I now live in Calgary and it too lives in me. Bread delivered by bicycle, from a biomedical-engineer-turned-baker. Tear-shaped brass-framed windows of a chocolaterie. A cocktail menu printed on grade one readers. Meeting a stranger from the Hague whose grandmother lived in the Dutch part of town.Where is this section, I wonder? The prairie remixed by curators of the High Performance Rodeo, and a nine-foot Nuova Twist sculpture resembling a barb that redefines my notion of fencing-in livestock. Shades of brown, a knitted car cozy, chalk sidewalk signs to get out the vote that made a difference.
Calgary
amery calvelli
If the viewer makes the picture, applying Duchamp’s truism, then the inhabitant makes the place. People fill spaces with meaning and memories.An encounter with a stranger becomes a memory over time. Destinations wax nostalgia as we pass a closed door, like the jukebox playing our song when we were in that love. Wenders refers to this two-way street between the identity of place and the identity of the individual as a dialogue,‘[A]rchitecture, cities and places in general are in dialogue with us all the time’. If people enliven cities by living in them, and if inhabitants are in dialogue with their cities, the identity of place is enshrouded in a context of time and space. ‘Space, with respect to place, would be what a word becomes once it is spoken’. In this sense, the identity is spoken-word and results from the way in which the city is inhabited and lived in. Lest we forget the street. g
30
1 Stefano Casciani,“The feeling of the place on the map of virgin lands”, Domus , January 2011 2 Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien. I Arts de faire. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1990 [as quoted from: Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, The [un]common place,Trans(ient) City , BOM Publishers, 2007]
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator