Jana Colonna

Places I lived in the past 5 years

On September 12, 1997, I moved from my house in Crawfordville into an apartment in Tallahassee, FL.

The new apartment was only 15 miles north of my old place so moving wasn't hard. I moved there with:

1 queen size bed
1 set of sheets
1 futon mattress
1 drawing desk
1 set of plates, 3 cooking pans, a set of plastic glasses
5 boxes of clothes and shoes

This was the first apartment I have rented all by myself. The apartment was beautiful, brand new. It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an enormous living room with a dining area and huge windows facing south and west. The kitchen was small but functional, separated by the counter-bar from the living room. Apartment complex had a beautiful swimming pool that my kids adored.

I lived in the apartment for two years. I liked it, but didn't want to stay in Tallahassee forever. "How to make a decision where to move? How do I start looking for the new place?" After quite some decisionmaking I decided to move to Salt Lake City, UT. I found the perfect little apartment through the internet. I checked its floor plan, it was perfect, it even had a balcony. I contacted the office, discussed terms and conditions and rented it. I arranged everything through the web, fax and phone! And a one-bedroom apartment was waiting for me.

I rented a 15-foot Penske truck, with a trailer for my 1993 Honda Civic LX. In just two years my possessions accumulated to:

1 queen size bed
1 bunk bed
1 futon mattress
1 twin size mattress
2 desks
2 living room chairs
1 coffee table with glass top
1 dining table with 4 chairs
all paraphernalia for the kitchen (silverware, glasses, plates, half a dozen frying pans, cooking pans, bowls, large salad bowls, etc.)
1 microwave
1 cappuccino maker
4 decorative white cast columns, about 3 feet tall
8 huge boxes of books
35" TV with VCR
1 CD tower with cassette player and radio
1 sewing machine
1 trunk full of sewing materials
several sets of oil, pastel and other kinds of paints, canvases and drawing pads
about 30 framed paintings and drawings
1 computer and printer
8 huge plants
1 mountain bike
2 standing lamps
1 chest of drawers
several boxes of clothes and shoes and towels, blankets, comforters, pillows, etc.
1 large desk with the office chair (my working desk)

2 white desks with office chairs (for kids)
1 large white dresser with a TV stand
1 13" white TV with VCR
2 kids bikes
several boxes of toys

The last 5 items I left to the kids, the rest went with me.

July 28 1999. After four days of straight driving (10 hours a day) I came to Salt Lake City.

I liked the apartment, but it was a kind of small for everything I brought with me. I had to get rid of some stuff.

After half a year I realized I will not stay in Salt Lake City for much longer. My five-month lease was coming to an end and I learnt that my friend Jayne Darling was looking for a roommate. I moved again on January 2, 2000.

615 Columbus Street Salt Lake City, UT

But now I was sharing an apartment, and had way too much stuff for my new place. I had to rent a storage space. For the first time in my life my stuff accumulated beyond the size of my living space. At this point, there were several more items I owned, besides the ones written above:

1 love seat (bought at a garage sale for only $10)
1 blue velvet couch, and
a huge amount of decor: pictures, framed mirrors, candles and other Feng Shui decor (supposedly bringing good luck).

This apartment was in a duplex divided into four apartments (two upstairs, two downstairs) located right behind the State Capitol. Our apartment was the top one, facing east, south and west. It was one of the sunniest apartments I have ever lived in. Located on the hill overlooking the city, it offered a magnificent view. Thousands of lights twinkling at night, traffic lights changing colors, car lights traveling--I spent nights staring at the lights. They mesmerized me. I loved that place.

But I decided to move again. This time to New York City.

Until this point my material possessions have only been accumulating. I had the most possessions ever in my life. From that time on it was time to start getting rid of them. I started selling, or just plain giving away the accumulated stuff. The things that never made it with me on my move to New York City include:

1 blue-velvet couch
1 bunk bed, with futon mattress and a twin size mattress
1 old computer (I bought a new one though)
1 Honda Civic LX
2 living-room chairs
several clothing items, coats, shoes, etc.

April 27 2000, I was moving again. I mastered the routine by now. I rented a Penske truck (one way rental) loaded the things, and I was on the road again. It took me 4 days to come back to the east coast. My destination: Rye, NY. My friend Maja Zbogar lived there with her family at the time.

