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My first piece of work in the inquiry into psychogeography was a series of charcoal drawings titled 'Rush Hour' taking the audience on a journey and feel the stress which many commuters experience. I used charcoal due to the immediacy of capturing movement. I'm particularly happy with Waterloo Station as it succesfully created an overwhelming sensation.

A train station is an example of where we experience placelessness as they are points of transit and nothing more. It is highly functional with predetermined procedures- correspondeding with machines or people fulfilling job roles rather than unique individuals. They don't allow humans time to establish relations to place and fellow humans just become obstacles. This coexistence without interaction makes it a non place and something I want to research further in regards what makes us experience placelessness.

Charcoal is a material I have mastered on the course and could use in my FMP as a way of creating larger works to engulf the audience to feel a real sense of being unanchored.

I also want to experiment with photography as up until now I have ben using it to factually document the world around me. Leading on from this, I want to make more abstract work.

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Katarzyna Coleman exhibitin, Mandells Gallery, Norwich

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Katarzyna Coleman exhibitin, Mandells Gallery, Norwich

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Monochrome pallet of her works reflects the bleak landscape outside her studio. The decay of the industrial buildings are unique adjacent to the busy seaside town of Great Yarmouth yet is a scene replicated in many towns facing deindustrialisation.

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The unusual industrial landscape of South Denes in Great Yarmouth has been the visual obsession of Katarzyna Coleman for the last fifteen years. Her studio, in an industrial building that she shares with fellow artist, John Kiki, lies just South of where the dwellings behind South Beach Parade dissolve into the strange and desolate peninsula that hangs between the Yare and the sea, docks still on its inner side and the new outer harbour, pretty inaccessible, on its outer side. This bleak landscape has gradually developed over time as the fortunes of Yarmouth have oscillated between stagnant downturns and the optimistic upturns of the fishing boom,...
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Works

Battery Road

Salmon Road

Keep up to date with the latest news and events from Mandell's Gallery

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Skip to main content The unusual industrial landscape of South Denes in Great Yarmouth has been the visual obsession of Katarzyna Coleman for the last fifteen years.

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Circles a private garden- we are outsiders and strangers to that place. Can we really build a connection to the space if we are unaccepted in it?

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Art collective Stovington23, making Art in 'Placeless' Places

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Art collective Stovington23, making Art in 'Placeless' Places

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Put street art in the public domain to question 'who owns public space' and 'who has the right to leave visual marks in it'. It links to placelessness as whilst we can visibly see and be in them they are privately owned and heavily guarded. Spacial injustice means we don't form a close bond with it- for functional use rather than space for us to interact in.

Stencils create a dialogue with the environment, expressing how we live, rather than just passively consuming (as shoppers, or as viewers).  It can be seen as a way of re-connecting us to local communities.

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Uses sculpture to connect and isolate forms from their environment. Aims to create a feeling of displacement.

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24th February till 3rd March THIS SALE HAS NOW CLOSED Please email engage@101.art for inquiries What dictates our understandings of place? This exhibition grapples with the implications and material legacies of our surroundings. Sara Ahli’s sculptural work combines fluid and rigid elements, interrog…

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Artist experienced placelessness due to not being able to return home since 2020 and not having a permanent studio space. Her work reflects the lack of belonging to a place and culture.

She remotely trained twenty performers to follow a script investigating the absence of human presence which came out of the pandemic where we were deprived of interpersonal relationships which can make us feel detached from a place. The performers became robots having no control to make conversation or explore thus not building strong relationships with surroundings.

Performance is an area I want to take forward as a way of fully immersing an audience into feeling unanchored- they become active participants rather than spectators.

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For the performance work Lord of the Flies (2021), Shuang Li remotely trained twenty performers, each following a script, to embody the sense of failure and implosion that defined metropolitan cities during the pandemic years. The performance is about the absence of human presence, both contingent and conceptual, as well as the metamorphosis of interpersonal relationships during a historical moment in which humans have become ever closer to a state of dematerialization.

Li herself hasn't been home in two years. Despite her best efforts, she has been stranded in Europe because of the pandemic. Lacking a real studio, she moves between Berlin and Switzerland, trying to metabolize the meaning of human existence in a given place.

The sociopolitical dimension of her work, from the very beginning deeply shaped by her life experiences, in recent years has been largely informed by absence; the lack of belonging to a place - and to a culture, with all that that entails - has been decisive. Her ongoing research into the projection of human identity onto digital platforms and the increasing use of artificial intelligence in everyday life takes place in fictional media landscapes rendered via mash-ups of historical eras and cultural backgrounds. Shuang Li's characters are hybrid entities, technological and genderless, and communicate like characters in a video game, renouncing a purely corporeal dimension as well as any dialogic link to coexisting entities.

Li's research often starts from her own body, from the study of desire and affect, which she reflects back in fictitious narratives across disparate temporalities and geopolitical contexts.

In the following conversation with Andrea Bellini, the artist tries to reconstruct the roots of her interest in seeing the world "for the first time" through images and the body, trying to understand the essence of digitalized intimacy amid the existential restlessness of the world around us.

Andrea Bellini: Dear Shuang, since the start of the pandemic, you haven't returned to China. In 2020 you went to Berlin for a show and you've never been able to return home. Your body seems in transit, in a state of placelessness. I was thinking that, well before the pandemic, which made everyone's life more complex and static, you were already interested in the question of the contemporary body, in its political status, but also in its increasingly virtual dimension. Will you tell me where you come from and why you started to deal with these issues?
Shuang Li: I have long been fascinated by different mediums. As our lives keep getting more and more mediated, it's actually hard to remember that a body is physical in the first place. I was born in a small town in China. As a child I spent most of my time reading and playing video games - maybe that's where everything started. My dad is into Russian literature so I got to read a lot of those. At the same time, my parents got me a knockoff Nintendo, and now looking back I think that's when I got to see the world for the first time. Of course it was a highly mediated one, but no less than how life is today. During my teenage years the urge to escape not just my immediate surroundings but also my own body had become very acute. That's when I first heard punk and emo music, which had a huge impact on every aspect of my life. I came into contact with punk and emo through dakou CDs - CDs that were overproduced, and the record labels would punch a hole in them to strip them of their value as commodities in order to dump them in Asia as digital waste. Eventually somebody found out the hole would just damage one song, if at all, and as a result these CDs started circulating. Dakou CDs in Chinese means "CD with a hole." I think these CDs have become a forecast of my practice - I'd like to think my works break smooth surfaces and connect different dimensions.

AB: Video games and punk music sound very interesting as an early approach to the moving image and the sound track. What exactly do you mean when you say that you started seeing the world for the first time when you got your knockoff Nintendo?
SL: What I mean by "seeing the world for the first time" is, in a literal sense, how the world was portrayed in the games. For example, a lot of video game backgrounds are set in New York, so I believe that's when I first saw the city, similar to how people find New York familiar the first time they go there because of movies. But contrary to movies and TV, while showing me how the world out there can be drastically different from my immediate surroundings, the world in video games was still within my reach as I interacted with the scene and figures through my controller.

AB: And later you ended up studying art in New York. Did you find the city lived up to the image you had formed of it through video games? [ laughs] How did you find the study experience and the New York years? I imagine it's not easy to land in the US coming from a small town in China.
SL: In some ways the lived experience really aligned with the images from the video games! It was not easy for me, but years of listening to American bands helped a little.

AB: Some of the work you've done during your time in New York is related to the issue of immigration, the experience of being a "foreign" body or an "other" body. Would you like to talk about that?
SL: My perception of "foreign" and "other" has changed a lot since then. In New York I was still in my teen angst period, and I felt, like: "I don't belong anywhere." I'm not saying I grew out of it finally, but after the last couple years of moving around in the world, I have noticed I'm good at finding connections between different locations and cultures, so wherever I go I can make myself somewhat at home. Maybe it's just a coping mechanism against this placelessness. But looking back, there seem to be lines connecting the places I have lived, composing a constellation of stars instead of remaining as separate dots. I have been making sculptures based on the imagery of seashells. A seashell is the home of the creature that inhabits it, but vendors at a tourist beach will tell you, "You can hear the sea through it." In this sense they can also be a medium, a conductor. Once it starts circulating, it becomes an empty shell where the tunes once lived. I guess these new works are also a way for me to process this placelessness.

