Uncertain Spaces: Limbo. An Experiment in Mood. Video Project From 2020.

Originally shared: Friday 27 November 2020

[View page in desktop view]

Introduction: Due to the constraints put on us by Covid the feeling of stasis, back in 2020, was huge. Our personal geographies shrunk enormously and the feeling of frustrating constriction and dread were at an all time high. 2021 was also the 700th year after Dante Alighieri's ‘La Commedia’ (link), was completed, a year before the author died. The overlap felt worthy of notice. The page is best viewed full size on a monitor screen. There may be issues viewing on a smaller smart phone screen please do view this page in “desktop view”

Each individual video below will need to be un-muted and you may need to refresh the page to get all the videos to load properly. Listen to all of them at once or individually, obviously the choice is yours. There's no plan as such, however, I am interested in how the videos connect with each other to see if any patterns arise. The page is best viewed full size on a monitor screen. There may be issues viewing on a smaller smart phone screen.

SO, WHAT IS IT I'M DOING?

[The project is still in development so subject to change.]

Why Limbo?

A conceit - what if instead of feeling like we're living in a bizarre and frightening unending stasis, a limbo, we 'actually' are in one, that we are in the first ring of Hell itself? What would that look like? What eerie shifts and subtle visual slippages would there be to suggest such in the world about us? How has Limbo been represented in the past and can I use that to inform on the current moment?

Though possibly a bit too dark for our specific times I'm using it as a way to vent and sublimate my frustrations about the world at large, in a way which is a lot more explorative emotionally than my Uncertain Spaces work of the past few years whilst obviously being heavily informed by it too.

In Dante's 'Inferno' (700 years old in 2020), Limbo is a place of stasis, obviously, There is no punishment or torment, just an unending waiting that must be endured.

There are 3 forms to Limbo in Inferno -

1. The 'Limbo of the Fathers' - the place where those born before Christ, or those deemed heathen reside. Heathens and pagans are the people, when alive, that never heard the true word of God, as declared by Jesus, then voiced by the true followers of Christ.

2. The 'Limbo of the Infants' - the place for those who died before being baptised.

3. The third version is the place of waiting before being judged by the long tailed Minos. Once Minos has wrapped his tail rings around the plaintiff souls they are then cast to whichever ring of Hell that has been chosen.

This third form is the 'why' of this Limbo project. The choices available to us appear on a personal, local, national and international level seem to be unending stasis with no resolution or a drop to a state or level where things are worse. Much worse. 

------

Throughout the pandemic I have been walking a very specific path here in Sheffield for most weeks since the beginning of the 1st lockdown. Walking predominantly at night or twilight the streets and buildings are lit in a half-light or shielded in shadow. Being industrial hinterland backstreets, there is an absence of people which has allowed me a place to process and contemplate as time progresses. The whole experience whilst routine has been highly charged and very disconcerting. Seeing the empty streets reflect back a strange haunting quality, heightened by the induced kenopsia of lockdown then strangely reflective of the weirdness that has emerged in late 2020 and most of 2021 where everything (city, people, institutions, politics, spaces, ideas all existing on multiple levels of interaction - personal, local, regional, national, global) appears familiar yet nothing is reliable or can be trusted as all kinds of situations are without stability, thus open to change and flux. There is a huge paranoic suspicion that no thing is as at appears.

[The project is still in development so subject to change.]


Limbo

A place of waiting.
A place of uncertainty.
An insecure doubting place.
An in-between place, state or condition of neglect or oblivion which results in an unresolved status, delay or deadlock.
A place of holding.
A place on an edge.
A liminal unresolved space.
A dream like space, hazy, without definition.
A place of being in-between.
A prison or cage where time is endured.
An indeterminate neutral transitional place or space.
A place of waiting pre-judgement.
A place or state of oblivion to which persons or things are regarded as being relegated when cast aside, forgotten, past, or out of date.
An intermediate, transitional, or midway state, space or place.
A place or state of imprisonment or confinement.
An unknown intermediate place or condition between two extremes: in Limbo.

[Depending on your browser and viewing platform you may have to press play and
turn on the volume for the 2 small videos below (top left and bottom right)]