Hunting
I've been looking at a lot of apartments lately - there's something so odd about looking into some one else's domaine when they're not there and trying to imagine superimposing your life on it. You see how people create a world, filled with memorabilia and mess. Something about creating an identity through objects... but then it gets wiped clean when you move on, leaving a blank slate for the next occupant. But the space bears the scars of the previous person, holes in the walls where pictures hung, odd packages of leftover food in the cupboards, a handprint on a doorframe...
How we make our mark on our immediate world, what we chose to clean up and hide and what we don't even notice as our effect.
posted by Anonymous @ 8:23 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
do you look at their mail? at the writings and quotes on the fridge?
It's an awkward thing... you feel so invasive but at the same time you want to know what it's like to live somewhere.
I found that smells tell me a lot about people and places. If a place smelt bad (to me), there was no way I could imagine myself there.
the layers of residual living in the flat reminds me of the palimpsest: something that is written on, erased and then written on again.
just to define my terms, as i'm coming at this from a graphic design perspective: the word 'palimpsest' is used in reference to medieval manuscript books, when valuable parchment for book pages was re-used rather than recycled. it produces pages that have ghostly remains of previous texts on them, sometimes at right angles. but it is a great word to describe anything where this kind of residue can accumulate: the inside of an apartment seems to be just that! layers of wallpaper, or paint, furnishings refinished, shelves covered or painted over, scratches or marks on the wall… palimpsests as documents of previous uses of things. i like the idea of 'excavation' too -- how do you know when you get to the bottom layer?
Post a Comment
<< Home