Imagine yourself remembering something. Now imagine yourself imagining memories. It has been less than a month since i visited a Mitsuo Miura public intervention in a globally posh setting, Madrid's Cristal Palace as curated by the Reina Sofia Museum. A mostly empty space with soft-colored circumferences suggested to me as either podiums or umbrellas, situating me for say, a picture, or as a shade-seeking someone in at a summer-hot spring. Where and under what I stand were important loci of how I related to the space I was in and especially to how the work of art was transforming such space. However, this wasn’t a solipsist universe, I would soon be reminded: my mother who insisted a picture should be taken in such and such pose, the guard that impeded me or any other from sitting on the circumferences (stand-only postures, please), the woman I almost hit while I walked in reverse staring at the glass ceiling… The production of space was beyond my controls and desires. Yes, I was in Spain, in Madrid, where some great great male ancestor had once walked through the courts before me and my mother had traveled through other means and purposes all the way back to reinvigorate our bonds. The space I was at was a collective construction.
I bring this to mind because I
have carried a leaflet of the exhibition inside my diary since the first day of
class, hinting its association with this class, but without being able to relate
it in a concrete fashion. Despite being a white male I always felt dispossessed
of something important, transcendental, essential. I was brought up in a “white”
all-male school and built an outsider identity for 12 years. “white” in
quotation marks because that was what all the boys were trying to be in the
Colorado-Benedictines-founded institution, not strictly correspondent to
hitlerian tone-of-skin standards. Although probably the cheapest bilingual
(English-Spanish) "international" schools, the poorest families were middleclass, but most came
from the higher income elite. Outside that space I would later learn I could
fit in, but it was through exclusion that I learned to relate to others. I
learned to distrust the self-centered and self-secure displays of identity and
to sympathize or even commune with monsters and almost anything abject. That is
still, broadly speaking, how I know the world and how I develop interests about
it.
In a way ports have become
important for the reasons mentioned, they’re a way of scape. Centraal, Holland
Spoor, Laan van NOI were my first referents of the city.
Of course, they were my port of entry but they have become also the way to exit
it. Those came up first on my list of spots outside-the-ISS-bubble, to be
followed by parks, the cinema, and places of worship. All places I frequent
mostly by myself but that I am happy to share every now and then with those who
are willing. Not that I don’t worship Haneke or von Trier or even cinema itself,
nor do I go to the mosque to worship Allah or to an Evangelic or Catholic
Christ.
These subjectivities were not
accounted for. I did not mention them to my mapping group, nor were they
collectively discussed into a particular category. The taxonomy into which
consensus was allocated excluded, probably due to time constraints, a more
pluralistic classificatory logic. I will never know if someone else understood
ports similarly or if it is through sentiment that another order of reality
might be achieved.
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