Spatial Imagination

The following essay sketches varieties of imagination operative in the best architectural work. It was published in Warehouse Journal, a student-edited journal produced annually by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba. Student editors for Warehouse 25 were, Alena Rieger and Ally Pereira-Edwards.

This essay analyzes the narrative structures of forms of graphic autobiography in premodern China. Focusing on three woodblock-printed picture-texts by the painter Zhang Bao (b. 1763), the poet Zhang Weiping (1780–1859), and the official Linqing (1791–1846), this study shows that these authors experimented with the representational and expressive affordances of landscape imagery and the printed book, to reconfigure the stories of their lives through a “language of vision.” By restructuring their life stories both formally and figuratively in spatial ways, these authors crafted multilayered but coherent images of their moral, intellectual, social, and personal identities, often against the grain of their personal and social predicaments. These imaginative interventions in the generic practices of self-representation invite renewed attention to historical and cultural construc- tions of personal and collective identity, relations between landscape and subjecthood, and narrative structure in premodern and modern literary and pictorial texts.

Argument This article takes up what and how maps might have taught a Crown Prince in the century before maps became a part of classrooms and Mercator's system of projection engendered those collective perceptions of space and person that have become a part of a modern shared spatial imagination. The focus of this article is a single codex, utterly unique, which scholars have posited was compiled in 1570 to accompany the Crown Prince of Jülich-Cleves-Berg on his Italian trip. This article argues that this codex was designed to teach him practices of spatial imagination, a concept this article introduces.

Les textes littéraires nous ouvrent la porte des représentations spatiales des Anciens Egyptiens et de leur relation avec leur environnement. Les éloges de la ville, genre littéraire du Nouvel Empire, peignent ce qui fait pour les scribes de cette époque le luxe des capitales de l’Égypte, les jardins des grandes demeures de l’élite.

Авторы статьи, опираясь на представление об экзистенциальной природе литературы, рассматривают топосы смерти в творчестве Г. Айги. Особое внимание уделяется проблеме «опространствления» смерти в культуре и литературе, раскрывается точка зрения поэта на явление смерти, а также определяются способы и особенности ее поэтического описания. Выявлены образы, посредством которых Г. Айги раскрывает топосы смерти: метрополитен, овраг, могилы, руины; затронут вопрос о его отношении к собственной смерти.

After Vyborg's incorporation into the Soviet Union, its status diminished from a regional capital to a district centre. To add insult to injury, the city also suffered a symbolic demotion, when the use of its coat of arms was discontinued. Change came in the 1960s when the idea to (re-)create city symbols began to circulate in the Soviet press. New symbols were adopted, and informal heraldic imaginaries appeared on souvenirs and badges, millions of which were produced, consumed and collected across the USSR. This article examines the heraldic revival in Vyborg: the attempts to create a Soviet symbol by the city authorities and informal uses of the heraldic form. Through appropriations of space and time, the heraldic revival created new visions of the city that undermined the monolithic Stalinist symbolic order. Consumer items used heraldic fantasies to promote the perception of Vyborg as a non-Soviet place, as part of the imaginary West. In the 1980s and 1990s this vision became dominant in Vyborg's official symbols.

This text was published in Finnish but I am happy to share the English original with editor's permission.