Consider the tourist destination, experienced, captured, remembered by millions every year; a space that exists as much in the form of a visually codified idea as in its physical reality.
Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist working at a French hospital in the 1980s, coined the term ‘Paris syndrome’ to describe a condition he claimed to be observing in tourists, particularly those from Japan, upon visiting the French capital.
According to Ota, some individuals who felt the city was not what they were expecting were experiencing a form of extreme culture shock, manifesting in psychotic symptoms including hallucination, anxiety and delusions.
Though there is a pseudo-scientific quality to the idea of a ‘Paris syndrome’ and its status as a legitimate medical condition is largely contested, I am particularly interested in how such a notion presents the existence of a ‘second Paris’; one that exists solely in the mind of a would-be visitor, and does not relate to the physical actuality of the city.
The ‘version’ of Paris said to cause the disappointment of Paris syndrome can be considered one of a multiplicity of ideas of a space that form its total identity. I have discussed this idea in the context of the work of Canadian artist and filmmaker Jack Chambers (see 2-11), who painted a total image of a site based on records of multiple sensory experiences, seeking out some greater truth in an image that was more truthful through its incorporation of intangible interactions with space.
Perhaps it could be argued that most people—including those who have never visited, myself included—have some idea of Paris; an image of certain landmarks or experiences created and influenced by forces external to the physical form of the city. A ‘Paris of Desire’? Alongside this exists a recorded representation of the city, in holiday photos, social media posts and printed materials amongst others. A ‘Paris of Memory?’.
What other ‘Parises’ exist?
My immediate concern is not with the city of Paris or Paris syndrome itself, but rather the notion that a multitude of narratives co-exist and interact within space and that these ‘utopian’ ideas of a space—in fact heterotopias, existing within yet separate from the actual reality of space—may have some subliminal influence on our actions within or the physical form of the space in question.
My initial visual experiments seek to test ways of manifesting this intangible aspect of space in a physical form that may allow the inhabitant of a space to recognise the source of their own reality and how much of it is in fact founded on codified ideas.
I began by collecting images of the Eiffel Tower, Paris’s icon and one of the most visited landmarks in the world. I drew on both social media posts featuring the tower, as well as simply asking people to share their own photos—somewhat validating in the process that in the case of many, some relation exists to Paris through personal recorded materials.
I started crudely overlaying the images on top of each each other, adjusting layers so that each ‘memory’ of Paris is visible to some extent within the other. Though the end result is more abstracted, I considered Jack Chambers’ approach to overlaying narratives to create a whole image of site, the end result more closely resembling the directly interfacing images of THE HART OF LONDON (1970) as opposed to Chambers’ painted works.
As another aspect of my spatial explorations concerns giving some physical presence to intangible or sensory aspects of an environment. As I abstracted my collaged images further, I tried to create a stark separation between light (the sensory aspect) and more material elements of the image.
Using these distorted images to create an ambiguous yet total form of several ‘Parises’, I produced a number of small-scale laser cut mockups representing a concept for allowing these images to be physically overlaid onto the site in question as ‘frames’. A heterotopia physically manifested in reality, I would hope that the interactions of residents of and visitors to the city—for instance, taking and sharing photographs of the large-scale structures—would essentially allow for a natural system for the generation of further heterotopic images of the Eiffel Tower.
I would hope to investigate the effects of directly placing this heterotopic interpretation of Paris into the actual Paris, though this is likely will not feasible within the frame of the unit. In future experimentation I will aim to consider site more closely, identifying places to which I have a more tangible connection where it may be possible to apply a similar methodology.