AB: Your father's interest in literature during your childhood seems seminal. You often speak about the importance of writing in your work. Is this something you would relate to the years you spent reading Russian literature?
SL: Maybe "reading" was too big a word for that. Looking back, I don't think I even understood much in those books. In terms of writing in my own work, I do think it's somehow been impacted by this experience: even though my moving-image works are usually text heavy, I believe people don't really need to understand much of the text or the background to get into my work. I'm constantly asked to explain my work and the cultural background to which it relates. There seems to be so much explaining to do, and still so much that is lost in translation, partially if not completely. But I don't think it's important after all.

AB: Certainly what is lost is much more than what is understood, and I understand your discomfort in talking about your own work. The Italian writer Giorgio Manganelli, to return to the question of literature, argued that the author does not even exist. This conviction was connected to a polymorphic, iridescent ideal of personality - to a critique of the self as something stable, knowable, representable. Around the idea of the artist-author, its progressive cancellation, absence, and the relationship between public and private, you've done a pretty curious work. I'm talking about If Only the Cloud Knows (2005-18). Can you tell me about it?
SL: I really like your reading of author and authorship. If Only the Cloud Knows starts with some personal trauma that I wanted to forget at that time. While it's not that hard to block it out mentally, traces of those events can find their way back through external memories. I didn't have the heart to delete those, so I made a website where I uploaded all my digital memories for the past ten years, from texts to all kinds of images on my phone, computer, hard drive, etcetera. I made it available for visitors to delete anything they wanted, as long as they left a note, while deleting all other copies from my end. This work started with a very selfish intent, but I was also very interested in researching how external memory devices affect our brains, and what's the essence of digitized intimacy. During the course of going through and uploading my personal archive, the shifting of the media landscape of the past decade also flashed before my eyes.
In some way, very personal and intimate works are the ones that can touch the public the most. I was very inspired by Chiara Fumai's show at Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. It must be a very personal project for you as well. Though I would describe her works more as intimate than personal, the curation made it a very personal and touching experience for viewers. Like, we set foot in a replica of her apartment, and from there we entered her oeuvre. The exhibition for me was a medium for reaching her.
Relating to If Only the Cloud Knows, there's a funny anecdote: at the beginning it was hosted on another URL, but for a while I forgot to pay for the domain so the URL went back on the market. Shortly afterwords, a porn production company purchased the domain and it became a porn website. For a while people who clicked on the link from my portfolio would end up on the porn site. I didn't realize it until a curator asked me about the work, super perplexed.
I'm not too familiar with Giorgio Manganelli's work, but these days I find myself thinking about one of the stories Italo Calvino wrote in Cosmicomics, titled "The Distance of the Moon." According to the story, the distance between moon and earth used to be really short. At one point in their cycle they would even get so close to each other that people on earth could pull out a ladder and climb to the moon for one night, and go back to earth before the planets drew away from each other. One night, when people got to the moon as usual, gravity changed drastically. The moon suddenly was drawn away from the earth. Amid chaos, some people managed to get back to earth, but some remained on the moon forever. I use it as a romantic filter to look at the pandemic, not just for my own but for the planetary situation.

AB: An interesting idea to look at the pandemic through Calvino's "The Distance of the Moon." Perhaps we should all ask ourselves if we remained on the earth or on the moon. And I'm happy to learn that the Chiara Fumai show left a strong impression on you. Both of you put the body at the center of the work, although in a diametrically opposed way: Chiara's is still an organic body - her body - full of physical moods, even if astral and elusive. Yours is often a digital body, a subjectivity increasingly entangled with an immersive online culture. I'm thinking for example about I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side (2020). Can you please tell me how this complex work originated?
SL: My works engage predominantly with the relationship between body and screen, which I think is now completely reversed. Before we had our physical bodies first, then we had representations on different mediums, like photographs and paintings. But now, if we don't have a screen body, our physical bodies don't exist either.
I think I first noticed this transition when I was working on I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side, which departed from the production and circulation of yellow vests. It later grew into a fictional online romance between a young boy working in a factory and a French mother who was involved in the gilets jaunes movement. Yellow vests are everywhere in real life, but it was only after seeing them on my screen, lighting up the streets of Paris in a context of civil unrest, that it started registered in me. I started to see them on the street, but even in real life they look so unreal - they are so thin, stiff, and transparent. They move clumsily on the bodies wearing them. They look like a bad filter, pixels leaked from screens that have congealed in real life. I think this reversal was completed during the pandemic, coined by writer and curator Alvin Li as "planetary camgirlization" - we were all reduced to our performance online.
Working with the idea of leaked pixels and congealed realities, I'm making a new video for my upcoming solo show at Peres Projects. In this video, flip-book animation is used to address leaked pixels between pages, like leaked pixels in circulation, while connecting the movement of flipping with the gestures of swiping and scrolling on the screen.

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Processing Placelessness: When Screens take Bodies. A Conversation with Shuang Li | | Flash Art

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For the performance work Lord of the Flies (2021), Shuang Li remotely trained twenty performers, each following a script, to embody the sense of failure and implosion that defined metropolitan cities during the pandemic years.

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Gilbert Munger: Quest for Distinction, looking at placelessness in American Life

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Gilbert Munger: Quest for Distinction, looking at placelessness in American Life

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Paintings are hazy reflecting faint memories had in the places lived in. The narrative gets lost as the works are disjointed due to being in so many locations and of different styles. The artist was constantly on the move, losing what it means to be 'at home'.

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J. Z. Grover reviews an exhibition of a turn-of-the-century Minnesota artist at the Tweed Museum in Duluth: "Gilbert Munger: Quest for Distinction." The show runs July 26–October 12.

The U. S. Postal Service (USPS) tells us that the average American residency is only eighteen months long and growing shorter. What do people who move about see that those of us more placed do not? What do they overlook that we see?

In the case of a visual artist, a painter, the plasticity of vision that touching down only briefly encourages can create a body of work so discontinuous that it fails to add up to anything with weight. Gilbert Munger, a landscape painter of the 1860s-1900s, is a case in point.

The Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth has mounted a large (73 works) retrospective of Munger's work based on the research of a true amateur, California software engineer Michael D. Schroeder, and art historian J. Gray Sweeney, using paintings held by the university and others borrowed from public and private collections across the country.

Munger's life was as restless as those of the USPS's most transient customers. Born in Connecticut in 1837, Munger moved to Washington, DC, in 1850 to apprentice as an engraver. There he saw his first heroic landscape paintings and aspired to make similar canvases. During the Civil War years, 1862-65, he served as timekeeper to a defense project and painted on the side. His timing was auspicious: the war years created an immense visual appetite among newspaper and periodical readers that was satisfied by field sketch artists and photographers. This appetite, along with the halting of government geographical surveys and construction of railroads during the war years, created an immense market for images of the opening of the American West in the years following the war.

As a young artist on the make, Munger followed this emerging market to New York City. His first large-scale paintings were calculated to satisfy popular curiosity about unseen landscapes. For example, "Minnehaha Falls," painted during his stay with his two brothers in St. Paul in 1867-68, excluded the bridge built below the falls and instead inserted two stock Indian figures in the foreground, thereby annexing the painting to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's popular poem, "The Song of Hiawatha."

Munger's other large-scale Minnesota canvas in the show is "Duluth" (1871), one of those subjunctive, Westward-the-course-of-Empire-takes-its-way paintings so popular in the postwar period. Duluth-a town that would become all but abandoned by 1873-was depicted with a ship canal, a dredge, a railroad-all things that would come to it eventually. The painting, not surprisingly, was bought and hung in a Washington, DC, hotel that catered to congressmen and lobbyists.

