The emptiness between each heartbeat

LIMINAL SPACES

March 2024 newsletter

Our lives are structured around a succession of milestones. The way we organize our days, the gestures we repeat, our ambitions and projects, even our way of communicating, all revolve around stages whose sole purpose is to help us visualize any notion of progression. The Japanese language, for example, uses specific particles to designate origin and destination, or cause and consequence (respectively から – kara – and まで – made), and does so naturally. This binary representation thus obscures the connections that nevertheless exist between two points, be they geographical, temporal or abstract. However, we are beings with an astonishing sensitivity, and these connections, while they mostly evaporate over time, sometimes manage to survive in the face of the repeated assaults of oblivion that lacerate us as we age. A crooked corridor in the house of the neighbors we used to visit as children, a withered tree on the side of the road leading to the bus stop, a particular smell under the window of this building – these are the interstices into which memory slips. For the purposes of this text, we’re going to concentrate on physical spaces, those places lost in an in-between, limbo of a reality that crumbles at their touch.

These places, torn from a valley of architectural strangeness, are commonly referred to as liminal spaces, a term fashioned from the Latin word “limen”, translatable as “threshold”. And threshold is what we’re talking about here, given the connector nature of these constructions, which link two places together. Forged in 2019 by the publication of a disconcerting image on the social network 4chan, liminal spaces quickly became an internet curiosity, covering an increasingly cold, insensitive and pragmatic world with a veil of salvific strangeness. Hypnotizing explorers of the impossible, those web surfers in search of an “other” culture (internauts?), the phenomenon easily extirpated itself from its own boundaries to escape all control, and clash with analytical studies of its aesthetics, role, effects, breath and essence. And yet, liminal spaces have probably existed since the dawn of time, from that funny-looking gallery carved into the rock, which linked the wilderness to the depths of that cavern synonymous with safety for our distant ancestors. Without going back that far, let’s mention the fact that culture, and in particular cinema, took hold of them a few decades ago.

How can we fail to detect evanescent echoes in the seventh art of these abstruse spaces along the insalubrious corridors populating horror films? How can we fail to feel the coherence collapsing beneath the emptiness of the rooms in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel? How can we fail to notice that absurd heart beating beyond the suburban neighborhood of Edward Scissorhands? Just a second… A hotel reception, you say? A cluster of houses in a row? Aren’t these places in total contradiction with the meaning expressed earlier, namely the notion of threshold? A house as a whole is not a threshold, it’s a point of departure or arrival. A cocoon. The door is a threshold, not the building. But then, how can these rooms and buildings become liminal spaces?

It’s through this simple observation that the concept of liminal space really reveals itself, and is adorned with a meaning that only exists precisely because of its total absence of primitive meaning. These thresholds are not just physical, they are above all symbolic and psychological. The suburbs depicted in Edward Scissorhands are frightening in their reverence for conformity. Its feigned and simulated perfection gives it a nightmarish, alienating aspect, its beauty dislocated in favor of an underlying ugliness. The regular alignment of colorful facades it displays is in reality no more than a passageway to the lair of unspeakable monsters that lurk there, the connection between appearances and the true nature of its residents. Liminal spaces can thus embody any mutation, progression or evolution – physical, of course, but also mental. A state of psychological in-between can thus come to life through the architectural anomalies of the places that surround us. The void between the columns of an abandoned hangar materializes insecurity, doubt and the wanderings of the mind, the blocks of a dilapidated open space crystallize all possible futures, and a drained swimming pool shelters the remains of an evaporated past. The mind glues its memories and hopes to these places, which have been battered by the waves of time, filling the emptiness of these foreign places.

In the cinematic examples cited above, these architectural absurdities serve a purpose and are at the service of the work. And yet, the liminal spaces that dot the web are, for the most part, nothing more than images without context, onto which Internet users deposit their own neuroses and uncertainties. Uncertainty is the word. We look to these dismemberments of coherence to fill the holes in our lives. The neighbors’ winding corridor becomes an alley to an unknown future. The withered tree on the path to the bus stop is no longer a mere strangeness etched in our memories, it embodies a childhood that will not last. And the smell we encounter under the window bears witness to the existence of an anonymous family that exists beyond the walls of its apartment building, itself drowning in its own uncertainties. There’s something reassuring about knowing that not everything is set in stone, and that there’s still something wonderful and unspeakable in the concrete and cables that surround us. Surrounding us. Locking us in. There’s something reassuring in not being reassured, in recognizing the imperfection and uselessness of places that exist only to be crossed. So much so that, through their non-existence and the unease they manage to arouse, these places end up embedding themselves in our flesh.

