ON GETTING LOST (2020 - )

On Getting Lost is a set of spatial memories. It comes from a series of reflections beginning in 2020 on architecture and loss, on queer grief, and on normative publics. Building on Heather Love's reparative work Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History it is an early piece of work mapping out the terrain of a larger project on urban change, queer space, and the potential of loss.

EXCERPTS
“ What is the condition of loss that we are experiencing today? In the city? How do we register this loss? There’s a starting point in terms of what it means to lose something – or to have something disappear, and then in terms of grief. Or also, to win and to lose.”

“If cities are accumulation machines, then they are also machines of loss – profound, deep, loss. Loss in space, capital, sanctuary, quiet, loss in darkness, loss of life, loss like a gambler in a boom / bust cycle of resource extraction and the chance of geography, loss of nature, ecologies, systems, epistemologies, languages”

“This is a different equation of loss than the discussion of the game, or the discussion of the effects of accumulation – instead of loss being the position of abjection in regards to winning, here to lose one’s identity, to let go and lose the constraints of small town life is to find freedom. To lose is to be free.”
© Adam Kaasa 2021                              
adam.kaasa [at] rca.ac.uk