#nonplaces

[irrazabalblog]

Rolleiflex 6x6, A Coruña. No lugares by @andres-irrazabal

[archtheo-inntervals]

https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000036852096/exkursion-an-nicht-orte-damit-die-wirklichkeit-geiler-wirkt

[itstaisstuff]

Why's no one talking about that. Because I'm about to go insane.

[fatehbaz]

In the ruins, ‘master narratives of history as progress decompose into the tense confabulations of a continuously remembered past that hits the present like a nervous shock’ [...]. The ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin, they are the debris of unprecedented material destruction [...] ‘the “trash” of history’ [...]. Forgetting this carnage [would be to support] the myth of [...] progress [...]. But the ruins remember [...], revealing the fragility of the social order. [...] Hauntings rupture linear temporality, inconveniently bring forth energies, which have supposedly been extinguished and forgotten. [...] Cities [and places, generally] seem to becoming increasingly regulated. In the transformation towards a service economy during the 1980s [in Britain], [...] [o]ld industrial sites were turned into shopping centres, retails parks and leisure sites. [...] There is then, in the drive to market places, [...] an aesthetic imperative to smooth over the cracks [...], and to fix the past, so that it does not intrude into an imagined linear future. [...] In cahoots with [...] marketeers, they suggest that the past is a distant, romantic echo that resounds faintly in museums [...]. Yet the ruins shout back at the refurbished urban text. [...] [T]hey haunt the city, for the unofficial past cannot be exorcised [...]. Ruins are sites where we can construct alternative stories to decentre commodified, official [...] descriptions, and [...] keep the past opened [...]. Counter-memories can be articulated in ruins, narratives that talk back to the smoothing over of difference. Away from the commercial and bureaucratic spaces of the city, ghosts proliferate where order diminishes. Ruins are [...] especially important, because [...] it is ‘essential to see the things and the people who are primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of our social graciousness.’

Text above by: Tim Edensor. “Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality.” Space and Culture Issue 11, pages 42-50. January 2002. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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[T]he contemporary Western city [...] [is] the site of [...] regulatory regimes concerned with strategies of surveillance and aesthetic monitoring [...]. The modern city can never become a wholly Appollonian, seamlessly regulated realm for it continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, and the repressed [...]. Within the interstices of the city there are a host of other spaces, part of a “wild zone”, a “[…] site […] which avoids the objective processes of ordered territorialisation […]”.

Staged […] through the intensified mediatisation and commodification of popular sites, myths, and icons […], mediated imaginary geographies circulate through adverts, soap operas, ‘classic’ rock stations [...] typically drenched in […] ideologies. […] These exhibitions memorialise culture via ‘publicly sanctioned narratives’ and institutionalised rhetoric [...]. [I]n which people are encoded and contextualied, categorised and narrated.

Accordingly, ruins are places from which other memories can be articulated [...]. [T]he outmoded object can become charged [...] with a certain power, and "might spark a brief profane illumination of a past productive mode, social formation, and structure of feeling - an uncanny return of a historically repressed moment" [...]. Thus we might stumble across seemingly archaic decor or furniture, [...] toys, and mascots of yesteryear [...], the debris of discarded fashions [...]. Although such objects [may] seem [...] absurd or comical, they may bring back knowledge, tastes, and sensations [...]. This was debris which was enfolded into the mundaneity of a shared everyday [...].

Along with other places on the margins of regulated space, industrial ruins are “points of transition, passages [...], moments of magic that exist at the interstices of modernity” […]. Modern attempts to cleanse, banish ambiguity, and order the memory of space are always disturbed by such disorderly spaces and by the ghosts they contain, who refuse to rest quietly, [...] a “spectral [...] residue“ which haunts dominant ways of seeing and being [...].

