Places, Spaces and Memory. Reading into Practice.

Lecture from presentation given by Caroline Wright
July 2012

Caroline ponders various ideas about place, real, remembered, imagined, experienced.

Sharing the intersection and methodology used to create new work.
The edge of landscape, of life - shifting and transient.
Places with change of use and purpose.
Book- Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/19/edgelands-farley-symmons-roberts-review

Meaningful sense of space - non-spaces, inbetween spaces.
Often an element of commercialism, anonymity - carparks, travel, etc.
Marc Auge - non spaces.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/28/non-places-marc-auge-review
Contrast to places with historical context and social interraction.
Social structure - shift between places and nonplaces - eg bus.
George Perec - lists of edgeness/ edge-likeness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec
enclosures, boundaries, vanishing points, thresholds, etc.
Heterotopias, distopias, utopias.
Place of purpose, etc - experience of space.
Places where we do something - eg walkers inscribe a place -
Signs and systems construct a space.
Repeated patterns and learned behaviour.
Tacit understanding and absorbed behaviours.
Space - configuration of position, intersection of mobile elements.
Between real and imagined - qualified by sediment of history.
Space, nonspace, place, nonplace.
Construct somewhere for a purpose.
Places of static energy - containers of clues - repository of signs,
Bachelard - poetics of space -( how often that crops up recently!)
Great images have history and prehistory - blend of memory and legend.
Jospeh Cornell box. collections, ephemera.
http://www.josephcornellbox.com/menu.htm
Inner and outer space - freedom or constraint.


I missed the group seminar about this, having double booked myself. So I missed out, but can at least imagine the conversation.

Reflection

Caroline really wove in the ideas from her reading and research, and linked her own explorations and themes around it. Every idea had its provenance in research, and the talk came across as a thread of essential ideas distilled from these writers. She mixed personal discoveries and contemplation with other ponderings of writers, and linked her own explorations and questions to the ones they posed. It was sharing the direction of research and thoughts, rather than any conclusions - so open-ended.

3rd August 2012