Non-Places

It's an extreme privilege to be a fugitive to circumstance, to have nowhere to be but to keep moving. The scene where I am sitting, almost a caricature of French cafe culture, seems more remarkable when juxtaposed with the many banal and interstitial spaces we enounter on a more regular basis. Last night I set up camp under cedars on a narrow strip of land between a highway and an industrial park. There are still needles stuck to my shoe.

Spending time in such "non-places" allow me to reflect on the way that landscapes are inevitably imbued with meaning. As a professor of mine once said, "every landscape of consumption has a corresponding landscape of degradation." Even more so, there are places that are so banal and commonplace that it takes extra effort to even notice their existence. Still, the needles of cedar made a sort bed and the whir of highway traffic yielded a strangely comforting lullabye.

Speaking of such non-places, I found out that Adam Ryder and I got a grant to do a colloaborative photo and mapping project about the spaces around high-tension power lines in Rhode Island. For both of us it will be a farewell to Providence, a place that has remained home even as I have moved on. We are planning to travel by bicycle along the power lines, so this trip is allowing me to reflect on how landscapes are viewed by the vantage point of a bike.

More than anything, it helps to think about the balance between getting lost and planning a specific route, organization versus spontanteity. From this trip, I don't know that either work as satisfying frameworks for getting to know a place. We need a map to deviate from.

In commemoration of the grant, Krisztian and I camped under power lines somewhere outside Montpelier last night.