Non Places Karen Mirza & Brad Butler 16mm b/w, sound dur: 15 mins. We are ever increasingly in transit through ‘non places’. Corners that lurk at the edge of activity. Passageways where activity occurs but the relationship between use and place remains unnamed. Places where names are incidental, meaningless because the need for communication – or the passage of time spent – is already deemed to be transient, insignificant, minimal, empty. Street corners, bus stops, shopping malls, motorways, airport lounges – new forms of solitude. But, if the city is truly a place saturated with meaning, “it is also a place where meaning and value are distributed evenly” [Rogers]. Non places are not just empty passageways devoid of significance because the city is ‘traced’ with the echo of events, silent marks made by personal memories that reverberate in and around public space.
Extract begins 11 minutes into film. This film is concerned with those ‘non places’ that have become unalterably connected to an individual’s personal memory, a personal memory that when shared, will change the collective perception of that ‘non place’. Put another way, this film is concerned with those ‘non places’ that trigger a memory causing the past, present and future to collide into a collapsed sense of time and space.
