This morning I was out to reach my destination and I realized that the remaining space was invisible outlined.
The insignificant spaces to our eyes do not need to be physically divided by barriers or fences because they are empty.
People walk through them like androids but their mind is somewhere in a future temporal dimension.
Busses, stations, supermarktes, streets,…
They are place of transit that have neither history nor identity but only one purpose:
To satisfy the user.
In the moment you take a certain path you expect it would lead you to the place where you already imagine to be. After stamping the bus ticket we just have to sit, put our headphones on and wait for the right moment to get off.
If one side we witness the shrinking of the planet due to the conquest of space, on the other we perceive more and more that endlessness in that hour of commute that seems never to pass and so never before in worlds history „non-places“ have occupied so much space.
Our daily life is characterized by frenzy hurry to go to work, hurry to see the boyfriend, hurry to go grocery shopping…
What if we stopped for a while and looked around?
Trivially we would realize that even those places of passage that we rush to leave tell something:
They tell the story of the boy sitting in the back of the Bus sad because he has just been cheated on by his girlfriend or the story of the eighty years old lady sitting in the front who goes to the market in the morning always the same time.
If we looked up to observe the worn out of the other passengers and internalised their experiences as our own we would walk out from that non-place at least richer than before and precisely at this point that space would not longer represent an invisible outline but one of the few tangible existing in the emptiness of our frenzy.
Kerstin Hirland