Memories & dualisms: Reflecting on abandoned places
My fascination with atmospheric spaces is mostly due to the emotional affect they can bring about. How strange that a few walls and a roof, a simple structure, can make you feel a certain way; cold or cozy, sombre or happy, safe or unsettled…
This affecting nature becomes even more pronounced when you venture into abandoned places. Perhaps because the predefined notions of public and private are skewed upon your trespass, as you become a voyeur in someone else’s forgotten world.
Berlin has so many of these deserted spaces. Hidden away, forsaken though not forgotten. Barred (unsuccessfully) from intruders and vandals, from explorers… Like portals into bygone worlds they become great story tellers of the ones who might have lived there. Offering the outlines, so we can fill in the blanks; a perfect canvas for the imagination.
A once unassuming structure, becomes a place of fantasy, where memories–imagined or real–are captured in the walls, each layer of peeling paint exposing an era that once was; each colour another step back in time.
These delicate worlds are perhaps so etherial not because they might give way underfoot, but because with each passing day, nature takes back what man has made there. Earth and her elements reclaiming their territory, re-entering where it was once banished from.
Suddenly exposed, are our disconnected relationship with the world. These creeping vines and rotting timbers attest to our disparity with nature. Cause with each brick being laid, each floor board secured our manmade shelters slowly take us out of nature, and nature out of us, so that we no longer feel the beating heart of the earth below our feet.
Perhaps therein lies the beauty of abandoned places. Perhaps these dirty, dusty spaces remind us not only of our forgotten pasts, but of the dualisms we’ve defined–man vs nature, dirty vs clean, past vs present, real vs imagined–and allow us to ever so briefly, collapse them into one…
