Places and Spaces

by Ruth Barker, 12 Jul 2010

Hello,

so I just finished writing a Feature article for the next issue of NABROAD magazine, which is due out in August. The subject I was asked to write about was an interesting one, catalysed by the questions behind the project Third Space, a NABROAD Production for the Baltic Bienalle for Contemporary Art in St Petersburg.

Third Space’s curator, Pavla Alchin, wrote the following about the project:

“At the beginning of the 21st century, the Earth has been changed by globalization into a planet of nomads. It is hardly surprising that among the recent waves of immigrants are thousands of visual artists – history after all, is littered with creative people on the move. In the past the reasons for their exile where varied – persecution, a search for the exotic, from the need to survive to the need to be at a place of artistic innovation. Today many of these reasons remain the same.

However, I would like to suggest here another reason why artists find living abroad appealing. According to Czech born philosopher Vilem Flusser, exile and creativity are closely linked. In exile everything around us is new and becomes sharp and noisy. Uprooted people have to be creative to process an ocean of chaotic information that surrounds them, to change it into meaningful messages (1). It is perhaps this heightened state of perception that attracts creative minds.

The title of our project was borrowed from postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha who first fore-grounded the concept of Third Space in his book The Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha sees the Third Space as a space of enunciation, where two social groups with different cultural traditions carry out special negotiations, which eventually lead to a displacement of the members of both groups from their origins. However, it is also supposed to bring about common identity, new in its hybridity (2).

Taking the above ideas as a kind of springboard, our project wishes to focus on artists who have decided to make this leap of faith in making their home in homelessness (3) and as a result are benefiting from a similar crosspollination of cultures."

1&3 from V. Flusser Writings, 2002.
2 from K. Ikas and G. Wagner, Communicating in the Third Space, 2009.

It’s an interesting set of relationships that Alchin presents, and it was a useful incentive for me to think around some of these ideas of space and placelessness. One of the most fruitful realisations I made as I wrote was that of a personal paradox, which I’ll try to describe.

We speak a lot, after all, about the need for places rather than spaces, about the need we have to inhabit landscapes that have meaning and memory and association. We often feel that we know as a fact, that spaces with which we don’t connect, or territories that we pass through rather than inhabit, are sterile and lacking in humanity or love. And yet as I wrote this piece about placelessness, I realised that I actually feel a kind of joy about being in a place I do not know, and that I have no connection to.

I travel a lot, and one of my greatest pleasures is to walk the streets of a city that I don’t know and don’t quite understand, feeling my lack of connection and my outsideness. I really relish that sense of wonder that comes with dislocation. Does any on else feel that kind of pleasure? It can’t be that unusual, surely? It’s a great feeling! Or am I just weird? And does this devalue, in a way, our notions of placemaking?

Thoughts welcome! I’ll post a link to the article here once it’s up on NABROAD.

More later,
R.