Paola Anziché: The Earth Sounds
We are in the epoch of simultaneity, of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” According to Michel Foucault, we instead experience the current epoch of space as a “network that connects points”. In his 1967 lecture, the French philosopher made a fascinating distinction between utopias and heterotopias. He defined utopias on the one hand as sites with no real place and heterotopias on the other hand as places that are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect. He cited the garden, for example, as one of the oldest heterotopias and stated that the traditional gardens of the Persians had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. “The garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space”, so Foucault.