I had to move most of my stuff in the storage place in Rye. There was only enough room for my bed, computer, and clothes in the house. This was my home for the next two and a half months. It was nice up there in Rye. It felt almost like being on vacations. The city was quiet, there were gardens with large trees where people hid from the hot summer sun, and the beach wasn't far away.

I had not saved much money and NYC is so terribly expensive. After finding a job my focus shifted to an apartment search. In NYC is not at all an easy job. I went to see several places in Manhattan, and they were all asking way too much for what I saw. Then I saw a house in Queens in Kew Gardens. I liked it.

I moved to Kew Gardens July 15, 2001. Kew Gardens is another quiet family place, like Rye. I rented a room in a five-bedroom house, in which the owner had business offices located in the first floor. Renting a room in such arrangement had proven to be a big mistake. After only 7 months I was moving yet again. By now I was really tired it.

I was apartment searching again and hoping to get something in Manhattan, preferably in the East Village. This neighborhood felt like home to me. Apartment hunting was exhausting. I had seen about 30 apartments in 10 days. I didn't like any of them.

This one was the last apartment I was going to see that day in March. Actually, the last one for the next two months. I planned to move in temporarily with a friend Igor who had a beautiful apartment on the 11th floor on 3rd Street between 1st Avenue and Avenue A. But I dreaded the idea of putting everything in storage again only to take it out a month later. But this last apartment was something else. It had windows in every room, two in the bathroom and bedroom. It had a kitchen, living room, bedroom, and a nice size bathroom. I liked it right away and the price was acceptable.

I rented it. But the new place was no mansion and again I had to get rid of some stuff. These are the things that never made it to Manhattan:

1 queen size bed
1 love seat
1 vacuum cleaner
1 coffee table
20 framed pictures
2 boxes of books
1 set of 6 plates
1 silverware set
15 glasses
1 aquarium
3 large boxes of clothes
6 pairs of shoes

With the help of friends Igor and Robi I moved to my fifth floor apartment in the Lower East Side on March 27, 2001

I like my current apartment very much, but recently it started thinking that it might be rather small...

Suzana Milevska

Curator of "Capital and Gender" exhibition in Skopje, Macedonia, January 2001.

THE CHURCH

The architecture of the orthodox church mirrors, through its form, the concepts underlying orthodox liturgy. The symbolic narrative is manifested visually in the layout and material presence of the church building.

The junction between the vivid and subjective interpretation as a result of the Christian exegesis of the biblical texts unifies the internal and external, the visible and invisible truth of the architecture that reveals continuously in the eternal displacement of the gazes.

THE HOUSE

For Heidegger there is a metaphorical difference between "house" and "dwelling." The difference is made by introducing innocence, by descending from the heights of metaphysics to the realm that is closer to us: "dwelling" is conceived as "being closer to something." The anecdote from Heraclitus' "The Letter of Humanism" presents man's unwillingness to accept such closeness, familiarity. Visitors to Heraclitus were disappointed that instead of finding him in a deep philosophical contemplation, they saw him simply warming up next to his stove.

According to Heidegger, the innocence of dwelling contrasts with the pompousness of philosophy. The description of the dwelling as "concern," "care," "expectation of divinity" attributes an ethical tone to its interpretation. "The House of Being" is a metaphor employed to bring us closer to the Being: through the form of the house, which is familiar and known, we can more easily approach something as strange and alien, unknown and abstract as Being.

The House of Being is language itself. "I live," "I dwell" means the same as "I am." Dwelling consists of the four basic dimensions: earth, sky, divine and mortal. The house is familiar, and can become at any moment a dwelling--thus representing the visible with the invisible and unknown. The association between building, being, and dwelling brings us to the thesis that being is possible only inside shelter. One interpretation of the notion that the appropriate space for living is one that enables the "constitution of the subject" is Foucault's mention of space that is connected with an event and time.

According to Heidegger, the first trouble in life is not a lack of homes but the continuous quest for the meaning of dwelling. For Heidegger, homelessness does not carry the usual meaning that we associate with it today, instead it is a call for dwelling and building. This house becomes a shelter not only for the body but also for thought. Free from danger, the house secures free space for the development of being.

