The idea of finding oneself implies an investigation of our interior lives. It conjures notions of our tolerably fluid identity becoming unsettled and even dissolved. To become unmoored is only one of the geographic terms that describes this sensation. The physicality of listlessness is a reaction to the intense need for grounding oneself, finding our place. An environmental place feels real, certain and visceral. However our knowledge of that place is dependent on our personal experience of it. The somatic sensations that contribute to that understanding are real, but our impression of place leads us to believe that it exists outside of ourselves, that it’s independent of us and is therefore an absolute. Although we treat a place as an object with all of the permanence that implies, it is one that is defined by our experience of it through time. My contribution to Beating the Bounds is an investigation of this process, the process of placemaking that is both personal and grounded in external relationships and history.

Anyone who has spent anytime in Atlanta can vouch for the ever changing nature of place, neighborhoods at the mercy of current trends for so-called development, neighborhoods that become holders of experiences which are particular to time and place. The desire for them to be cohesive distinct bodies is not always congruous with the actual places themselves. The neighborhood of Kirkwood has been many things to many people. At any given time, people are having unique experiences of the place. When considering the area across time, those narratives only become more complicated. There is no one place in time.

The geographic space of the neighborhood encapsulates many lives happening at one time. There is a way of thinking about simultaneous experience that can be understood as a flat circle rather than a linear progression. The present moment, the sensational representation that constructs our reality, erodes the tendency to describe our lives through our past experience. The now supersedes what has gone before. All of those lives are happening at once, eliminating the limitations of our past or future selves, how we got here or where we are going. It’s not that space is static and time is fluid, rather we only know how to define space through movement over time. That movement through geographic space is intertwined with the fabric of time, that linear march, the inescapable, the inevitable, the oppressive forward.

In that same space of Kirkwood are the memories of everyone who has lived there before, everyone who has claimed that space at one time or another. The neighborhood is in the middle of the rapid gentrification that followed the white flight of the middle of the twentieth century and subsequent residence of middle class African American families. Prior to the 20th century, the land was owned by white families who farmed using enslaved peoples, and those people took the place of the Creek people who occupied it for centuries. It is a space that has held and continues to hold many places at once.

With so many different histories and experiences of place happening at one time, finding the edge of a place seems particularly impossible. Determining where one place ends and another begins relies on a binary division that can only exist by creating a threshold that breaks down the multiplicity of space. There is nothing more absolute that the authoritative line on a map regardless of the lived encounter with that separation of place. Photographing the boarder looking towards the sky inverts the determinism of the aerial view. The implied objectivity of knowing a place by its boundary only captures part of its character. This work of photography and video encapsulates the forces of the past and future from which emerge a tug of war between what a place was, is, and what it is becoming. The constant state of place making that is always shifting, always becoming, requires present observation and invites the viewer to consider their role in that process. We are all very much a part of that place regardless of our history and future.  

~ Mary Stuart Hall