User:Alessia/liminal

I am using Liminal Landscapes Travel, Experience and Spaces in-between as a starting point for my own notes about liminal spaces. Almost everything here will be in a way a summary of that book, poisoned by my own thoughts and some random stuff I found around

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Space vs Place

Each culture defines the concepts of space and place in a unique way. They take on almost fluid forms, taking the shape of the context in which they are applied like water in a container.
Space is multidimensional. It’s typically understood in terms of direction, volume, and distance, sp with a strong mathematical character, an abstract form.
Instead Place is much more relative, connected to a more personal perception and subjective experience of the world. A place holds significance, identity. Places are where people live and interact, making them rich with cultural and social meanings.
When thinking about space in a much more conceptual aspect, George Simmel is the first one popping up. Simmel worked on conceptualising space from a sociological point of view, being focused on its materiality and spatiality rather than treating it as a non material concept.
He explored how space shapes social relations and individual experiences around cities, markets, and how they function as hubs for social interactions connected to the negotiation of power between individuals.
A key point of Simmel’s theory is spatial differentiation. He argued that different social groups and individuals perceive and use space in different ways, always reflecting their own social status, cultural backgrounds, and personal identities. This differentiation can lead to spatial hierarchies and segregation.
Simmel emphasised that space is not static but constantly shaped by human activities.

Following these studies, Doreen Massey rethought the concept of space while calling attention to how spatial relations between people, cities, and actions are the main point of focus to understand power structures. She describes space as "unfixed, contested, and multiple," showing that places are dynamic, in a constant evolutionary state. Massey's perspective can be aligned with the ecological idea of the earth as a single breathing organism, which can be maybe understood as fractal in a sense, because of its interconnectedness.

Keith Basso introduces an interesting concept, interanimation, a process where people and places engage in an ecological relationship, creating a unique web of meaning. This dynamic that builds space make places seem alive even in the wildest stillness.

_ E un'immagine che descrive il processo di interanimation durante il quale il paesaggio geografico si sovrappone a quello mentale nel momento in cui un luogo viene sentito (sensed) in maniera attiva (107). "Un'oscura sete". Natura nella Milano di Milo De Angelis _

Transformation to Place, Non-places

Spaces become places when people use them and create a culture around that use, like a school or a bank. In modern societies the anthropologist Marc Augé called them "non-places", urban leftovers that sit between places. And so we all constantly transition from place to place, slipping through unseen non-places. Train stations, airports, and waiting rooms are great examples of non-places, places that are stripped of culture and interpersonal interactions.

J. Nicholas Entrikin, geographer, divides place into objective and subjective, fundamental aspects to be taken into account to understand liminality of spaces. He calls the betweenness of places the meeting point of subjective and objective space.

Henri Lefebvre, the marxist sociologist, challenged the classical binary interpretation of space, proposing the concept of "thirdspace," which connects spaces of living and spaces of leisure. To him a place is a physical and social landscape filled with meaning through everyday social practices, working across different spatial and temporal planes, it’s neither home nor workspace, nor space of sociality. That space we transit in, an hybrid, then what is the difference between a thirdspace and a non-place?

How to encounter a place, ecosystem

Massey describes places as constellations of trajectories, highlighting their porous, sponge nature. She argues against establishing severe boundaries or identities to places, as this can lead to nationalistic or attitudes. Instead, places should be seen for her as dynamic networks of events, constantly being reshaped.

To truly encounter a place, we must recognise that we are part of it. Throwntogetherness, actively participating and leaving traces that contribute to its ongoing form, narrative. Emmanuel Levinas' writings and the holistic, ecological, approach of deep ecology on humankind as an interlocking web of changing relations, offer a framework for the ethical engagement approach that some sociologists and geographers took inspiration from. This involves developing self reflection, awareness, getting almost to anthropomorphizing a place, to observing its behaviour thoughtfully, empathetically.

So, while being a complicated and unfixed set of networks, a place might also have the capacity to remember, to hold traces of past activities, in the loosest sense. While it remembers, it does not necessarily do this in a human way. The memory of place may then be thought of as fluid, transitory, and open-ended, activated only by those who pass through.

