I’m sharing
a text called ”Some Times of Space” by Doreen Massey. The article was originally
published in 2003, and I encountered it as it is part of the publication Time
appearing in 2013 in the Documents of Contemporary Art series. The publication
was recommended to me by the curator Maaretta Jaukkuri as I was looking for reading
suggestions on the topic of narrativity and contemporary art.
I enjoy
reading the text by Doreen Massey for several reasons. Firstly, it tackles the
topic of temporality from the perspective of movement and elaborates on the
connections between space and time in a thought-provoking way. Massey approaches
movement in space as an intertwining of ongoing trajectories. Instead of perceiving
movement as it often is understood, as a spatial representation, a line drawn
on the map from place A to place B, the text considers movement as a series of
encounters where all the parties are constantly changing and living their own
temporalities. The places are newer the same as in our last visit, and in the
meantime, we have also changed. “An encounter is always something on the move”, Massey writes.
Second, the
text is also easily approachable as it refers to concrete examples that we all
can relate to: traveling, encounters with different places and weather
conditions.
All in all,
the text conveyed a very concrete and insightful understanding of places as a
plurality of intertwining trajectories on the move. The perspective of movement
is very useful for my investigation on the practices of public art. Massey also
makes an interesting point about the spatialization of meaning, that we are
used to thinking representation in terms of space. This was also the concern of
Henri Bergson, the philosopher who was concerned about the topic of temporality,
stating that language ”always translates movement and duration in terms of
space,” and ”The more consciousness is intellectualized, the more matter is
spatialized.” This notion made me reflect on the parameters of representation,
on how our understanding of meaning is constructed.
Bibliography:
Massey,
Doreen. ”Some Times of Space.” In Time. Documents of Contemporary Art, edited
by Amelia Groom, 116–122. London
& Cambridge: Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2013.
