Liminal Lands - Initial Conversations
Liminal Lands is an interdisciplinary project for MA and PHD students affiliated with the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Film Studies, the Centre for International Borders Research and the Interdisciplinary Arts MA at Queen’s University Belfast, as well as the School of Art and Design at University of Ulster.
The focus of the project will be the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The project will be lead by Michael Mayhew working in collaboration with Paul Stapleton, with support from a variety of artists and academics who have an interest in this particular border and/or borders in general.
In the beginning…
Liminal Lands is an excursion. We’d like you to come with us…
We’d like you to travel out of Belfast and meet us on a beach where we will be waiting for you standing by a fire. This fire will be set within a threshold, a fire set within an invisible line, a demarcation, a mark on a map, a dividing line, it is somewhere yet nowhere.
We are interested in an investigation not into what exists on either side of these borders that slice across landscapes defining place and people, nationality and language, economics and identity, culture and our thinking and so our praxis will exist in living and experiencing within what we have called ‘Liminal Lands’.
This is a threshold, a non-identifiable location where we desire to search, listen, see, feel and witness the conceptual evolve from within a non-place set between two politically identifiable locations.
We will meet in the northeast of the country and travel back along the border stopping at a series of locations in order to gather and collect material.
We will work in collaboration with the skills and knowledge we have within the group, gathering and collecting material that will go towards a presentation created specifically for the Sonic Arts Research Centre’s Sonic Lab. This presentation will intertwine multiple perspectives on the social, tactile, sonic and visual experiences of traversing this site and the issues it projects upon us.
Related Posts:
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February 6th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
Belfast.
So we’ve had our first meeting at Sarc and Paul and I thought it would be progressive to establish an on-line dialogue enabling us to develop the project whilst separated.
Please introduce yourselves - we guess by posting the information you originally sent to us - or develop this text. This enables people to begin to understand something of the groups make-up, skills, knowledge, ideas, research areas . . . it all helps to work within a collaborative frame work.
Ask questions / be curious.
What do you know about the locations we are considering to travel to?
What places could we go to?
What is searching?
We are planning to have a Liminal Lands get together on Sunday 14th February, (venue to be confirmed) Time 11:00am.
I am not here until April so it would be great for people to arrive and continue.
This is a beginning.
Many Thanks
Michael
February 10th, 2010 at 9:20 pm
My first thoughts: boundaries, bodies, bodies of knowledge. Creases on maps and histories, written into the map deliberately and crushed into it unintentionally.
Wrinkles are spreading on my body - all unintentional creases - little in-roads «Who reads my map?» Not marking off territories, but opening out and opening up. Filling up with experiences known and unknown, not yet considered. Filling up with people and touch and private and public, and all the boundaries and the risk in the crossing. Filling up with a sense of boundaries.
The border has been talked into me from before I arrived to know what it meant.
This is the first time in my work that I will consider the border. I haven’t really looked at it as closely as I have in the week following our first meeting/
I haven’t looked at myself as closely as I do now/
I have a desire to care less about boundaries «risk in this crossing»
I care more about identifying boundaries/
I’m silenced by the boundaries that I come to discover not through people, but through information, through the internet and the call to identify more and more frequently where boundaries meet with perceptions of injustice. The call to identify and act, to position myself. Fill in, fill up. Breathe in, breathe out.
Today, 10 February 2010, I think about Uganda. I think about how relatively far way this threat of institutionalized homophobia seems from my life - even as I see the cover of The Mirror scream at me that a man in Derry had been brutally beaten to death because he is gay. «There is power in silence, and at the same time it isn’t really silence. » Am I, are we, going to fill up a gap in the map – noisy gap - fill in a crease? If we fill it in is it like a kind of botox and all artificial and public, or is it an act of connection - making bridges between personal memories, assumptions and new realities?
*****
I make all of the work I care about after making a long journey, and now - increasingly - I find myself deliberately creating work that absorbs journey into the process. A journey for myself shared with a journey for others.
