They tend to see beauty as a synonym for perfection, while Westerners also see an aesthetic value in decay. 4 The photographic representation of the theme park challenges the distinction between 'real' and 'false' versions of reality, between historically accurate representations and entertainment. What is interesting is that this view of the Netherlands comes from Asia and has, in turn, been manipulated by a Dutch artist. This choreography of time is a typical example of how we, in postmodernity, relate to the past. The photographs express temporal experiences that result from the acceleration of modern history: the acceleration of social processes and events, of representations and images. The subject of this paper is the relationship between time and history. So far,