PLACE AND SPACE

This section will sum up and formalise the understandings of the concepts of place and space introduced explicitly or implicitly in all of the five articles. Much like themes of identity and community, narratives of place became increasingly central from one research encounter to another. They “traveled” from the notion of home and belonging to a place, especially, in Articles 1, 2 and 3, towards the more abstract understandings of an artwork as a place/space and representation of places through narrative and artistic practices, in Articles 1, 4 and 5.

The spatial turn

The interplay between the understandings of place and space has been ongoing in interdisciplinary theory and practice for over two decades (e.g. Massey, 1994; Kaye, 2000; Kwon, 2002; Rendell, 2007). This has to do with the spatial turn of the early 1980s that coincided with the previously mentioned narrative turn and emphasised the “power relations implicit in landscape” (Guldi, n.d.), particularly in the works of Foucault, Lefebvre and de Certeau. Disciplines such as geography, anthropology, cultural studies, history, art and architectural theory have been drawn into debates on the city, which led to reformulation of “the ways in which space is understood and practised” (Rendell, 2007, p. 12). Lucy Lippard (1998) defines place “from within”, putting emphasis on the human perspective, as

“a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar . . . ‘the external world mediated through human subjective experience’” (p. 7). Space is understood as “socially produced”

(e.g. Lefebvre, 1991). De Certeau (1984) arrives in his work to the understanding of space as a “practised place” (p. 117), exemplifying further that a street, a place defined by a city planner, becomes transformed into a space by walkers.

According to de Certeau (1984), space “occurs” through the practices that, among other attributes, “temporalise” a place, add the dimension of time through which spatiality is established (p. 117). The transformation of places into “socially practised” and “temporalised” spaces was central to my study. It is argued specifically in Articles 2 and 4 that narrative, art-making and documentary practices can mediate such transformations.

Through the course of the above-mentioned interdisciplinary spatial turn,

“identity and place became central to discussions of space” (Rendell, 2007, p. 35).

Spatiality and politics of space impact strongly on the identity formation of individuals and communities (Massey, 1994, p. 7). For example, as noted by Saskia Sassen (2006), certain urban spaces outside hegemonic city structures may contribute to the citizens’s identity work and sense of belonging:

...cities contain a diversity of under-used spaces, often characterised more by memory than current meaning. These spaces are part of the interiority of a city, yet lie outside of its organising utility-driven logics and spatial frames. They

are “terrains vagues” that allow many residents to connect to the rapidly transforming cities in which they live… (p. 1)

The world’s rapid change through migratory and globalising processes affected the understandings of placeness and spatiality leading to “intensifying conditions of spatial indifferentiation and departicularization—that is, the increasing instances of locational unspecificity—are seen to exacerbate the sense of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life” (Kwon, 2002, p. 8). A good example of such spatiality is digital space, as defined by Mitra and Watts (2002) as a “discursive space produced by the creative work of people whose spatial locations are ambiguous and provisional” (p. 486). The digital spatiality can be criticised due to its many qualities, such as partial or perceived anonymity and depersonalisation, but also valued due to its vast potential for inclusivity and outreach, empathy building, and fostering lasting relationships and knowledge transfer beyond spatial boundaries in the context of community-based projects, as argued in Article 5.

2.2.1. Place and migrations

Attempts have been made to theorise the new transforming relationships between subject/object and location (e.g. Frampton, 1983; de Certeau, 1984;

Jameson, 1990; Lefebvre, 1991; Lippard, 1998). A critical approach to space derives from the assumption that a collective identity, a collective narrative of an urban space, is constructed from a plentitude of personal narratives interwoven together. Doreen Massey (1994) notes about the parallels and likenesses between the nature of personal identities and that of place: “Just as personal identities are argued to be multiple, shifting, possibly unbounded, so… are the identities of place” (p. 7). From the point of view of human geography, Massey (2005) embraces the shift, the temporality and the “loss of meaning” in the old understandings of place. She questions the perceived stability of place-bound identities: “How long do you have to have been here to be local?” (Massey, 2005, p. 149).

This is a great question without an obvious answer, which implicitly touches upon the notions of memory and historical narratives, place, community and identity. Indeed, the forms and circumstances of movement and staying are highly divergent and impact both on an individual and her external life worlds (Ahmed, Castada, Fortier, & Sheller, 2003). Although some scholars question whether the contemporary situations of constant “ungrounded transience, of not being at home (or not having a home), of always traveling through elsewheres” may have a deteriorating effect on the constitution of the self (Kwon, 2002, p. 156). Ravetz and Webb (2009) argue that forms of migrations tend to be “intentionally sought after and prepared for, or unexpectedly encountered” (p. 15). Thus, an individual does to an extent have an agency in her construction of self even when undergoing situations of “ungrounded transience”. Throughout the study, and especially in Articles 2, 3 and 4, the processes of movement and staying were investigated with the research participants in relation to the way these processes impact on the identities of the “movers” and the places they relate to, newly inhabited or those left behind. Specifically, Article 2 addresses the narratives of forced migration that has impacted on the sense of place for many Aboriginal communities, while Article 4 draws conclusions on the fluctuating identities of urbanised Arctic environments that have been shaped through centuries of human movements.

Sara Ahmed and her colleagues (2003) refer to this constellation of movements away and towards places as “uprootings” and “regroundings”. I find a wider term migratory practices more fitting to my study contexts. It is used in literature (that is, however, quite limited at this point) to describe a variety of processes that go beyond mere physical or political movements, such as discursive processes between remote communities across space and time, as discussed by Domingo (2011, p. 224). Much as contemporary identity scholarship has been deconstructing the dichotomies of “self-otherness” and beyond, Ahmed and her co-authors (2003) conceptualise migratory processes in order to blur the

distinction between “here” and “there”: “Where or what is ‘there’? Is it necessarily not ‘here’? How long is ‘there’ a significant site of connection? And for whom?

How far away is ‘there’?” (p. 4). This study, too, contributed to the understanding of a plurality and simultaneity of places acting in a complex landscape of interrelated spaces: from physical ones in the present, through mental spaces of the past, memories and the imaginary that manifested in the narratives analysed in all the five articles, to digital “timeless” spaces, which are more thoroughly discussed in Article 5.