Abandoned places originate from the cessation of an activity.
They naturally evolve to a secondary landscape.
Gilles Clément, Manifeste du tiers paysage, 2004
The non-place is the opposite of utopia:
it exists, and it does not contain any organic society.
Marc Augé, Non-lieux, 1992
The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place
several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.
Michel Foucault, Des espaces autres, 1967
A sudden sense of pleasing disorientation and astonishment is what we experience when an abandoned place – a non-place – is transfigured into something else, under the power of the artist’s hand and mind. This “something else”, which is always something new and unknown, is hardly definable, for it consists in the encounter between two conflicting aesthetics: the aesthetic of arbitrary – the abandoned place – and the aesthetic of will – the work of art. Foucault would probably include this “something else” in his definition of heterotopia, and that is exactly what we are witnessing: a deconstructing game of opposites, resulting from the creation of art in a place no one would go, and from the juxtaposition of a space of ποίησις (poïesis) and a former space of πρᾶξις (praxis). A further heterotopia is even recognizable in the puzzling overlap of a C and a T: their curvilinear and orthogonal natures intertwine and turn into a mesmerizing essay of geometrical abstraction. So that feeling of disorientation isn’t but the result of what we perceive as a non-place transfigured into a new place: that comfort zone provided by a pure act of visual poetry.
A sudden sense of pleasing disorientation and astonishment is what we experience when an abandoned place – a non-place – is transfigured into something else, under the power of the artist’s hand and mind. This “something else”, which is always something new and unknown, is hardly definable, for it consists in the encounter between two conflicting aesthetics: the aesthetic of arbitrary – the abandoned place – and the aesthetic of will – the work of art. Foucault would probably include this “something else” in his definition of heterotopia, and that is exactly what we are witnessing: a deconstructing game of opposites, resulting from the creation of art in a place no one would go, and from the juxtaposition of a space of ποίησις (poïesis) and a former space of πρᾶξις (praxis). A further heterotopia is even recognizable in the puzzling overlap of a C and a T: their curvilinear and orthogonal natures intertwine and turn into a mesmerizing essay of geometrical abstraction. So that feeling of disorientation isn’t but the result of what we perceive as a non-place transfigured into a new place: that comfort zone provided by a pure act of visual poetry.
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