TRACE
Sense of place occurs at the juncture between space and time. Spatiality can be conceived as a model of mobility and motion, or of transience and transitivity that can be both played out and punctured through. Lived experience is narrated through a language of stratification and depth, imagined as an archaeological structure. Construct of its own occupation, place is a site of séance where all its histories collide. It is the meeting point between past and present, whilst a non-place is the empty void whose history has been bleached out, erased or is still yet to come. Reflect on the journeys that have crisscrossed the site at which you now stand. Tune in to its bandwidth of inhabitation, conjure the ghosts of your coordinates. Wandering is a tactic through which a contingent or relational sense of place can be retrieved and even instigated, where unauthorised versions of reality — emerging at the interstice of memory, anecdote and lived experience — might elude the flat and static visuality of the map. Now visualise the route that your own life has taken. Plot it as an imaginary itinerary or mental map. Carve your history in illogical footsteps across the fabric of the city or as footnotes to its text. Score its surface with the scrawl of your itinerant epitaph. Walk your signature into the places in which you dwell.
From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 44. Revised extract of a text entitled ‘Pay Attention to the Footnotes’ previously published as part of a series of publicly sited postcards and artists’ pamphlet produced in collaboration with the project Open City (2007–2010).