Soon after painting these canvases, Munger left Minnesota, returned to New York City, and within the year managed to get himself invited as a guest artist on Clarence King's federal Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel. This and other of King's surveys, the most lavishly financed and longest-lasting of post-Civil War government surveys, included at different times the Civil War photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and Andrew Russell and the San Francisco-based photographer Carleton Watkins. In their company, Munger sketched and painted the American West. Their influence is evident in his Western canvases, whose perspective is sometimes identical to the photographers' (for instance, "Lake Lall and Mount Agassiz, Uinta Range, Utah," which mirrors O'Sullivan's spliced panorama of the same scene). The surfaces of Munger's paintings from this period are smooth and highly detailed, their contrasts similar to the long continuous tones of wet-plate, printed-out photographs. Some of Munger's sketches and paintings were adapted as chromolithographs in the volumes King later published to document and promote his surveys.

In San Francisco, Munger quickly assessed the market among that city's wealthy businessmen for heroic, highly detailed canvases of western landscapes and began producing them. Like those of Albert Bierstadt, many of Munger's paintings were vast, hyperbolically lit, and intended for the cavernous California mansions where I first saw them: the Crocker and Gallatin mansions in Sacramento, the Spreckles and Stanford ones in San Francisco.

These were Munger's boom years. Introduced to San Francisco "society" by the well-placed, Yale-educated explorer Clarence King, Munger shuttled between San Francisco and New York, painting heroic landscapes for his western and eastern admirers. He depicted a West designed to awe viewers, if not by the vastness of the land, then by the drama of its lighting. (I have to say that in most of his California landscapes, with the exception of his Ocean Beach, San Francisco, paintings, Munger's lighting strikes me as wilfully false; like his visual successor, the photographer Ansel Adams, Munger couldn't seem to leave California's largely untroubled skies alone, instead insisting on piling up contrasting clouds [as in "Yosemite Valley from a Cliff," n.d., ca. 1870-75] or unreal contrasts ["Redwood (Sequoia) Forest," n.d., ca. 1870-75] to heighten their drama.)

After less than a decade of restive survey and salon work, Munger left his studios in San Francisco and New York for Europe. The Gilded Age's giddy economy had caught up with his patrons; the Panic of 1893 had ruined some of them. Munger had been urged to visit Britain by some of Clarence King's wealthy acquaintances, and by mid-1877, he had followed them to London.

What had been meticulously, even photographically, detailed paintings of the American West now morphed into a variety of styles. In Britain, Munger was successively influenced by John Millais, John Ruskin, and J. M. W. Turner. His paintings in Millais's and Turner's styles (such as "Landscape with Hiker and River," ca. 1877-79 and "Venetian Scene," ca. 1882-92), the latter all sfumatous atmosphere, are technically accomplished and utterly impersonal-painterly essays in another's cultural sensibility. Munger was welcomed in the world of well-upholstered, conservative art patrons, and he responded by acquiring a posh English accent, a fictively genteel background, the status of a gentleman, and an urge for remaking himself once again.

This he did by moving to Paris, where, he apparently lived for six years (1886-93). Like the artists later characterized as the Barbizon school, Munger painted forest scenes in Fontainebleau. Unlike his Western paintings, these were rough-textured canvases that depended for their drama on the deep, forced perspective made possible by the flat landscapes of broad river valleys.

Like Munger's Venetian and British landscapes, his French ones strike me as superficial: they are about the transient effects of light and surface on generic landscapes. Unlike, say, Cézanne's patient deconstructions of Mt. Ste. Victoire, Munger's European canvases focus not on known, explored places but on painterly gestures. In this sense alone, perhaps, Munger could be said to be a modern.

Put another way, he could be said to be an archetypally displaced person: an artist who had to depend on more placed artists for his cues, since he himself was not culturally attuned to what he saw. A painting like "Neue Reuilly" (1889) is a case in point: the trees and light lack specificity: one couldn't characterize this scene as depicting morning, midday, afternoon, or evening light; its trees are strictly notional.

Munger recrossed the Atlantic in 1893, aged 56, intent on "earn[ing] that recognition in my own country which I have won abroad. I should like to identify myself with the people of my own land and take an interest in their art life." Between 1893 and 1903, when he died, Munger moved between New York City, Duluth, and Washington, DC. He continued to paint landscapes that were mostly domestic-scaled and filled with harvest shocks of corn, orchard trees, glimpsed farmhouses, and flocks of chickens. He painted remembered French landscapes as well.

The art market passed him by. It is jarring to recall that Munger was still painting his serene, umbered landscapes shortly after Alfred Stieglitz opened An American Place, before the Armory Show signaled a deep shift in what painting in America could be and mean.

Munger's last years were lived in Washington, DC, in increasing poverty and obscurity. He did not paint Washington; his last known canvas was a portrait of Niagara Falls that depended for its power on dramatic lighting (including a rainbow) and monumental scale.

What does Munger's life as an artist add up to? How do we make sense of a career that, in the words of art historian Alan Wallach, was "art-historical[ly] nondescript, impossible to pigeonhole and therefore impossible to assimilate to the sort of history of art that relies on conventional narratives of style and stylistic evolution"?

For me, Munger's work demonstrates the weakness of American mobility. He was free to move-he moved; he never settled anywhere long enough to know it well. Out of his element everywhere he went (change was his element), he was drawn to the most dramatic, but often humanly least significant, of landscapes. He picked up deftly on the stylistic traits of painters far more embedded in cultures and places than he, and he replicated the visual traces of their involvement without their depth of observation.

He returned from Europe, like so many of his own and the preceding generation of American artists, to a country he no longer understood, and here he found that the market-and the culture-had changed and no longer wanted what he could offer. From being voluntarily displaced, he became an involuntary, internal exile. Bitterly, Munger learned that he was native only to an era, not to a place, not to a culture.

Gilbert Munger: Quest for Distinction is a melancholy show, one that can be made sense of visually only when its subject is considered in light of the USPS's chill fact. Development doesn't figure in any understandable sense here, nor does progression nor vision. Munger makes sense chiefly as the charting of a restless, questing, but ungrounded sensibility.

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Art Review: Placelessness in American Life - Mn Artists

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J. Z. Grover reviews an exhibition of a turn-of-the-century Minnesota artist at the Tweed Museum in Duluth: "Gilbert Munger: Quest for Distinction." The show runs July 26-October 12. The U. S. Postal Service (USPS) tells us that the average American residency is only eighteen months long and growing shorter.

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The first is when the built fabric of the environment fails to provide places in which we can build deep emotional attachment. The second is the potential to have random encounters.

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Welcome everyone, in our previous article, we discussed the concept of "place" in depth. Today we are going to discuss a few of the most noticeable aspects of the "place" concept. To understand this article better I suggest readers refer to the few articles author wrote on " placemaking ".

Significant Places

Under ordinary circumstances, Significant places occur when a certain space has a high potential to deliver a high emotional attachment to its users which can create a strong and everlasting attachment. These significant places make way for a meaningful spatial experience which
embed the experiences of a man to his surrounding environment.

A significant place
Source: Genius Loci

Placelessness

According to the author's studies. There are two main methods that could generate placelessness. The first way is when the built fabric fails to provide any significant places. This lack of significant places results in dead spaces hence decreasing the number of activities happening.

The second way placelessness could occur is when the built environment is unable to present different spaces with a variety of potentials and resulting in creating huge monotonous spaces. This decreases the ability of the user to understand a certain space hence the degradation of activities taking place in it. The main reason for this can be narrowed down to disregard of the human scale in the design process.

" Placelessness in other words is the incapability to express places which endowed with meaningful values response to needs of physical health capable of stimulating a grasp existential identity. "
Relph, 1976

" Placelessness describe both an environment without significant places and the underlying attitude which does not acknowledge significance in places. "
Relph, 1976

Sense of Place

Sense of place is the embracing feeling of a space that goes beyond the user's connection with the physical setting of a space or its perception of the user. It can be expressed as more of an experience altogether rather than a mere spatial quality of a space. This sense of place is generated in the mind of the user.

" The catalyst that convert any physical location any environment if you will into a place is the process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by the feelings. "
Relph, 1976

Sesnse of place in urban spaces
Source: Finding Lost Space

The origin of the sense of place in a person's mind is entangled with how a certain space contributes in a positive manner for his experience in the particular space. So in simple terms, we all have a different sense of place for a certain one space. Because sense of place is the projection of a certain place created in every single person's mind with regard to the positive manner of how a particular space responds to our experience.

