Saturday, April 14, 2012

Series. The Dark Whole.






Michel Foucault talks about prisons as heterotopias in his unpublished article "Of Other Spaces" (1967). Heterotopias are marginal spaces that are linked to our real everyday spaces but "act as counter-sites", privileged, sacred, forbidden places, where cultural imaginations of spatiality are contested and inverted. The Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is such a heterotopia twice: First a heterotopia of deviation, in Foucault's terms, at the time of its (disciplinary) use, reserved for deviant individuals and their out-of-the-ordinary living. And secondly, abadoned in 1971 and kept as a "suspended ruin" ever since, the penitentiary is an urban archaelogical site where culture-tourism is performed and modern art installed. This photograph speaks to its character as a locus of panoptic viewing practices (of its past and contemporary guardians) and the tyrrany of governmental surveillance.


The scene seems to last forever – a caravaggesque rendering of some minor myth, in which the horror and splendor supersede the particulars of the obscure narrative”
—Nicholas Muellner, No Such Place
Site Specific: 'Arsenaal, completed 1682, Castle, Cape of Good Hope.