We don’t have many answers. We don’t even know when it will end. Today I felt like I was sinking, most days I feel like that. 

This situation—the pandemic—makes us feel like ‘normal life’ is on pause. Anguish, anxiety, apocalyptic dreams, alternative realities, boredom, mind ghosts and uncertainties. I miss the walks by the park, the evenings at the theaters, those days I end up daydreaming under the sun, the roads that I saw daily while on the bus, but mostly the way those things, more than I imagined, fed me creatively as a designer that I am. 

The way this crisis obligates us to see our life and the little things within it in other new ways, and thinking about the true meaning of society and democracy, is fascinating and at the same time full of uncertainties. Before analyzing the global cultural and social context, we need to understand our innermost issue – soaking our minds in emotions. 

Usually I don’t express myself in the best way I can, so I choose a song whose lyrics represent the empty space that I have between my mind and heart. Because for me there isn’t a better way to describe what's on my mind. There’s this thing in this song, that takes prominence and surely makes us think: the elliptical ‘well...’. In Alone, Omen 3 (Man Alive!, 2020) this expression is an element of uncertainty, undermining our thoughts and reassurances but apart from that, King Krule’s poem tells us that there’s nothing wrong with feeling like we do, for time will heal everything, as we are “the omen of paradise”.

Khora – a radical otherness that gives place to being.

Spatiality as a concept was always attached to some sort of controversy. Coming up with a definition for a dimension that pertains to all aspects of being and existing in a terrain setting is not a consensual task that ends up in unanimous agreement, and it may never will. 

Space embeds a multitude of dimensions, it exists in a relational structure with time, position, objects and it forms a network among all things physical, material and relative. It is the distinction of separation between things, it positions them in the physical realm and it spreads them and us, beings, in a chronological setting with a vague and loose sense of linear familiarity. Space is the foundation of the framework in which all the universe, and thus life, is composed. It is the essence of the realm of physicality and of the material and concrete, and although a consensus on what space really is and where it belongs in a conceptual framework most likely will never be reached, there was never a more appropriate time than now to open up this discussion. 

Physical space is the validation of one’s life. Your existence is proven through spatiality, and your persona and lifetime is engraved in the physical demonstration of space. And when we view space as something so essential for life to happen, it’s hard to imagine going through its loss. 

The loss of a physical dimension happens in very few instances, it usually implies an individual experience and a social and political motive behind it, such as seeking asylum or prisional incarceration. But in the reality we encounter ourselves in now, the world has lost its space collectively, and thus its contact with the physical realm. This spatial network between the relationship of all things that surround us that we have grown so used to and thought it would only expand—and never contract—has shrunk massively. No one ever thinks about losing physical space, because its topology renders it as something that is forever imprinted on earth—and you can’t lose eternity. When you feel entitled to eternity, there just isn’t an easy nor a fathomable approach to disintegrating yourself from most of the physical realm, to reduce the structure of space, time and position into a portion of itself. 

But disintegration is necessary, there is no way around it and as there isn’t a timeframe from this phenomenon to occur in, the concept of physical spatiality is bent and broken becoming a shell of itself, with its presence becoming more and more suffocating—the elephant in the room so to speak, if there was any space left for it to fit in. 

There is an urgency to detach ourselves from the common conceptions of physical space, as existence and expansion can’t prosper within such a tight confinement. As beings, we lead a material existence mediated by a physical medium, but in order to avoid hindering ourselves, another medium needs to be considered. 

Spatiality needs to be stretched out of its physical properties, of its perfect mathematization and quantifying qualities. There is a need for another kind of spatial dimension. One that doesn’t hold our bodies accountable for being stuck in a rut. 

Khora, meaning space in its rough etymology, embodies the nuance between the physicality of being terrain and the other. It is an extension of being, an attempt of expansion. It represents a clearing where the intelligible and sensible are torn apart—a gap in space and reality. It is the space of another, the act of being inside of oneself. 

Jacques Derrida describes it as «a radical otherness that gives place to being». There isn’t a better property to describe than «otherness». Khora is an eternal state of passing through, where everything folds and nothing holds. In this spaceless space, there are no X,Y, X axes to measure ourselves with. The concept of dimension is lost and discarded—materiality loses itself to a pure state of consciousness, denying logic and perception, as there is nothing to perceive in khora. 

This Third state between one and the other is a defiance of space as a physical entity. Spatiality in this philosophical realm is defined by being neither this nor that, it is a transitory state. It is in the state of transiting that a breach is opened. Now more than ever, this breach is necessary and urgent. Some layer of being where our physical entities are discarded, as they become more and more obsolete through confinement. Khora is a state of intimacy that can only be found by ignorance of the body. It is our innermost self where no physical distraction can stand in the way of a connection with our own consciousness and the possibility of being. 