"Place is the center of meaning, an organized world of meaning, constructed by experience. "
Tuan, 1977

The author hopes you gained some knowledge and an introduction to places and spaces. The comment section is open to start up a discussion and share your knowledge among other readers.

Subscribe and Stay tuned 😊 to receive a notification when we dive deeper discussing more attributes of place.

Reference

Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980). Genius loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli.

Relph, E. (1976). Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.

Trancik, R. (1986). Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design. John Wiley & Sons.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1977). Space and Place. London: Edward Arnold Publishers Ltd.

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Significant places, Placelessness and Sense of Place - Placemaking Guru

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According to the author's studies. There are two main methods that could generate placelessness. The first way is when the built fabric fails to provide any significant places. This lack of significant places results in dead spaces hence decreasing the number of activities happening.

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How wandering can make us feel more connected to a place.

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How well do we think we know our urban landscapes? How do cities make us feel, and how does walking the city help us locate ourselves? In this piece, we delve into the art of psychogeography and explore the simple ways we can shift our perception of the everyday.
Taxi lights stream by like a sea of plankton; people chatter in high-speed Mandarin as they deftly navigate the crowded streets; a group of elderly dancers moves in synchronised steps to Korean pop blasting from a portable stereo; and an advertisement covering the entire face of a building illuminates the scene with the intensity of a spacecraft's searchlights.

Diving underground, I seek refuge in subterranean Shanghai, and it's here that the realisation suddenly hits that I've relocated to a city where I don't know anybody and barely speak a word of the local language. I feel as if I've been airdropped onto the set of Lost In Translation .

The metro map - a mass of colours and lines - swirls into an intoxifying, headache-inducing vortex. So instead I return to street level and I begin to walk.

Shen Zhou, Walking by a Mountain Stream; China, Ming dynasty, ca. 1487-89

Cities, by their nature, are unknowable places. Forever moving and evolving, they're constantly in flux even if outwardly things appear the same. One of the best ways of getting to know a place is by walking, but as walking is no longer convenient, we travel in cars, buses and trains and in turn, lose our ability to organise the city on our own terms. Locked into familiar rhythms, we retrace the same routes over and over, and the city - laden with possibility - closes itself to us.

In 1950s Paris, a group of left-wing artists called for a radical change. Deeming modern architecture both physically and ideologically restrictive, the Situationists sought a new awareness of the city. In 1955, the collective's co-founder Guy Debord coined the term 'psychogeography' to describe the study of how the urban environment influences our moods and behaviours; it was thought that by tapping into these myriad experiences of the city, life itself could be transformed.

Of course, another motivator was the group's desire to disrupt the capitalist system, which they believed was slowly destroying society. Faced with the increasing privatisation of public space, the city was becoming more inaccessible, so in revolt, the Situationists developed a series of experimental strategies to effectively unlock the city.

One of their core practices was the dérive or 'drift' - unplanned, often drunken walks around the city. Through wandering, they encouraged the act of getting lost, straying off the prescribed path and exploring the city free from the confines of predictability and routine. If the drifter had company, the dérive essentially became a combined art of conversation and drunkenness, both of which Debord apparently excelled at (according to his biographer, Vincent Kaufman).

Although the term was coined in 1955, the actual practice of psychogeography likely goes back much further. An early example is the author Thomas De Quincey, who in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) , embarked on drug-fuelled wanders in the capital's 'sphinx's riddles of streets':

"I used often on Saturday nights, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets and other parts of London to which the poor resort of a Saturday night... Some of these rambles led me to great distances, for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time."

Opium den in the East End of London, 1874, Wellcome Collection

Psychogeography and its reimagining of the city also has roots in Dadaism and Surrealism - both art movements which explored techniques of unleashing the subconscious mind. Surrealism, like psychogeography, shows how by shifting our perspective just slightly, the real and the extraordinary collide, or as André Breton put it, they become 'communicating vessels'.

The Situationists believed that by walking the city, the mind is unconsciously guided by the sensory information it encounters en route. According to Debord, the drifter is steered by unconscious markers in the city: "From a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones."

These key psychogeographic points were known as plaques tournantes ('turning places') and by charting their locations in the city, the Situationists argued they could map the ways in which the seemingly dull geography of everyday urban experience gave rise to specific emotions and behaviours.

As well as wandering, the Situationists cut up and manipulated maps and experimented with zany ideas for getting lost, such as hiking Germany's mountainous Harz region using a London A-Z as a guide.

Back in France, they entered the catacombs illegally, navigating its subterranean tunnels and ossuaries, whose existence many Parisians were unaware of beneath their feet. In each instance, their walking practice became one of empowerment, a means of regaining autonomy over their environment and injecting a sense of play into everyday life.

While geography in the traditional sense is about the objective study of the land, psychogeography is concerned with subjectivity, the way our psyche is closely interlaced with the topography of the city. Here's an experience nearly everyone will relate to: you're walking along and suddenly you pass the same street corner where, years ago, something happened.

Isidore Isou, Hypergraphie, polylogue, 1964

Maybe you collided with a lamppost or said goodbye to someone for the last time, or perhaps you fortuitously discovered a £50 note. Through the simple act of passing through a place, the memory instantly surfaces, whether welcome or not.

Sometimes the associations are so strong, as in the case of trauma, that the person will do everything in their power to avoid returning to the place where the event occurred, for fear of reliving their trauma.

As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), places become enmeshed with our identity: "Perhaps it's that you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of fatal decision; the places are what remain, and are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you and in some way you too become them."

Though we often think of our consciousness as being entirely within us, the mind also relies on structures outside the body to help us think. Let's, if you will, imagine a spider:

Seemingly idle, she sits in the centre of her web. Like a labyrinth, concentric lines extend outwards from her static, suspended body. Yet beneath this passive exterior, she's tugging and loosening strands of her silk net, actively manipulating it in subtle ways. In fact, according to new research , spiders don't just use their webs to sense with, they use them to think.

Areas where the web is taut signal where exactly she's focusing attention - and if the web is cut or broken, she immediately recalibrates. According to researcher Hilton Japyassú, it's as if the already-built portions of the web are reminders, or parts of external memory. Cutting the web is equivalent to performing a spider lobotomy.

The reason for this spider detour is that this idea of extended cognition might partly be translated to humans and the way we navigate our own surroundings. Whether consciously or not, we're constantly responding and reacting to our external environments.

The cities we inhabit are scribbled with the ultraviolet ink of our memories, desires and regrets only visible to us, just as they're scored with the familiar paths that we tread. Imagine what your own internal map of your city or neighbourhood would look like. How often do you venture off the beaten track? How often do you walk purely for the sake of walking? How deep into the city does your curiosity take you?

Though I didn't realise it at the time, in Shanghai I was creating my own psychogeographical map of the city, using the aimless walk as a way to reorient myself. Having not yet succumbed to the smartphone life, I named my walks 'Shanghai without Google Maps', willing myself to get lost and discover hidden pockets of the city I knew I wouldn't otherwise find.

By walking Shanghai, I knew which streets to avoid after dark, knew the exact spot for hot sweet potatoes on winter mornings or noodles late at night, and where, buried deep within the maze-like shikumen neighbourhood, a book market was assembling at dawn. I learnt how the streets slotted together and how single streets contained whole universes within themselves.

Even now, six years on, I can still recall those same routes I walked in my mind and feel the exhilaration that lies in not knowing what awaits you round the corner.

Featured image is 'A Wander is Not A Slog' - Blake Morris walking Lizzie Philps' 'Maternity Leaves' an artistic walk included in Ways to Wander (2015) - a book of walking instructions written by members of the Walking Artist Network.

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From the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to modern-day psycho-geographers, walking has long been associated with thinking. Looking at how artists and writers have consistently used walking as a tool to unlock creativity, this is the third piece in a series that explores the inextricable nature of walking and thinking.

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The house is a visual representation of a place that no longer exists. It links to placelessness as it is a familiar architectural form but devoid of purpose. Past residents returning would find the area unrecognisable with only a concrete shell to suggest what's happened. They may feel disconnected due to the loss of landmarks to anchor onto.

