‘No place is just one anymore’, says Elisa

“The House then may open up a useful avenue for theoretical discourse about the postmodern condition of displacement, where ‘the borders between home and world become confused; and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting’. As Pierre Levy has noted, the cultural evolution of displacement (and virtualiza- tion) has begun to affect our physical presence of the world and our modalities of being. When a person is displaced, when a person is ‘not-there’, he or she is detached ‘from conventional physical or geographical space and the temporality of the clock or calendar’ (Levy 133). In The House, spatial and temporal specificity are torn apart. The narrative unfolds from any temporal point; past, present, and future are in constant redevelopment. Things that occur no longer shed light on the past. ‘No place is just one any more’ says Elisa. We see her floating among the treetops, gripping on to the trees and bushes to move closer to the house, then holding on to the roof of the house in order to get back to the ground. After this, we catch her fixing weights to her ankles, as though she were unable to stay firmly on the floor. Here Elisa escapes herself, she acquires new ways of sensing the world and moving through space. This involves a transition from the located to a dislocated subjectivity, where the boundary between the inside and the outside is never clearly defined.”
LAINE, T. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Affective Images in ‘The House’. Mediascape, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2006, p.5