Remote places
Remote places (Antoni Marí)
Remote places are places that are near and very far. The proximity is provided by desire; the distance is imposed by the difficulty, or the impossibility, of realising or encountering that desire. Remote places are mental places constructed by intuition and by the idea that there are spaces, far from everyday space, in which one can realise the totality of the person or dwell according to the idea each one has built of existence, or the place where the possibility of another existence appears.
It is imagination, the faculty capable of identifying desire and idea in the construction of the image of remote places. Because, however remote and far away they may be, remote places appear with a precise image, often minutely described, whether in a plastic image or a verbal one: so remote places are not unknown spaces, but open to knowledge and to being found from the need that desire provokes. The remote place offers, perhaps, the real presence of the unknown, and the unknown is, above all, that to which attention was never paid and which suddenly appears in all its strangeness and familiarity.
The Spanish and Catalan term comes from the Latin remotus, which in turn derives from removere. The prefix re fundamentally expresses repetition, inversion of the meaning of the primitive verb, or intensification of the action. Thus, removere could mean both a return and a removing or going back over the same thing: above all it means to move or to shift; in such a way that remote implies the idea of displacement, a journey from empirical reality to imagined reality. The remote place is an extension of real space, without the contingencies imposed by reality and without the habits frequent in that reality.
The term has served to situate a place at a great distance from the site or the moment in which one is, or of which one speaks. The remote refers to immemorial times, of which no one has memory, for they are beyond history and blur the borders of the faraway with the mythical. They are the places occupied by the protagonists of tales, folk stories and popular songs, and which personify attributes shareable among so many.
Antoni Marí, Ibiza, 1944. Professor of Art Theory. Writer and poet.
© Antoni Marí. Article originally published in La Vanguardia. Text ceded by the author to accompany Marco Noris’s project Lugares Remotos.
Remote places (Ramon Sarró)
Perhaps some readers think, intuitively, that by remote place I mean a faraway place. Not exactly: as Edwin Ardener taught us, author of an inspired text on remote areas, distance and the remote are two different things. A remote place, the Oxford professor wrote, is not a place that is very far away, but one that has no continuity with the place of lived experience, with the Lebenswelt in which we are installed. We could divide the places of the world into empirical and remote. The former are the places in which we are installed or could be, which have continuity with our body, are to the left, or to the right, or above, or below, or in front, or behind. They are places where we are, or at least where we can go and which we would know how to look for on a map.
(…) The remote is that which we would not even know how to look for on a map: Xanadu, Atlantis, Eden, Neverland, the Island of Adventures. Utopia. The remote is the world in which we are not installed (no longer, or not yet), in which we dream and which is so important to our existence that it often seems to us as having more foundation than the experienced world, a pale reflection of the remote: “You seek Rome in Rome, O pilgrim! and in Rome itself you find Rome not,” wrote Quevedo. Likewise, we could say to the tourist who returns disappointed from his trip to Africa that “You seek Africa in Africa, O tourist! and in Africa itself you find Africa not.”
Ramon Sarró holds a degree in Philosophy from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a doctorate in Social Anthropology from the University of London.
© Ramon Sarró. Article originally published in La Vanguardia. Text ceded by the author to accompany Marco Noris’s project Lugares Remotos.