It can also suggest placeless as the sculpture is of a terraced house, common to many towns thus representative of almost anywhere.

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Descriptions of British artist Rachel Whiteread's artworks often read like riddles. She makes room you can't enter, stairs you can't climb, and doors you can't open. Her monumental sculptures appear, upon first glance, like familiar architectural forms-yet they're devoid of utility, leaving the viewer to simply look and consider the meaning embedded in plaster and concrete. Reactions have varied widely: In 1993, Whiteread received nominations as both the best and worst artist in Britain.

No sculpture earned her as much simultaneous praise and loathing as House (1993). Situated in East London, the artwork comprised the inside of an entire home, cast in concrete. Ultimately, Whiteread won the prestigious Turner Prize for the sculpture. The artwork, the award, and their attendant publicity launched her career and increased her visibility as one of the country's most ambitious and promising young artists.

For her project, Whiteread chose to work with a home in northeast London that was slated for demolition. The government had chosen to tear down a group of dilapidated dwellings to create more green space for the community, and the artist was able to access the last building standing-recently vacated by one Mr. Sidney Gale, who'd been evicted (he lost a years-long fight to keep his home, and the local council rehoused him nearby). Whiteread entered the condemned structure and went to work, with approval from the local council and Gale. Her resulting sculpture would be in situ, standing precisely where the original property had been. From the beginning, the artist knew House would only be temporary; the government would tear the work down after just a few months to continue the redevelopment plans.

Whiteread and a team, supported by the London arts organization Artangel, worked inside the home, casting the walls using concrete. An interior metal armature supported the sculpture so that it wouldn't collapse in on itself. The artist then removed the exterior of the house ("brick by brick," she told The Independent), leaving only the hardened concrete visible to passersby-a heavy, Brutalist mass. House memorialized not the façade that we're used to seeing, but the more intimate, private details of the interior.

Londoners trekked to the neighborhood to see the massive, multi-story sculpture. The condemned area became a tourist destination. Some of the locals favored House, while others became angry: While they struggled to pay for their own flats, an unlivable structure had received significant attention-and funding. The art world and the local government both voiced dissent in colorful, hyperbolic terms; a council member termed it an "excrescence." The local government voted to demolish the artwork even earlier than originally agreed. It stood for just 80 days-10 days short of the initially agreed-upon exhibition time.

The sculpture's political dimensions helped make it especially divisiveness. House "was a lightning rod for all kinds of public housing debates," says Molly Donovan, curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which recently opened a comprehensive retrospective of Whiteread's works. The show also includes Ghost (1990), which Donovan identifies as the "lynchpin" that paved the way for her later Turner Prize-winning work.

How did Ghost come about? In 1990, Whiteread was a 27-year-old artist earning money off the Enterprise Allowance Scheme-a Margaret Thatcher-designed welfare program that gave a small weekly income to unemployed Brits who set up their own businesses. With additional grant money and thousands of pounds from her own pocket, she set about making Ghost, casting the entire parlor of a vacant North London home in plaster of Paris. Medium-sized, with a fireplace, window, and door, this room reminded Whiteread of her own childhood homes.

The plaster of Paris material, says Donovan, "has an almost neoclassical look. When we think about plaster sculptures we sometimes go all the way back to antiquity." The aesthetic was fitting, of course, for a work that eternalized the history of one particular space. The completed work comprises 86 panels-smooth on the outside, like the walls they replicated, and rough on the inside (though the viewer never sees the interior, where traces of the artist's process remain). There's no top, but Whiteread specifies that exhibition spaces must place Ghost in locations where viewers are unable peer inside from above.

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones posited that Ghost is uniquely British, exuding a "Dickensian chill." "It is the solid trace of all the air that a room once contained," he wrote in 2012. "We wonder at the dark invisible silence within. Vanished lives, lost voices, forgotten loves are trapped in that fossilised room like prehistoric creatures in limestone." Whiteread's sculptural magic, Jones suggested, enlists heavy, colorless plaster to evoke desire, mystery, and death.

In the end, though, it's House-a transient work that exists only in documentation-that remains Whiteread's greatest feat to date. "People were even lobbying in parliament," Whiteread told The Guardian in 2007, recalling public fights to keep the sculpture on permanent view. "There was nothing in the art world that had had that level of publicity before."

House came to a bittersweet end. On the same day Whiteread won the Turner Prize (November 23, 1993), the council decided to demolish her sculpture. Shortly after, a demolition and dismantling engineer razed the work. The televised, highly publicized event-journalists swarmed Whiteread, onlookers scooped up concrete remnants as keepsakes-took about an hour. House, however, had already earned its real estate in the art historical canon.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly stated that Whiteread was awarded the Turner Prize on January 11, 1994; she was awarded the prize on November 23, 1993.

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Rachel Whiteread's "House" Was Unlivable, Controversial, and Unforgettable | Artsy

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Descriptions of British artist Rachel Whiteread's artworks often read like riddles. She makes room you can't enter, stairs you can't climb, and doors you can't open. Her monumental sculptures appear, upon first glance, like familiar architectural forms-yet they're devoid of utility, leaving the viewer to simply look and consider the meaning embedded in plaster and concrete.

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Dan Flavin, Coloured Fluorescent Lights, David Zwirner Gallery

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Creating situations, how we engage with spaces

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Creating situations, how we engage with spaces

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There is a parallel of being engulfed in the gallery space but being focused upon a singular object which can make us feel disconnected from the wold around us.

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A non-place I have probably done more traveling via plane in the past three years than I have in the rest of my life combined. I could thus relate to Skyler Reidy's recent piece at the Front Porch Republic, "Airports [...]

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Jason Reitman's film Up in the Air (2009 film) 

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Jason Reitman's film Up in the Air (2009 film) 

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Shows an extreme example of placelessness, looking at how people with a high rate of air travel feel disconnected from any fixed location which can affect managing their personal lives at home.

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Atopia – Migration, Heritage and Placelessness. 

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Atopia – Migration, Heritage and Placelessness. 

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Atopia is a Greek word used in medicine and philosophy translating as placelessness, out of place and unclassifiable. The exhibition showcases how artists explore not belonging to a fixed location, cultural ambiguity and the dilemmas which result.

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My Art Guides | Your Compass in the Art World

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Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia​​, Calle 24 N. 6

Atopia: Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection is an ambitious exhibition developed in collaboration with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia. Atopia, a word mainly used in medicine and philosophy, literally means placelessness, out of place, unclassifiable and of high originality. It is, in its traditional use, at the same time, a category of otherness, difference, expulsion and exclusion, as it is a reference to the ineffable, the pristine, and the absolute. It is in this double connotation, in which the term becomes a productive figure for thinking in addressing the various ways in which artists have dealt with ideas of place, geography, migration, heritage, translation, the crossing of national, social and cultural borders. The atopic is here but not here, it is a position which denies location, perhaps an attitude that relates to an "original" cultural or social experience but at the same time diffuses it and even negates it.

Thus the exhibition focuses on the practices and representations of the ways in which artists have accessed, rehearsed, participated in and negotiated concepts of "place" or "place of origin," their past, heritage, and cultural ambiguities, with all the dilemmas such notions provoke. Origin / locality is not a neutral point of reference. What seems to be just a geographic denotation, comes with an apparatus of definitions and is grounded in systems of authority. Geography and place-bound symbolisms incorporates a (very rigid) signifying system through which individuals and collectives register and express their identities. As "writing about the earth," the science of geography has traditionally bridged human and physical science to map out places of presence and embodiment. Gradually the geographic denotation of space has shifted in favor of a more fluid and multi-layered meaning, invested with personal and intimate affects and complicated by subjectivities and their interaction. Place-specific and locational narratives have thus become important figures of the artistic expressions of the past decade, but also projective sites of stereotyping and (post-colonial or ethnicizing) simplifications. Artistic exploration of geographies through mappings, landscapes, descriptions of sites, places, collection of cultural objects, historical inscriptions and personal research, as well as the shifting political implications in language, writing and formal representation are at the nexus of the current exploration.

