The non-places
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Text: James D Campbell, 2014
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Many viewers of Rioux’s work reportedly see specific location in the Landcuts. This has more to do with projection than plenum. In fact, his works render iconic non-places that have much in common with what French anthropologist Marc Augé developed in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Augé coined the word "non-place" to refer to places of transience that are not synonymous with actual "places" but are profoundly the product of our present and future tenses.
First published in 1992, Augé's seminal book is a trenchant analysis of how we live now in the new tense of Supermodernity. He looks closely at all the "non-places" wherein we are suspended or move through: airports, railway stations, superstores, motorways and international hotel chains. These are "spaces of circulation, consumption and communication" that exist beyond history even as they seem to prophesy a utopian city-world. |
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The writings of Augé are important for identifying the radiant nomenclature of non-place in terms of Rioux’s images.
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The non-places of Rioux are certainly generated by an inherent logic of excess as can be seen from the sheer multiplicity of their structural recombinant DNA strands.
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The writings of Augé are important for identifying the radiant nomenclature of non-place in terms of Rioux’s images. He assays the topological and psychological particularities of site, both local and exotic, which are at one and the same time everywhere and nowhere today. He argues that Supermodernity is a new tense in the time-stream that effectively generates non-places like locusts riding the crest of a tsunami, as the natural environment is hollowed out and falls away in the wake of brick, mortar, glass and stainless steel. This new tense brackets us all, particularly when we enter the vast portable parentheses of airports, subways, bullet trains—and skyscrapers.
Augé defines non-places as possessing no identity or identifiable history. They are purely transient. He holds that a non-place “designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces.” Rioux focuses not on the subjects bracketed within them, in transit, but on the architectonic that isolates them in an overwhelming opacity. Augé specifies one of the most important effects that the non-place has on the subject is an induced solitude and develops the non-place as a product or symptom of Supermodernity itself, central to which is its defining trope excess. The non-places of Rioux are certainly generated by an inherent logic of excess as can be seen from the sheer multiplicity of their structural recombinant DNA strands. Similarly, the excess of space is correlative with our incredibly shrinking planet and its wholesale collapse of scale. Rioux’s cities, as Italo Calvino’s “Continuous Cities,” are visionary landscapes that create their own aesthetics, either through poesis, poetic license, or the potency of unfettered semiosis. |
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Rioux’s cities, as Italo Calvino’s “Continuous Cities,” are visionary landscapes that create their own aesthetics, either through poesis, poetic license, or the potency of unfettered semiosis.
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