Perhaps because of my Mum and Dad, I’ve always had a heightened awareness of geo-political boundaries. The first time I ‘crossed the water’, I was a baby, and it was a return home - for my Mum - to the North from Birmingham. I met my grandparents on the first return and the memory of this is a photograph with deliciously hideous green wallpaper. The second time, Birmingham was left behind and I do remember being on the plane. I was two and a half years old.
More than once over the last ten years I have felt like I’ve never been off planes.
In airports, trains, planes, train stations, ferries and cheap buses I’ve written a lot. I wondered - only in the last few years - if this is good for me. I felt myself once, and once only, making a real decision to stay put and settle, to choose to stay in one country. Paris: such awareness of boundaries. It is as if the kisses break through only so that everything else is kept at a polite distance. It lasted two and a half years, which aside from the 19 years I spent mostly in Craigavon, is the longest I have ever stayed in one place.
As I’m writing this out for this posting, I only just now realise: two and a half years from birth to arriving to live in Ireland, and two and a half years in what was to be my chosen ‘home’.
I wonder if the people who live closest to a border see it more or less of a boundary. If what was talked into me on the news every night of the week was talked up and made bigger.
Who was present at the first meeting? How have they experienced the border?
I have always believed we should look outside of the North, forget about the North, stop tying ourselves to place and just make and experience and connect with our own histories… and now I am going to exploring a border that I can’t taste.
The test of my relationships is always the distance traveled. Literally. I find myself in relationships across borders, across land and sea. The ability of the live, the lived, Live Art and Performance, to activate, to connect, across gaps and pockets and histories made with others and generated within. Seeing how friends and lovers and colleagues hold memories that have been lost to me in the creases of my map.
Map: spatial arrangement. A diagram.
Liminal Lands: our map is going to show us where to start and not how, we are forming the attitude towards our map together and with consultation and with openness.
I’m interested in my body map, in my first thoughts. First thoughts: boundaries, bodies, bodies of knowledge. Creases on maps and histories, written into the map deliberately and crushed into it unintentionally. I’m interested in my body and my memories.
February 13th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
thanks for this Mark. we are indeed setting out to explore these creases. and as you said, we are forming an attitude towards these in-between spaces together with consultation and with openness.
it would be great to hear from more people. who will be next?
this sunday (14feb) we will be meeting at clements coffee shop on botanic avenue at 11am. this is the last opportunity to meet with michael in person prior to april. please let us know if you are not able to attend.
February 16th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
So we met at Clemaents Coffee following the previous evening adventure, where I feel people involved were able to experience something of the forth coming Liminal Lands process and praxis.
We left the coffee shop and searched for Liminal Lands and found it in the botanic garden. An open space that I defined as our Liminal Lands for a brief moment in time.
We discussed and eventually lay down on the ground.
I feel we have moved a little closure to Liminal Lands.
Many thanks for arriving and coming on a walk.
How do we put images up on this site?
February 16th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Does definition defy liminallity? Does identification of a liminal space, name it as such and therefore give it function or specificity? Does this action stop a place being liminal?
But I am curious about the continuous search for the in- between. The places which do not impose a ‘norm’. Where it is possible to redefine what is acceptable, include everything. How do I remain, for four days, in a liminal space, exploring boundaries and stretching them without burning out? How do I alter my perspective to see spatio-temporal dimensions which are usually too small or too big to see? How do I apply this thinking to relationships with my colleagues, is colleague a definition which inhibits other kinds of relationships emerging. Can we explore working collaborative structures in a collective?
February 16th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
‘Traveling, both geographically and culturally, becomes an intrinsic part of the artistic process, particularly for those of us who see ourselves as migrants or border crossers.’ - Guillermo Gómez-Peña.
February 17th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Ah questions / statements / statement / questions /
If you don’t get an answer were would you be, located?
Liminality is an everyday occurrence part of our daily ritual, essential for our development as human beings, a needed sense of being between in order to be / arrive elsewhere.
As artists we have a requirement to understand that / those / moments – I would suggest that it’s a moment impossible to defy – yet one that is possible to abuse.
