The Unavailable Image of Spatial Empathy

Beneath Our Skin: The Unavailable Image of Spatial Empathy


How might a gap between subjectivity and location be presented within the image to create zones for other relationships to be formed between them?
A missing experience of empathy and its image creates a broken connection, an "un-relation" to space, as a representation of a mental state, these feelings of the uncanny often describe the unrecognizable conditions of urban space. However, the impossibility of relating to space remains more about conditions than relationships between subjectivity and reality. Concepts such as empathy and the uncanny (especially in relation to undefined territories, architecture, and urban environments) have often been described from subject-oriented perspectives. In some works of artists, even though their contexts vary from historic to commercial urban spaces to traumatic forced spaces, they offer unique aesthetic approaches that release subjectivity from imposed sympathetic relationships to space. I see possibilities not only for several different ways of expressing dynamics of time and space, but—perhaps more importantly—a possibility for gestures that constitute "non-relationships" with space. The conditions that require specific gestures and aesthetic languages as core components of their becoming. If we understand space as a given set of meanings, then we naturally assume an existing relation between spaces and subjects. But perhaps there are moments—conditions of space—in which subjectivity relates to space through an incompleteness, though infinitely incomplete gestures. (ref.: www.e-flux.com/journal/view/16)