Hotel corridors and deserted hospital, parking without living soul in the middle of the night, schools and closed shopping centers are all examples of space limb (from the Latin limen“Threshold”), or that category of “non-places” characterized by a function of Liminal stateie of transition or connection Among other places and environments, however emptied of the normal human presence that animates them and provides them with a function and meaning. It is precisely these deficiencies that make them strange to our eyes, yet, since we recognize something familiar in them, the feeling they arouse can be described as a paradoxical mix of restlessness, nostalgia and, sometimes, a sense of safety.
The concept of liminality: from psychology to places
The concept of liminality, which exists at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, commonly refers to the psychological condition of being on the threshold of a new phase of life. Scholars such as Arnold Van Gennep And Victor Turnerthey introduced him to describe the rites of passage; It can therefore refer both to the movement from one physical place to another (the space between what is and what will happen), and to a moment of transition or change that we experience during our existence (the juncture in which we are no longer what we were and not yet what we will become). Liminality was subsequently adopted by academics of other sectors to make sense of the most disparate phenomena, and also to describe those empty spaces – united by precise architectural characteristics, such as a bare furniture, dècor or essential and repetitive geometries, a labyrinthine succession of environments or identical corridors – capable of giving the impression, to those who cross them, to be in a limbo out of time.
This feeling is similar to that caused by the phenomenon of Uncanny Valley: form of discomfort to which very resembling humanoid robots can bring but not perfectly identical to us. In the same way, a space can appear almost normal and, to arouse restlessness and melancholy – but also nostalgia and a sense of security, because it is still a recognizable and familiar place – it is precisely that small waste compared to reality. We are in fact used to associating certain environments with presence of people And to see an absence where instead we would expect a presence, creates disorientation and a “short circuit” on an emotional level. We had the test during the recent pandemic: see squares, roads and supermarkets usually crowded suddenly becoming empty, made us experiment with the alienating atmosphere of the limited spaces.
Limited spaces in the digital era
Limited spaces became, during the early 2020 years, protagonists of a web phenomenon who took hold starting from a crepypasta (a horror, short and unpublished story) published by an unknown author on 4chan and accompanied by the image of a Empty corridor with carpet and yellow wallpaper. The photo, which will then be understood to have really taken in a store in the US chain Hobbytown in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, embodies the aesthetic of the now viral #LiminalSpaces And it inspires the imagination of the so -called “backrooms”, or an immense extra -dimensional extension of empty rooms, accessible by leaving reality through the “noclip”. The latter term, belonging to videogame jargon, defines the mechanism of passing solid objects within a video game, inhibiting the collision with them and leaving the game map.