Place-specific art

Lucy Lippard, american writer and art critic, defines place-specific art as art governed by a place ethic, accentuating its location rather than just occupying, using it.
Examples of contemporary works that are place specific in Lippard’s sense:

• John Newling’s 2010 Root Zone and Local History. https://www.john-newling.com/street-works
• Lucy Harrison, how we experience place, memory, location, Remains project
• Roger Hiorns Seizure installation, he filled a council flat in elephant and castle with copper sulphate solution and then rained it
• Wrights and Sites’ Wonders of Weston 2010 Everything you need to build a town in here, 41 signs scattered across a variety of locations https://www.situations.org.uk/projects/wonders-of-weston/

http://www.mis-guide.com/
http://www.mis-guide.com/ws/people.html#phil
The metal plaques appear without explanation and offer instructions, observations or comments, which are designed to encourage the reader to somehow engage with their immediate vicinity by way of real or imagined actions. At the Old Town Quarry, which the artists describe as the keystore site for the series, there is a map and description of the project in its entirety. Not only does the work lead the visitor (tourist and resident alike) to unexpected places, but it also highlights the layering of historical and contemporary stories and associations that surround us everywhere

Counter-Tourism and site writing

Counter-tourism and site writing are great alternative perspectives on living with/in/against places, disrupting traditional tourist routes and attractions, encouraging deeper exploration of the experiential character of a location. Smith’s tours aim to reveal hidden layers of a place, inviting participants to engage with the urban landscape in unexpected ways.

Phil Smith, a member of the artistic collective Wrights & Sites, is an important figure in the world of counter-tourism and mythogeography (probably the main intellectual writing about these concepts).
His works, including "Counter-Tourism: The Handbook" and "Mythogeography," bibles for unconventional wandering into urban spaces.

Jane Rendell’s concept of "site writing" emphasises even more the role of narrative and personal engagement in encountering places. Her researches focus on everything concerning situatedness and site-specificity, exploring how writing can intersect with the experiential aspects of a space.

Liminality

Between-ness is the core concept of liminality.
Liminality, "limen”, threshold, the concept of being in-between, partially belonging to two worlds while not wholly fitting into either.
A transitional metaphor.
Liminal spaces are related to the uses and practices of space in constructions of identity, particularly in the context of contemporary approaches to the study of space, place and mobility. Experiential landscapes associated with mobilities, such as border zones and transitional spaces, serve as fertile ground for exploring the ritual, performative, and embodied geographies that shape individual and communities’ identities.
The emotional response to such spaces is where liminality truly manifests. It feels both otherworldly and familiar simultaneously. They possess an unsettling familiarity, feeling both open yet enclosed, safe yet unsettling, and artificial yet natural.
It is not one or the other but both at the same time and can be hard to describe because we want to describe it as only one of those things because the other contradicts it.

In rethinking ideas of the liminal, even in an anthropological and sociological sense, it’s possible to uncover contemporary issues surrounding technology, surveillance and power structures, as well as postcolonialism overlooked dynamics.

Landscape of the margin, haunted, rotting

Landscape refers to the visible features of an area of land, including its physical natural elements as well as all human made things such as houses, roads, and cultivated lands. Landscape unite both natural and human altered environments, it’s like space, but not abstract :).
Landscape as something that can be shaped, produced, influenced on human or natural actions and processes. As they are in a constant state of transition landscapes themself are intrinsically liminal.
Liminal landscape ad the one that are shabby, desolate, marginal, abandoned have been embraced in popular culture, mainly within subcultures thriving on the web, tied to urbex culture mania, thirsty for that sublime decay that permeate ruins, industrial abandoned sites, degraded lands, ‘dead zones’.

Da cool cinematic experience: Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky is the artist of spiritual and emotional decay on screen. Long takes, deep focus cinematography, and an evocative sound design that mixes natural sounds with snippets of music and dialogue. Tarkovsky's films are known for their immersive and deeply symbolic presentation of liminal spaces, which blur the lines between reality and the subconscious. The Stalker is one of the masterpiece of Tarkovsky and is probably one of the best example of employing liminality both visually and thematically. The Stalker, so the guide is itself a liminal figure, suspended between two worlds, being the spiritual, almost shamanic figure that helps the others fulfilling their transformation.
https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781136134364_A23812945/preview-9781136134364_A23812945.pdf

Shield's discussion about places on the margin is quite interesting. He focuses on margin and peripheries of Britain, focusing on the image and stigma connected to marginality, and on exposing the central role of “spatialisation” to cultures and national states. He followed the intimate link of the concept of space and the categorisation of practises and modes of social interaction connected to the so called “Low culture”.
Drawing on Orientalism, by Said, Shield highlights the concept of symbolic exclusion elucidating how the West employed strategies of "positional superiority" to assert dominance over marginalised groups, inside itself and outside through colonisation. Shield also references Strallybrass and White to show the eroticisation, fantasization and still repulsion of the top society to the low Other. This could be translated in a lot of ways, through different contexts.

