Heidi bender, (dis)Placement.

"The window glass and the iron (rail) line divide, on the one hand, the traveler's interiority and, on the other, the power of being constituted as an object without discourse, the strength of an exterior silence...

Only the partition (between the two) makes noise. As it moves forward and creates two inverted silences, it taps out a rhythm, it whistles or moans. There is a beating of the rails, a vibrato of the window panes&mdasha sort of rubbing together of spaces at the vanishing points of their frontier. These junctions have no place. They indicate themselves by passing cries and momentary noises. These frontiers are illegible, they can only be heard as a single stream of sounds, so continuous is the tearing off that annihilates the points thought which it passes."

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

In daily life, the social noises most ingrained in our consciousness are those created by frictions at the margins between the permissible and prohibited. As individuals encounter these junctions, choices are made either to affirm the existing shape of the particular society or to shift societal constructions to fit under a new set of boundaries. The conception of border as divider does not take into account the existence of the frictions that linger there. These residual energies exist outside of definite boundary—entities of space whose beginnings and ends are impossible to pinpoint, a wedge of uncertainty that laps over definable limits.

My work is an examination of how areas of definition are constructed in my own life. I use existing parameters of acceptable use of space, class, and culture as identification categories that I then overlay, distort, appropriate, and blend. Most often these social interventions come in the form of the insertion of the body into interstices between different types of spaces—public/private, commercial/residential, socio-temporal/geographic, etc. These (dis)placements extend the edges of private or personal spaces over areas that have been designated as common domain—alluding to the infinitely more forms that the social terrain could take. The co-existence of seemingly polar social possibilities deconstructs conventions that are rarely questioned in the defining and dividing of community space.