REHEARSING SPACES
Look left of the locations most frequented on the map, towards destinations never destined for the crowds, or the places that have fallen out of favour, the last resorts. Pay attention to changes in dialect, to shifts in turn of phrase and the cut of swagger, for these show you to be approaching a border long before place names ever can. Marginal places lend themselves well to the practise of marginal knowledge. They offer optimal conditions for testing one’s tactics, critical leverage against which to rehearse one’s nascent skills. Inhabit the shoreline as the tide ebbs, or the wastelands of receding industry, the slack of the landscape leftover after innumerable waves of boom and bust. Seek out the new ruins, the evacuated office blocks and empty shopping malls. Linger in those intermediary places that are on your way to somewhere else. Make moves upon the twilight hours of dusk and dawn. Akin to the margins of a page, marginal landscapes are annotated through active reading. They are patterned with the scribbled footnotes of those refusing to accept the authority of the central text, without comment or reflection. Marginalia has its own poetics; it carries the counternarrative, its voice incisive. Margins leave room for manoeuvre. They are a space for dialogue or for rehearsing a different position. Rehearsal is reciprocal, for landscape becomes practised as it becomes practised upon. Place is capable of being exercised in the same way as the body or mind, is equally malleable. Marginal practices thus simultaneously test the limits of both landscape and self. Their rehearsal produces capacity for further rehearsal, their training creates suppleness rather than control.
From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 29. Revised extract of a text previously published as ‘Room for Manoeuvre, or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins’ in Manual for Marginal Places, (Close and Remote, 2009).