Liminal Spaces

What are they?

Liminal spaces are one of three types and yet all share the same feeling. "If lonelyness was a neutral feeling" is the best way to explain it. In all silplicity a liminal space is a place stuck between two frames, two times, a point A and a point B. Most of the time a "point B" or the next step is either not known or is at least impossible to figure out. Liminal spaces are rooms, areas, ideas, pictures, houses that are stuck in a state of change and yet never changing. Like a Subway with no trains, a street with no end, a room with no doors or windows the limits just dont exist.

Imagine you’re in a hallway. The old, gray, worn out carpet almost completely flattened, the walls are covered in a beige wallpaper with a pattern you can't quite make out, large fluorescent lights stand above you buzzing at a slight frequency. What would you hear? Taste? Smell? Feel? The walls, floor and ceiling aren’t what you are focusing on though, what caught your attention first was that there are no doors. No widows. Just a plain, old, dusty box that seems to go on forever.

Examples

It's best described as a time, idea, room, or area that you find yourself in with no point A or point B. Think of it like a road trip where you didn’t come from anywhere important, and there is no important place to go. A prison of sorts, a place of traversability that you would normally not focus on, just pass and go on with the next step; the start to a holiday at a beautiful beach, a business meeting, a trip to a grandparents house. When one of these spaces is taken out of context – like a subway with no trains coming or going – you no longer are focused on what there will be, and start thinking about what is. Why exactly is this subway here, if not to take me places?