The Any-Space-Whatever

Crossroads and Painting, some insights

"Neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away." 

Samuel Becket

"The surface is only two-dimensional when it pre-exists the time-space."

Lygia Clark

I'm sitting at the school playground with Ulysses, giving him time to get used to this new space and build new relationships that will help him feel safe without me. He brings me a toy car to show me it has a person inside. I look for someone in the driver's seat, only to find someone standing in the back—a mailman working, sorting the mail to be delivered. 

The toy transports me to think about the many everyday actions that go unnoticed but build the bulk of our lives: by fulfilling tasks, we keep the structures of our lives ongoing. While washing the dishes, folding the laundry, driving to school, doing whatever task we do to keep our work life ongoing — for example, after battling with these words, I'll perform the necessary tasks to post this text on my website — we are in a space where time passes differently because we become part of a larger scheme of things. 

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote about the any-space-whatever to study images in films done in the post-second war times, such as images of empty spaces or shaky zooms that can't be precisely defined. According to Deleuze, these images functioned in a film to empty signification while expanding possible connections, creating a point in which the viewer can take their own pathways to understand/create a story. For example, an image of rain falling or an empty unidentified cityscape might access our memory or activate our imagination in a myriad of ways. In his own words, Deleuze defined:   

“Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as the pure locus of the possible." (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 1983)

In my understanding, I'm connecting Deleuze's any-space-whatever with the power of the Orixá Exú and the space of the crossroads. Exú is the orixá that helps us find balance in life, an entity at the point of connection between human life and spirituality. Exú Himself stands at THE crossroads. In parallel with the "any-space-whatever," the crossroad is also a "pure locus of the possible," a space in which time is suspended or stretched to hold all the possible worlds we can imagine. 

I can't help but see Painting in this definition. As Clark noted, the two-dimensional takes that step back on the (western) straightforward time-space connection. When we look at a painting, the space that the painting occupies isn't simply the canvas's centimeters (or inches!). A painting is this strange space where time passes differently. In some ways, looking at a painting is the same as standing at a crossroads, washing the dishes, or sorting through the mail.

These days, whenever I find myself at a crossroads, I talk to Exú to help me choose the right direction. Usually, the next step forward is yet another task. Indeed, the dishes never end, and neither do the paintings. Meanwhile, after a joyfully independent week at school, Ulysses needs to be with me again 24 hours a day, preferably breastfeeding— may I, as a mother, also be a space of possibility, where time is expanded and connections abound.