nowhere/somewhere

notes on heterotopia's by focault + australia 

Either their role is to cre­ate a space of il­lu­sion that ex­poses every real space, Or else, on the con­trary, their role is to cre­ate a space that is other, an­other real space, This lat­ter type would be the het­ero­topia, not of il­lu­sion, but of com­pen­sa­tion, ab­solutely per­fect other places

our ex­pe­ri­ence of the world is less that of a long life de­vel­op­ing through time than that of a net­work that con­nects points and in­ter­sects with its own skein.

it is not pos­si­ble to dis­re­gard the fa­tal in­ter­sec­tion of time with space

In any case I be­lieve that the anx­i­ety of our era has to do fun­da­men­tally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time.

a sort of mixed, joint ex­pe­ri­ence, which would be the mir­ror. The mir­ror is, af­ter all, a utopia, since it is a place­less place

I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own vis­i­bil­ity to my­self, that en­ables me to see my­self there where I am ab­sent: such is the utopia of the mir­ror.

this place that I oc­cupy at the mo­ment when I look at my­self in the glass at once ab­solutely real, con­nected with all the space that sur­rounds it, and ab­solutely un­real, since in or­der to be per­ceived it has to pass through this vir­tual point which is over there.

The het­ero­topia is ca­pa­ble of jux­ta­pos­ing in a sin­gle real place sev­eral spaces, sev­eral sites that are in them­selves in­com­pat­i­ble.

the cin­ema is a very odd rec­tan­gu­lar room, at the end of which, on a two-di­men­sional screen, one sees the pro­jec­tion of a three-di­men­sional space,

Heterotopias are most of­ten linked to slices in time — which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of sym­me­try, het­e­rochronies. The het­ero­topia be­gins to func­tion at full ca­pac­ity when we ar­rive at a sort of ab­solute break with tra­di­tional time.

there are het­ero­topias of in­def­i­nitely ac­cu­mu­lat­ing time, for ex­am­ple mu­se­ums and li­braries,

the idea of ac­cu­mu­lat­ing every­thing, of es­tab­lish­ing a sort of gen­eral archive, the will to en­close in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of con­sti­tut­ing a place of all times that is it­self out­side of time and in­ac­ces­si­ble to its rav­ages, the pro­ject of or­ga­niz­ing in this way a sort of per­pet­ual and in­def­i­nite ac­cu­mu­la­tion of time in an im­mo­bile place, this whole idea be­longs to our moder­nity.

Heterotopias al­ways pre­sup­pose a sys­tem of open­ing and clos­ing that both iso­lates them and makes them pen­e­tra­ble. In gen­eral, the het­ero­topic site is not freely ac­ces­si­ble like a pub­lic place.

AUSTRALIA

Australia – inverts a set of relations it mirrors and reflects

a sort of si­mul­ta­ne­ously mythic and real con­tes­ta­tion of the space in which we live,

while there is still a general relational analogy between that of australia and typical reality in which I inhabit: both being sites of traditional western dwelling, unlike a utopia, reality is not perfected in its form nor turned completely upside-down: and further, what I experience is not unreal, per say, but rather an inversion of the set of principles that make up my natural day to day, reflecting and refracting what I believe to be ‘real-life’.

It is a counter-site, an outside-reality located within my current notion of reality, despite your location, a joint, and still temporal experience of what reality is. The space that you occupy at the moment at which you experience yourself in this moment is absolutely real, and absolutely unreal.