Spaces, poetics and voids

de Marc Schoonderbeek, Simone Pizzagalli, Nicolò Privileggio

The East Railway Line in London is a fascinating subject of study. It is rich in history and forms a surreal and fragmented physical presence between the City and the East End. A literary analysis of the chaotically ordered composition of this part of the metropolis involves spaces, places, voids and objects within the realm of this place of experience and imagination, with its visible elements and its ethereal body of histories and myths. The process of naming spaces and elements becomes a new way of making them exist in reality, a way of translating the complex and chaotic body of the city into some rough material capable of being rearranged and sequenced in a story or on a map: words, pauses, punctuation, rhythms. As in a text, what is not written remains the place of the active reading imagination, and similarly this applies to empty city areas, voids, unnamable places where a consistently different interpretation of the metropolis is created by the active (living) reader.