otherness exi le body space despair
translation spaces of exile by enrique enriquez
why architects have to experience exile to better understand space
I am strong and weak. Sometimes I leave, to be closer to me, and it happened also about my country. Go far to be close. That would give exiles, voluntaries or not, or travels; the knowledge of what you don’t know about who you are.
— Manu Leguineche
Maybe the people who are running away from their lives fascinate us not because they’re the exceptions but because they’re symptomatic of our world. — Stephen Bertman . Cultural Amnesia: America’s future and the crisis of Memory
The door pull at Marguerite Yourcenar’s house, Petite Plaisance in Maine, where she lived from 1950 to 1987
To all my little mermaid friends:
Between 1942 and 1943, Marguerite Yourcenar wrote a small theatre play based on The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. It was the first time since her exile from Europe that she wrote an original text after a long period of blockage (without taking in consideration certain commercial translations, past works modifications and minor journalistic works) apparently the fruit of a period of depression. In her new land, America, she experienced the weight of being an exile. In one of her letters to her friend Jacques Kayaloff, she wrote: I force myself to work but I am greatly discouraged. 1 In another letter she finished with a revealing phrase: …and my despair reaches the width and the depth of the Atlantic Ocean . 2 The sea creature allegory in her play was a reflection of her ‘état’ , as she recognised years later: I realised after some delay what that creature could have meant for me, violently transported to another world without identity and without voice. 3
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