The links between the tale of the Little Mermaid and the theme of the exile are remarkable. Like the grotesque creature, the exiled must undergo a transformation to inhabit the ‘other place’; firstly in its exterior space (the territorial one), changing the depths of the ocean for ‘the land of men’ and secondly in its interior space (the language – not only the oral but the whole language of the body), changing the voice for the legs . In the act of exile the space of the exiled is transformed. I remember a discussion I had with a professor, an architect, about this very topic. He argued that it was not about the transformation of space per se but about the transformation of how the space is perceived. But, what is space if not perception? Can we see space as a thing separate from perception? Space is not a self-contained entity. It is built with the immediate experience between the object and the body. It is the relationship among things – rather than the things themselves – that gives objects their identities. Though we tend to regard them as having stable and enduring characteristics, the determination of “thingness” is more a matter of groupings and classifications than it is a consequence of inherent properties. Objects require limits in order to be distinguished from the field of reciprocal relations in which they exist, but the limits we impose upon them are a function of our perception rather than a property of their thingness . 4
Or as Tadao Ando plainly put it, space is alive only if people enter it. 5
According to studies, the exiled suffer physical and psychological distortions, such as agoraphobia and claustrophobia. People were surprised to hear me comment how unsafe I felt on the streets of Montréal during my first years living there, especially since my comments were from someone who had previously lived the ‘dangerous’ Mexico City. As Aijaz Ahmad has noted, émigré writers and artists – for example, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, T S Eliot, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Salman Rushdie, experienced suffocation and claustrophobia. 6 Early studies were conducted on men, but today apparently most of the people suffering from claustrophobia and agoraphobia are women, which brings us back to the figure of the little mermaid. It was not by accident that the character chosen by Hans Christian Andersen on his tale was female. The female body is often used in western culture as a representation for our collective fears and anxieties. Intrinsically concerned with the centrality of the body to subjectivity, sexuality and the politics of power, feminist literary critics have frequently argued a case for woman’s existence as monster under patriarchal law. Woman may be the body in society, but she is excluded or marginalised by the body of society, even as she employs such carnivalesque processes for her own revolutionary ends. 7 Remember the female character in Fritz Lang’s apocalyptic Metropolis ? I cannot stop thinking about the possible connections between being a woman in a man-made world and the condition of the exiled. In both cases, one has to rebuild one’s entourage from an alien perspective. Being an exile is not only about spaces and perceptions but more importantly the experience of being ‘other”; and to be ‘other’ you have to take into account your body and start again to build your personal points of reference and boundaries. Is there a better way to learn about space? In current times where the architectural core of the profession is invaded with the narcissist cult of the object (which, in fact, it is only the cult of the narcissism of the author), I recommend to future architects (and to well-consolidated ones) exile. I assure them that they would learn something about space, or at least some humility. On December 19th, 1953, Marguerite Yourcenar went to see the famous statue of the little mermaid Copenhagen’s harbour. Paradoxically, this year the same statute was moved – for the first time – to the Denmark Pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai. An ‘exiled statue’ sign of our times; a reality that more and more defines what is going to be our life in this century. /
1 Marguerite Yourcenar. Cartas a sus amigos . Alfaguara, Madrid 2000, page 76 2 Marguerite Yourcenar. Cartas a sus amigos. Alfaguara, Madrid 2000, page 81 3 préface, La Petite Sirène, divertissement dramatique d’après le conte de Hans-Christian Andersen . 1970 4 Mitnick, Keith. Artificial Light – A Narrative Inquiry into the Nature of Abstraction, Immediacy, and other Architectural Fictions. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. p 42 5 Ando, Tadao. Conversaciones con Michael Auping . Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2003. p 31 6 Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema, Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton University Press 2001. p 194 7 Armitt, Lucie. Theorising the fantastic. London: Arnold Publishers, 1996. p 70
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