Liminal spaces thus confront our psyche, allowing us to discern in them sometimes the answers to our questions, other times the questions themselves. They fill what reason cannot, the labyrinths of their decrepit textures reflecting the wanderings of our thoughts. It’s for this reason that each and every one of us is more or less sensitive to a particular liminal space, depending on our experience and sensitivity. Some individuals will be more receptive to pieces of such perfect symmetry that they become frightening, so much so that they question their own intimate and futile quest for perfection. Others will bend under the absurd geometry of rooms that are but a manifestation of the chaos that surrounds them. A final group, on the contrary, won’t give a damn about the layout of the premises, submitting instead to the unreal hues and colors they display. Liminal spaces, like all forms of art, speak directly to our innermost selves, and become a showcase for our psychoses. Their strange power to offer meaning to a world lost in exponential alienation is fascinating in that there are as many interpretations as there are souls ready to be engulfed by them. These grotesque architectural creations embody, in their own way, a new form of narrative. Unique images, capable of telling a different story for each and every one of us, a story that speaks directly to our most secret and buried part of our psyche, a story that can only exist because we’ve taken the time to contemplate its contours, which are at once so reassuring and so sinister. And so incredibly wonderful.

These cracks in reality, these explosions of emptiness, don’t just speak directly to our hearts, they form a web that connects the world into a myriad of interstices through which to thread our way. As mentioned above, we think of our daily lives in terms of connecting different stages (getting from point A to point B), but these routes lead us to cross just as many thresholds as there are destinations, thresholds that remain frozen between the past (the point of departure) and the present (the point of arrival), like memories destined to be forgotten because they are impossible to define precisely. It’s not uncommon for observing a liminal setting to evoke a surprising nostalgia that has no place here. How can this unreal swimming pool with its non-Euclidean properties be a forgotten piece of memory? How could this line-up of wooden desks covered with old, unidentifiable computers be the fruit of memories? These liminal splinters are not only the thresholds of a path leading to knowledge of the intimate, they themselves open thresholds in our own minds. Doors we didn’t even know existed are unlocked at the sight of these images, making us recall a past we could only fantasize about.

The art of disorientation that liminal spaces are guilty of is so fascinating that they give rise to sensations that contradict our realities. New truths are grafted onto previous ones, and we come to cherish memories we’ve only just created. We still don’t understand how these images act on our minds, only that they slip directly into the intimacy of our emotions, to the point of modulating them as we wish, amalgamating them, even corrupting them. This phony nostalgia pins a frieze of blurred snapshots to the wall of memories, like failed photos that would be the ultimate means of plunging back into an era neither lived nor evaporated. This strange comfort, sculpted on the impossible, echoes the desire to bring order to a universe where everything goes too fast, too far, all the time, as if these holes were filling ours. Erasing an abyss with a void, two negatives forming a positive. Yet not everyone finds such serenity in these spaces; some detect a cold, clinical terror.

From this paradox, it’s possible to extract the cliché of its time. Every decade has its horrific codes, which contaminate popular culture with frightening grace. From post-11/09 anxiety and paranoia, to the fear of what’s different in the early 50s, mirroring the Cold War, to 1957’s Godzilla becoming the receptacle of nuclear trauma, every people, every nation, every period, has seen its horrific manifestations constantly redefined. The 2020s are no exception to the rule, with digital horror version 2.0 concealing itself in these impossible spaces converted into creepypastas extirpated from social networks. Horrific liminal spaces feed and are fed by Art, as horror always has, while infecting the tools put in place by Man to communicate.

How can we not think of backrooms broadcast on a platform as ubiquitous and accessible as YouTube? How can we not plunge into insidious terror as we wander along subreddits as obscure as they are fascinating? But then, why deconstruct the nostalgic facet of liminal spaces to build a cathedral of the unspeakable on its ashes? Despite the incredible possibilities afforded by technological development embracing exponentiality, it’s a fact that behind the walls of online discussion and the processions of clashing comments, the human being remains a solitary creature in spirit. A pure product of its time, the horrific penchant of liminal spaces embodies the doubts of a civilization that continues to search for itself, that could have been capable of the best, but regularly gets bogged down in the worst. The inexorable consequence of conflict cells sprouting all over the globe, but also of a world brought to a standstill by the fear of an unprecedented epidemic, the birth of these images woven into existential malaise proved inescapable.

So there’s an extremely paradoxical ambiguity between the ability of these images to envelop us in a comforting cocoon or, on the contrary, to weave a disturbing, if unspeakable, sensation. One of the reasons for this is that these spaces overturn our assumptions and expectations, denormalizing environments that are so deeply rooted in our daily lives that the slightest aesthetic or logical disorder shatters their evanescence. These tremors of reality operate through subtraction, by removing all traces of life from these settings, or even by extracting a few basic rules of perspective from the frame, or through addition, by adding elements that have no logical implication as to their presence in such and such a place. The strangeness that emanates from these ghostly places slashes away at all forms of reason, so much so that they no longer make any sense to any form of human life. They appear as shaky experiments by hypothetical entities whose aim is to reconstruct a framework that seems familiar to us, but who are unable to grasp its essence or function.

The nostalgic and horrific aspects of liminal spaces discussed above are just two of the ways in which Internet users have found to escape this disillusioned reality. Whether it’s a question of plunging back into a past that could only have been hoped for but never had the chance to exist, or confronting the horror of absurdity and nonsense, liminal spaces ultimately fulfill a single, unique role. That of filling the void between each of our heartbeats.