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B+WThis stream with its lush vegetation was a welcome relief to
the previous landscapes, offering a space for reflection.Pillars of salt, looming up next to the sea, bringing to mind the story of Lot’s wife, reminding me to never look back.
allows space to reframe, and tell my story.
On a recent visit to Spain, I was struck
by the variety of mini landscapes I
encountered within a short distance of
each other, from the monumentalism of
the cactus gardens, and their possible
anthropomorphic reading, to the salt flats
glinting in the late afternoon sun, and the
dark cool streams and verdant growth
offering a cool retreat from the heat. They
all give voice to my current needs. Having
returned, I am still able to sense these
places, the memory of them is not purely
visual, I can still feel the heat and smell the
herbs on the hillsides. Talking about this
with others helps form a visual soundtrack
and, all of these combined, form a more
haptic reading which I can reach out and
almost touch. Using the whole body as a
locus of perception, enables us to bring our
voice to the fore.
The transience of spaces and the people
that once occupied them is often tangible
at these sites. In her study of time, Helga
Nowotny talks about the ‘extended present’,
an uninterrupted unfolding of ‘now’, which
pays no heed to the future or ‘post now’,
leading to a lack of distance between the
present and the past. This is how we hold
our memories of place. Of course, we need
to be aware that memory as narrator means
that recall is never going to be neutral.
Human memory stores information in a
way that is meaningful to the individual
depending on how they see themselves inthe world. We extract underlying meaning
from information that is presented to us
that best fits our schema. Our voice is
subjective; it shouldn’t be any other way.
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