Subliminal Messages in A Liminal Space
MAGCD / 20036676
In this essay I tried to find relation between my chosen site and George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Perec, 1974) Perec’s interest of investigating random simple places evoked me to do the similar things. In his book, Perec stated that there is something frightening in the very idea of the town; we get the impression we can fasten only on to tragic or despairing images of it (Perec, 1974, p. 62) We might see the block in the neighbourhood as an uninteresting place, we tend to pass thirty houses to get to the tube station in a rush to get to our destination without noticing that the row of houses is radiating the message of everything who lived there for years. The curiosity about the messages motivates me to choose Hermitage Road as my method of investigation brief. Through admiring places that people do not spend much time in, I am trying to find meanings in imperfect ordinary insignificant things which people usually ignore.
In the first three weeks I investigate the liminal space: place between their home and their destination. 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; Van Gennep, 1960 [1909]) I watched people walk from south to north everyday but their mind is not being present in the moment, I noticed that by seeing a few of samples: the fresh apple that being there for almost three weeks, plenty of big dog’s stool being stepped and spread along the road, some died snails on the road stepped meanwhile on another wall they were crawling slowly living in the moment, it contrasts with the background noises: sound of people walking, speeding bicycles, fast vehicles, and ambulance siren. Every house has small garden some of them have lichen, moss, and wild plants growing through their wall. If we think about it further, we will learn a lot that the small plants are trying to deliver a message that they will reclaim their place in the nature. It also represents the threshold between decaying and growing and how time and nature eventually visualize them in a better vision without human noticing because we are too busy to try to get to our destination. It connects to the liminal space of people on the Hermitage road: going from a place to another place.
As an evaluation, from Perec’s work, I can see the red thread that pulled from the beginning of my project until this week what relation between my fragment of thoughts. I also imitated his ways of thinking towards ordinary things in life, it helped me to get more point of views in only an ordinary space with no monumental object to see.
Reference:
- Perec, G. (1974) Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin.
- Turner, V (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Van Gennep, A (1960 [1909]) The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.