Just Visiting, Again
Originally published for Marius Moldvaer’s Heimat / Hiraeth exhibit, supported by the Arts Council of Norway, 2015
Déjà visité — the sensation of having known somewhere without having been there — makes of the feet something akin to what automatic writing makes of the hand. What is notably lacking in both phenomena is the source of their impetus. The sensation of Déjà visité reveals the unique quality of place to be, not in landmark or language, but in what is stirred within the visitor; the potency of memory.
The notion of home is Déjà visité amplified. Home is measured less in latitude than it is in memory; to say home cultivates nostalgia is perhaps, to undermine its force. Indeed, it would seem a better definition of home — the space of forced memory — than its oft-cited familial connotation. Like Déjà visité, the memory of home is untethered, wandering, and wanting; home exists for the seeker alone. If home is something to know, something to be remembered and re-remembered, it must be tilled from the same lack that Déjà visité sips upon, as it implies the presence of our selves where we, ourselves, can never truly be present.
In 1985, Derrida and architect Peter Eisenman collaborated on the unrealized garden project “Choral Works.” The project centered on Plato’s notion of the chora, a “receptacle for becoming.” The chora is quantified by the womb, the matrix, or the pause: an intentionally dissolvable, generative space that acts as a (paradoxically) non-stable referent to the flux that is human life. Derrida and Eisenman, respectively interested in establishing non-presence, struggled and, ultimately, failed to design a garden in absentia. Instead, and (perhaps) even more successfully, their work exposed the utter impossibility of reconciling becoming with place. Place requires presence; becoming destroys it.
The chora, rather than a garden, is best imagined as a portal: a simultaneous point of entry and exit; an architectural reference to the body’s transmuting capabilities, rendering the structure diaphanous after its use. Doorways are the tensed intersections of verticality and downward compression; they form a voided space, which, in turn, generates a necessary disruption for the insertion of the self. A structure, like a memory, cannot be intact and useful; it must wreck some aspect of its placehood: it must let us come into it and, at once, leave just the same.
This model unveils the central, choral character of home. Home is the vessel of our own becoming and, once it is evoked, the present there ceases to exist. What spurs knowing without presence, as in the notions of home and of Déjà visité, is this latent understanding: that which defines us, that which makes us — in the streets of an unknown city — attempt acquaintance, and that which proliferates the (truthfully) bizarre want to belong to a place is a subconscious, wholly human admission that to be present is to be, always, between what has happened and what has yet to unfold.