Part way through the making of Other Spaces I was invited to join Brazilian artist Frederico Camara in conversation, to discuss his ‘atlas’ project In an Ideal World. We based our discussion around Michel Foucault’s 1967 text Des Espaces Autres, which considers ideas of physical and psychological space in relation to location and time. Our conversation was ostensibly around our work on animals, but this potent text crystallised many of the ideas circulating at that time in my new work with gymnasts.
I’m repeatedly drawn to human systems and structures, interested in attempts to create order from disorder, and the many ways in which we try to make sense of our place in the universe. I often return to the question of how we as individuals learn to be the world: how we are judged, shaped, or affected by our social and political environment, and how we are expected to ‘fit in’ or conform. I’m particularly interested in exploring ideas of perfection, yet while reading Foucault’s text, I was drawn to the idea of the heterotopia, a term he elaborated to describe real, but culturally determined, places of ‘otherness’, which have more layers of meaning, or relationships to other places than initially meets the eye. Unlike the Utopia – a fantastical place or idea that presents a perfected vision of society – Foucault proposed the heterotopia as a real place, or real site of activity, that offers many levels of engagement; a place where ideas about contemporary society might be examined or worked out. This proposition struck a chord with how I was thinking about the rigorous training regimes of elite gymnasts, and how the performance and spectacle of international competition create a stage on which broader ideas of excellence are played out.
Looking at my unfolding body of work, it occurred to me that a photograph might also be considered a heterotopian construct: like an image produced in a mirror, a photograph has the quality of being both ‘real’ and ‘not real’; an indexical record of a particular moment in time, which presents our world to us, often in stark detail, but which may also offer us alternative ways to view humanity.
Jo Longhurst, May 2012