Film: Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979)

This session was located in a disused post industrial space in Sheffield and explored the issue of appropriating coexisting temporalities.

The discussions on Tarkovsky’s Stalker will try to uncover the mechanisms through which these spaces are appropriated, up to a point of re-activating the notion of belonging. If this is achieved, is this re-activation an act of sensibly remembering the invisible qualities of space and perceptually understanding coexisting temporalities? Or is it simply a lived reality, which constantly reiterates itself?

Immersed within the contemporary urban fabric and its current flows, the fragmentary sediments of a city’s industrial past – aside from providing rich grounds for imagined potentialities – provide loci of indeterminacy, which, under a more or less inquisitive gaze, may question the very experience of place. The levels of indeterminacy are set by the very absence of limit, or rather the absence of an act of clear delimitation between heterogeneous entities, which exist simultaneously, but do not necessarily interact. Spatial incongruence is multiplied by the coexisting temporalities and rhythms, which reside within these fragile and fluctuating borders between used and unused. The zone of confluence between the presence of built reminders and the absence of habitation appears to be the catalyst for another form of spatial awareness. The sense of alienation of the human experience is muted by seeking, reclaiming and eventually fabricating spatial memories for those marginal places which cannot be perceptually grasped. The temporal chiasmus, spatially visible, therefore becomes a physical evidence for the urban void which sustains desire.

Synopsis by Ruxandra Berinde

This event took place in 2012 and as such reflects the social and political conditions of the time