Source: Photo by the author.
Francisco Martínez starts his essay with a quotation by Édouard Glissant. He might just as easily have chosen something from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958) or Dick Hebdige’s Hiding in the Light (1988) to introduce what lays on the other side. Indeed, when evoking opacity and the suspension of time through concealment, the socially embodied imaginary is never very far away. Neither are the minor key details, as described by Rebecca Solnit in Orwell’s Roses: “What exists ‘without any wish to change’ is static; it’s before the story begins, before the fall from grace, or after it is concluded with reunion, rectification, or some other form of repair” (2021: 191).
So there’s a lot of reading between the lines when reflecting on Martínez’ essay. Here, the unsaid could be understood as mirroring the invisible. Moreover, what is renamed, rediscovered and revalued are important factors. As in the case of ...
]]>The apparent paradox that Martíez sets up appears to be a problem with relations of power, wrapped up in the expressly visual coding of “observer” and “observed”. As inherently dark places, basements present a particularly fertile ground for exploring and reversing these relations, and – I suggest – for challenging our own ethnographic reproduction of language that links the ability to see with knowledge possession.
Basements as places that reveal through their withholding: one might assume that on entering such reticent spaces, the ethnographer’s job would be to find the means for “illuminating” objects and social relations, bringing them “to light”. But this is not what Martínez is proposing. Instead he offers opacity as “a medium that resists the light of (Western) understanding in order to pre...
]]>Source: Photo by author.
“Where is a bunker?” This question started to haunt many of us in Georgian cities when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Quest for bunkers, basements and shelters, for spaces of both opacity and safety, was drawn from the possible spillover of this conflict onto Georgia that itself had been at war with Russia in 2008. Feelings of fear and anxiety snapped so strongly that they prompted us to introspect our cities from below – in search of spaces for survival.
What our renewed inquiry for bunkers revealed was that many underground spaces of Soviet blocks were not as opaque, secretive or even valid anymore. Indeed, basements in Soviet apartment buildings were intended to preserve sealing and waterproofing, and in an emergency to be convertible back to shelters. But today, in Tbilisi for instance, most of these dark spaces were reformed into privatized areas of relation, becoming small shops, big supermarkets and banks, or even b...
]]>“is a zone of non-judgment, away from the eyes of others, filled with possibility but not certainty. Basements themselves are characterized by being undefined, intermediate, and even mysterious, existing beyond the realm of the visible, along with voids, absences and the hidden.” [el resaltado es mío]
Lo subterráneo aparece en esta etnografía como un objeto privilegia...
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