Relational Geographies
I wouldn’t say that what I am doing is setting up new ways of thinking and acting rather highlighting what is already there. I’d like to re-introduce a statement by Garnet about artists serving as good navigators and explorers of the in-between. There’s also been discussion between us about how problematic it is to make a distinction between the digital and non-digital, the physical and virtual, as if these were two completely different situations and/or states. I think I use the word ‘virtual’ not because I make this distinction, but for a gap in the language to explain this hybridity between the two except by using binaries.
Regarding the production of space, whether pointing to Henri Lefevre or a multitude of other thinkers, I think that we are always dealing with in-betweeness and hybridity, in connection with technology or not, where space becomes a complex layering of buildings, sensations, social interactions, emotions, memories, etc. Citing the work of Irit Rogoff and her definition of ‘relational geographies’, the contemporary rendering of space is something that is always relational, unable to be located within a fixed ‘truth’ or ‘identity’ but always somewhere in-between. I really liked Kate’s Path project about a narrative produced by moving through the city, itself a state of in-betweeness, and created by visibilities and gaps where the culmination of disparate fragments forms into a cohesive whole. It’s the feeling of fragmentation and in-betweeness that I really enjoy about walking through cities, especially ones that I’ve never been to before.
I’ve also been thinking lately about the writing of history, specifically the public collective memory generated through the production of media and accumulation of personal footage. The industrial ability to mass-produce images creates more opportunities to tell our own personal stories, while also setting up a situation for a type of memory defined by affinity and sameness, not to mention the way data is classified, standardized and stored. These set up the conditions for what is remembered, but also who gets to tell the story. Back to my YouTube adventures, I find it puzzling, but at the same time of course alarmingly not, that most of the videos I’m finding are being made by young boys and men, mostly white, between the ages of 14-40.
