Spaces of Refraction - Ella Harris
Three
Geographical Encounters
Premises:
1.
“The site is defined by relations
of proximity between points or elements”
2.
“one
could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites
of rest—the house, the bedroom, the bed, et cetera. But among all these sites,
I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in
relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize,
or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or
reflect.”
(Foucault,
Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias and Utopias)
The mirror is a semi-real/semi-unreal site. It is real because it takes up a literal
portion of spacetime, it occupies an actual site in a given room. However, the
mirror is also virtual because it has
the potential to take on countless images, and unreal because it shows things where
they are not. In ostensibly displaying you in your own real site the mirror
actually transports your image over there
– reframing it in a curious elsewhere, where it is given a new site and takes
on a whole new set of relations and therefore characteristics, changing your
image before you have a chance to catch it. The mirror is therefore a not a
space of reflection: its surface is one which refracts, bends and distorts what
it shows by a process of theft and motion, taking what is and transfiguring it into something else, in its passage
via the virtual.
For Foucault, there are certain spaces, which he names ‘heterotopias’,
that function like mirrors, in that their relations with other sites have a
transformative effect. The relational connections that heterotopias have with other
sites are not relations of affirmation or propping up, a neighbourly proximity
that secures each’s place – they are relations of questioning and destabilisation;
relations which cast a critical light upon all spaces and their relations. As Foucault suggests, even the most seemingly
circumscribed of sites, ‘the house, the bedroom, the bed’ can have this
transformative power.
Akerman’s early work demonstrates a fixation on the
interiority of precisely these places, the bed, the bedroom and the apartment. This is spelled out in La Chambre but
more acutely explored in Je Tu Il Elle
and Saute Ma Ville and 15/8.
La Chambre - Eve Marguerite Allen
