I've been thinking about place

24 Jan, 2025

I've been thinking about place, lately.

We're always present somewhere, in some place. And, when we're lucky, we get to choose the place we are in. What makes us go to that place and not another? Every place says something to the people that dwell in it. Every place acts subtly on those who inhabit it.

I've been thinking about place and the way it mingles with my skin.

I can feel it. Especially when I walk in the cold fresh air of winter.

I’ve thought about where I sit down for a coffee, where I take a walk through, where I do work, where I read, where I rest, where I meet others and where I am by myself. Every different place whispers its own subtle little things and allows me to exist in different ways.

Moving abroad does that to you, I guess. Make you think about how “who you are” and “where you are” are not really different questions. Coming to Finland showed me a lot of new things about myself. It’s helped parts of myself flourish; parts that perhaps didn’t receive enough sunlight someplace else. I miss home too, sometimes. But I’ve come to think of place as something that shapes who I am being, and that enables different rhythms to emerge within myself, different forms of expression and relation with others. I am in different ways when I’m in different places, some things become easier while others harder. Some become more comfortable and others less so. I access different parts of my interiority.

A lot of the work I’ve been doing, without consciously intending to, has ended up dealing with notions of place, the aesthetics of place, and how place relates to subjectivity. I’ve been thinking about virtual places too, places we dwell in online, and places in our shared imagination. I remember the Fire Emblem forums on Game Spot I used to dwell in as a kid, discovering newgrounds for the first time and the atmosphere and ethos of that place. I like reading other people’s stories of what it was like existing in the internet for them growing up and which places felt like home to them. I’m thinking of videogame places one can get lost in.

A friend told me recently “I don’t know if I want to go back, I like the person I am here”. And I’ve been thinking about place.

#blog