Ghosts haunt our spaces, ripped open by abandoned public and embodied gatherings-quarantine leaves public spaces open to a new haunting. The images and words in these pages are ruminations on spatial narratives, contested space, architecture, fiction and memory.
“The ghost exists although we often do not see it”. Therein lies the haunting. In other words, the ghost is uncontrollable and ever-present. It has no concepts of space and time, but rather, appears whenever and wherever it may. In this sense, it is surely not dead, but rather, undead, immortal even. ”
Olivia Maccionni –
‘The logic of the ghost … is that it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic” (Derrida), blurring the boundaries between supposedly stable ontological categories (e.g. living/dead, being/non-being, and presence/absence).
Spectres and ghosts
Ghosts are always temporal…. they are AFTER life, existence is contingent. Without time, there is no being. Mark Fisher says that “What is important about the figure of the specter, then, is that it cannot be fully present it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet’’ (What is Hauntology)
Language erased What happens, thus, to meaning?
“These spectres – the spectres of lost futures – reproach the formal nostalgia of the capitalist realist world.”
They show us … that we don’t have to live as we presently do: that there could have been and thus could still be another way of organising things. In Derridean parlance, they help make the present non-contemporaneous with itself.”
Posthuman Museum of Haunting 