Liminal Spaces
Liminality is defined as the transitional period or phase of a rite of passage, during which the participant lacks social status or rank, remains anonymous, shows obedience and humility, and follows prescribed forms of conduct, dress, etc.
I started this project by creating a mindmap of what I consider liminality. The concept that I wanted to explore further was “space in-between spaces”. If you’re like many people, you may have noticed that there are certain places or states of being in which you feel different, off, or uncomfortable. During the COVID-19 lockdown, there were many moments where I wanted to get out of the house and be in any other space. I found myself constantly looking outside my window and imagining all the other spaces that I have been to and how those spaces made me feel at that point in time.
One of the most important events of my life that happened during COVID was moving to Boston for my masters. The move from Mumbai to Boston made me feel equally anxious and equally excited. After staying in a lockdown for 6 months in Mumbai, I moved to Boston, leaving everything I was comfortable with. I woke up for the first week every morning not believing I was miles away from home.
For this project, I started by opening my phone gallery and looking for images from the times I lived in Paris, Mumbai and Boston. I started collecting images that at that moment would be considered a liminal space.
Liminal spaces are transitional or transformative spaces. They are the waiting areas between one point in time and space and the next.
The images collected were of landscapes, museums, passages, food, doors, windows and staircases. I then started to look for formal relationships between these images by observing the elements, shapes, patterns, colors and depth. This helped to define the sequence of the images.
I realized that I was looking at each image through a set of grids that I had formed in my mind, which I then drew out and used as the grid for the video. The video is made using the concept of match-cut.
The technical term for when a director cuts from one scene to a totally different one, but has objects in the two scenes “matched,” so that they occupy the same place in the shot’s frame.
The images last for one second each, the amount of time it takes you to capture the moment. The grids are integrated into the video so that the viewer can observe the similarities and differences between each space.
The video was then adapted to a book where each image was edited/cropped/erased while still forming formal relationships.
