Abstract Spaces

Dennis Oppenheim Salt Flat, 1968

The legibility of the landscape of the cities was related to the imaginability, to the capacity to evoke a strong picture in the observer. It supposed visual references, a sensorial control of the space, through experience and of ocular observation. But the current configuration blocks the mental mapping of urban landscapes. The cities doesn’t allow anymore the individual imagination to have a location, correct and continuous in relation to the remaining portion of the fabric urban.

The phenomenological experience of the individual citizen does not coincide anymore with the place where it happens. These structural coordinates are not accessible to the immediate living experience and, in general, are not appraised by people. The result is a collapse of the experience, basis of artistic interventions focusing in a reordering of the urban space and its apprehension by the passing observer.

Today we have individual subject insert in a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities. An abstract, homogeneous and fragmentary space. The urban space lost situability _ a precise inscription in geographic dimensions, accessible to the individual experience.

There is a problem of incomensurability between constructed and the project, the built and the environment, the different spaces of the city. It is impossible to represent. What the photographic picture, for more including it can be, does not give account. The space today is overloaded by more abstract dimensions.

The mapping problem, of positioning the individual in this complex global system, is also of representability: although affected in the daily life by the corporate spaces, we still do not have how to shape them mentally, even in an abstract form. A radical rupture between the daily experience and these models of abstract spaces occurs.

References:

K. Lynch. The Image of the City, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1960.

F. Jameson. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York, Duke UP, 1991.