In contradistinction to the fixed memories [...] and to the imaginary linearities proposed by hegemonic […] memories, these ghosts foreground ambiguity, polysemy, and multiplicity, enabling us to “disrupt the signifying chains of legitimacy [...].” Although it is often overcoded and regulated, the city nevertheless contains multitudinous scraps from which alternative stories might be assembled. […] In spaces such as industrial ruins, the excessive debris confronted constitutes material for multiple modes of narration about the past: “the debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forth within the modernist, massive, homogenous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language” [...].

This kind of remembering implies an ethics about confronting and understanding otherness (here, the alterity of the past) which is tactile, imaginative […].

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Text by: Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Volume 23, pages 829-849. 2005. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[way2uchuu]

Chicago - October 2024

[iamshipwrecked]

[visualratatosk]

Cartes postales de Saint-Non-lieu, 11

Non-lieu ("non-place" or "nonplace" in English) is a concept, introduced by French anthropologist Marc Augé. It describes transient spaces where people maintain anonymity and which lack the cultural or historical significance to be considered true "places" in anthropological terms. Augé contrasts this concept with "anthropological places," which are spaces that reinforce identity and facilitate meaningful social interactions among individuals with shared cultural references. Non-places, however, do not serve as meeting points or foster a sense of community. In essence, a non-place is an area we pass through rather than inhabit, where individuals remain detached, unnamed, and lonely.

[gabes-pixels]

where tf am i

[frankwaxman]

The Embassadors feat Michel Ongaru​ - ​Healing The Music (Nonplace, 2008)

[mental-skillness]

[thoughtsofahouseplant]

travis in doomcoming saying “none of us are here” vs coach in doomcoming saying “love is everything, it’s the whole reason that we’re here”

if love is the whole reason that they’re there, but none of them are there, and love is everything, then are they . . . nowhere?

[radiophd]

nonplace urban field -- whimp

[fatehbaz]

The habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract [...] commerce; a world thus surrendered [...]. [N]on-places are the [...] hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, [...] that mobilize [...] space for the purposes of a communication so peculiar [...].

The real non-places of supermodernity - the ones we inhabit when we are driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lounge waiting for the next flight - have the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and texts they offer us: their ‘instructions for use,’ which may be prescriptive (’Take the right-hand lane’), prohibitive (’No smoking’) or informative (’You are now entering the Beaujolais region’). [...] This establishes the traffic conditions of spaces in which individuals are supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but ‘moral entities’ or institutions (airports, airlines, Ministry of Transport, commercial companies, traffic police, municipal councils). [...] [L]ists of their notable features - and, indeed, a whole commentary - appear on big signboards nearby. [...] [S]o that an abstract space [...] can become strangely familiar to them over time [...]. There is more direct but even more silent dialogue between the cardholder and the cash dispenser [...]. ‘You may withdraw 600 francs.’ [...] Non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers, or Sunday drivers. [...] [P]eople [...], for a time, have only to keep in line, go where they are told, check their appearance. [...]

[T]he user of a non-place is in contractural relations with it (or the powers that govern it). He is reminded, when necessary, that the contract exists. One element in this is the way the non-place is to be used: the ticket, the card [...]. Proof that the contract has been respected [...]. Boarding pass and an identity document [...]. So the passenger accedes to his anonymity only when he has given proof of his identity. [...] The supermarket customer gives his identity when he pays by cheque or credit card; so does the autoroute driver who pays the toll with a card. In a way, the user of the non-place is always required to prove his innocence. Checks on the contract and the user’s identity [...] stamps the space of contemporary consumption with the sign of the non-place: it can only be entered by the innocent. [...] There will be [...] (no right to anonymity) without identity checks.

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All text above by: Marc Auge. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. 1992. Translated by John Howe. [Some paragraph breaks and contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[burlveneer-music]

Burnt Friedman - Hexenschuss - new album of electronic polyrhythms, also available as extended versions

Hexenschuss (Extended Versions) by Burnt Friedman

The vocabulary of modern ‘Western’ music or of the so–called Global North has finally been spelled out. The ever more hasty striving to move forward led to a music that is ‘starving among this embarrassment of riches’. In those days, the music that was oscillating in a state of “permanent obsolescence” — often in short cycles of a few months — and preserved as a sign of the times in musical codes, has gone in the completely opposite direction, into a state of obsolete permanence.

