Stillness gives rise to an enhanced sense of place. That’s place, not space.
There’s been so much said about space – safe spaces, ‘a space to do’, spaces rather than rooms, life lived in a white cube where we’re the curator. Someone once told me, if you don’t know what to say in a gallery, say “It’s an amazing space”. It’s a catch all phrase for admiring vacancy, absence and one’s own refusal to commit. But you can’t grow roots in a space.
Clusters of spaces are called hubs. I felt sad when I saw a sign of greeting outside a church which read ‘Welcome to our hub’. Was there ever such a dead sounding word as hub?
The BBC’s ‘The Travel Show’ (‘showcasing the best of travel across the globe’) is the essence of space signifying little, a compacted stream of rhetorically efficient sensation seeking set against chromakeyed perma-blue sky. The effect is akin to twenty-eight minutes being force fed overheated global tourism: a water slide, a dog sleigh ride, a champagne safari, a paintball brasserie. It’s anywhere and everywhere yet it’s not here and neither is it there, a succession of air conned virtual experiences, places which have had their sense of place excised to form part of an entertainment feed, a colour rush of effects along fibre optic cables encircling the globe. But when you pull apart the cables and look inside, what is there?
This lockdown here and now might be a pause in the linear time of our appointments but it doesn’t feel in the least like empty space. It’s entering a slipstream that is covered over but always present. May it come forth and show itself. The place of ornaments, mantelpieces, curtain folds and dust. The place of rusty door hinges, static grooves and mysterious carriage clock chimes. The place of blossom flurries, tree trunk faces, worm casts. And cheesy bugs curled up under stones. Deeper, darker, longer, lower, older, smaller and younger.
[April 2020]
lightspots 