Friends of the Westminster Reference Library welcome you to their place. Watch their videos and discover what is the life of a library today. (More coming soon)
4 key citations from the short and very interesting book written by Marc Augé in1995 (contemporary philosophy and anthropology):
“If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. Supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”
“Our towns have been turning into museums (restored, exposed and floodlit monuments, listed areas, pedestrian precincts) while at the same time bypasses, motorways, high-speed trains and one-way systems have made it unnecessary for us to linger in them.”
“Motorway travel is thus doubly remarkable: it avoids, for functional reasons, all the principal places to which it takes us; and it makes comments on them [texts planted along the way side]. Service stations add to this information, adopting an increasingly aggressive role as centres of regional culture, selling a range of local goods with a few maps and guidebooks that might be useful to anyone who is thinking of stopping.”
“A person entering the space of non-place is relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does and experiences in the role of passenger, customer or driver [...] he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same entreaties.”
The Welcome to My Place project is launched! Check out the first contributions here and please feel free to add your own videos.
The aim of the project is to encourage people to film the places that matter to them. Workshops will be organised to better understand the meaning of ‘places’ through the usage of videos. Please contact me if you would like to collaborate. I’m looking for artist cartographers, communities, professionals and academics interested in the study of places and their subjective relations.
