Once a place, now the quintessence of five-star luxury

In Auge's Prologue of Non-Places I misread the quote 'once a palace, now the quintessence of five-star luxury', mistaking the word palace for place. Even after I realised that wasn't what Auge had written, it stuck with me as an idea that surmised a lot of what he was talking about.

Once we had places. Now we have super freeways and chains of stores, and hotels, where every one, no matter where, all look alike- Have the same paint,the same lay out, the same products. This is part of the shift towards non-places being a huge part of our lives.

I think Auge also feels there is a certain amount of freedom in being in these non-places. He talks about fear of the self, and of the other, and it almost seems that he feels existing within non-places gives people an opportunity to escape that. Travelling on a plane, you feel no responsibility towards the strangers on the plane with you. When you're stuck in traffic you don't care about anybody else stuck in traffic with you, you just want to get from A to B.

And just quickly, here is a proposal I wrote for a theory class last year. I re-read it last week, and found it rather amusing.


My Strangers House – Claiming Space
“A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions […] a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral”
Marc Auge describes a ‘non-place’ as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” . A foyer is a non-place. It is a transitory space, where no memories are formed, which is simply assigned a classification, a purpose and then for the most part ignored.
In 1974, Joseph Beuys did a performance called I Like America, America Likes Me where he lived in a gallery with a wild coyote for seven days. In 1996, Tracey Emin, in Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made, lived in a locked room in a gallery for fourteen days. Both of these artists took command over the gallery space and created an intimate and personal relationship with their surroundings.
In My Strangers House – Claiming Space I propose an interference with the traditional role of this place, by transforming the SCA foyer into a home; a complete reconstruction of the function of the SCA foyer. A group of people living in the foyer for an allocated amount of time, perhaps 24 hours, and changing the space into a temporary home. Through doing this not only will we successfully establish a personal relationship with an impersonal space, we will also question what makes a space significant, a query that is often raised in regard to institutional spaces, such as the gallery, but less often in regard to foyers. While living in the foyer the group would be isolated, and would only interact with the people they were living with, and anyone who passes through the space briefly.
The exhibition would then take place in the foyer, and would consist of documentation from the home-making process, such as photographs, film footage and remnants, for example wine bottles and dirty plates.