space of 'in-between' quotes
♪ In one of my conversations with Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba he described something mesmerisingly beautiful, an image that etched itself on my memory. If one dives down to a certain depth in the sea, so deep that the surface is no longer visible but not deep enough to perceive the bottom, our human senses lose their ability to orient themselves in space. Suddenly, deep down there in the sea, one finds oneself in a totally borderless condition, unconscious of anything other than oneself, freely floating without any points of reference. Beyond the world, gravity and what we call reality.
(Fredrik Liew 'In between spaces and beyond borders' Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba Lars Grambye and Frederik Liew (curatorial) (Malmö: Malmö Konsthall, 2005))
♪ I think there are a lot of payoffs to leaving, but not having home is difficult, although I feel comfortable here in the big city because I'm in the company of strangers, and I'm a stranger myself. But then on the other hand, there is this whole element you can take for granted when you are at home, and which functions without you having to do anything about it... I think it's about having this network of friends, family, relatives, all this army of people you met throughout your childhood and school years and university years, which existed even if you haven't really been in contact with them. Knowing that they aren't around you is sometimes quite difficult. Not that I want constant communication, but just that feeling of being part of something.
(Greg A Madison The End of Belonging Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation p.30-31 (London: Greg A. Madison, PhD, 2010))
♪ Exile places one at an oblique angle to one's new world and makes every emigrant, willy-nilly, into an anthropologist and relativist; for to have a deep experience of two cultures is to know that no culture is absolute – it is to discover that even the most interstitial and seemingly natural aspects of our identities and social reality are constructed rather than given and that they could be arranged, shaped, articulated in quite another way.
(Eva Hoffman Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language p. 51 (New York: EE Dutton, 1989))
♪ Perhaps cross-cultural elaborations can complicate an individual to the point that he or she becomes increasingly unlikely to find any body-environment 'match' will allow the feeling of being at home. Perhaps there are not many social or physical environments complex enough to 'match' an increasingly elaborated cross-cultural person? If this is at all true, then we may begin to consider the implication that the sort of complexity experienced by cross-cultural people inevitably generates a kind of unheimlich sense, a not quite fitting-in anywhere. What does this mean for a world that is increasingly demanding that we become cross-cultural, global, citizens? Perhaps we are witnessing the end of belonging, at least belonging of a certain kind.
(Greg A Madison The End of Belonging Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation p. 154 (London: Greg A. Madison, PhD, 2010))
♪ A farewell to one's country, to its landscapes, customs and mores throws one into a no man's land comparable perhaps to the desert chosen as a place of contemplation by early Christian hermits. Then the only remedy against the loss of orientation is to create anew one's own North, East, West, and South and posit in that new space a Witebsk or a Dublin elevated to the second power. What has been lost is recuperated on to a higher level of vividness and presence.
(Czeslaw Milosz (foreword) 'On Exile' Exiles: photographs Koudelka, Joseph (photograph) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988))
♪ Exile is a test of internal freedom and that freedom is terrifying. Everything depends upon our own resources, of which we are mostly unaware and yet we make decisions assuming our strength will be sufficient. The risk is total, not assuaged by the warmth of a collectivity where the second rate is usually tolerated, regarded as useful and even honored.
(Czeslaw Milosz (foreword) 'On Exile' Exiles: photographs Koudelka, Joseph (photograph) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988))
♪ To belong suggests an ability to locate oneself within a reassuring family, locality, religion, nation, or other context of sameness. Belonging, then, is to find, and perhaps to some extent thereby attempt to 'fasten' one's own identity within a larger identity, but which larger identities should one choose?
(Greg A Madison The End of Belonging Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation p. 137 (London: Greg A. Madison, PhD, 2010))
♪ It is difficult not to think of home as place but what if this is simply misleading manifestation of concrete settled thinking? Of course home is related to place, and to many things, like relationship, mood, sounds and smells, food and furniture, acceptance, freedom, personal values, and other individual sensitivities. What if 'home' is the name we use for specific interactions in specific environments (familiar places of origin as well as entirely unfamiliar places); interactions that are constantly in flux, constantly developing through new experiences. For every individual it will be a unique 'kind' of interaction that raises, every momentarily, a feeling of being at home, and perhaps a slightly different kind of interaction each time.