The exhibition looks at the countersides of the processes of aggregation and homogenization and addresses the ways in which a collection of 21st century art is constructed around the various experiences of difference, in which individuals and collectives participate in different cultural processes and realities. It therefore pivots around the specific systems and methods of exchange, translation, and its embedded critiques. A wide ranging production of visual and spatial works catalyze the reexamination of the agency of the artist in the production of such locational inquiries. It also implies strategies for re-claiming certain histories and place-specificities by way of reasserting territorial representations. The way "localism" is understood in this particular context is not as a reaffirmation of common simplifications but is instead based on productive inquiries and internalization of paradoxes and transitions, which evade categorizations or nostalgic impulses. It also shows how shifting political and economic realities have created new tales of places, and how their histories have sparked the impulse to document the rapid processes of transformation set into motion by new "continental shifts".

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Atopia - Migration, Heritage and Placelessness | My Art Guides

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Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia​​, Calle 24 N. 6 Atopia: Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection is an ambitious exhibition developed in collaboration with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia. Atopia, a word mainly used in medicine and philosophy, literally means placelessness, out of place, unclassifiable and of high originality.

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Marissa Lee Benedict & David Rueter, Sarah Rothberg: Placelessness

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Marissa Lee Benedict & David Rueter, Sarah Rothberg: Placelessness

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Immersive installations invite visitors to oscillate between actual and perceived places, perplexing them into what is reality and what isn't. There isn't a 'true' place to hook onto.

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September 20 - October 16, 2016

Featuring interactive installations by an individual artist and a collaborative duo, Placelessness transforms two galleries into immersive environments in which the viewer experiences an oscillation between their sense of actual and virtual space. Visitors entering Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter's bedroom-sized telecom shelter Dark Fiber witness a video projection depicting a cinematic montage of the two artists dressed as laborers, laying an unauthorized fiber optic cable from the Pacific Ocean across the Western landscape, through Chicago, and, strangely enough, into the very telecom structure in which the viewer is sitting.

With its wall-to-wall shag rug, an old swivel chair, a CRT television, and a virtual reality headset with sound, Sarah Rothberg 's installation is immersive to the point of disorientation. Wearing VR goggles, visitors are transported out of the family-room-furnished space into an encapsulating collage-like representation of the artist's childhood home. Their ability to control their exploration through an unusual environment-created by compositing digital 3-D models with old family photographs and VHS home movies-affords viewers an experience not unlike a lucid dream.

Both installations invite visitors to sway in and out of real and perceived places, whether you believe you are connected to a cable stretching across an ocean or looking around a room that isn't there.

Marissa Lee Benedict andDavid Rueter began their collaboration in 2015 with Dark Fiber, first exhibited at Chicago Artists Coalition, and then at Contemporary Art Brussels and EXPO Chicago. The artist team received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2015 for their collaborative project Gary Streetlights. Individually, Benedict has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, UK; the DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago; and Threewalls, Chicago. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rueter's work has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals, including the International Symposium on Electronic Art, and Northern Spark in Minneapolis. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics from Oberlin College, and a Master of Fine Arts in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is Assistant Professor in Art and Technology at the University of Oregon.

Sarah Rothberg lives and works in New York City, where she is the Virtual Reality Experience Director at the Samsung Accelerator and an adjunct faculty member at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as Bitforms Gallery, New York; REVERSE Space, New York; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York; Babycastles, New York; and Grand Central Station. Rothberg received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree in Professional Studies from New York University.

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Placelessness | University Galleries - Illinois State

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September 20 - October 16, 2016 Featuring interactive installations by an individual artist and a collaborative duo, Placelessness transforms two galleries into immersive environments in which the viewer experiences an oscillation between their sense of actual and virtual space.

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Shahpour Pouyan- My Place is the Placeless

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Shahpour Pouyan- My Place is the Placeless

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Explores lack of attachment to a specific place. The Iranian artist took a DNA test and translated the results into ceramic sculptures.

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Shahpour Pouyan: My Place is the Placeless at Lawrie Shabibi, Dubai

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Left hook. “Where are you from?” Right cross. “No,…

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2. Mick yates: Photographer exploring Placelessness

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2. Mick yates: Photographer exploring Placelessness

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How human experience defines place not physical characteristics. The term 'non place' would usually be applied to locations he photographs as they are settings in which we pass through rather than actively experience. However, he  defines these as places due to spending time in them in his youth. Taking photographs allow personal memories to re-emerge but we as an audience wouldn't have the same connection.

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As I have been finalising the book edit, I have increasingly been drawn to maps to help tell the story - both the Khmer Rouge history, and that of the school program. This has prompted me to go back to Edward Relph's Place and Placelessness, a geography classic.

I was introduced to his work by comments in James Tyner's book, The Killing of Cambodia: Geography, Genocide and the Unmasking of Space - an extraordinarily rich and insightful volume.

Tyner described the Khmer Rouge as 'objective outsiders', using space to re-locate an entire population, and re-naming of geography to redefine and upend people's everyday lives.

My notes and comments on Relph's book:
Chapter One: Place and the phenomenological basis of geography
We use human experience to define place, not physical characteristics.
Mick Yates. 1972. Burton Station.
This station was a place that I 'used' as a teenager; not really thinking about it as a place, but rather as part of a journey.

Jim Brogden might call this a 'non-place', like an airport or a part of a disused, declining urban setting that people pass through rather than consciously experience and relate to. That said, as Jim also notes, we do imbue a shared meaning to an airport concourse, related to our experiences and needs, many of which we share with other users. So, it might be a 'non-place' in some ways, but most certainly a 'place' in other people's definitions. On the contrary, we rarely ascribe meaning to a scene of urban decay, other than perhaps as some 'artistic' and artificial photographic composition.

But, in more properly looking at it, experiencing it - it is indeed a 'place' for many people, defined by how they use it and not what it looks like. And it is a place situated in another place; an urban landscape, across the local pork pie factory (which always smelled horribly from the maggots extracted from the pork), and onto Drakelow Power Station, at that time one of the biggest in the UK - and a declared target for Soviet nukes during the Cold War.

So much to unpack, despite the banality of the station.
Chapter Two: Space and Place
Relph wrote of a hierarchy - from the most primitive to the most abstract sense of place.

It forms a useful analytical tool when considering personal experiences of place (and of photographs). Most are quite easy to find examples of.

1. Pragmatic or primitive - instinctive or unselfconscious - though animals might also be able to define 'home' spaces.

2. Perceptual - human reflection on space - based on needs, practices, emotional encounters. Safety, warmth, food.

3. Existential - as members of a cultural group, defining the group or configured to physically manifest its practices. Home, workplace, layout of Balinese villages etc.

4. Sacred - archaic, symbols, meaningful objects, ritualised relationships to the space. Sacred landscape, human-built places of worship, cemeteries.

5. Structural or geographic - analytical, reductionist, scale, relationships of spaces. Use of light, space and movement in a Frank Gehry building.

6. Architectural or planning - considers living spaces, uses, relationships though may leave 'non-spaces' between. Shopping malls, new housing estates, new towns.

7. Cognitive - abstract definitions as objects of reflection, not experiential other than as basis for actual constructs. Architectural sketches, materials development, social studies and research.

8. Abstract - non-Euclidean, theoretical, thought experiments. Mathematical space, time and movement.

Mick Yates. 1973. Wallsend Shipyards.
I remember walking the streets of Wallsend, not too long after we started living in Newcastle, to start my post Uni career at Procter & Gamble. The street were rather run down, and superficially one could use the word 'slum'. But the rows of identical houses were also homes. The meaning they had for the inhabitants was quite different to mine.

Something similar could be said of the shipyards. At that time, they were central to everyone's livelihood. Hardly sacred, but certainly socially essential. Threats to the shipyards were existential.

The yards had grown in a rather higgedly-piggedly fashion, and not obviously planned from the beginning. But it was all functional, and seemed fit for purpose. how did they launch those huge metallic monsters in the River Tyne?
Mick Yates. 1973. Wallsend Shipyards.
Photographically, there were symbols everywhere, vistas to create, and details to capture: the markings on the ship for construction reasons, the graffiti, the local pub and more.