It depends on what knowledge you posses.
Is it just place that is liminal?
What is considered as the norm?
Liminality is part of the ‘norm’.
Burning out?
We have good places to sleep.
We have good food to eat.
We have breathing to live with.
Why burn out?
We have a responsibility to explore and live within the investigation.
Burning out?
Maybe you will drown.
Is it about seeing the way you suggest seeing is perceived?
Experiencing how we are socially structured to experience?
Labelling human beings being humans.
Who says I am a colleague?
Who says I’m part of a collective?
Who is defining what and whom and why?
Great quote from Guillermo.
February 17th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
When I think about the border between North and South memories come to mind:
1. Driving north from Dublin to Donegal, a dozen or so times before the age of seven to visit family in the wilds up there. The large towers where we were stopped and the soldiers asked my parents questions, and then beyond, the anxiety in the car as we crossed from South to North and back to South again. And a landscape that seemed untamed, remembered as full of red hills and conifer forests.
2. Driving south from Belfast to Cavan for the funeral of a friend’s brother. And the stretch of road that weaves into Monaghan and back into Fermanagh and then back out again, and in, and out, sign after sign welcoming you and bidding fare ye well over and over again.
And thinking now all I can think about is how little the border seems to exist to me anymore. I’ve been crossing constantly, unrestricted, for four and half years now: I know the A1/M1 too well for my own good (sections of good road opening up make me giddy). I drive back and forth between my adult home here in Belfast and between my parents’ home in Dublin, between everyday life and family life.
And yet, after Newry, after the dreadful roadworks, I always look out for that moment when the road signs turn from Miles to Kilometres. And KM to M on the return journey: It’s the only indication I have that I crossed any kind of boundary.
February 19th, 2010 at 1:10 am
Border. Border. Border.
I have been walking in the past few walks, the same path, the same route, from my place to the harbour.
It’s not a particular athletic, adventurous or even a great exploration of local history or architecture.
It’s an act of love and admiration that moves me. A relationship that is made through routine. I want to suddenly become Benjamin’s flaneur, because there is nothing than I can over that the admiration itself. Gazing and Listening, letting my memories set and personal narratives that come by to aestheticize the rythm of my walk. I use to call this emotional maps. Michel de Certeau calls it an essential tactic of survival, Gui Debord, psychogeography and….
X-Y-Z AND BLACK AND WHITE. LEFT AND RIGHT. I can make a distinction, but i still dont know were our role lies in this. I prefer to know how to feel you about what your doing? Do you like strolling in this place? Why? Show me your favourite place?
That’s why what moves me right now, is just the beauty of walking together as …. walking…cooking…listening…filming…touching..dancing…or doing none of these things.
Reaching an end of a route and finding nothing. Moving your finger and finding my nose. Reaching an end of a route and finding love. Moving your finger and finding air. I am curious about revealing. I am curious about sensuality and space. I am curious about you.
We are constantly negotiating and mediating so many layers of space, that we might find this border between north and south, right the minute we leave our house. In a square inch of our garden.
There is an amazing work from Dee Hedon called:
One Square Foot: Thousands of Routes
She wrote an article about it, you should all check it out.
This is also cool:
( there are some sounds from belfast recorded by me)
http://aporee.org/maps/
February 19th, 2010 at 9:40 am
–clean lines–clean sounds–clean breaks–clean maps–
Listening to your sounds Rui, and remembering what we had said at the first meeting about silence (the impossibility of?), reminded me of when I was trying to get three minutes of ‘clean’ sound of a clock ticking inside the St George’s Market clock chamber. I kept having to end recording and start again because of heavy bins being moved, or traffic, or a conversation nearby. Still in the chamber after about twenty minutes - a transparent box, so I could see all these sounds and the possibility of where the recording might be next interrupted - I laughed to myself when I realised that I wasn’t going to get a ‘clean’ three minutes - three minutes out of time.
