___atopia

ATOPIA. A Photographic Sketchbook

Sebastian Weiss _Tel Aviv 2021

Something went out of place. Something doesn’t match with our expectations. It is off-topic, without a theme or place. Its political, geographical, or ideological sphere may be noticeable, but rather as an attribute than a frame of reference.

It denotes a multitude of meanings, but eludes any subject and represents only itself. In many ways, it seems to be the definition of the indefinite: ATOPIA.

Here, there is no hope for the future

_ she said _

only hope for the present

There is, innate to the human venture, a prolific curiosity about atopic spaces: neglected corners, liminal places and identities always caught our interest.

Since modernity brought about the creation of a second world, a terra cognita, they challenge us to unmap territory and reconfigure semantic spaces.

As a result of this process, they turn into objects of consumption and subjects of a discourse. Their reintegration becomes functional. Their functions merge with the imaginary.

Already the word bears a strangeness: atopia doesn’t have a plural. It embodies difference and negates singularity at the same time. Necessarily it can not provide a model, - only a perspective, in which contradiction is a faculty, and not a problem.

Through this perspective it opens up a selective mode of perceiving, that generates aesthetic estrangement from the known, and intimisation with the unknown. We are enabled to see our own gaze mirrored in the eye of a stranger.

We have the chance to witness the evocation of a shared sensible world, of our common sense. Rather than asking for explanations, atopic spaces are questioning our discursively preformed experiences.

They can be part of the spectacle of de- territorialisation through consumerism, which is widely referred to as globalisation.

But they can also open up new ways of introspective perceiving, which are not reactionary, but sensitively reacting to the otherness, to the involuntary contiguity of everyone with everyone and everything.

Between anywhere and nowhere there is always the emergence of an atopia, of an emphatic, surprising, unconceivable presence.

Okay, this is the place, my friend, this is the place. How do you pay? Do you need a receipt? Listen. It is simple. There are things, which you know, but do not feel. Then there are things, which you feel, but do not know.

What do you feel? What do you know? Can you tell the difference? I like what you said before. What did you say?

I said “This city never sleeps, I said, it dreams with open eyes_”