(Greg A Madison The End of Belonging Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation p. 153 (London: Greg A. Madison, PhD, 2010))
♪ 'Home', we suggest as a working definition, 'is where one best knows oneself – where 'best' means 'most', even if not always 'happiest' ... One is at home when on inhabits a cognitive environment in which one finds one's identity best mediated – and homeless when such a cognitive environment is eschewed.
(Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson Migrants of Identity. Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement p. 9-10 (Oxford: Berg Publ, 1998))
♪ It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has executed his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.
(Victor Hugo)
♪ We feel ejected from our first homes and landscapes, from childhood, from our first family romance, from our authentic self. We feel there is an ideal sense of belonging, of community, of attunement with others and at-homelessness with ourselves, that keeps eluding us ... On one level, exile is a universal experience.
(Eva Hoffman Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language p. 40 (New York: EE Dutton, 1989))
♪ Displacement creates a distance measured by kilometers or miles, hundreds and thousands of miles. The biblical image is that of a movement in space from the Garden of Eden or, translating this into modern notions, from the borders of a state guarded by armed soldiers. However, distance may be measured not only in miles, but also in months, years, or dozens of years. Assuming this, we may consider the life of every human being as an unrelenting movement from childhood on, through the phases of youth, maturity, and old age. The past of every individual undergoes constant transformation in his or her memory, and more often than not it acquires the features of an irretrievable land made more and more strange by the flow of time. Thus the difference between a displacement in space and time is somewhat blurred. We can imagine an old expatriate who, meditating on the country of his youth, realizes that he is separated from it not only by expanse, but also by the wrinkles on his face and grey hair, marks left by a severe border guard, time. What then is exile if, in this sense, everybody shares that condition?
(Czeslaw Milosz (foreword) 'On Exile' Joseph Koudelka: Exiles Joseph Koudelka (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988))
♪ To recognize oneself as the refugee: this means that the relation to the shadowy figure of the exile defines the way one relates to oneself; in other words, it demands, paradoxically, ‘identifying universality with the point of exclusion … Far more radical is to universalise exile as the condition of being human, and to determine a politics of equality on that basis. It may currently be unlikely to conceive of this eventuality in today’s political environment. But perhaps this is exactly where artistic practice may assume its most radical role: to imagine alternatives otherwise impossible to contemplate, unleashing an imagination that may produce material effects in turn.
(Demos, T.J. 'The ends of exile: Towards a coming universality?' p. 86-7 Altermodern : Tate Triennial Nicholas Bourriaud (ed.) (London: Tate, 2009))
♪ Exile is not a material thing, it is a spiritual thing. All corners of the earth are exactly the same. And anywhere one can dream is good, providing that the place is obscure, and the horizon is vast.
(Victor Hugo)
♪ No matter how well they may do, exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference (even as they frequently exploit it) as a kind of orphanhood. Anyone who is really homeless regards the habit of seeing estrangement in everything modern as an affectation, a display of modish attitudes. Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong.
This usually translates into an intransigence that is not easily ignored. Willfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept your vision - which you make more unacceptable because you are in fact unwilling to have it accepted. It is yours, after all. Composure and serenity are the last things associated with the work of exiles. Artists in exile are decidedly unpleasant, and their stubbornness insinuates itself into even their exalted works.
(Edward Said 'Reflections on Exile' p. 145 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
♪ (Art Vital – no fixed living-place, permanent movement, direct contact, local relation, self-selection, passing limitations, taking risks, mobile energy, no rehearsal, no predicted end, no repetition. (Marina Abramovic and Ulay, 1976))
This was very important statement for me at that time, especially taking risk is, you know, not just taking risk in the work but taking risk in the way of life, and how life will go on, and really to continue to move and move and one way, I really realized that the house is yourself, wherever you go. Not outside kind of thing and the car was just perfect for us in that time.
(Marina Abramovic 'Talking Art at Tate Modern' Interview with Iwona Blazwick 16 October, 2010 http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/events/category/talking-art 1 March, 2012)
♪ The whole point of what I do, the monster ball, the music, the performance aspect of it, I want to create a space for my fans where they can feel free and they can celebrate, because I didn't fit in, I didn't fit in high school and I felt like a freak. So I like to create an atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang out with and they don't feel alone.
This is really who I am and it took a long time to be OK with that because ... you feel discriminated against, like you don't fit in, you want to be like everyone else but not really, on the inside, you really want to be like Boy George ... or I did any way, so I really want my fans to know that it's OK . Sometimes in life you don't always feel like a winner but that doesn't mean that you are not a winner.
