{"id":2483,"date":"2024-05-11T00:56:17","date_gmt":"2024-05-10T21:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soniakh.com\/?p=2483"},"modified":"2024-12-19T13:41:31","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T11:41:31","slug":"the-unconscious-of-the-landscape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soniakh.com\/index.php\/2024\/05\/11\/the-unconscious-of-the-landscape\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unconscious of the Landscape"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


Forgetting is not destruction \u2014 destruction is forgetting<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the text The Unconscious of the Landscape<\/em>, an artist and psychoanalyst Teta Tsybulnyk examines the layering of memory in the psyche in contrast to the impossibility of \u2018holding several contents\u2019 in the physical space and landscape. Along with this, the author analyses her films Salty Oscillations<\/em>, (ru\u0457ns collective, 2021) and Endless Sea of Sand<\/em>, (ru\u0457ns collective, 2023) and thinks about the ways of symbolisation in art. <\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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Reflecting on the sources of religion in his work Civilization and Its Discontents<\/em>, Freud describes the \u2018oceanic\u2019 feeling [1] typical of the primary phase of the development of the human psyche, when the ego experiences an all-encompassing and inextricable connection with the environment. In the course of its development, the ego gradually detaches itself from the outside world, but the primary feeling of boundlessness and belonging to the whole is preserved in the psyche along with the later feelings that arise from it. Freud advocates the idea that nothing that was once formed in one\u2019s mental life disappears forever, and that under certain conditions everything can be rediscovered. Forgetting does not mean destruction. [2]

To illustrate this thesis, Freud refers to the story of the Eternal City. \u2018Now let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome were not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest.\u2019 [3] With his characteristic eloquence, Freud conducts a thought experiment about how all the buildings and monuments of this city, which were built during different eras of history, continue to coexist in the same space. \u2018And the observer would need merely to shift the focus of his eyes, perhaps, or change his position, in order to call up a view of either the one or the other.\u2019 [4]

This bizarre fantasy serves as an example of impossibility to Freud, contradictio in contrarium<\/em>, because physical space, unlike mental space, \u2018will not hold two contents.\u2019 [5] New buildings can arise only on the wasteland, on the ruins of previous times. Having enjoyed the inventive fiction of Freud the writer, Freud the scientist rejects the analogy as absurd, only proving \u2018how far away from mastering the idiosyncrasies of mental life we are by treating them in terms of visual representation.\u2019 [6]

However, it is possible to find something more than a false example in this poetic parallel. Isn’t this an involuntary attempt to imagine the urban landscape as a multi-layered construct, which could also have its own unconscious? Writing about the \u2018memory of a place\u2019, [7] Aleida Assman notes that the place itself can be a subject, a carrier of reminiscences that sometimes go beyond human memory. \u2018After the space has been studied and opened in the horizontal plane, it is worth studying also its symbolic depth in the vertical dimension.\u2019 [8] What if the vertical dimension of space makes it possible to hold two (or more) contents at the same time? Isn’t it similar to the mental dimension, where different layers of the past are superimposed onto each other?

In The Interpretation of Dreams<\/em>, Freud proposed the first topographical model of the psyche, distinguishing the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious systems. [9] Although he himself positioned these systems on a horizontal plane, through the metaphor of an apartment with different rooms, [10] commentators most often depict these as an iceberg, where the unconscious hides deep under water. Later, Freud also made a choice in favour of vertical thinking, developing the second model based on the interaction of three psychic instances \u2014 the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. Such a topography solidified the spatial representation that locates the unconscious below, in the depths, underground. It also matches the canonical comparison of psychoanalysis with \u2018an archaeologist\u2019s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice.\u2019 [11]

Psychoanalysis has always relied on spatial metaphors, and topographical thinking turned out to be a key heuristic tool for it. [12] And even when the images of physical space seemed unsatisfactory for the illustration of mental processes, they inspired the psychoanalytic imagination and were the aesthetic framework of the theory. Perhaps such a symbiosis indicates a deep affinity between the mental and the spatial. Then, the psychoanalytic method may turn out to be suitable for the study of real topos: landscape, city, infrastructure. If the dream space is the landscape of the unconscious, then what is the unconscious of the landscape?

***

This was the question that Elias Parvulesco and I addressed in the film Salty Oscillations<\/em> (ru\u0457ns collective, 2021), which was shot in Soledar. This city is known primarily as one of the salt-mining centres of Donbas, which arose in the 17th century and developed considerable industrial power by the 19th century. However, the mythology of Soledar goes back to much earlier times: many millions of years ago this place sat at the bottom of the Perm Sea. This ancient past lived on in the mineral of salt that was the material basis of industry, the alchemical symbol of the city and the core of its identity. Mentions and \u2018memories\u2019 of the ancient sea constantly emerged in the autoethnographic narratives of the local community. [13] The industrial city seemed to retain the \u2018oceanic feeling,\u2019 that Freud wrote about, along with the later phases of its development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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