Liminal landscapes are tinged with death, connected to transformation and processes of becoming, and with entropy,with its liminal flux made up of organic forms flowing and propagating, as into a body the vascular system branches out. Lichenous, constantly rotting. Entropy as radical impermanence.

Mapping, navigating, regulations

How is then possible to navigate liminal spaces? Is there any different approach we could have on mapping liminal spaces? What are the mechanics and processes by which liminalities work or function in relation to landscape? What are the temporal geographies of liminal landscapes? What are the politics of liminal landscapes?

Liminal spaces, in military and territorial contexts, go against the traditional methods of control and mapping. Unlike conventional landscapes liminal spaces cannot be controlled or commanded in the same way. Instead, what they must be "invoked" (Moore, R.L. (1991) ‘Ritual, Sacred Space, and Healing: the Psychoanalyst as Ritual Elder’). This shows a more ritualistic approach to navigating liminal spaces, that indeed demands a different kind of knowledge, one derived not just from maps or commands but from direct engagement and ritualistic practices. Maps are a no no.
The liminal landscape of the border zone, for example, operates beyond laws and logic, challenging typical forms of knowledge. It creates conditions of urgency, emergency, necessitating the cultivation of a diy anarchic approach?
In such liminal spaces, where nothing moves while still changing, wanderers can lose sight of their path, even if that is a familiar terrain, highlighting the disorienting nature of these kind of spaces.
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Van Gennep talks a bit about “territorial passage” in the past accompanied by various formalities that ranged from political, legal to those of a more magic religious type. Our contemporary neoliberal landscape is not even borderless as it sell itself. Mobility remains a privilege as it always was, accessible to some denied to many. Borders and restrictions continue to shape the movement of people, echoing the structured and ritualised passages of earlier times but within a modern framework of control and regulation.

Political, legal and economic formalities are now as likely to be used to prevent the free movement of a person from one place to another. Mediterranean sea, visas, migration policies.

Danger, unbelonging, the border

Never before in the history of the world have non-places occupied so much space. (Benko and Strohmayer 1997: 23)
Anything is now liminal?

the visa state of suspence, liminal state
Inhabiting the neutral zone between one territorialized state and another

To me this just feel as a privileged approach: Rogoff argues that "unbelonging" is not about feeling lost or lacking something, but rather about a deliberate, ongoing process of detachment to make way for new possibilities. She calls for an active form of "unbelonging," not as marginalization or rebellion, nor as a way of dropping out, but as a refusal to accept the terms and implications that become normalised in this kind of discourses.
I might have not fully understand her point.
To me unbelonging is most of the time an act that the individual is not fully conscious, nor involved in, it’s something comes from the outside world, that digs into the consciousness of a person and sediment, in a way that just unbelonging becomes naturalised. To me that cannot be a choice, unbelonging as a choice is still belong to an idea, a movement at least.

The Border is a traditional landscape of transition, now it mirrors the global landscape shaped by global capital. The modern hyperconnected landscape is a constant flux of transition, embodying a state of perpetual liminality. The current era is characterised by an enduring of indeterminacy (still, why is that negative, as it is the most natural form of reality?), disorientation and limbo.
Bauman's concept of liquid modernity or liquid life encapsulates this condition where everything is disposable and perpetually in motion.

In fact, Turner notes how the turbulence and ‘topsy- turvy-dom’ of liminality was often used to reinforce stability in the post- liminal phase, where ‘reversal underlines to the members of a community that chaos is the alternative to cosmos, so they’d better stick to cosmos’ (Turner 1982: 41)

Epicentres of trauma

Maria Tumarkinos examination of six epicentres of national trauma and tragedy across the world in order to unearth and examine the psychological investments that these places hold. John Lennon's investigation and the concept of dark tourism, trauma tourism Laurie Beth Clark