Devour me, Territory
Essays on Topophilia
Have you ever obsessively fallen in love with a place?
When returning is no longer enough; when you want to get closer, stay longer, know every surface, every repetition, every minor change. When affection turns into attachment, and attachment into a method.
This semester starts from the proposition that such an attachment can be cultivated. Perhaps even performed.
Let’s take a small detour.
In film studies we encounter the term cinephilia: the love of cinema. Cinephilia has a long and peculiar history in film culture. It names more than an appreciation of films; rather it describes a particular mode of attachment, a way of being intimately close to the filmic material to the point where it might even become obsessive.
In this regard, Laura Mulvey’s notion of the possessive and the pensive spectator offer a useful figure: the spectator who does not simply let the moving image pass, but stops it, holds it, repeats it, extracts fragments from it, and lingers with it. The image becomes something to return to, something to possess, something to think through, something to make your own.1
But what if we extend this mode beyond the screen? What would it mean to redirect this gesture toward a room; a particular site; a place? Not merely to admire it, but to stalk it, to desire it, to inhale it through and through; to return to it until it becomes familiar, strange, intimate, excessive. To fall for a place catastrophically: badly, irrationally, obsessively.
Let’s call this topophilia – for the moment.
This semester will be an experiment in cultivating such a close and intense topophilic relationship with a place. We will use essayistic methods – or rather, the unmethodical method of the essayistic – to get obsessively close to a place of desire. Rather than approaching the place as a stable object of research, we will allow our methods to become entangled with it, to circle around it, get lost in it, repeat ourselves, follow digressions, and see what forms of knowledge and embodied insights emerge from sustained attention.
Throughout the semester, we will read essential texts on the essay as a practice within literature, film, and audiovisual media, establishing a foundation for translating essayistic thinking into spatial realms. This is complemented by a series of recurring tasks, exercises, and experiments, with the aim to gradually build a situated relationship with our chosen place.
We will explore different ways of capturing and performing this relationship through writing, video, photography, 3D scanning, mapping, and other forms of spatial recording. These media will not simply document the place; they will become lenses through which our growing attachment to it can be tested and made tangible.
Finally, we will also work with artistic research and publishing infrastructures such as the Research Catalogue (RC) of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), using them as media sites in which to stage and publish our experiments.
1See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2007).
Dates:
tba