This morning, clean sounds and clean breaks seem surface. Clean is reaching for the impossible, not earthy. Clean is one of those wipe-clean maps. The map, a surface, a suggestion of something that needs exploration. I’m more interested in the body of land, the smell, feel and taste of the earth. More interested in experiencing the land than only thinking about it. Authenticity, not lines and colours and names.
Clean breaks? Always a memory, or the thought that ‘I should have some memory of this’, or a memory activated by someone else, shifting, connecting, alive. Moving away from place, into another, slipping between, sliding into a moving train, or bus, or onto a bike - and breathe. Live memories, live lands, liminal lands.
February 20th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
I am interested in the present tense, present-tension, in-tension.
Bodies and voice in space. When I ask questions I ask them to crack open and create a new space, undefined. I am the craic in the world! :D Crack head crack open. I am interested in contact between human beings and how to be inclusive. Commonallity and non-verbalahhhhhhhhhhhhhhuuuurghhhhhzzzzvvvvpppppppleaseeeesqqueeeezeeeeeeeeemeeeeeeegrrruuuuuuuuuunntttttshunt tractorrable tractable intractable Do we dream together?
Dreams are liminal, a between state. Dreamstate. The state of YOU. Body in state of consciousness/un/on/in. Dreams are democratic, all dreams are equal. I would like to share dream associations, have a dream dialogue. Dream Matrix remove the boundaries of ‘consciousness’ and share associations from the undercurrents, the dream/wakefulness/awake dreaming.
I am interested in water. Movement, body, attraction, states, structures and anti structures in transition between states. I am interested in water as a starting place to make contact.
Improvised Dance is a way to be in contact, tactile, leaning, sharing weight, copying, sharing energy space responsive. Where straight lines and curves collide, schluff slide and support. Open and extend.
Waiting in the liminal moments for the next shift to carry you on to the next moment.
state- ment? Quest I on ;D
February 20th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Gelane’s spiral arms span hundreds of kilometers over the open ocean.
February 20th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
rememberings - respondings
http://audioboo.fm/boos/25730-signal-box-sunnyside-st-belfast
http://virb.com/theybreakinpieces/photos/1679290
February 22nd, 2010 at 11:01 am
gorgeous drone. I love fog horns. They remind me of my childhood. I grew up by the sea and when the clouds fell you really couldn’t see anything. But you could hear the fog horns singing to each other on their way into the bay. it was like creatures, whales or anything you could imagine materializing out of the fog, I imagined them rising out of the sea. These fog horn creatures floating on the sea, large and heavy, singing together in the dark
Latest tracks by reganobrien
February 22nd, 2010 at 2:05 pm
the power of maps…
thanks to lisa for this: http://newmapsofulster.blogspot.com
…and photographs…
thanks to isobel for this: http://www.flickr.com/groups/liminal-spaces/
related reading:
The Power of Maps by Denis Wood
On Photography by Susan Sontag
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
p.s. i also love fog horns
February 22nd, 2010 at 4:12 pm
Really nice sound map Rui from aporee.org - similar to the flickr group that Paul posted up before which also has a map: http://www.flickr.com/groups/liminal-spaces/pool/map?mode=group
And it was funny reading about you trying to record a clean 3 minutes out of time, Mark. I think it’s easy to forget about all the sounds that go on behind (or annoyingly in front) of the sounds we enjoy or are interested in listening to.
I was trying to think of liminal lands I might have been to and I realised that it feels like I go to these places in my own mind. Walking triggers memories, but also fantasies and I find that I am almost dreaming when I have walked alone for a long time - walking in the present, remembering the past but imagining the future. This seems to be a sort of liminal mind state, where you are connected to places, people and events that you cannot engage with physically in the now, but instead, overlay on to where you are in the present.
This process, which is almost some sort of therapy, then comforts and inspires you, and at time frightens you. It can feel very lonely sometimes up on top of a hill with just your thoughts for company. but this process while you walk, makes you then connect to the place you are in in the present. It becomes your canvas, and just as when you paint a picture and never want to throw it away because of what it represents, you never want to forget this route you have taken and the foot steps you tread. it has now become another memory, another experience to draw on when you go on your next walk.