When I took the photographs, I think I was considering it as simple record keeping, as part of my new home area. Alhough I see now that I composed very carefully, most probably for clarity for the viewers of my slide. Looking back, the layering of meaning can be broken into many of Relph's constructs.
Chapter Three: The Essence of Place

Place and location - most places are located but location is neither a necessary not sufficient condition for a place.

Place and landscape - there is some type of appearance - physical and describable form.

Place and time - the place might physically change over time (or not) yet it's meaning might not change (or it might). Clear relationship with time.

Place and community - attachment to 'home' - community and place powerfully reinforce each other - constructed places to link to power and control (3rd Reich, Cathedrals)

Private and personal places - obviously
Mick Yates. 1970. Home, Rolleston on Dove.
My home as a teenager. A place of safety and comfort, yet also a place I wanted desperately to leave.

There is a rootedness and care for such places - a deep familiarity. Home is as profound centres of human existence - paraphrasing Heidegger - ' a deep relationship with places is perhaps as necessary, and perhaps as unavoidable, as close relationships with people '. (pg 41)

But there is also a drudgery of such place - nostalgia - becoming (in the worst case) places of everyday misery. Why one wants to leave, perhaps?

Can I say that my first hall of residence was a 'better' place, in substantive ways?
Mick Yates. 1970. Boddington Hall, University of Leeds.
The essence of place is a centre of action and attention, a ' focus where we experience the meaningful events of our existence'. (Norbert-Schultz, 1971).

In that sense, Boddington became my new focus - new studies, new lifestyle, solo, new girlfriends. And Boddington had a darkroom, my first use of such a place. Boddington, and these building, became places of new experience with (in retrospect) quite deep meaning for me. Existential, almost. Which leads to ...
Chapter Four: On the identify of places
There is a hierarchy in the sense of one's relationship with place, in ascending order:

Existential outsideness - everywhere the same except in superficial qualities (unreality, poetry?)

Objective outsideness - viewed scientifically and dispassionately

Incidental outsideness - place as background to something else

Vicarious insideness - a second-hand experience of place

Behaviourist insideness - deliberate attendance (and analysis) to place

Empathetic insideness - understanding the real meaning of the place

Existential insideness - significance of place without conscious reflection

Mick Yates. 1970. Coal Mining at Albert Village, Derbyshire.
I worked as a 'tallyman', collecting monthly payments from families to prepay for clothes, Christmas presents and more. The mining communities of South Derbyshire were part of my 'patch'. I got to know some of the people living and working there quite well, stopping to chat and have tea. And I saw the mines and the slag heaps, instinctively knowing that they had meaning for the people that lived and worked there. these places were of existential importance to them all. Existential Insideness, for sure. Today, these places do not exist, having been replaced (sic) by self-consciously designed communities. In turn, the occupants are most likely a new form of Existential Insider.

Yet too me, they were just landscapes, urbanscapes, objects that needed composing in the frame.

Vicarious insideness, perhaps?

When I first visited Cambodia, the same mechanism was probably still at work in my photography. But in the recent series, deliberately shot to tell a pre-defined story, other constructs were at play.
Mick Yates. 2019. Kirirom Forest, Cambodia.
Perhaps Empathetic Insideness is at work, here?

In Tyner's view, the Khmer Rouge leadership were objective outsiders, and were not at all insiders or empathetic. Their geographic regions were deliberately designed to destroy previous sense of place and country. And the 4 year plan was totally unrealistic - it was a detailed, all-encompassing list of targets for the population to achieve, without strategies or executional detail.

When things started to fail, instead of changing the plan, the Khmer Rouge turned on their own people as failing to support the revolution. The regime started to consume itself, by again moving people from place to place, using space - and the Killing Fields took on an ultimate meaning.

...........................

It is worth repeating Tyner's notes on Relph:
'Specifically, Relph develops seven-fold typology in an attempt to flesh out the various "experiences of being an insider or outsider". FIrst there is "existential outsiderness" in which all places assume the same meaningless identify and are distinguishable only by their superficial qualities. According to Relph, this is the position that fascinates poets and novelists, who often are intrigued by a "sense of unreality of the world, and of not belonging." A second relationship entails "objective outsiderness" in which all places are viewed scientifically and passively. Objective outsiderness involves a deep separation of person and place, and has a long tradition in academic geography as well as that of military planning and politics. Such a position reduces places either to the single dimension of location or to a space of located objects and activities. "Incidental outsiderness" constitutes a third relationship between experience and place. Here, places are experienced little more than backgrounds for activities and thus, the experience of place is even detached than that of objective outsiderness. Relph provides the example of business persons going from city to city merely to attend conferences and meetings. Place is secondary to the activities at hand; indeed, the identity of the place is little more Than a background for the conduct of other functions." A fourth relationship is that of "vicarious insideness" in which places experienced in second hand way. Relph explains that through paintings or poetry we "enter" into other worlds and other places. Often feelings towards these places are most pronounced when the depiction of specific place corresponds with experiences of familiar places. Fifth, "behaviourist insidedness" involves the deliberate attendance to the appearance of a place. Here one perceives and conceives of a place as a set of objects, views, and activities. Sixth, "empathetic insidedness" occurs when one understands a place to be rich in meaning. Such a position demands a willingness to be open to the significance of a place, to know and respect its symbols. Lastly, according to Relph, "existential insideness" constitutes the most fundamental and "intense" a place as an existential insider, one experiences place without deliberate conscious reflection, yet all the whole knowing that the place is full of significance'. (Tyner, pg 142) Chapter Five: A sense of place and authentic place making
Place is essential to human self-identity, individually and collectively. But there is a distinct difference between a singer (or authentic) sense of place, and a superficial (or inauthentic) one.

Relph writes:
'An authentic person is thus one who is sincere in all he does while being involved unselfconsciously in an immediate and communal relationship with the meanings of the world, or while self consciously facing up to the realities of his existence and making genuine decisions about how he can or cannot change his situation. Such a person stands in fundamental contrast to someone who either denies the fundamental realities of his existence, or explains them away as acts of Fate, the Will of God, the dictates of history, environment, economies, fashion, or whatever. Whereas the authentic person assumes responsibility for his existence, the inauthentic person transfers responsibility to large, nebulous, unchangeable forces, for which lie cannot be blamed and about which he can do nothing.
An authentic attitude to place is thus understood to be a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places - not mediated and distorted through a series of quite arbitrary social and intellectual fashions about how that experience should be, nor following stereotyped conventions. It comes from a full awareness of places for what they are as products of man's intentions and the meaningful settings for human activities, [my emphasis] or from a profound and unselfconscious identity with plac e'. (Pg 64)

Sometimes we have an unconscious but authentic sense of place. For example, the Australian Indigenous view of Ayer's Rock is governed by attention to every detail, which has sacred meaning, and is important to the identity of the individuals viewing and using the place. Martin Buber describes the 'I - Thou' relationship, where the relationship between the subject and object means everything, rather than focus on the two 'parts'.

Relph goes on:

' An authentic sense of place is above all that of being inside and belonging to your place [Relph's emphasis] both as an individual and as a member of a community, and to know this without reflecting on it '. (pg 65)

By contrast, a self-conscious sense of place is useful for understanding and analysis. It becomes 'I - You' in Buber's terms.
Mick Yates. 1970. Canal Street, Derby.
I do not know the people that used to live in this street, but I can only imagine that it was home, and that they felt community. The details - the wallpaper, the TV aerials - show that is was a lived-in place, and of a certain kind. One doubts that the inhabitants thought too much about their home space - other than perhaps to want to find a better one.

Exactly why the Morris had been left there, I do not know. But the scene offers the viewer a chance for conscious (and authentic) documentary and social reflection.

Relph discusses different kinds of construction of place.

First, there are authentically created places, which may be either consciously or unconsciously created, but which gives a system for humans to live, work and play in. An example of an unconsciously created place might be a lovely village on a hillside, built over time, but hardly pre-planned. Castle Combe, perhaps - or even the homes of Wallsend. These places gain authenticity by being lived in.

