TAI-E3156 - Approaches to Writing, Lecture, 25.4.2022-23.5.2022

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.