Between the tangible and the imaginary, we build topographies that fuse inner and outer worlds. These topographies, intimate and particular, are where our psychic lives take place. Using what poet Susan Stewart calls “the world-making capacity of language,”1 each text in this issue becomes a psycho-geography of discovery. As with Winnicott’s potential space, these papers create and mediate a zone between the external and the internal, the real and the imaginary. They are playgrounds, but they are also an invitation to togetherness, a way of sharing and journeying through in-dwelling landscapes.

Despite its undeniable prompt to motion, the -scape in landscape has nothing to do with fleeing, but is its contrary – a bond that shares roots with the suffix -ship that designates commonality, as in relationship, kinship, and friendship. A landscape is thus a landship, a union with land, “a condition of being,”2 as the etymological dictionary says. The linguistic force through which we shape our ties to the land is also “a condition of being.” A landscape is thus a relation and a form, alive, interdependent, and ever-changing.

Reading the texts we have gathered in this issue means a willingness to surrender the presumption of individuality and to shift from the I to the we. Stewart declares that “[t]he locus of action is not in the text but in the transformation of the reader.”3 Entering these written, inner landscapes necessitates an opening and merging for the reader, giving rise to a new shape that can accommodate the -ship in a relationship with the other’s imaginaries. The asynchronous “we,” formed by the shared experience of entering someone else’s inner landscape, is deictic; it depends on the context. The “we” is therefore unstable, a shifter.

This “we” blurs boundaries and causes inner landscapes to begin to melt; one’s favourite churchyard becomes the other’s grandparents’ garden – a form of spatial, emotional, and even historical empathy.

We understand the smallest, sensorial fragments of memories (something we have called “minor memories” elsewhere4) as something transferable and citational, that travels from one utterance to another, attaching and referring to different bodies and different situations, forging an imagined collective, a community-at-a-distance. Thus your rosebush may not be the same as mine, but our rosebush is an impossible blend of the two and of their circumstances, a kind of coexistence found in the connected independence of our mind’s eyes – yours and mine.

Colm mac Aoidh proposes a tour through synaesthetic spacetime in a text laced with childhood memories. From verdant Irish streets to Aboriginal cosmology, the spatial humanities spread out in this paper, peeling off the layers of a particular, “deep” world-map, composed of both facts and legends. Emily Trenholm revisits Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis, and, more specifically, the notion of the poetic image as a way of evoking felicitous spaces. Focusing on the architectural typology of the nineteenth-century octagonal house, she moves beyond Bachelard’s solipsistic daydreaming individual – the poetic image emerges from shared memories through dialogue with others, spanning generations.

Photographer and architecture scholar Nicoletta Grillo takes us on a nocturnal border-crossing. Here, photography tries to capture invisible, historical lines dividing the territory, through which workers drive between one country and another, split between the land that holds a job, and the land that holds a life. Taylor Jordan Holmes departs from the United States to follow Audre Lorde on a trip to Russia, detouring through Paris to see the Musee d’Orsay and the Louvre, and connecting with Ukraine at the beginning of the Russian invasion. Through all the wandering, Holmes obsesses about the Black woman in a French painting, weaving in and out of historical violences and pleasures.

Improv performer and writer Rebecca Mackenzie turns the landscape into a stage – and philosophers into unexpected characters; –Heidegger ice cream, anyone?. Water becomes body, and body becomes water, as three sisters experience different topographies in the possibilities and impossibilities of motherhood. Visual artist Katharina Swoboda follows the straying cats of Vienna: These urban yet wild animals not only offer a non-human view of inhabiting the city, but they also provide another perspective on the inner landscape, and become a powerful way of relating to memories and trauma and to aspects of love and motherhood.

Simona Rukuižaitė’s ontology is rich in phenomenological detail. It lends to the reader the eyes and hands – and even the teeth! – of the artist as she touches and names pigments with utmost sensibility, capable of distinguishing between this pinch of ochre and that one, creating her own landscapes on her studio table. Poet and urban researcher Jeremy Allan Hawkins offers a lyrical examination of the city landscape. His mode of observation and expression looks for relations, associations, and affinities that reveal new, and until that point invisible, possibilities in unexpected urban encounters. Finally, writer and researcher Ania Louka, theatre scholar Stella Medvedeva, and psychotherapist Alexander G. Romanitan create a triptych of voices, evoking specific inner landscapes that are the result of migration, landscapes created by a sense of longing and rupture, of no longer or not yet belonging, shaped by a complex personal meshwork of affects, memories, and stories.

Each of these texts invite us to experience spaces from the perspective of others’ bodies, moving, acting, human, and beyond. Crossing borders to swim in open waters to find sand between one’s teeth: spatiality is a kinesthetic affair. Each space is determined by that which occurs in them. From the magnitude of the weather, be it the wind chasing clouds or sunbeams illuminating dust, to the particular constitution offered by emotional layers, moving inwards through desire, longing, or shame: Each of these creative-critical papers presents a unique constellation of memories, emotions, events, and concepts that shape a specific space, and relates this space to others. And, coming together in the unique way autotheoretical writing allows, these effects and affects meet, influence, contaminate, and reciprocate with theories and concepts. They are not external to the territory, to the digested map – they are the territory itself, fully. Just as a psycho-geographist of the Internationale Situationniste famously used a map of London to navigate the Harz-mountains,5 we can use the different writings, papers, here as a map for elsewhere, as well as for the place we are in. Here. Now. Our own place.

1 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 5.

2 Douglas Harper, “-ship”, Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001-ongoing. https://www.etymonline.com/word/-ship.

3 Stewart, 3.

4 Maria Gil Ulldemolins and Kris Pint, “Wherever You Go, You Will Be a City. Minor Memories and Tactics of Empathy in the Work of Lisa Robertson,” Writingplace 2: Inscriptions: Tracing Place. History and Memory in Architectural en Literary Practice (2018): 64–80, https://doi.org/10.7480/writingplace.2.2640.

5 Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” in Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro (Kelowna, British Columbia: Praxis (e)Press), 26. http://hdl.handle.net/10214/1798.