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Reimagining the political geography of “place” and “space”
The distinction between “place” and “space” is fundamental not only to much art, but also to our global situation within neoliberal political geography. Among other things, the space-place dichotomy facilitates the reduction of developmental issues, political unrest or violence to irrational expressions of local misguidance, backward culture or belief systems. When the evolution of neoliberal space is merged with democratic and civilizing pretentions, the otherness and particularism of “place” appears to be a legitimate pretext to expand into always new (potentially profitable) areas in and beyond the periphery.
If time has come for us to reimagine the political geography of our times, as well as the interrelationships between, and definitions of “space” and “place” that it entails, is it thinkable that art could be an ideal site for such reimagination?
In a personal account, featured in our Spring Issue, Neery Melkonian reveals the definitional obstacles in pursuing the local affinities between Armenian-Lebanese artists in exile—displaced by a more recent experience of war and migration, and removed from a notion of their ancestral homeland—and the necessity of doing so, without succumbing to a traditional concept of “Diasporas.” In this article, Lebanon in the Armenian Imaginary: So Close with a Distance, Melkonian writes that the works of these artists “invite critical inquiry to better understand the messiness of contemporary experience” in which past traumas or events are present-absences, and that they do so without the notion of a “return” to an originary homeland, usually implied by Diasporas with a capital D.
The particularism of the local, apparently indigenous to neoliberal political geography, is elaborated through the concept of “reserves” in Shaily Mudgal’s article Revisiting ‘Reserves’ in Neoliberal India: Case Study of Jarawa Tribes. From a different angle, in her essay on the The Ecopoetics of Space in Snyder, Merwin, and Sze, Jenny Morse demonstrates how the neglect of the central problems related to the opposition between space and place undermines poetic attempts to reconfigure human/nature relationships.
Moreover—while in a contemporary and decidedly urban, neoliberal, parisian setting Carola Moujan analyses the potential of digital furniture and mapping technologies to provide what Walter Benjamin claimed to be the condition of an authentic city—namely the experience of origins, not just its narrative—Brian Brush imagines alternatives to map-centered cartographic artistic practices in his article Beyond Reference: Continuity, Memory and Territory in Cartographic Art.
In a photographic essay, The past persists in the present in the form of a dream, Paula Roush documents the Meia Praia estate in Lagos, Portugal, to ask if the photographic image still can provide a critical tool for an “archaeology of the country’s recent past.”
In the conception of the Gija, however, history is never resolved or complete, but constantly replayed and extended. And in the paintings of Paddy Bedford, Timmy Timms, Janangoo Butcher Cherel, and Rammey Ramsey, landscape and canvas are reimagined as accumulative sites of meaning, memory, and place. “They show us how to comprehend a contemporary world of accelerating multiplicity,” Henry Skerritt writes in his article The Politics of ‘Just Painting’: Engagement and Encounter in the Art of the East Kimberley.
Seismopolite Journal of Art and Politics is an online, Norwegian-English quarterly journal founded in 2011, which investigates the possibilities of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation. Seismopolite Art Map presents art venues and ongoing exhibitions from all the places visited by the journal.
Previous issues: www.seismopolite.com/artandpolitics
*Image above:
Front cover: photo by Aline Manoukian, A Palestinian fighter holds a kitten in the refugee camp of Burj Al Barajneh near Beirut. It was taken on July 8, 1988 a day after pro-Syrian Abu Mussa’s fighters ousted the PLO from the refugee camp, Arafat’s last stronghold in Beirut. Courtesy the artist.