I think this is why as humans we love finding out about the history of a place we inhabit, even for short periods in time. It’s a human instinct to connect with a places past, I suppose because it makes us feel more comfortable connecting with our own past then within it.
I’ve been spending some time in the Linen Hall library and looking up writing on the border. Obviously a lot of it is centered around the politics of the area and a lot of what I have read is very sad.
Some of the reading I’ve done has been about how people feel when they cross a border and know they can’t go back. It really reinforces just how lonely and desperate a liminal land can be. it is not just a place to feel free from constraint or able to let your mind wonder but a place where certain people or issues are relegated to. And there is also the perspective of crossing a line, and dealing with the consequences. Do you accept what that will bring or do you keep yourself in a state of limbo, a no-mans-land, hoping things will go back to the way they were?
February 22nd, 2010 at 5:51 pm
I remember the humming of that signal box in the Holylands too, Paul! hearing it reminded me of when I was a kid living on what seemed an enormous housing estate in Craigavon - these substations were so curious, we used to stand with our ears pressed up against them wondering what was inside this huge grey concrete box …and just beyond the substation, the path that marked the edge of one estate and the start of another - right beside each other but a world away “don’t cross that path, I mean it!” We walked that path only with Mum, it felt dangerous, it was a very clear boundary. Coming back from the shopping centre one day, aged about 7, there was a goat grazing on the grass out the back of a house that was right on the path and I went straight to it, to pet it. It kicked me to the ground - never liked goats since.
Yes: WATER! I’m really happy that we are starting on a beach.
Was just reading about Phil Smith’s ‘Crab Walks’ and he says something interesting that connects:
“I pass an electricity substation, humming conspiratorally - like monks (…) Most of us walk past those things, we probably think they’re ugly…and we definitely think the pylons are…do you know where that word ‘pylon’ comes from? Pylons are the door between one room and the next in the Egyptian afterlife…”
I love these sounds calling us in to experience them - they are deep sounds, they burn themselves onto the map, into the water.
For me dreams aren’t liminal spaces - the gap between waking and sleeping is the liminal - the trying to remember and the reordering is the crossing.
Thinking about what you wrote Isobel: has anyone ever really felt that they couldn’t go back?
February 22nd, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Thats an interesting question. A friend of mine wrote a song and I remember the line ‘there is no point of no return’ so clearly.
For so many reasons I think ‘going back’ has negative connotations of going backwards in time; having to deal with or not deal with issues which may have driven you forward, potential for conflict or overwhelming emotion. Or going back into lost time, memories and nostalgia could bring a certain stagnancy with it. Going back over the same old ground type of thing, but this only stands if we see through the old eyes also. Going back home can be beautiful, warming, comforting or blindingly routined. I think going back is a moving forward also, a gathering of self. If, as Isobel says, we find ourselves in relation to a place creating a space for being, then to go back there is also to go to a state of being. Return ourselves. Renew awareness or re-know ourselves in relation to that place. I have a place where I go back to again and again when I want to feel space, I go to the sea. It is really one of the only place in Ireland where we can really feel the expanse of Nature. The top of the Carrantuohill is a good one too. But I never feel like I am going backwards, in time for instance. I also know the feeling of not wanting to go back and it is because I know it would do me great harm.
When we dream we are so close to being awake, it is the closest point to wakefulness in the sleep cycle. Light sleep and REM are our dreaming points, I guess this is why I think it is a liminal or border space. The lucid dream, the conscious dream state seems a kind of reverse to daydreaming also. It’s like the two states run parallel and there are moments of crossing. So perhaps lucid & day dreaming are liminal states rather than all dreaming time.
Has anyone ever had a lucid dream?
