Abstract

The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan denotes the symbiotic relationship of space/place when he explains, “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” In the last fifty years, artists developed a discourse of earthworks and site-based arts that have sought to transform landscape. Ultimately, I argue, this transformation of landscape may lead to a spatial disappearance into place, as when Baudrillard warns: “By their exceptional faculty for knowledge, human beings, while giving meaning, value, and reality to the world, at the same time begin a process of dissolution ('to analyse' means literally 'to dissolve').”
By considering Husserlian strategies of adumbrational theory, this paper is an enquiry into the experience of unfamiliar spaces – those ripe with meaning. In order to uncover and produce an imagining of space, this investigation seeks to explore site without colonising, physically altering, or hastening its dissolution.
Investigating momentary glimpses into space – this practice facilitates brief experience vis-à-vis journey and imagining the potential shape of site. Through durational praxis, creating video works which combine the documentation of movement through space while re-joining and altering aspects to allow viewers to imagine alternate ways in which to encounter location or indeed how site might be conceived without dissolution.