THE MOTHER

The architecture of the female body was axiologically and anatomically connected with giving birth: the pelvis as the center of gravity--a firm foundation for the hips, was the basic criterion for evaluating the health of a woman. In contrast, bodily form and giving birth was not the most important aspect of the Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church. Rather, she was extolled for her motherly love, an abstract not physical part of her being.

However, in the case of the Virgin Mary, the dichotomy between the body and mind is a paradox; it is because he was born of Mary's body that Jesus is part of humanity, and furthermore, his conception without sin saves her from death. According to Julia Kristeva, The Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, in contrast to Jesus, has a perfect biography: she was not tortured, she has no grave, nor does she need resurrection. The Virgin Mary's identity as simultaneously mother, daughter, and wife of her son confounds her physical nature. Similar to the Church building, her body is reduced to function as a vessel for symbolism.

Motherhood is bestowed with divinity when it is used as a metaphor for artistic creation as discussed by such writers as Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Pregnancy appears as a shelter of the body of the Other, which is the artwork. The body of the mother becomes endless and limitless in her folded structure. The mother/shelter provides security for the child/text until it becomes autonomous, emerging out into the light of the world. The child/text is folded in her body, vibrating and swelling until the moment when she opens and thrusts out the newborn. To come into the world means to come into language, to construct the self, to overstep the threshold of the archaic and to construct a new independent shelter in an unstructured world that is full of danger. The folds and the warmth of the friction of different layers and textures of the body, becomes the metaphor for walls and other architectural elements of a building, which hide and protect. Architecture and dwelling are undoubtedly connected with the mother's body as the only secure place for creation. "The room of her own" enables the child/text to become independent and create shelter as an autonomous body.

Ana Peraica

On the Indifference [inhabiting "inbetween" as a territory]

The political meaning of any territorial identity suffers from trivial binaries (me/you, good/bad, East/West, left/right, this/that .). The third way (in its many versions and nuances of fusion, ordinary, dislocated, unified, unspecified), inhabited by those dissatisfied with both opposing radical choices, or alternatively, rejected by both opposites, is hardly ever regarded as serious. It is seen as bad, faceless, beyond ethics, geographically and spatially lost, not serious. It is described in terms of cowardice, weakness, lack of a position and with no interest in the debate. Being third is worse then even being an enemy, as conformism or non-conformism is demanded for the sake of creating division. Otherwise, the whole dispute seems plastic and superficial. But, there has always been that less acknowledged way of neutrality, chosen or imposed, that indeed looks like anxiousness, indifference, or apathetic resistance from aside. There have always been, and there still are those people that live in the twilight of political binarism, that move right and left, East and West, between socialism and capitalism, feeling no gravity from any of them--and there are those who simply live in between.

The story repeats symptomatically, again showing no sense, as is its nature. Narratives of indecision are boring and repetitive, echoed and replicated. Their territorial forms are always abstract--moving in circles, a trivial absence from a place, a moving that is not a departure, an elimination of the return, treating all platforms as only places to take a breath. Similar are their timed descriptions, as spending time in between waiting and thinking back. It is an apathetic geography with undecided time.

The indifference of the double-minded seems to be a channel through which everything needs to pass, to be purified, to be refreshed, and to get meaning. That nomadism is meaningless in all directions, while at the same time there are those who are heading "to" somewhere, and those who know only where they travel "from." And again, there are those who have given up asking the question. They are anxious, skeptical of defining both the departure and arrival point. For them they are the same, as things simply repeat. So, the arrival paradoxically happens before the departure, and all this takes place in lost times of maybe, sometimes, once, as in a dream, a long, long time ago.

The Third is a ground decided in-between two, but at the same time it is a soft border, and is inhabited by those who do not know who they are. It is a zone of the un-named, or a zone with a vague name (like the "Krajina"), interzone, twilight zone.

For those reasons, the territory inhabited is un-settled, and all depictions of it are foggy, distorted and doubled, unfocused and uncorrected. So, they are simply omitted as irrelevant by all sides. In that un-objectified world, only another illusion of impossible both-ness is desirable, of fullness of meaning, while any of the single solutions feels claustrophobic. Both sides include them in the descriptions of themselves. Those are doubled beings, existing at the same time in both of the different maps that cover the same edge as a reference. But since the map is not a territory, they live in a territory in between two maps, a territory of extra-dimension needed to draw a map on the flat surface, seeing both of them fused.

