30/SEPT/2021
On The First Week:
[…] There are few events which don’t leave a written trace at least. At one time or another, almost everything passes through a sheet of paper, the page of a notebook, or of a diary, […]
Species of Spaces and Other Places, Georges Perec
At the first time of the class, I choose the Quarantine Hotel as my site, because I already took pictures of everything that interesting for me:
- View from the windows
Because it is the only entertainment I got among repetitive TV shows and chaotic news in the television, I admired few different working classes of people: at 6 am, middle-class workers already standing on the bus stop in their best uniforms and suits while people who do not do the 9 to 5 work or might be an upper class persons, still having time to do morning exercise such as jogging and cycling.
- View from the key hole
That exciting moment when I waited for my food, and to see what happened in the alleyway, how is my next door guest looked like, who was walking in front of my door. And it was interesting to think about how two point of views connected by the quarantine room and me in the middle.
- The quarantine food
Repetitive menu that made me can count how many days I have spent on the room by counting how many croissant left on the desk, it was like a prisoner counting days using tally mark scratched on the wall, but instead, it was croissants.
Choosen Space: Hermitage Road
But after did some discussions with Mr. Houman and the class, I think I have to change the chosen space into site that I have an easy access into. Then I choose the road outside my house: Hermitage road.
What I found was nothing interesting in the beginning, but when we tried to walk slowly in the neighbourhood and looking the row of houses, and then looking at every house individually, we might noticed that there are so many ways of people to try to make a visual communication in a symbol which represents their character that they put on their home. There is a house that has a Chinese decoration on its glassdoor, the country flag that decorates the second floor windows and another house has a rainbow handcraft made of felt displayed on the windows, those are enough to communicate how diverse the neighbourhood is. Those things made every house which looks similar, feels different and the people who made the ‘house’ into ‘home’ are the most important of all. We, human, turned a building, a tangible object shaped by concretes, bricks, woods, stones, and glass into a home, intangible conceptual space that somehow make us feel close and alive. This makes me think that there would be another intangible shape of the pavement on the Hermitage road.
We protect ourselves, we barricade ourselves in. Doors stop and separate.
Species of Spaces and Other Places, Georges Perec
On the Hermitage road, at the window from a second floor of a house owned by a Greek couple who already married for 50 years and have been lived the house for almost three decades, I watch people walking in rush from their home to tap their oyster cards at the station, catching the door for a place to gaze other people’s shoes or the beautiful tube’s blue-grey terrazzo pattern that no one cares lying everyday underneath their docmart, vans, nike, adidas. At the same window, where their heads moving from south to north, almost running to the nearest bus stop, they might be secretly hoping the priority seats are empty in between the songs they play on their phones to avoid the weird feelings they might get on their way to do the routines: Waking on the pavement by passing thirty houses that look slightly similar everyday to go where they need to, they want to, they have to.
The pavement became the liminal space where people walk from their home into their next destination. Liminal, according to Merriam webster means being an intermediate state, phase, or condition. Liminal space originated from the Latin word ‘limen’ meaning on a threshold or at a boundary and evokes a period of time/space ‘in-between’[…] (Turner, 1974 1982; VanGennep, 1960 [1909]). Arnold van Gennep (1960) stated that experiences of liminality are not temporary, but rather triggered anxiety as they move from (or between) the known to the unknown. In other hand, Turner also stated that liminal spaces are also sites of hope and opportunities. In this project, I tried to investigate what happened in the liminal space by systematically mapping the objects outside my house: Do you know the colour of the door of the three houses next to you? Do you know how long the empty house in the corner of the street have been? Or at least, do you know what kind of wild plants or lichen on your outdoor walls?
I also tried to capture some lichen and wild plants in the neighbourhood.
What I Learned
- the idea of looking at objects which we barely recognize that they’re existing around us, as we are always in hurry to go to the station or taking a bus to move from place to place
- how similar places can be very different by adding some character like changing the wall colour, putting small decorations, planting flowers and trees, adding ornaments on to the gate
- people like to label things, categorizing, adding semiotics or symbol, statements, unconsciously claiming this is theirs, that is ours, there are hers etc.
- how the place we call home used to be ‘another creatures’’ home. the way they grow through the houses’ walls and pavements is like they’re trying to say they will fight back their home which intruded by us, a human being, for a long time.
The Feedbacks
- Try documenting sounds, recording audio of people talk
- try taking videos
- mention time: morning? afternoon? evening?
- macro photographs of bricks? walls? any changing things?