(Lady Gaga 'Ellen DeGeneres Show'Interview with Ellen DeGeneres http://ellen.warnerbros.com/videos/?autoplay=true&mediaKey=09c5d523-dce6-43ff-b69e-07ce6520e8b5 2 June, 2012)
♪ I don't know if this makes sense to any of you but it does to me. I've found that because I listen to a wide variety of music I like to think it keeps me somewhat attached to society. And it does. I don't listen to mainstream shit, but rather, all different kinds of genres including but not limited to: industrial, tango, old school hip-hop, electronica, trip-hop, latin, funk, turntablism. What I'm trying to say is that you just can't limit yourself to only one thing. When it came to music I realized I could listen to whatever the fuck I want and that's how I came to be the person that I am that no one knows about.
(a voice)
♪ Stereotypes are largely the result of preconceived social expectations. However, whereas the expectations provided by roles are tied to a social function, the expectations that form the basis for stereotypes are largely arbitrary. Sometimes, stereotypes serve a mass function in establishing and maintaining a status quo; however, the individuals who have stereotyped expectations projected upon them are not actually obligated to act out those expectations.
♪ A five-year-old child newly arrived to Toronto, whose first language is not English, attends his all-English kindergarten for several months without speaking. The teacher tries hard to interest him in the brightly coloured building blocks and other toys, art materials and books, but he remains passive, distant, silent. His silence is disturbing. His teacher is concerned, but she is also wise: she waits. Then one day the class takes a trip to the zoo. In the section devoted to reptiles, the boy spots a reticulated python, wrapped several times around a branch inside a large, glass-fronted display case. The boy darts over to his teacher, grabs her hand tightly and pulls her hard, insistently, away from her conversation with another student, over to the glass case. He points at the python and shouts, over and over, 'Me know this! Me know this! This my home, teacher, this my home!'
(Dale Smith (Personal communication) 1997 Silence in Second Language Learning Colette A. Granger p.1 (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004))
(Greg A Madison The End of Belonging Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation p. 153 (London: Greg A. Madison, PhD, 2010))
♪ 'Home', we suggest as a working definition, 'is where one best knows oneself – where 'best' means 'most', even if not always 'happiest' ... One is at home when on inhabits a cognitive environment in which one finds one's identity best mediated – and homeless when such a cognitive environment is eschewed.
(Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson Migrants of Identity. Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement p. 9-10 (Oxford: Berg Publ, 1998))
♪ It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has executed his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.
(Victor Hugo)
♪ We feel ejected from our first homes and landscapes, from childhood, from our first family romance, from our authentic self. We feel there is an ideal sense of belonging, of community, of attunement with others and at-homelessness with ourselves, that keeps eluding us ... On one level, exile is a universal experience.
(Eva Hoffman Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language p. 40 (New York: EE Dutton, 1989))
♪ Displacement creates a distance measured by kilometers or miles, hundreds and thousands of miles. The biblical image is that of a movement in space from the Garden of Eden or, translating this into modern notions, from the borders of a state guarded by armed soldiers. However, distance may be measured not only in miles, but also in months, years, or dozens of years. Assuming this, we may consider the life of every human being as an unrelenting movement from childhood on, through the phases of youth, maturity, and old age. The past of every individual undergoes constant transformation in his or her memory, and more often than not it acquires the features of an irretrievable land made more and more strange by the flow of time. Thus the difference between a displacement in space and time is somewhat blurred. We can imagine an old expatriate who, meditating on the country of his youth, realizes that he is separated from it not only by expanse, but also by the wrinkles on his face and grey hair, marks left by a severe border guard, time. What then is exile if, in this sense, everybody shares that condition?
(Czeslaw Milosz (foreword) 'On Exile' Joseph Koudelka: Exiles Joseph Koudelka (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988))
♪ To recognize oneself as the refugee: this means that the relation to the shadowy figure of the exile defines the way one relates to oneself; in other words, it demands, paradoxically, ‘identifying universality with the point of exclusion … Far more radical is to universalise exile as the condition of being human, and to determine a politics of equality on that basis. It may currently be unlikely to conceive of this eventuality in today’s political environment. But perhaps this is exactly where artistic practice may assume its most radical role: to imagine alternatives otherwise impossible to contemplate, unleashing an imagination that may produce material effects in turn.
(Demos, T.J. 'The ends of exile: Towards a coming universality?' p. 86-7 Altermodern : Tate Triennial Nicholas Bourriaud (ed.) (London: Tate, 2009))
♪ Exile is not a material thing, it is a spiritual thing. All corners of the earth are exactly the same. And anywhere one can dream is good, providing that the place is obscure, and the horizon is vast.
