Transitional Spaces

Transitional Spaces:

An archive based on the public thresholds.

As part of the course: Visual Practices and Illustration from the department of Graphic Design and Visual Communication we were assigned to create a monument, which would escape from the classical concept that characterizes it and, through research, would propose new and timeless practices.

Archive psycogeography situationists threshold

Archive_Public Kouros
Means and Strategies p_74

Arjun Appadurai

The material and activities associated with the archive may sometimes be presented and referred to as art and sometimes not. The process of archiving and research can produce objects, experiences, information, it can be politically didactic, telling or simply aesthetically pleasing, visually challenging or all of the above. Their combination, however, aims to disrupt the way we still think about and value art, the way we think about records and the historical value we place on them, and produces an archival art of subversive information, an art awareness of scarcity, randomness and contingency.
The archive as conscious design is based on the recognition that all documentation is a form of intervention, and thus that documentation does not simply precede intervention, but is its first step. Since every archive is a collection of evidence (graphics, artefacts or recorded in other forms), this means that the archive is always a meta-intervention.
This also means that files are not just about memory. (and trace or presumption), but also the work of imagination and a kind of social design. These plans seem, initially, to have largely evolved into bureaucratic tools in the hands of the state, however today we remember again that the archive is an everyday tool...

The goal of my archive was to record the transitional spaces or otherwise thresholds in the center of Athens, at Monastiraki.

Archive front and back cover

Thresholds

“The threshold connects different universes – if nothing differentiated them, nothing would mark the passage from one to the other. […] Thus, the threshold defines a particular place that depends for its existence on the existence of places between which it extends. The threshold, one could say, is a product of the relationship between two domains but also a defining term of this relationship. Because the relationship between territories is certainly judged by the way they communicate." "The existence of this intermediate place, this "neutral zone" between two worlds is reduced to a necessary condition for the formation of the relationship between these worlds." Thus, the threshold is emphatically presented as a portal of accessibility between two entities.

Based on the performative practice from the situationist movement, i used the method of derivé :

Wandering [dérive], as "the practice of an exciting deviating course based on the hasty change of atmospheres", is the means of study of psychogeography and situational psychology. The evidence that emerges through a wandering reveals the organization of the psychogeographical structures of a city.

Later, while i was "deriving" in the city i searched for the places that were "transitional spaces" for me or a stranger that i could observe.

To create the archive i used screenshots of my locations from the google maps application, mixed with photographs and thoughts from every space that was transitional...