Massey’s interpretation of place and “I take of places.” – Yorgos Petrou
In Doreen’s Massey’s alternative interpretation of place,”what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the face that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.” Places, by this conception, are not static – as the interactions that make up their constellation of social relations are inevitably changing through time. Thus, Massey writes, places are “processes.”
Yorgos Petrou is an Cypriot/British artist based in London, who is currently exploring some of the tensions that Massey was exploring on place, through highlighting the connections between the human body and land. Through various mediums, he composes of imagery that “contributes and responds to the contemporary identity of a place,” and his art aims to explore “what connects individuals to those places and how they become sites of memory legend and trauma.” I believe that the point Massey makes on the uniqueness of place being derived not only from some long internalized history, and globalization’s role in producing uniqueness of place (as counterintuitive as that might first seem) could be seen in the flesh in Petrou’s art, as it uses a “juxtaposition of image and object” to show “the appropriation of specific locations by personal, cultural, and political discourses.”
https://www.artrabbit.com/events/i-take-of-places-yorgos-petrou
Works Cited
Massey, D. 1994. A Global Sense of Place. In Space, Place and Gender. 146-56
https://www.artrabbit.com/events/i-take-of-places-yorgos-petrou
Contributed by ShaylaSchlossenberg on 11/02/2020