(Victor Hugo)
♪ No matter how well they may do, exiles are always eccentrics who feel their difference (even as they frequently exploit it) as a kind of orphanhood. Anyone who is really homeless regards the habit of seeing estrangement in everything modern as an affectation, a display of modish attitudes. Clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will, the exile jealously insists on his or her right to refuse to belong.
This usually translates into an intransigence that is not easily ignored. Willfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept your vision - which you make more unacceptable because you are in fact unwilling to have it accepted. It is yours, after all. Composure and serenity are the last things associated with the work of exiles. Artists in exile are decidedly unpleasant, and their stubbornness insinuates itself into even their exalted works.
(Edward Said 'Reflections on Exile' p. 145 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
♪ (Art Vital – no fixed living-place, permanent movement, direct contact, local relation, self-selection, passing limitations, taking risks, mobile energy, no rehearsal, no predicted end, no repetition. (Marina Abramovic and Ulay, 1976))
This was very important statement for me at that time, especially taking risk is, you know, not just taking risk in the work but taking risk in the way of life, and how life will go on, and really to continue to move and move and one way, I really realized that the house is yourself, wherever you go. Not outside kind of thing and the car was just perfect for us in that time.
(Marina Abramovic 'Talking Art at Tate Modern' Interview with Iwona Blazwick 16 October, 2010 http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/events/category/talking-art 1 March, 2012)
♪ The whole point of what I do, the monster ball, the music, the performance aspect of it, I want to create a space for my fans where they can feel free and they can celebrate, because I didn't fit in, I didn't fit in high school and I felt like a freak. So I like to create an atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang out with and they don't feel alone.
This is really who I am and it took a long time to be OK with that because ... you feel discriminated against, like you don't fit in, you want to be like everyone else but not really, on the inside, you really want to be like Boy George ... or I did any way, so I really want my fans to know that it's OK . Sometimes in life you don't always feel like a winner but that doesn't mean that you are not a winner.
(Lady Gaga 'Ellen DeGeneres Show'Interview with Ellen DeGeneres http://ellen.warnerbros.com/videos/?autoplay=true&mediaKey=09c5d523-dce6-43ff-b69e-07ce6520e8b5 2 June, 2012)
♪
Subjectivity is an objective matter, and it is enough to change the
scenery and the setting, refurnish the rooms, or destroy them in an
aerial bombardment for a new subject, a new identity, miraculously to
appear on the ruins of the old.
(Frederic Jameson 'The Antinomies of Postmodernity' p. 64 The Cultural Turn Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 Frederic Jameson (London: Verso,( 1998))
♪ I don't know if this makes sense to any of you but it does to me. I've found that because I listen to a wide variety of music I like to think it keeps me somewhat attached to society. And it does. I don't listen to mainstream shit, but rather, all different kinds of genres including but not limited to: industrial, tango, old school hip-hop, electronica, trip-hop, latin, funk, turntablism. What I'm trying to say is that you just can't limit yourself to only one thing. When it came to music I realized I could listen to whatever the fuck I want and that's how I came to be the person that I am that no one knows about.
(a voice)
♪ Stereotypes are largely the result of preconceived social expectations. However, whereas the expectations provided by roles are tied to a social function, the expectations that form the basis for stereotypes are largely arbitrary. Sometimes, stereotypes serve a mass function in establishing and maintaining a status quo; however, the individuals who have stereotyped expectations projected upon them are not actually obligated to act out those expectations.
♪ A five-year-old child newly arrived to Toronto, whose first language is not English, attends his all-English kindergarten for several months without speaking. The teacher tries hard to interest him in the brightly coloured building blocks and other toys, art materials and books, but he remains passive, distant, silent. His silence is disturbing. His teacher is concerned, but she is also wise: she waits. Then one day the class takes a trip to the zoo. In the section devoted to reptiles, the boy spots a reticulated python, wrapped several times around a branch inside a large, glass-fronted display case. The boy darts over to his teacher, grabs her hand tightly and pulls her hard, insistently, away from her conversation with another student, over to the glass case. He points at the python and shouts, over and over, 'Me know this! Me know this! This my home, teacher, this my home!'
(Dale Smith (Personal communication) 1997 Silence in Second Language Learning Colette A. Granger p.1 (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004))