February 23rd, 2010 at 8:37 am
Sub
Liminal
http://www.liminalinstitute.nl/
February 23rd, 2010 at 12:43 pm
http://www.liminalinstitute.nl/rebuilding-the-berlin-wall/
February 23rd, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Just putting up some links to some interesting places along the border:
The Wee Rupublic or Drummully Ployp: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/365-a-nameless-intra-irish-pene-enclave/
This is a small pene-enclave that jots out in Fermanagh belonging to the republic. It’s about 4 miles in length and during the troubles could only be entered through a tiny opening on the southern side.
Lough Erne and the pilgrimage walk that passes through Killeter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lough_Erne
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killeter
The Kingdom of Glen or Glangevin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glangevlin
Situated in the Northwest of county Cavan, Ireland. supposedly the Gap in Glan was created when a magical cow belonging to a black smith ran away. This cow was a celebrated magical being with green spots whose inexhaustible supply of milk signified prosperity. The Kingdom of Glen has been described by Samuel Lewis at around 1837 as having no public road, only one difficult pass; the Gap of Beal. At that time the area was densely inhabited by a ‘primitive race’ known as Mac Gaurans and Dolans, who (it was reported) intermarried and observed some peculiar customs; electing their own king and queen from the ancient race of the Mac Gaurans, to whom they paid implicit obedience.
Here are also some really good photo’s: http://www.flickr.com/photos/2cme/4324600685/in/set-72157622774794912/
One of which is of an abandoned railway station in Tyan, in Co Armagh near the border. there’s a whole album of abandoned railway stations and they struck a chord with me when thinking about this project and what was mention before about crossing a line you cannot go back across - A station that brought you somewhere but has stopped running. It won’t take you back to where you began your journey, you are left where you’ve arrived.
February 24th, 2010 at 12:31 am
I leave home with my bag, a pair of binaural microphones and a recorder.
I start to walk and after a few minutes, I notice a particular soundscape. The sounds of seagulls with a backdrop of traffic noise. Now some might argue that this is classical example bad acoustic ecology, or that not desirable sounds are bleeding into a natural soundscape. ( see R.Murray Schaeffer) But I am interested in this type of co-existence. I love as much the sound of cars passing by, as the sound of seagulls passing by close to me.
It’s exactly this type of atmosphere that reveals layers, l a form of inbetweeness that populates our lifes. And in a open field, sound just flows and crosses political borders.
I climb a small fence near the lagan path and position myself to record. I find that my presence has scared the seagulls away. My experience shows, that if I stay long enough, part of them, or one, or two, will return. If I stay still enough, not looking for the sound, but letting it come to me. Strangely, I think about the work of cartier bresson, and the idea of moment and in most of his work, it seems like the perfect moment came to him.
I stay still for a few minutes, until I feel that a particular moment has been recorded. My legs might hurt after a bit, but I feel truly warm, it is a moment of intimacy, that I strive to transmit in my work and for me it is such a powerful thing, to discover this while walking. It’s like expanding your perspective and building your own map of that site.
If someone wants to go for a walk with me. I’ll bring my microphones and we will spend sometime listening and recording.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
That sounds great Rui, I’d love to.
February 25th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Hei, what do you think about this tuesday?
Kind Regards,
Rui
February 25th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Just let me know a day next week, does tuesday suit you?
March 1st, 2010 at 9:55 pm
hey there,
Sorry for delay. Tuesday is tomorrow, so no I’m afraid. But Wednesday would be cracking! I have your number, i’ll text ya .
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Just thought i’d post up some more things I’ve been finding out about in case anyone’s interested in them:
I’ve been looking into the folklore and stories around the border and have come across Kilbroney Graveyard and the Lost Church of Saint Bronagh. Just by the Mountains of Mourne there is the village of Rostrevor on the coast (and border). Saint Bronagh founded what is thought to be the firt church in Ireland here along with her group of virgin ladies. The church was given a bell which was hung in an oak tree in the forest on the hill near the church which was rung whenever there was some important news for the surrounding community. The church was overrun by the vikings and left as a ruin, but long after Saint Bonagh and her ladies had left, the bell kept tolling up on the hill till one day it stoped. Years later an old oak tree was found fallen in the forest and when the tree was cut open the bell was found. It was taken to Rostrevor Catherdrall where it is now kept and is thought to be the only example of it’s kind.
