Quotation // Ignasi de Solà Morales

terrain vague [quotation]

Empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place seems to subjugate the eye of the urban photographer. Such urban space, which I will denote by the French expression terrain vague, assumes the status of fascination, the most solvent sign with which to indicate what cities are and what our experience of them is. As does any other aesthetic product, photography communicates not only the perceptions that we may accumulate of these kinds of spaces but also the affects, experiences that pass from the physical to the psychic, converting the vehicle of the photographic image into the medium through which we form value judgments about these seen or imagined places. It is impossible to capture in a single English word or phrase the meaning of terrain vague. The French term terrain connotes a more urban quality than the English land; thus terrain is an extension of the precisely limited ground fit for construction, for the city. In English the word terrain has acquired more agricultural or geological meanings. The French word also refers to greater and perhaps less precisely defined territories, connected with the physical idea of a portion of land in its potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which we are external. The French vague has Latin and Germanic origins. The German Woge refers to a sea swell, significantly alluding to movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation. Two Latin roots come together in the French vague. Vague descends from vacuus, giving us 'vacant' and'vacuum' in English, which is to say The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city's terrains vagues. 'empty, unoccupied', yet also 'free, available, unengaged'. The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city's terrains vagues. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation.A second meaning superimposed on the French vague derives from the Latin vagus, giving 'vague' in English, too, in the sense of 'indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, uncertain'. Once again the paradox of the message we receive from these indefinite and uncertain spaces is not purely negative. While the analogous terms that we have noted are generally preceded by negative particles (in-determinate, im-precise, un-certain), this absence of limit precisely contains the expectations of mobility, vagrant roving, free time, liberty. The triple signification of the French vague as 'wave' , 'vacant' , and 'vague' appears in a multitude of photographic images.

_Ignasi de Solà Morales

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