Words and things: souvenirs of over-site/over-sight for place-making

This paper addresses the problem of making things in a given place (Qatar), and asks how anticipations and memories of place contribute to practice-based manoeuvres of place-making. Flying across time zones and travelling through sites suggests aspects of place-making that would draw upon both a notion of meteorites coming to earth and an awareness of the sensory consequences of global travelling. What this experience also suggests is an ‘over-sight’ (‘over-site’) in how travellers remember a place for themselves, and how they re-member it for others in the form of souvenirs. Going to a place might often default to an envisioning of pre-emptive or imaginary souvenirs in anticipation of the destination; thinking about what a place might be like is hard to separate from what we think we will eventually take away from it. Thus, the idea to be explored is how we might ‘make in to place’ as much as we ‘make something in-place,’ which perhaps results in ‘making some thing into a place’. Etymologically, souvenir already suggests this in its derivation from Old French: ‘to remember, come to mind.’ How does one ‘come to remembering’ in a place that, like all planetary places, will always be both global and local? Perhaps it depends on how one lands in a place…. Meteoroids remain in orbit around a place: nascent souvenirs always above the horizon, un-made place-makings. Meteors come closer to landing but still, by definition, burn up in the atmospheres of the new place. Meteorites, though, land: they suggest what we mean by the human element of ‘makings in-/to place.’ Travelling from somewhere, to somewhere yet to be fully determined, meteorites (people and/or words and/or senses) reflect the dispersion and compression of sensory (thing-based) and word-based experiences of place. Drawing on the work of Paul Hopper, Paul Carter, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Serres, William Desmond and Julia Kristeva, the paper concludes that words evoke a place in which the present might take place, and that the senses evoke a present in which place might take place.