Because of this, the political meaning of that middle way [of neutrality, of vagueness, of unbelonging] is futile. It is a road of the unsatisfied or even a road of unsatisfaction, crowded with those tired of chronically confronting the limited choice, always in between two single-sided constructs that both have to be used as parameters of the same real space they refer to. Tired of being a reference, they become a line of referring, a border of sense.

Being imprisoned from the outside of both means living on the border. Although a border is a small territory, a framing line of a temporary sense. Therefore, that zone has no reasons, ideologies, interpretations and uses. The line of division is inhabited by alternative histories, and alternative geographies of repeating. It moves, but with all its movings it has no sense, since the meaning of the border is precisely to keep the sense outside or inside the self.

We can think the border visually, as a line on which no one is supposed to live, a two-dimensional world. That line is doubly exposed, from both the sides described. What it is, then, is a doubled territory, that can be seen as belonging as well here and there. In the time sense of visual media double exposure, that can be compared, an error in which "a bit before" intersects with "a bit after," but without any present, or any presence. It is a consequent event of the transformation that is not accepted as distinct.

There are two eyes that show the same story. Parallaxes, a fall of a picture between two eyes, is corrected or objectified (made desirable) in three dimensions, perspective (or purposive), and real. In biological and, in parallel, in maturing culturally, the correction of the binocular vision is a main interrogation of the authority that resolves the meaning, or identity that gives meaning to the one. The unfocused world is irrelevant, and its existence does not matter. It can be omitted, as are the histories of the undecided or double-minded. It is irrelevant, and that irrelevance is repeatable while all divisions around it change. That is, and for those reasons it is excluded from it, because finally civilization is a fight against the apathy of undeciding, of drawing precisely--borders.

That is, again, the world that has no other horizon than that of the expectations in-between. The history of the undecided, and at the same time refused, rejected, and uninvited, is a history of longing for a meaning in a lost and unreachable land, that tries to find the ideal identity while it is tired of both identities it already possesses. It is rich of interpretation and poor in meaning.

The same is a story of the Promised Land, the richest narrative without a sense. As how can something be logical that is lost and desired at the same time? On the border that is a territory, there is always a wish to become a space. The Promised Land can only be described in terms of inside outside, through the history of diving out. Utopia is produced by melancholy.

It means, "the home, that is lost." Birgel's concept of Heimat [German: Homeland] gives the closest definition of "utopia omnius" (Morley and Robins, 1995), losing the security, or ghostly reminder of a disintegrated past, that cannot be re-established. Only in the Bible, it was lost twice. It is a home that is abandoned, but refused, desired but rejected. And it always had its space. It was always that strange territory in between lost past and unreached future, but lacking the dimension of the present. It was always only a thin line that has no other territory, outside of both bridging and dividing--as all borders are.

It is a place of identity, a place of lost meaning. As such, it is also a dream of drawing another border, and the only horizon (of expectations) is basically a border. But all places are discovered. Finally, this is the first century of a "closed map." a century that had to find the way of resolving the tragic of the discovered world, since the last Terra Incognita disappeared in 1899, and there is no place for those who have nowhere to go, who stand "on the line."

That place is inhabited by people that can be both "in residence", although prosaically they are in exile, refugees, or gastarbeiter [German: temporary hard laborer abroad]. It is an imperfect world of errored fusions, of here and there, being nowhere, being home abroad, real and virtual, included or excluded. It is a place of being alive dead, dead alive, being both, without a will to change it, to atrophy and diminish the self away, to dream. Because, finally, the border is an ideal territory that has no gravity of meaning, it is paradoxical enough to be free, until the real meaning arrives.

But the Third can also be related to the other nicely drawn territorial identities, despite major ones [such as: state, nation, religion, culture]. They can inhabit descriptions of any real or illusionary space, even movements in it, any inclusion and exclusion, territorial identity, or even its valorisation. It can, therefore, refer even to that of one's own body, as the only state, as a nation, even as one's own religion and cultural position. What remains is only indifference in lost both-ness, in between maps that are not the territory but appear as such. And that travel is only a travel on the border, on all those territorial borders, from the state to one's own body lines, as a temporary home.

Cristine Wang

Digital Diary:
Ruminations on a Society of Control

Part 1

Keywords = border =citizen

http://nyartsmagazine.com/59/diary.htm