retreat
Café Gallery Projects leaflet, 3-28 September 2003
Travelling alone to a new place at night - be it by car, bus or train - is unsettling. Bearings become lost as there are none to relate to. The road keeps on going, almost without end, the windows of the train only reveal a returned reflection. One will search desperately for a moment that will confirm human existence outside of the bubble of reality that is the mode of transport. In this space a parallel version of reality seems to exist, layered on top of the external surroundings. The lights on the horizon are reassuring; the beam of a car headlight offers a perceived sense of security. Beyond this cone of light, though, anything could be happening. Potentially, as the headlights pick up the edges of the road, any imaginable object or event could become visible.
To speak of, write about, or represent darkness will inevitably involve the use of cliché. The night is an evocative thing that has been used as a site for countless fairy tales and horror stories. We all know that in film a nocturnal scene of an unpopulated forest, for example, will be later revealed as a site for unpleasant occurrences. It acts as a signifier in our collective imagination: it is near impossible to reject the idea that that danger might be lurking somewhere in there, somewhere that can't quite be seen. Night is no more dangerous than day but in the imagination it becomes something to avoid, to rush through. It is easier to negotiate the darkness if it is perceived as simply something bracketing one illuminated space from another - to believe that the darkness will relent a little way further along the journey
At night vision is occluded; it requires external illumination to make sense of it. The limits of vision define a space where the boundaries are more than simply visual: a psychological or conceptual space is constructed. Darkness feels, illogically, more solid than light - the atmosphere seems changed as if a recognisable and definable presence has moved in. On stopping a car in an unlit, unfamiliar place it can - falsely - seem so much more secure if the headlights are left on - they create a zone of logic, a space that can be inhabited. It might seem safer to do this, but in contradiction this amplifies the darkness. The endlessness of the night becomes more apparent through the marking out of the limits with the controlled punctuation of light. Effectively a stage set is being created: to stand inside the beam one will become highly visible from within the darkness. It is almost as if two versions of reality are operating side by side: one rational based on vision, and one irrational based on imagination.
The literary critic Maurice Blanchot wrote that night is the thing that defines day: only by filling light with darkness does it become possible to make sense of perceptions of both the surrounding world and of our own existence (1). The night is neither a negation nor an emptiness: rather it is a layering of one set of references on another, effectively affirming space. A shift in the appearance of what is around us enables an understanding of it, and the predictable onset of darkness creates this re-articulation of space every twenty-four hours. When darkness overtakes daylight dimensions of spaces become stretched and shrunk, producing a different, rather than reduced, sense of place. Darkness can alter even the most familiar site into one unfamiliar. To experience a place well known by day for the first time at night will not only reveal a new sense of place in the dark, but will make new elements of that space re-appear when light again returns. The next day one might comment to oneself "but it looked so different at night", and in this realisation the memory of the everyday made strange will remain at the edges of familiar experience.
So if the space of darkness is different, what is its nature? It is something located in reality, but not of reality. Senses become altered - the night makes the air feel thicker, denser. There is a desire to allow oneself to fall into this space, as one falls asleep, or falls for the illusion of cinema. To see a film involves a consensual immersion in another's imagination, and also a weaving of individual imagination through the pointers laid out on the screen. This drawing together of imaginations will leave each spectator of a film with their own interpretation of what is being presented. A still image too can have the same power: photography seduces the viewer to engage with its surface and invites projection on to it. A photograph of darkness extends this relationship, indeed it is an almost absurd activity as the camera reveals something that the eye cannot see. It creates a representation of a location that cannot be experienced first hand, and in doing this the photograph demands an engagement of the imagination. To look at photographs of darkness is to look at a space that cannot be experienced, because experience of the night is situated between reality and imagination: where objectivity and subjectivity contest each other.
Michel Foucault spoke of "other spaces" (2) such as this. He discussed a notion of space he defined as the heterotopia, existing halfway between the impossibility of Utopia and the experience of reality. Utopian sites are projected versions of reality acting as reflections or versions of what is known. A Utopia is a wished for reality, something to be aspired to but ultimately unattainable. What characterises the heterotopia, for Foucault, is that it operates outside of 'normal' space, while also having a "relation to all the space that remains". Where a projected version of reality seeps into the world itself a space constructed through the subjectivity of imagination and objective reality occurs. The heterotopia is a "counter-site" that is "a kind of effectively enacted Utopia in which the real sites [...] are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted". It changes perceptions of 'real' space by showing it up for what it 'really' is, inviting reflection on what we know and what we imagine. Foucault spoke of libraries, of museums and prisons as heterotopias. Perhaps as night is a state that clearly exists yet is open to projection and imagination it too is a counter-site that defines and contests what is known.
Lisa Le Feuvre, writer, lecturer and curator.
(1) Maurice Blanchot, The Outside, the Night, in The Space
of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Nebraska University Press, 1982.
(2) Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces in Diacritics, Spring 1986 Vol. 16 No.l,
p22-27.