A public square is a space without clear begining and ends—no entrances or exits; it allows people gather to experience, create experiences, and experience the experiences created by others……There is a sense of fluidity in public square that makes me believe it to be an informative site to investigate.
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When you step into a public square, ready to absorb some aspects of local life while found it narrated through a set of, “ready-made terms”, you will realize this place is a tourist’s attraction, even before knowing its name. You might or might not notice, but your interaction with it started with “don’t really know what to look at” but “found almost anything affecting and look with interest”. Georges Perec describes this as an indefinable charm of experiencing a foreign town.
This is a public square, a public square that is labeled as a tourist attraction, therefore you make no efforts to find “anything affecting” because everything is affecting, and you acknowledge that when stopping in front of a building, a singer, a statue, a long queue waiting to enter a famous shop, and take out phones or cameras trying to keep some visual records of what you see. Here things are exhibited, performed, in ways they wish to be viewed and watched.
As Perec reminds earlier, the town itself needs no justification from us, or what “town planners and sociologists have said”. But when those statements are written in such bold types, big sizes, highlighted and illuminated, it seems hard to not be persuaded or convinced by them.
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Following Patrick Keiller’s view of filmic space in recreating “no longer encounterable spatial experiences”, I started looking at the square through videos I took of people there, some seems “live locally” while some might not.
When the events there become concretely marked with minutes and seconds, the square turns into more than just a place that stores ready-made stories, but a measurement of familiarity and unfamiliarity through units of time and speed.
Yet, the more I rewatch my footages, the more the square becomes “just a square”: it is just somewhere that pedestrians might pass through, either fast or slow; no matter it is temporarily occupied by whom, it is the same square made up of that pavement, lawns, benches, statues.
Here I started to understand why Perec suggested: “talk about it as simply as possible”. Perhaps it is never as complicated as those vocabularies that used to describe it, indeed.
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Upon my last visit, the crowds come and go as always. The pavements, lawns, benches, trees, statues remain there; they become such a familiar pattern in my head that I could quickly locate what have been changed and what remain unchanged. Have I “took possession of the town”, as Perec said? But he then adds, “That doesn’t mean you start to inhabit it”.
…… What also remained there, is a man lives next to that ticket booth, who I saw when I first visited there, and every time I visited there. It is unclear when he began to reside there or if he will leave—he remains even after the guards close the gate at night. Will I see him next time I am there? Perhaps he knows more about the square than any of us.
Perec, Georges. 1997. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London, England: Penguin Books.
Keiller, Patrick. 2013. The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes. London: Verso.
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