Here’s a link to a photo of the graveyard: http://www.flickr.com/photos/annekedragonflytemmink/3830296461/
I’ve also been reading a book called Tyrone Folk Quest which is the journal of folklorist Michael J Murphy during his time researching and living in Tyrone. It’s quite good at getting you to think about your presence in a new place with a very strong sense of community and history.
He also wrote a lot about the mountain Sliabh Gullion in South Armagh by the border. It’s really interesting to read how he feels so connected to the landscape there:
‘Dome of Sliabh Gullion
And of your brood
My soul is a part
In your rock-heather heart
Slave to your mood’
Here’s a photo of it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50277096@N00/2808523564/
March 3rd, 2010 at 11:35 am
As people are coming up with possible places for us to visit - i would suggest that you locate them on a map and bring them with you to the first session - that being April 6th - There will be a big map that we will start locating & seeing where we might go - we might go to all, some, or none - but the research happening is wonderful - inspiring ideas arriving intot eh portal of Liminal Lands.
Please explore the blog of NRLA Winter School. A successful exploration into sites around Glasgow, including a grave yard.
Be wonderful.
Regards
Michael
March 3rd, 2010 at 7:22 pm
An English Journey re-imagined
Video (5min 27sec), Writers and ‘psychogeographers’ Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore explain their arts project
www.guardian.co.uk/
3rd March
A reflection of place and journeys.
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:44 pm
“The Government requests all concerned authorities to permit the bearer, to pass safely and freely and in case of need to give him/her all lawful aid and protection”
I feel I have lived my life on borders.
Home is Ballinderry, a small parish situated on the Co. Derry/Co. Tyrone border, but reading the journeys of those that weaved along the border north and south reminds me of the less official borders crossed daily during my childhood.
Traveling from one destination to the next we invariably met a mobile checkpoint:
the large towers were not present,
no signs bidding welcome or fairwell
and there was no line on a map
but borders existed nonetheless,
their positions not fixed but liminal.
I remember being stopped and soldiers asking my parents the questions of admittance: name, address, destination, place of departure, purpose of journey. Vehicle was checked and identification verified. Anxiety a condition of entry.
Though the physical presence of these borders no longer operate, I still look forward to that moment when I pass the traces of checkpoints in my memory, reassured that home is just around the corner.
March 3rd, 2010 at 11:17 pm
Victor Turner
Anthropology of Performance
“…I have called “liminality”, following Arnold van Gennep, the great French folklorist who divided rituals associated with passage from one basic human state or status, individual or collective, to another into three stages. These were: separation from antecedent mundane life; liminality, a betwixt-and-between condition often involving seclusion from the everyday scene; and re-aggregation to the quotidian world. Such passage rites were of two broad types: (1) those performed to mark and, in the view of performes, to effect transitions from social invisibility to social visibility, as in birth rites; from juniority to seniority, as in circumcision and puberty rites; of sociosexual conjunction, as in nuptial rites; and of the passage form visible to invisible social existence, as in funerary rites converting a corpse or ghost into an ancestor; and (2) those marking a whole group’s passage from one culturally defined season to another in the annual cycle, where solar, lunar, planetary, and stellar cyclicities may be involved. Such rites may be extended to include collective response to hazards such as war, famine, drought, plague, earthquake, volcanic eruption, and other natural or man-made disasters.
“…Liminality itself is a complex phase or condition. It is often the scene and time for the emergence of a society’s deepest values in the form of sacred dramas and objects - sometimes the re-enactment periodically of cosmogonic narratives or deeds of saintly, godly, or heroic establishers of morality, basic institutions, or ways of approaching transcendent beings or powers. But it may also be the venue and occasion for the most radical scepticism - always relative, of course, to the given culture’s repertoire of sceptical concepts and images - about cherished values and roles. Ambiguity reigns; people and public policies may be judged sceptically in relation to deep values:…”