You will, I hope, forgive me, as in spite of our being in the midst of Christmas celebration, I will entirely ignore Christmas in this my blog update. It’s not that I dislike Christmas – much to the contrary, in fact – but I won’t just blog about it because it’s “the season”. Instead, I’ll talk a little about something that’s strangely near my heart: liminal spaces. I really, really like those spaces of transition. They give me a sort of giddiness, especially places like airports, train stations or coach stations. Simply feeling the buzz, getting immersed in the atmosphere of comings and goings, the continuous flux of people – all of these give me, more or less, a feeling of “belonging”. Which is, I’ll admit, most weird, as this seldom happens when I’m at home, or at uni, or anywhere else. At the same time, this love of mine for liminality might also be one of the many reasons behind my taphophilia. And I’m also attracted to quiet, abandoned places that look almost as if they were caught in an eternal state of limbo. It’s like they’re waiting to be populated, to throb with life, but at the same time they reject anything but dust and silence.
Well, anyway, I’ll take this opportunity to share some more photos of the city and some of those liminal spaces with the world. Please excuse the poor quality, they are all little frankenphotos taken with my mobile camera.
Here, I would have added a fabulous quotation about liminal spaces and cities, but I find myself too tired, for once, to look it up. Maybe some other time.
Encyclopaedia Vanitatum 
Hi Maria,
I wonder if you know this song, which seems to tie in with some of your interests in a nicely existentialist way.
Andrea
Hello Andrea, my personal stalker. 🙂 First of all, let me take this opportunity to wish you a merry Christmas and a lovely winter break. 🙂
No, I didn’t know the song. Truth be told, I’ve never listened much to The Kinks, as I have a rather eerier musical orientation. It does tie in nicely with my post, though, so thank you for sharing. I am, of course, fascinated by the compulsion to, as it were, document their whole lives with photographs which people often feel (and which I, too, share to a certain degree). That is also one of the reasons standing behind my amateurish hobby of collecting old photographs. I find vintage photos all the more alluring because of the impracticability of photography “once upon a time”, when (expensive) photography studios were pretty much the only option and it follows that photos were cherished to a much greater extent.
In addition to all of that, I suppose photographs are, in themselves, liminal spaces of sorts. Now that I think of it, maybe that’s why photography of liminality is so exciting to me? Hmmm… Oh, and also, here’s an interesting article which I should have mentioned in my blog post, perhaps: http://cm.revues.org/447 .