NO PLACE
Alison Yip, Emily Ludwig Shaffer and Quintessa Matranga
8.2 -30.3 2019
EMILY LUDWIG SHAFFER
EMILY LUDWIG SHAFFER
EMILY LUDWIG SHAFFER
ALISON YIP
Courtesy of L'INCONNUE and Monte Clark Gallery
ALISON YIP
Courtesy of L'INCONNUE and Monte Clark Gallery
QUINTESSA MATRANGA
QUINTESSA MATRANGA
QUINTESSA MATRANGA
ALISON YIP
Courtesy of L'INCONNUE and Monte Clark Gallery
ALISON YIP
Courtesy of L'INCONNUE and Monte Clark Gallery
Three ruminations on no place
I) It’s so easy to think we know a place.
To speak of it off-hand as this or that: ‘this place is always so busy or
boring or loud’. When in fact places are always changing. Weather moves over
the earth, casting its shadows. And the earth itself, with its hot liquid outer
core, never stops spinning. Considered in terms of geologic time, our feet
hardly touch the ground.
Before 6500 BC, a strip of dry land
connected Great Britain to the mainland of Europe. Hunters followed mammoth and
reindeer across the mudflats and saltmarshes, and the Seine and the Rhine
flowed together there to become one big river heading out to sea. Eventually
the weather warmed and the water flooded the land. Today it is still coming,
lapping away at the shore fronts and eroding the beaches as the island becomes
ever more islanded.
II) Regardless of how it changes over
time, at any given moment a place can mean different things to different
people. A place may not really feel like it is anywhere in particular, yet it
can become gravely important. How effortlessly a strip of land can be traversed
by a lizard zigzagging over the sand or by those with the right accident of
birth. For the rest, an invisible chasm spelling out life or death.
The globe shrinks for
those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or
refugee, no distance more awesome than the few feet across borders or
frontiers. (Homi Bhabha, in an
essay for Artforum in 1992).
When walls are built to enforce a place,
they often divide sacred, ancestral land with catastrophic consequences to the
lives of those who have lived there for centuries. They also dissect routes
invisible to us but vital to animals. In the Sonoran desert, a herd of
pronghorn sheep started to disappear at the US Mexico border because the
fertile males were trapped on one side of the fence and the females on the
other. Deer are caught and mangled by the razor wires separating Serbia and
Croatia.
III) “If you believe you’re a citizen of
the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere”, says the current British Prime
Minister. Sunshine, the ocean, and flocks of migrating birds all have this in
common.
The sun shines
through my windows with no difficulty as they are wide open. I try to touch the
light but it disappears at that very moment; all I do is make shadows with my
fingers. Then I think that the world is somewhere else, in Mexico, in India…
Why should it always be in a named place? Why should it, altogether, be? (the painter and poet Etel Adnan, writing in her book
In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country).
Place resists the boundaries we attempt to
place on it. I form an ‘O’ with my arms and here’s a place - a pool of water,
reflecting the sky. In that case, it’s a perfect circle of nothing: no place.
Or it could be on fire and dripping a wax-like fruit. Or all the mysteries of a
desert night, wrapped neatly into a cardboard box.
Frances
Loeffler, 2019