Outside of the philosophical realm it is hard to think about such a state of being, as it denies completely the notion of material, and our proof of reality relies on matter alone. But that same reality is rapidly and aggressively shifting. Matter is now a trap, but it can’t trap what doesn’t exist. 

If Khora could be materialised, it would be in the formless shape of cyberspace. Plato probably never imagined a setup that could bring it to life without its materiality when he thought about Khora, but virtuality as a whole symbolises the disembodiment of being neither material nor non-existent, it is its own transitory state. 

Cyberspace can be the otherness where we could permeate. Of course the notion of space exists inside virtual reality, but it's only a notion, a mimesis of the real one without the reality of it. 

Cyberspace establishes itself as a connection between the man and the world, without actually experiencing the world firsthand. It is his own little world that connects to the real one in a realm where all physical matter is lost, and consciousness and a disconnected sense of being is the only possible presence. The real-virtual dualism is a tricky one, and although it has a controversial nature, something led us to the creation of an imaginary location that could be used collectively, that could resemble what we know but with its own personality and idiosyncrasies. 

The realm of the virtual is a breath of fresh air, a cognitive dissonance from our physical existence that can be used almost like a disconnect plug, because the implications of a material existence conditioned by space and time and all of its rules are just hard to bear all of the time.

So let’s not forget that, prior to our current state of isolation, we have built a Khora of our own, a placeless space where expansion can only happen. As our realities shrink around us, we are lucky to live in an era that guarantees us that at least this unreality that we’ve built for ourselves won’t. 

These are just some considerations about what space really means, whether in its material or  philosophical ideal, and how those same concepts can be bent at this current time—because we desperately need it.

IMG 1 - AN ORTHOGONAL APPROACH
IMG 2 - THE MATHEMATICS OF SPACE
IMG 3 - TOPOS - A TERRAIN VIEW
IMG 4 - A VISUAL DEPICTION OF EXPANSION
IMG 5 - TRANSITING
IMG 6 - THE TRINITY OF SPACE

On the 18th of March I signed a legal document upon arrival in my hometown stating that I would quarantine myself in my house for 2 weeks, avoiding any type of social interaction. Because I live with other people, I had to restrain my space even further to just being in the bedroom I grew up in. What succeeded was two weeks of a constant gaze into the territory from a childhood era, and a readjustment of its functional aspects. The desk was now a dinner table, the closet a pantry, and the bed was now my conference room, for its far superior wi-fi signal.

I remember somewhere in my childhood years I wanted to rearrange the furniture in my room for maximised space so, logically, the best method I conducted was to build a 100:1 paper version of the room and its objects and proceeded to examine which option provided the best feng shui to the division. I strictly complied to measuring every wall, window and table for what at the time was just pure entertainment of a bored mind. I now sit in the middle of it once again, at 21 years of age, confined by its walls, looking at the view of the window (which by now has started to look like a fake movie set view) reflecting on how its unchanged nature is so different from the memory I had of it.

Disclaimer: I do not intend to dwell on the hardships of the pandemic in this article. Please excuse my frivolity.

Three weeks in and it has become clear that the current reality of isolation and working remotely in which we find ourselves for what feels like an eternity is beginning to sink in. The number of infected people continues to heighten around the globe and there is overall no certainty as to when things will go back to their regular schedule—will they ever?, I ponder. On top of the shift of daily operations, many of us miss our families and most of us (who were already apprehensive about our prospects as freelancers who can’t find a stable job in the local design community) will face a great economic downturn in the coming period. All those factors relate to the first of my p’s in question,—which is not mine at all, it belongs to all of us—the pandemic.

Truth is, I’ve been trying to exorcise a fail in my own character over the past year, which is essentially of being a shameless postponer. But the fact is—and bear with me on this one—the «mañana mañana» approach to life is pretty hard to keep in check when you’re stuck at home with absolutely no forecast of when you can leave, for days on end. It comes to a point where «time is just a social construct» becomes a reality, and suddenly you realise you can postpone something forever, but now feels like forever, so you might as well start getting to it while now is forever and time is on your side. And that’s about the time that I began to reopen all the closed tabs on my mental to-do list, a larger-than-life queue of foregone ideas and productivity—my last p.

The current pandemic has put into perspective different forms of labour and their reliance on the physical world. The digital divide is as clear as day between the type of labour force which has already penetrated and successfully inhabits the digital world, and the type that operates outside digital platforms—which have taken, and will continue to take, a bigger blow in this intermediate period—, dictating an asymmetry between those forms of labour. In that sense, designers are a little like cockroaches—pardon my levity, again. The world may be in flames, but we continue to have room and material to work with, even if that means one tiny-ass room. That is because design should essentially not be about design, for a relevant work goes beyond the discipline itself, infiltrating the social and the political. And at this point in time, there’s plenty to process, especially as a designer. It is by being able to observe at a distance and digest these changes that are happening around us while we seem stationary that we will be able to bring insight into the production that shall come out from this pandemic.