The Center for Missed Connections

“You have had a Missed Connection.

And there is a whole world of people just like you, and a venue in which you and these other lost souls can collect these moments like rosary beads, communing over these simple pleas for the possibility of closeness.

The concept of a Missed Connection has its beginnings in the places where such moments often happen: public space. Bulletin boards, street posts, and other public platforms were once used to seek out these missed connections.

…

The Center for Missed Connections (CMC) began as a project simply to identify where the most missed connections happen in a given city. New York City is home to the pilot program, chosen for its high traffic and for the propensity of posters to include specific cross-streets or location information. Since then, the analysis has developed a thorough taxonomy of the Missed Connection and a method for identifying whether one has, in fact, had a Missed Connection. The CMC seeks to understand the longing, both poetic and banal, within public spaces”.

:: http://centerformissedconnections.info/

Ben Slow _ Charlie Burns

idee/inspiration für das “Ergebnis”

 

” Charlie Burns is 95 years old. He can be seen sitting in his car on Bacon Street watching the world go by pretty much every day. He has been here since 1915 and has never left. their business is very much a family run business and is still here today, run by his daughter Carol. He is a very well known and respected man in the area, having spent time with the likes of the Kray twins, Libererace… …and Judy Garland during his time as president of The Repton Boxing Club, aswell as running The Bethnal Green Mens Club. He even had a private audience with the Pope due to all the charity work he done in the area”.

London

via Unurth

The Casket of magic: home and identity from salvaged objects

Susan Digby

_ objects can be mobilized to make a home in unfamiliar surroundings. p.170

_ Closely related to possession of souvenir objects are performances of place-making, specifically homemaking (Miller,2001) p.170

_ … mobile people use objects in performances that construct both home and away … p.170

_ I suggest that collections of salvaged-object souvenirs and their inscription constitute one such spatial practice of travel and that their collection, together with practices associated with them, serves to reproduce knowledges and constitute identities. p.171

_ Souvenirs are not generally objects of need but items gathered, signified or created in response to nostalgia for other and past places. (…) Through them, places and actions can be revisited. p.171

_ Susan Pearce comments that: “Objects hang before the eyes of imagination, continuously re-presenting ourselves to ourselves, and telling the stories of our lifes in ways which would be impossible otherwise”.(1992: 47). For Susan Stewart, souvenirs serve as a trace experience fulfilling “the insatiable demands of nostalgia” (1993:135) p.174

_ The word “salvage”, derives from the Latin, salver – to save, and the primary meaning is that associated with compensation for saving a ship or a cargo from the perils of the sea, or for lives and property rescued in a shipwreck. (…) In terms of souvenirs, as mentioned earlier, salvaged-object souvenirs are not officially sanctioned objects exchanged for money in a store dedicated to selling hegemonic memories of a place; rather they are salvaged encountered objects. (…) They are objects to which individual meanings are attached, often seemingly of the everyday, plucked from anonymity or destruction. Attached stories are those from previous lives as well as those newly made, such as the story of the find and acquisition”. p.175

_ Bassett Digby´s collection of salvaged-object souvenirs and the activities around it act in similar ways to the collection of quilting displays. The similarity lies in the precesses of memory recalling and reforming through telling stories linked to locations, many of which are distant in time and space. As with the quilt components, many of the meanings are not inherent in the objects; rather, meanings are invisible, attached only though stories. p.176

_ to an outside person, the contents of Bassett Digby´s tin would have appeared not as a “casket of magic” but as a tin containing the debris of living, “stuff”, without meaning or “junk”. However, I suggest that the tin (…) contains items that are constituent to Digby´s identity and provide a spatial mapping onto the landscapes of his travel. p.177

_ + – collecting as a search for revenue from a source other than his pen. p.178

_ Performances of telling enrich and rework stories associated with objects. (…) It is a double inscription of the objects. p.180

_ Stories connected to souvenir objects are not static; rather they are mobile and fluid. The interactive telling is a performative mapping during which alterations in and evolutions of the stories can be expected to occur. p.182

_ … the telling of stories associated with the objects was more important than the objects themselves … Thus objects act as containers for stories, they are “wild things” to which a variety of meanings can be attached. p.182

:: pdf file

http://hurry-slowly.net/

About Hurry Slowly :: “This web page was developed by Ingrid Hjelmstad and Aashild L. Øren as a part of our master thesis by the Faculty for Architecture and Fine Arts at the NTNU”.

Berlin – Fragmented City

some quotes

_ Berlin is a city where such a fragmentation can be clearly read. Not only through the inner-city emptiness, but also because of the many crashes of different realities which can be observed all over the city.

_ the city is pieced together of fragments from several historical layers.

_ After the fall of the Wall, large inner city areas lay empty, and a heated public debate arose on possible future developments and strategies; hence how the future stories of the city could be told.

_ Oswalt continues to claim that what is missing can never be replaced by something which simulates history, and that these buildings do therefore not create the desired homogeneous image. Rather, they add yet another dimension to the conglomerate city.

”Die Simulation können das Fehlende nicht ersetzen, sondern nur  auf das Vermisste verweisen. So wird in Berlin die Heterogenität der Stadt, die eigentlich kaschiert werden soll, um eine weitere Dimension bereichert” (Oswalt)

_ new projects have “failed to project an image that Berliners could recognise” (Bisky 2006).

_ Berlin is a conglomeration of parallel worlds.

_ urban development projects initiated by the planning authorities in Berlin after the reunification do not correspond with people’s perception of the realities of the city (…) “crashes of realities”

_ Temporary use has even turned out to be “an important component of urban planning in Berlin” (Overmeyer 2007).

_ A void so filled with history and memories would lie as a reminder, telling the story of the city with its emptiness.

_ Thus, in an empty space it was easier for him to recall his memories and reconstruct the former platz in his imagination (Casu and Steingut 2006). Wenders continues with comparing the function of empty and open spaces in a city to reading between the lines in a text: “…the empty spaces in the cities work like that as well. They encourage us to fill them up with ourselves” (ibid). Perhaps this points out the most crucial quality of empty space, that it is a space of opportunities, of future stories. Thus, these places trigger our imagination; encourage us to add our own stories to the city. Because where nothing exists, everything is possible.

„Wo nichts ist, ist alles vorstellbar.” Phillip Oswalt

:: http://hurry-slowly.net/