In this drive forward towards refining and expanding a catalogue of superlatives, a never changing, underlying, but underdeveloped isometric schema has irreversibly and imperceptibly cemented in the body. The corresponding theory – the persisting phantom terms of academia – seek to break free of its phenomena. In contrast to this, in the music beyond the 'Global North', a nature of 'polyrhythms’ is detected, or, in other words, every beat that can not be grasped easily must therefor be a polyrhythm and African in essence. Now, shift the focus away from the contrafactual cultural connotations of the record sleeve towards the animating principle of the music, the phenomenological vectors of rhythm and view ‘groove‘ as the intrinsic attribute of regular harmonic motion patterns. This formulaic, animating principle is solely based on the law of the octave (doubling and halving). It appears repetitive, or circular in nature as opposed to linear and progressive. Such a formula is derived from a recurrent, balanced body movement from which every impulse originates as something sensed, as opposed to being subject to will or notation. What sounds merely technical or sophisticated in theory turns out to be basal in practice. It can also be grasped as an energy structure. In other words, a controlled regular movement yields stable interrelated time intervals with the least expenditure of energy.

In 'grooving', or 'composing a guiding path' all those involved (sequencer, drummer, dancer, etc.) become attuned to one another in a resistance against arbitrary dictates such as cultural appropriation, man–made aesthetic framework or notions of folklore. Such a 'guiding path' seeks to dispense with taste as much as possible, ultimately in favour of an experience of harmonic accordance, strangeness, displacement and not least, freedom. (Burnt Friedman) In regard to the people depicted on the cover: The Andamanese are the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands union territory in the southeastern part of the Bay of Bengal in Southeast Asia. They have lived in substantial isolation on the islands for thousands of years. Although the existence of the islands and their inhabitants was long known to maritime powers and traders of the South– and Southeast–Asia region, contact with these peoples was highly sporadic and very often hostile; as a result, almost nothing is recorded of them or their languages until the mid-18th century. Until this period, the Andamanese were preserved from outside influences by their fierce reaction to visitors, which included killing any shipwrecked foreigners, and by the remoteness of the islands. The various tribes and their mutually unintelligible languages thus are believed to have evolved on their own over millennia. Some of the tribe members were credited to having supernatural powers. They were called oko-pai-ad, which meant dreamer. They were thought to have an influence on the members of the tribe and would bring misfortune to those who did not believe in their abilities. When the British first established a colonial presence on the Andaman islands, there were an estimated 5,000 Great Andamanese living on Great Andaman and surrounding islands, comprising 10 distinct tribes with distinct but closely related languages. From the 1860s onwards, the British established a penal colony on the islands, which led to the subsequent arrival of mainland settlers and indentured labourers, mainly from the Indian subcontinent. This coincided with the massive population reduction of the Andamanese due to outside diseases, to a low of 19 individuals in 1961.

Music composed and produced by Burnt Friedman 2019 – 2022 Published by Freibank Cover photography – 1875, photographer unknown, group of Andamanese people, person in tropical suit presumably German ethnologist and explorer Fedor Jagor

[zef-zef]

Nonplace Urban Field (Bernd Friedmann) at Festival pomladi, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2008

source: wikimedia 📸: Špela Škulj  flikcr

[visualratatosk]

Cartes postales de Saint-Non-lieu, 14

Non-lieu ("non-place" or "nonplace" in English) is a concept, introduced by French anthropologist Marc Augé. It describes transient spaces where people maintain anonymity and which lack the cultural or historical significance to be considered true "places" in anthropological terms. Augé contrasts this concept with "anthropological places," which are spaces that reinforce identity and facilitate meaningful social interactions among individuals with shared cultural references. Non-places, however, do not serve as meeting points or foster a sense of community. In essence, a non-place is an area we pass through rather than inhabit, where individuals remain detached, unnamed, and lonely.