Villes-Noires

image Mowoso

Daily rhythms and scenarios will usually drudge along in the formats in which they are long familiar.  It is not as if the look and the characters of the immediate surroundings are remade with any great disjunction—few additions to either built environment, economic or social activity take place.  At the same time there is a paucity of evidence for exactly how what remains and persists secures its apparent stability. 

When city spaces are assessed in terms of their continuity or change, it is possible to point to certain “devices” such land valuation, wages, cadastral, zoning, municipal policy, fiscal frameworks, or census as a series of road marks.  Of course narratives and records can be compiled that identify certain stability of belonging or association—e.g. certain households have long resided in a particular plot or parcele, and these are often subdivided to accommodate more temporary residential stays.  Various associations exist, organized around particular ascriptions, loyalties, beliefs and identities that anchor capacities to represent neighborhoods in ways the facilitate predictability and a sense of order.  Many residents have had the same occupation (and preoccupations) for most of their urban lives and, as such, they “show up” in the same place every day.  They buy similar items from steady suppliers and pass their time in the same bars or houses of worship and, as such, the districts amass and reflect well-worn “grooves” of individual trajectories.  Often looking at the built environment—the streets, the infrastructure, the buildings—it is possible to read the histories that have been made.

At the same time, inhabitants are subject to (and made subjects by) a series of “tipping points” where everything they must do in order to put together and reproduce a viable existence potentially undermines it, and as such they must adapt to ruptures and recalibration of life that go beyond contingency.  Ways of doing things that otherwise would just fall into place can sometimes slip, lose conviction or become unthinkingly habitual raising certain doubts, even panic. 

At the heart of the black city is the tactile composition of light, something to be felt, not seen.

Allah is the light of the heavens and of the earth. The parable of His light is as if there were a niche and within it a lamp; the lamp enclosed in glass; the glass as it were a brilliant star: Lit from a blessed tree, an olive; neither of the east or the west; whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it: Light upon light, Allah doth guide whom He will to His Light.

Things are always passing through each other, particularly in settings where there is limited capacity to separate things out and to keep things on their supposedly “designated” path.  There are prolific “interruptions”, and these interruptions hold things up, not only in terms of a delay in reaching their final destination.  They are also “held up” to be viewed, not as discrete units or activities, but held up to the “light” produced by their participation in this intersection itself, as if the intersection is a particular process of apprehension.

Is there a white city, a city that could be white, that could exist in or as whiteness, without perforation, shadow, the infolds and ridges and interruptions. The sentiment for the perfect sentence, the ultimate design, the state where one need not say anything more.  But where the veneer seems to promise coherence—everything seamlessly related to each other—a monstrous curiosity is involved.  What is behind all of this; what lurks inside the sheen, the uniform presentation that otherwise would seem to wrap everything up so well?  This fading imagery of modernity in Phnom Penh, instead of solidifying the possibilities of continuous articulation now depends upon one subcontract after another—a jumble of disparate deals and neighbors that hold out neither intrigue or promise. More effective are the copies of copies at the left of the image, copies never intended to last, and giving way to various efforts to salvage what was possible. Disregard the plans and aspirations, but not necessarily the planning and the aspiring.