THE NATURE HERE IS BUILDINGS // VIDEO

September 2018: Screened at the Faux Faux Film Festival in Portland, Oregon

The Nature Here is Buildings from Clamber on Vimeo.

In the situation of supermodernity, part of this exterior is made of non-places, and parts of the non-places are made of images. Frequentation of non-places today provides an experience — without real historical precendent — of solitary individuality combined with non-human mediation (all it takes is a notice of a screen) between the individual and the public authority. […]
– Marc Augé, Non-Places, “Epilogue” (p. 96–98)

A place is a site where the individual has a form of identity, relation and history. A non-place strips the individual of these connections. A person in a traffic jam is “on hold”, a human on an automated phone line is “on pause”.

Non-Places.
Time. & Space.

These non-places are throwaway moments. Our brain compresses them into a single point. We wipe them away in dreams. They are not living moments, but robotic moments. These scenes are rows in a spreadsheet.

When looked at from the outside, we take these formely compressed moments of time and decompress them, using slow motion, to unravel microexpressions and movements, as people pass through forgettable time.

The community of human destinies is experienced in the anonymity of non-place, and in solitude. So there will soon be a need — perhaps there already is a need — for something that may seem a contradiction in terms: an ethnology of solitude.
– Marc Augé, Non-Places, “Epilogue” (p. 96–98)

When presented with so many moments of the meaningless and mundane, the viewer is invited to consider the value of anything at all, and how a single moment could be consdered more important than any other moment, how time in one space feels different than time in another, and what moments are important enough to resist compression?

“We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful.”
― Marc Augé, Oblivion

NON-PLACES, Time and Space We live our lives made up of a great quantity of isolated instants. So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things. (From the Double Dream of Spring, 1970.)

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