inhabitableruins:

THE RETREAT OF THE SHOPPING MALLFor my studio project this year I interviewed a number of people about what spaces/situations they inhabit to experience querencia. A close friend of mine, documentary film-maker and graffiti artist, had a very interesting example of inhabiting ruins:

Quite often I find myself going to big shopping malls just to listen to historical podcasts. I don’t know why really, but I guess the activities taking place around me renders quite absurd when I’m not partaking in them. I never buy anything of course, I just walk around, watching people doing their pointless shoppings while I listen to the stories of some old forgotten war. I guess it’s a good way of positioning myself in history.

(My translation from Swedish)

The super-identity-agency of shopping is repurposed by his personal agency through the use of the existing crack that it is *still *possible to be in a shopping mall without shopping – as long as you follow certain rules. My friend, a far-left anti-capitalist, already regards anything to do with shopping as a ruin, as in it being abandoned by him. The walls constituting the shopping mall is repurposed by him for a different – uncoded - querencia-enabling purpose. He gives his personal *perspective *of the shopping mall-perspective-cluster a kick, and thus opens a crack in it so that it produces something different from what its implicit code intends it to. He puts up a wall to create a retreat within the shopping mall and creates a new shopping mall-*sub-identity *as an absurd theatre where to experience history.

The headphones are the essential technological aspect of his repurposing /ruin-making of the shopping mall. It sever one of the senses/walls/tools with which he participate in the perspective-cluster of the shopping mall - essentially turning that sense/wall/tool into a non-sense in regards to said perspective-cluster; opening a crack in the wall of said perspective-cluster to start a new perspective-cluster in collision with the perspectives from the podcast. This only changes his perspective in relation to the shopping mall, it is his personal crack. A boombox on the shoulder blasting history podcasts all over would be a *super-personal *crack potentially turning the whole shopping mall into a history theatre. This is *prohibited *since it is a potential threat to the shopping malls maintenance of its current agency – that of shopping.