MOVESCAPES Geographies of Mobility between Space and Representation In 2009 La Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporaine hosted an exhibition entitled Terre Natale. Ailleurs commence ici. The aim was to propose a reflexion on the notions of being rooted and uprooted in the contemporary world, as well as related questions of identity. The exhibition was thought and organised in a strongly contrastive way, as its spatial organization reveals: the film-maker and photographer Raymond Depardon was selected to explore the theme of native land and its implications, through visual installations, films and photographies. The section about uprooting and dislocation – the one I chose today as starting place for my lecture – was assigned to Paul Virilio. This section was organised in two rooms, both realising a strong effect of presence on the viewer, each in a peculiar way and at a different scale. In the first room the viewer is thrown in a visual tornado of clips on almost fifty screens suspended from the ceilings, that are choreographed according to visual effects such as colour, speed, rhythm or image composition. A multiplicity of moving images portraying moving bodies invests the viewer, whose gaze moves from one screen to another, in the impossible attempt to control that flowing of images which affect his perception. The second room is entirely dedicated to cartography, proposing a dynamic visualization of global human migrations and their causes via a circular and immersive projection. The installation, realised by the artists and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, surrounds its viewers with the repetitive motion of a globe that circles the room as it spins; with each orbit, it writes and rewrites translations of different aspects of the migration data into maps, texts and trajectories. In this immersive environment, the visitor is literally surrounded by dynamic and unstable maps, on which transforming lines, fluxes and waves of points, changing surfaces and planes, continuously challenge the fixity of traditional cartographic representations. One of these panoramic narratives represents the mass exodus from areas of war. Waves of green pixels move across the screen and all of the movement slowly traces a map, locating refugees and asylum seekers in a world mutable as never before. A short message on the bottom of the screen expresses the scale of the map, a scale which is not made of distances, as usual, but bodies: “Un pixel vert représente dix réfugiés/one green pixel represents ten refugees”. Each pixel displays/displaces ten bodies, presenting under the eyes of the visitor not a world which is simply crossed by an ever increasing number of people on the move, but a world which in the move is incessantly reproduced. Each of these moving bodies – as Derrida wrote in his Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas – contains a distress and a call for a change in the socio- and geo-political space, in the sense of an ethical conversion, a call that cannot longer ignored. In this frame, the aim of the work I will present you today is not only to articulate a theory of movement and its possibilities of re-presentation in a geographical perspective, but to propose a radical rethinking of spatiality through movement, or rather, starting from it. To do so, my indispensible starting point is the body. Referring to it and trying to keep this reference along all the path of reasoning, I can avoid falling into two main misunderstandings, strongly enrooted in western tradition. First, that space is neutral and objective. If body, as Roland Barthes argued, is “the irreducible difference”, and if every space is embodied, that is produced and perceived through body, then space is always meaningful, because it is entrenched in subjective experience. As noted Irit Rogoff: Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture. Second: that space, mobility and their theoretical definition are anything but abstract. A dynamics of space cannot ignore that beyond its conceptual apparatus there is the body, and that every body is merged in history and time. To remove the plot of different dimensions in which it is involved or to dissolve its peculiarities into a general theory of dislocation is to fail. In this respect, I am not interested in making a nomadology. Therefore, the body occupies a space, which is a positional space or, according to the Greek thought filtered by Martin Heidegger, a topos. Nevertheless, space doesn’t terminate with body, it doesn’t remain enclosed in it, of course not. At the time that it forces its own boundaries and moves from its original position, the body produces another space, a space of extension and openness, a chora, continues Heidegger. Moving out of itself, the body generates a spatial interval which is anything but vacant. It is precisely in this movement that space comes into existence. For me, the sense of space is entirely enclosed in this step. Space is not a closure, as geographers usually affirm; conversely, it is an opening. Space doesn’t originate from a border positioning, but from a border crossing. Movement is not a breaking into a pre-existing space. No space, in fact, would exist without an original movement producing it: the body comes out of itself, it spaces, and it is precisely in this dislocation that the spatiality is brought into being. This outward movement doesn’t represent a taking possession nor a desire of expansion or domain. Conversely, it should be thought as a leap into the unknown. Spacing, the subject looses any possibility of control. Spacing in fact literally means exposing, that is posing themselves in an unknown outside, experiencing a radical exteriority. In this respect, the category where I found these concepts thought and related in the most incisive way is the espacement (spacing) of Jaques Derrida, I quote: Spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed in itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or in its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other. […] «spacing» designates not only interval, but a «productive», «genetic», «practical» movement, an «operation», if you will. Spacing is neither space nor time, it is a productive movement. This movement works as an interruption in self-identity. In June 1971, during an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and, some months later, in the exchange of letters that followed, Jaques Derrida underlined the necessary interrelation between spacing