Athens would be a classic example. Whilst the Acropolis was deliberately designed and placed in situ, the city as a whole was not developed with that kind of foresight.
Mick Yates. 1976. Acropolis, Athens.
A consciously created place might be a model village or town, or a cathedral. The Acropolis itself would qualify, as would so many other buildings and environments.
Mick Yates. 1980. Dome on the Rock, Jerusalem. (Arabic: قبة الصخرة‎ Qubbat al-Sakhrah, Hebrew: כיפת הסלע‎ Kippat ha-Sela).
Florence in the Renaissance, or Paris in the time of Georges-Eugène Haussmann are examples of complex environments, featuring multiple places and spaces, which are both authentic and conscious.
Chapter Six: Placelessness
Relph discusses the 'homogenisation' of the world, in cultural and architectural terms, as things have globalised. Alexis de Tocqueville, back in the 1830s commented that 'variety is disappearing for the human race'. Personally, I think that comment premature.

Whilst it is true that there are many parts and artefacts of today's world that bear a striking similarity to each other, there are also still big differences - as anyone that has observed the remarkable changes in China, and the extraordinary use of architecture and urban planning.

I recall visiting the 'Holland Village' outside of Nagasaki, Japan, in the 1990s. The place is detailed down to the artisanal cheese makers, and working windmills. A significant step up from Disney's Epcot.

Relph would consider both inauthentic tourist spaces - a kind of placelessness. However, as Relph himself notes, Heidegger, even as he discussed Daisen, wrote that both authenticity and inauthenticity are equally valid as modes of being and existence.

' As modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity (these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense) are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterised by mineness'. (Heidegger, 1962: 68)

Heidegger writes of Dasein thus:
Chapter Seven: Experiences of the present-day landscape
Relph argues that we should see 'place' and 'placelessness' as two sides of the same coin, rather than distinct categories of phenomena. If we go back to where he started, defining understanding geography as a phenomenological task, one can see what he means.

Geography, both places and placeless places, is something that we all experience. How we interpret it depends on our inclinations, and, to seem extent, our understanding of the issues. We judge places emotionally, technically, economically and so forth.

I am not going to go into detail about Relph's argument in this chapter, other than to note what he describes as a paradox in present-day landscapes.

' On the one hand, they appear to be confused and comprising of changing patterns; this is especially so for relationships in and between landscapes. on the other hand present-day landscapes often seem to be simple and superficial, naively obvious; this is the case particularly on a small scale and think specific settings '. (pg 135).

It would that unpacking the context, use, symbols, history and so forth are the key to ones' getting to grips with this paradox.
Chapter Eight: Prospects for places Mick Yates. 2019. Kirirom, where Sarath's Father lived and fought (and possibly was killed).
Relph's conclusions stand well the test of time since the book was written.
'... we must explore the possibility of developing an approach for making places self-consciously and authentically. The only alternatives are to celebrate and participate in the glorious non-place urban society, or to accept in silence the trivialisation and careless eradication of the significant places of our lives. And, as Sinclair Gauldie (1969, p.l82) has written: "To live in an environment which has to be endured or ignored rather than enjoyed is to be diminished as a human being."
A deep human need exists for associations with significant places. If we choose to ignore that need, and to allow the forces of placelessness to continue unchallenged, then the future can only hold an environment in which places simply do not matter. On the other hand, we choose to respond to that need and to transcend placelessness, then the potential exists for the development of an environment in which places are for man, reflecting and enhancing the variety of human experience. Which of these two possibilities is most probable, or whether there are other possibilities, is far from certain. But one thing at least is clear-whether the world we live in has a placeless geography or a geography of significant places, the responsibility for it is ours alone '. (pg 147)

A most thought provoking and helpful book

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Header: Mick Yates. 1970. Railway Sidings & Maltings, Burton on Trent.
BUBER, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. London: Charles Scribner.

BROGDEN, Jim. 2019. Photography and the Non-Place: The Cultural Erasure of the City. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

HEIDEGGER, Martin. 1927. Being and Time. 1962 Edition, Macquarrie - Robinson translation. Oxford: Blackwell. Available at http://pdf-objects.com/files/Heidegger-Martin-Being-and-Time-trans.-Macquarrie-Robinson-Blackwell-1962.pdf (accessed 18/09/2019).

MILLS, Sarah. 2003. Michel Foucault. Abingdon: Routledge.

NORBERG-SCHULZ, Christian. 1971. Existence, Space and Architecture. New York: Praeger

RELPH, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. 2008 Edition. London: Sage.

TYNER, James A. 2008. The Killing of Cambodia: Geography, Genocide and the Unmasking of Space. Abingdon: Routledge.

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As I have been finalising the book edit, I have increasingly been drawn to maps to help tell the story - both the Khmer Rouge history, and that of the school program. This has prompted me to go back to Edward Relph's Place and Placelessness, a geography classic.

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Copy and pasting of housing is common sight across the UK. They incorporate little detailing to differentiate them from others. Without the road-sign or postcode you could be anywhere. Is there a point in which repetition becomes too overwhelming and lose our sense of belonging?

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Tract housing, also known colloquially in the United States and Canada as cookie-cutter housing, is a type of housing development in which multiple similar homes are built on a tract of land which is subdivided into individual small lots.

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Representing Placelessness in Literature, Media and Culture

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Representing Placelessness in Literature, Media and Culture

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This report starts by looking at the internet as a means of being unanchored. Up until now I have been looking at physical places but  over the last two decades cyberspace has created new possibilities in creating places and disconnecting ourselves from the real world.

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Déjà Vu that comes with identical places

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Déjà Vu that comes with identical places

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The article explains how globalisation is eradicating local norms creating identical places. It gives an example given by the author where he woke up in a hotel which felt familiar yet he had never stayed in before.

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Glass-and-steel monoliths replaced local architecture. It’s not too late to go back.

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Edward Relph's book Place and Placelessness looks at the idea of insideness and outsideness which I can use to understand the feeling of placelessness. If a person is an insider they feel a strong sense of belonging whilst an outsider feels some sort of lived division or separation between themselves and world. A person moving to a new place may experience alienation due to the physical environment being different or not knowing the cultural/social norms, particularly if they are a minority.

He also suggested that authentic sense of place is being replaced by a forged sense of place. Standardised landscapes with no uniqueness to them allows placelessness to manifest. Chain stores and airports could be anywhere. This leads onto the idea of repetition of these identical places as a way of making the audience feel disorientated and unconnected to a specific place due tot the lack of individuality.

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www.researchgate.net needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

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The report is based upon a 2004 survey conducted by the New Economics Foundation looking into how globalisation, among other factors, is causing the decline of a diverse high street leaving us with soulless shopping districts which could be anywhere. Town centres that have undergone regeneration often lose their distinct facades under the glass, steel and concrete dulness of chain stores.

I'm interested in how clone towns have affected the lived experiences of people. I want to explore the ghost communities which are left behind due to having few or no services left. I'm interest in how I can present disconnection to a place that we used to have a strong relationship with.

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1. What places prompt the feeling of placelessness- are clone towns a good example? How can I make the audience feel unanchored in a space?

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1. What places prompt the feeling of placelessness- are clone towns a good example? How can I make the audience feel unanchored in a space?

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My work throughout the year has been investigating the subject of psychogeography, a term coined by Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 describing the effect of a location on our emotions and behaviours, inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer.
Psychogeogrpahy is a playful and inventive way of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.

It links to my interest in urban spaces, in particular place characteristics and our individual sense of place. I have been focusing  the urban walking practice the derive where we drop our everyday relationships with places and let ourselves be drawn to the unique encounters that we find there such as an inviting street or architecture.

I'm currently reading The Language of Cities by Deyan Sudjic which has given me a potential starting point for my FMP. It  looks at the factors that make cities what they are and also points to the fact that globalisation is eroding place character thus leading to the creation of homogeneous cities which can make us feel placelessness. One such example is 'clone towns' where the individuality of the high street has been eroded and looks identikit to others due tot the surge in the number of chain stores.  It lacks genius loci (spirit of a place) due to the lack of uniqueness.

I want to explore placelessness and how encounters with such spaces make us feel unanchored due to being devoid of a relationship. Does lived experience in a place can help shift us from feeling placelessness to having a strong sense of place?