Much of my MFA work focussed on considering and exploring notions of space and place. Of finding ways to articulate spaces of the everyday that operate as thresholds and/or places of transition; where land meets water, such as ports, as well as other points of departure, such as bus and train terminals. These places I walked around, attempting to know in an embodied way, and considered them as environments of non-place and of placelessness, referencing the work of authors such as Marc Auge, Edward Relph and Michel de Certeau.
Since then I have continued to think about space, specifically urban spaces, and how we know them. Thinking about cities, about how we engage with them, perceive them and know them. In my Masters work I considered maps as knowing devices both useful and problematic. Stretches of road marked with alternate names at each end, some transition implied but where?
Throughout this project I have been thinking of cities in other parts of the world. My mentor Gabi is based in Berlin so our conversations negotiate both distance and time, and has further influenced my thinking. It seems so strange to build a relationship with someone on the other side of the world- spaces and places who have no understanding of. There’s a certain familiarity felt for many cities around the world- even those we may not have been to. History, the media, discourses in all fields contribute to our perceptions of place in ways useful and misleading. Monuments stand, as Richard Sennett suggests, as exclamation points within cities, and who doesn’t know the Eiffel Tower? Maps help us negotiate these urban spaces, locating such monuments and grounding us in the geography of space. But no map, either digital nor in print, can convey the true scale of a city. No matter how sprawling upon the various fold out sections, or how often we return to the scale- 1:5000, 1:10000, etc; there is, to me at least, a meaninglessness to such numbers and the representations they refer to. Everything about the map refuses the embodied experience of negotiating the city on foot. Topographic maps enable some sense of the landscape we would find ourselves in; contour lines indicating gradient, indications of vegetation. But urban maps largely fail in attempts to convey the undulations and specifics of the city, which remains flattened and inert. The built environment is non existent while street names clutter the page. The negotiation of space is optic, not haptic, perceived but not experienced.
So what to do with a map… Could a map be more? Perhaps a map could embody. Perhaps one could embody a map…
