&NOW

What might it be to chart the weird rich territory emerging off a road (more or less traveled) as a resistance to the division between “on” and “off”? In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes “Spatial existence…is the primary condition of all living perception.” Yet spaces fluctuate, transform in the accumulation of particulars, as the sedimentation of experiences over time turns spaces into places. While places seem namable, even mappable, remaining deeply specific and often richly resonant for us in terms of memory, emotion, and association, we sometimes move through them insensible of their constitution and diversity, or the shaping influences they have upon our lives. Writer David Malouf asserts a reciprocal relation between places and subjects, arguing that “real work of culture” lies in “making accessible the richness of the world we are in, of bringing density to ordinary, day-to-day living in a place.” Or moving through it, down or off the road. The proposed, interdisciplinary and crossgenre, panel takes up the rich and unstable role of place in experience, examining diverse engagements with location and situation. The question of how to “[make] truth out of the multiple…a presence…come to the limits of language” (Alain Badiou) guides us. What forms – textual, visual, videographic, hybrid – allow language, at its limits, to express the complex of human (and poetic) relations to place? Laura Mullen, Bhanu Kapil, Jennifer Scappettone, and Marthe Reed will be presenting multimedia projects articulating modes of entry into these relations.