and alterity. Out of itself, beyond its own borders, the body runs up against other bodies. And, perhaps, it is precisely in these encounters that the sense of spacing is contained. For me, this sense is vividly expressed in the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. Unlike in many other philosophical considerations about spatiality, the space of Lévinas is neither a metaphor nor an abstract category. It is a space soaked by bodies, gazes, faces, gestures, which continuously cross it with all their materiality, producing and making it meaningful. This space is not a void, but its plenitude nowise returns it to the status of object. Neither concept nor object, space in fact is of another order: it is a modality of separation. Space is always the product of a relationship, between the Self and the external world, between the Self and the Other. In this respect, movement is not only its productive force but also the condition of its existence. This dynamics is efficaciously expressed in some reflections about the dwelling, to which Lévinas devoted one chapter in Totalité et Infini. Home is the product of a movement which leads the subject to retreat, to enclose in its own intimacy. But this retreat is not the end of human activity but its precondition, I quote: Man abides in the world as having come to it from a private domain, from being at home with himself and from which at each moment he can retire. He does not come to it from an intersidereal space where he would already be in possession of himself and from which at each moment he would have to recommence a perilous landing. But he does not find himself brutally cast forth and forsaken in the world. Simultaneously, without and within, he goes forth outside from an inwardness. Home is at one and the same time the result of a process of retreatment and the start of an opening movement: it is refuge from the external world and base for its exploration, place of rest and departure. Inside of it recollection and hospitality, intimacy and exteriority, become two different modalities of the domestic existence. The overturning is crucial: the most identitarian (?) space is reopened, uncovering in the Other its own essence: “The chosen home – observes Lévinas – is the very opposite of a root. It indicates a disengagement, a wandering which has made it possible, which is not a less with respect to installation, but the surplus of the relationship with the Other.” To dwell is to be separated. Separation, in fact, is positively produced in localization. The Self is in front to the Other, face to face. Between them, a distance, a space. Without such space, no authentic relationship would be possible. This distance – interval of space – is the essential condition of difference and multiplicity. Pluralism can be produced only if the individual maintain their separateness and secrecy, if their relation is not graspable from the outside nor from the inside, just proceeding from one unto the other. This space which relates and separates the Self and the Other is guarantee of this dynamics. For it cannot be suppressed nor dissolved: its role is crucial. Space in Lévinas is event of the Other. It interrupts the certainties of the Self, putting into question his control over the things. This space is not a safety zone, a homogeneous extension where individuals face each other, but a field of tensions, made of breakings, curvatures and violent asymmetries. It is the realm of unexpected or – if you prefer – the sphere of possibility. Space has a productive force, which we cannot entirely control, predict or understand. Contrary to what happens to the sovereign subject of Henri Bergson, who manage his space approaching or distancing the external objects without any real possibility to be affected or even surprised by them, in this space of openness and possibility we are irremediably exposed, fragile in a way. Space exceeds our expectations, it displaces us. The idea of the Infinity implied and required in the relationship with the Other has its spatial correlative in an irreversible border crossing and in its consequent openness. And if “to think the infinity” – as writes Lévinas - “is in reality to do more or better than thinking”, then starting to think open, different and plural spaces is something more than a theoretical effort. The significance of this is obviously political. So, we come to the second part of my PhD project, which can be shortly summarised in three questions: if in producing, perceiving, and experiencing spatiality, movement plays a key role, being its very condition of possibility, what happens when it is translated into the spaces of representation? Can maps and drawings hold the movement on their surfaces? Which effects of presence can cartography produce? In the attempt of articulating the answers, I started to collect these movescapes, or cartes dérive as Christine Buci-Glucksmann defines them, artistic maps or geo-performances able to challenge traditional cartography, opening up a space for thinking about movement and representation in new and critical ways. The installations curated by Paul Virilio at the Fondation Cartier from which I started my lecture will be part of this atlas of displacement. Once, Edward Said wrote that the “struggle over geography is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.” Wars, battles, occupancies, are not the only forms of struggle. At the same time, the struggle over geography is fought over another ground, a ground of representations, maps, narrations and discourses, where geographical imaginations have been contending a space of visibility and achievement. And if geographical imaginations have always a performative force (Gregory), then we have to rethink spatiality in a world in which “all real geographies are imagined and all imagined geographies are real” (Soja, Hooper 1993, 196). Drawn on a map or produced in the real world, in fact, spaces are always expression of an order that prescribes not only positions (where you are: inside/outside, centre/margins) but also movements (where you can go and where not). Sometimes though, artistic interventions can interrupt and alterate the logic of dominance and power, inventing spaces of otherwise and radical openness. “Without such spaces – warns bell hooks – we would not survive. Our living depends on our ability to conceptualize alternatives, often improvised. Theorizing about this experience aesthetically, critically, is an agenda for radical cultural practice” (bell hooks 1990, 148-9).
